SEA LION PRESS

By Gary Oswald As discussed in the previous article of this series, the failure of the West Indies Federation of all of the UK's...

By Gary Oswald The Caribbean, and in particular the lesser Antilles, are mostly known in the west as peaceful tourist traps, where...

By Gary Oswald This series will cover 26 topics related to Alternate History, as a beginners guide to the genre, through the format of...

By Gary Oswald I have written on and off about Africa during the 19th century on this blog for about three years in around 40 articles and over 150,000 words, and I have more articles like that to come. Most of those articles take the format of me describing an African people, their grim fate after being conquered by Europeans and some ways in which that could have gone differently. And they mostly take the presence of the European invaders as a fixed point of time, which the

By Gary Oswald This series will cover 26 topics related to Alternate History, as a beginners guide to the genre, through the format of...

By Gary Oswald This series will cover 26 topics related to Alternate History, as a beginners guide to the genre, through the format of...

By Gary Oswald Emir Abdelkader, as captured by Étienne Carjat, really should be much more prominent in this series than he is. In 1830 France invaded Algiers, which had long been a centre of Islamic piracy and where French merchants did significant business, after a diplomatic spat over unpaid loans and the Dey of Algiers hitting a French Ambassador. The French King, Charles X, and his conservative Prime Minister wished for a foreign policy victory to win over the French peop

By Gary Oswald This series will cover 26 topics related to Alternate History, as a beginners guide to the genre, through the format of...

By Gary Oswald Maasai warriors in German East Africa, c. 1906–1918 The Maasai people of Kenya and Tanzania are a nomadic group of cattle herders in the Great Rift Valley. Traditionally, they fought primarily with throwing clubs, spears and shields and relied almost entirely on their cattle herds. They ate the meat, drank the milk daily, and even drank the blood on occasion. After emerging in force in the early 19th century and threatening Omani Mombasa in the 1850s, they were

By Gary Oswald This series will cover 26 topics related to Alternate History, as a beginners guide to the genre, through the format of...

By Gary Oswald Georg Ledebour In 1907, the German Empire in Africa consisted of four territories. German South West Africa, German East Africa, German Togoland and German Kamerun. In 1904, German South West Africa saw the beginning of the Herero and Nama genocide when a German official, Lothar von Trotha , ordered that every single man, woman and child of the Herero was to be exterminated. This order was enacted for six weeks, until the German parliament got the Emperor to r

By Gary Oswald This series will cover 26 topics related to Alternate History, as a beginners guide to the genre, through the format of...

By Gary Oswald Flag of the German East Africa Company In 1885 German gunships pulled into the Omani island of Zanzibar and demanded that the Sultan of Zanzibar, Barghash bin Said, sell them his rights to some of his territory in mainland Tanzania. The Zanzibari control of East Africa tended to exist more in theory than practice, the cities on the Kenyan coast were constantly rebelling and Zanzibari Somalia was one house in Mogadishu where their agent would trade with the Som

By Gary Oswald This series will cover 26 topics related to Alternate History, as a beginners guide to the genre, through the format of...

By Gary Oswald On the Sea Lion Press Forums, we run a monthly Vignette Challenge. Contributors are invited to write short stories on a...

By Gary Oswald Jean de Wavrin's painting of the formation of the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance. In 1386, John I of Portugal and Richard II of England agreed the Treaty of Westminster. That treaty established a pact of mutual support between the two countries that is still in force today. Since that day, England and her successor states, Great Britain and the UK, have never been to war with Portugal as an independent state and have fought alongside it in numerous wars against Spai

By Gary Oswald This series will cover 26 topics related to Alternate History, as a beginners guide to the genre, through the format of...

By Gary Oswald Picture of King Lobengula of the Matabele; by Ralph Peacock, based on a sketch by E. A. Maund The Shona people, the largest ethnicity in modern day Zimbabwe, have a much longer history of strong centralised Empires than most of Southern Africa. Great Zimbabwe was the dominant force in the country in the early middle ages, the Mutapa ruled much of it from the 15th to 18th centuries and during the late 18th and early 19th centuries the Shona were united under the

By Gary Oswald This series will cover 26 topics related to Alternate History, as a beginners guide to the genre, through the format of...

By Gary Oswald Defeat of the Ashantees, by the British forces under the command of Coll. Sutherland, July 11th 1824 The Machine Gun more than anything else is the iconic weapon of the Scramble for Africa, the thing that made European conquest possible. Early versions of it often jammed in combat, allowing European forces to be defeated, which meant it was often unpopular by soldiers on the grounds, but by the 1890s it was much more reliable and so a killing machine, something