The Soviets had standards.
What could Rhodesia possibly offer that would not make the Soviets think of it as a corrupt racist dictatorship needed to be overthrown by the masses it oppressed?
I personally expect that the Norse did venture into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. PEI may well have been visited. How much of this experienced geographical exploration got transmitted, never mind recorded, is open. That Italian chronicler apparently getting that info from Genoese sailors has...
Different sources seek to suggest different things. One 14th century Italian chronicler seems to have implied something different, a more insular quality.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galvano_Fiamma#Writings
With regards to the Scandinavians, and to the red of Europe, to the extent they knew about Vinland they seem to have thought of it as an ultraremote island, not a continental landmass.
There is a lot of material I could share later, with proper cites.
I am not sure that we have any good material on Mi'kmaq-Beothuk relations in the pre-Columbian era. The early modern era did see growing competition between the two as a byproduct of Anglo-French imperial competition, the more...
We can speculate that the push factors driving migrants from continental Scandinavia, combined with the pull factors of available land, were enough to ensure the population of first Iceland then Greenland to their natural limits. Vinland, more remote still, was too far. The fact that the...
Without knowing what his plans involved, it may be at least possible that Japan will be able to keep pace with Europe, instead of falling behind over the 19th century. This would have huge consequences: Imagine a Japan that was a peer in per capita terms with any European power, essentially an...
I think the key would be to get Norway, arguably parent country of the whole complex of West Nordic settlements, unified and invested in Vinland at an early point.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Norse#Old_West_Norse
Even a one-off initial investment could be the fundamental change that we...
By "Western Norse", I suppose I should clarify that I am talking about the Norse peoples of the North Atlantic west of Scandinavia, from the Faroes west through to Greenland. I am not talking about the Scandinavian states. I am borrowing the name from modern political institutions...
In the case of China, it is probably true that an actively oceanic and maritime China would colonize Southeast Asia before the Americas, even Australasia. Luzon will look like Taiwan, for instance.
I suspect it would require some limits placed on inland expansion. Rival Chinese states, maybe...
I am sorry for your misreading. I have been saying that a Vinlandic colonization did not happen because of chance reasons but for good reasons. For centuries, multiple generations of the Western Norse saw no good reason to waste scarce capital and manpower on pioneering a colonization of Vinland...
If the shores.of the Gulf of St. Lawrence were occasionally visited by Greenland Norse operating from Vinlandic outposts, I can see the St..Lawrence Valley being occasionally visited by Vinland Norse.
I think that does not quite work. In the case of Iceland, you had a land known and visited for centuries eventually acquire a settler population.
This is not the case for Vinland, which was not only known but regularly visited for centuries by Greenlanders, even Icelanders.
If Vinland over...
It is worth noting that, despite centuries of experience actively scavenging on the Labrador coast, and occasional voyages which may have gone deep into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, despite all that experience over so much time there does not seem to have been any permanent settlement. This is...