World Tour

-In most of the world, the New Middle Ages were merely a rerun of the Old Middle Ages. In England and Japan, the constitutional monarchies dumped their constitutions. Europeans turned again to the Roman Catholic Church for guidance. Camels plodded along the caravan routes of the Middle East, bringing silk from China and pilgrims to Mecca, just as they did a thousand years ago. In America, however, Middle Ages were a new experience. 

This is a statement from the very introduction to the Atlas of Medieval America. It's also a very loaded one. While we can definitely look America as very unique in a world that has returned to Castles and Cathedrals, Sulatans and Shoguns, but there's definitely nuances to unpack. 500 years of new religions, revolutions, even genocides, where the bell simply can't be unrung. It can also be said that the Middle Ages themselves, at a thousand years certainly saw countless fluctations: The rise and fall of empires, plagues, revolutions in technology. So to some extent what a "rerun of the Middle Ages" means could imply a lot. The Middle Ages of Alfred of Wessex or the War of the Roses? The Middle Ages of the Ten Kingdoms or the Mongol Empire? Definitely painting with broad strokes.

There's also places, particularly in the Southern Hemisphere that were colonized just as much as America, though the populations are considerablly smaller. So the next couple of articles are going to look at the ripples, where things are surprisingly like the Old Middles Ages, where it's just down far down the rabbit hole, and where the old and the new converge in surpising ways. So next month, or the new year, I'll have series of posts looking at the rest of the world in the year 2900; We'll be looking at

Europe: A surprising Viking revival, brought about by geographical essentialism, the void left by Protestantism and Secularim, and the need for global couriers in a de-globalized world.

Africa: The yokes of colonialism have been thrown off. The West has has retreated, even the Muslim World is much more divided than its Golden Age. The Legacy of an Egypt that was ruled by Egypt the last century, and the rise of the Ethopian Church.

Asia: The legacies of Bollywood, K-Pop, Anime and Kaiju are actually quite congruent with their millennia old civillization.

Latin America: Can largely be divided along three metrics; The interior jungles are almost completely reverted to the Pre-Columbian model. Mexico and Peru, heirs to grand Pre-Columbian civillizations and once key nodes of the Spanish Empire, are re-living a Middle Ages they arguably did belatedly experience. And then there this is the Southern cone, located in

Sub-Capricona: Argentina, Australia, and South Africa. Temeparate, attractive for European ranchers, now on the other side of the world. In many ways, a strange reflection of Medeval Aerica.