Publisher's Synopsis
History, that smug little chronicle of things that happened, rarely pauses to consider how spectacularly sideways it could have gone. But we do.
- What if the Portuguese Had Successfully Established a Lasting Inland Empire in Africa?
- What If the Printing Press Was Never Invented?
- What if the Spanish Armada Had Successfully Invaded England?
- What if the Ottoman Empire Had Successfully Conquered Vienna in 1683?
- What if the Thirteen Colonies Had Lost the American Revolutionary War?
- What If Napoleon Bonaparte Had Won the Battle of Waterloo?
- What If the Industrial Revolution Had Begun in China?
- What If the Renaissance Had Focused More On Scientific Discovery?
- What If a Major Global Pandemic Had Struck Europe in the 17th Century?
- What If the Mughal Empire Had Successfully Unified All of the Indian Subcontinent?
In this second volume of outrageous alternatives, we march boldly into the gunpowder-drenched centuries where empires rise, revolutions spark, and the occasional philosopher tries to invent utopia with a quill and a questionable understanding of human nature. From Iberian dreams of inland African kingdoms to Mughal megastates that actually hold it together (shocking, we know), this book explores the dizzying chaos that might have been if just a few people had made marginally better-or worse-decisions.
What if the printing press had never been invented, and knowledge stayed locked in dusty monasteries alongside suspiciously passive-aggressive monks? What if the Spanish Armada had turned England Catholic and chucked Shakespeare for the Inquisition? What if Napoleon actually pulled it off, and Europe became France's slightly grumpier garden?
Mixing academic insight with dry, unapologetic wit, From Muskets to Madness is your passport to a world where the Enlightenment forgot the rulebook, the colonies didn't get independent, and the Ottomans finally got Vienna (and probably bragged about it a lot).
