zompist wrote: ↑Fri Sep 14, 2018 1:53 pm
So many weird little details— why does the US get Hainan and the Celebes? Why does the UK lose its empire but gets most of Indonesia? But these are typical of the conworlder who knows maps more than history...
It's the other way around - these may look strange on the map, but make a lot of sense given the history.
The situation in Indonesia was that the Dutch colonial empire had collapsed, and Indonesia had just been conquered by Japan.
If you were looking at the map in 1942, what would you predict would happen? Clearly, the map-maker expected Japan to be defeated, so Indonesia could not be Japanese. The maker clearly was correctly quite skeptical of the ability of the Dutch to regain their empire after the war. In hindsight, we know that Indonesia became independent - but the map-maker was not to know that the Indonesian nationalist movement, which had been almost invisible in 1941, would blossom during the war and be in a position to attain independence in under a decade. The map-maker may also have expected the old powers to come out of the war a bit better off than they did, with the war settled by the traditional giant peace conference at which the old powers carved up the territories of the losers.
In Indonesia, that would naturally mean Britain getting most of it. Britain held territory east, south, north and west of Indonesia (i.e. Australia, Papua New Guinea, Malaya and northern Borneo), and if Indonesia were to be liberated from the Japanese, it would presumably be by the British. Indeed, the British DID invade Indonesia after the war, before deciding to leave it to the Dutch and the Indonesians to fight it out.
At the same time, American policy before the war had for half a century been eyeing an expansion of its empire in southeast asia. If Indonesia had indeed been up for grabs, it's not unreasonable to suspect that the Americans might have tried to claim some of it - and as Sulawesi bordered the American zone of control, it was an obvious target. Specifically, in assuming America would take over Sulawesi, the Halmaheras and the Moluccas, the map-maker was mostly accurately predicting the consolidation of the local states into what would become known as Negara Indonesia Timur - except that in our timeline NIT included Bali and the Flores islands as well as West Timur, but hey, you can't get everything right. [IOT, NIT joined the federated states of Indonesia, which were then brought into a single unified state under Sukarno]
Regarding Hainan, this again looks very well informed. IOT, Hainan did indeed remain independent of China - until 1950. Hainan and Taiwan remained under ROC control as the PRC took control of the mainland. The map-maker, given the names, may be assuming the opposite. Either way, I think the map-maker is assuming Hainan remains in the hands of the losing faction, and America takes the opportunity to annex it. In our timeline, Hainan and Taiwan both went to the losers; in 1950, the PRC succesfully took Hainan, but the US took Taiwan into its ZOC. It's not unreasonable to imagine this happening for Hainan as well. (although ITT, it may be that America annexed Taiwan directly from the Japanese).
Of course, IOT, Taiwan has remained mostly politically independent of the US, and did not formally become a protectorate. The map-maker clearly didn't predict the extent to which the protectorate system would decline after the war - but more importantly, they probably didn't foresee the extent to which China and Taiwan would develop so rapidly economically, making it harder for the US to control the latter. In 1942, a US protectorate in Taiwan and Hainan probably seemed no more improbable that our timeline's protectorates in the Marianas and Guam.
