This is a timeline of the Global Swap, the chronology of the Controglobe setting, in which the historical trajectories of the Global North and the Global South are transposed from about 500 BCE. It runs from the prehistory the setting shares with the outside timeline, through the Nabataean unification and the caliphal centuries, the arrival of the African and South Asian crowns in Arabia and the trade in Europeans that followed, the Arabian Revolution of 1776 and the African partition of Europe, to the rivalry of Arabia and the Derg Union and the present.
Dates are Gregorian, with BCE and CE for the eras. Each entry is drawn from the article that treats it at length and links to it. The chronology is canon where those articles are canon and no further: where two of them disagree — as the reference atlases do over the Faroes — the timeline records the disagreement and settles nothing. The setting’s historians divide the period into ten eras, which the sections below follow.
Three long movements organise the chronology. For two thousand years Arabia was the centre of a written, trading, pilgrim world and Europe its tribal hinterland, raided for captives. From 1497 the crowns of Africa and South Asia reached the Arabian coasts, industrialised the trade in Europeans and, after 1870, partitioned Europe itself. And from 1776 the thirteen princely colonies of the Red Sea and the Levant grew into the federation that fought the Derg Union for the world between 1945 and 1991, and now competes with Nusantara.
Main articles: Prehistory of Arabia, Nabataean Unification § Background
Until the middle of the fifth century BCE the setting shares the outside timeline's record: the green phases of the Arabian interior, the farming villages of the Fertile Crescent, the incense kingdoms of the south-west. The Global Swap does not begin with a battle or a birth. Its first recorded departure is a withdrawal — the Achaemenid garrisons leaving the desert after 460 BCE — and the setting's historians add two slower causes for the European half of the transposition: the survival of the European lion across a far larger range, which kept settlement dispersed and defensive, and the later collapse of the European empires of late antiquity without successors.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| c. 400,000 BP | Stone tools at Jubbah, Shuwaymis and the Nafud lake margins record the first of Arabia's green-phase occupations. |
| c. 88,000 BP | A finger bone from the Al-Wusta lake bed, the oldest securely dated modern human fossil in Arabia. |
| c. 13,500 BCE | Hunters camp at the Gault site and on Buttermilk Creek, at the edge of the southern plains of North America: the oldest securely dated occupation of the later Solms-America. |
| 6th millennium BCE | Herders in the Hejaz and Shammar uplands build mustatils, long stone enclosures for ritual; tens of thousands survive. |
| c. 3000 BCE | The dromedary is domesticated; with the north Arabian saddle it makes the desert a trade route rather than a barrier. |
| 10th century BCE | Saba, Ma’in, Qataban and Hadhramout control the frankincense and myrrh trade and build the Ma’rib dam. |
| 853 BCE | Gindibu the Arab brings a thousand camels to the battle of Qarqar, the first attested use of the name. |
| mid-6th century BCE | Nabonidus of Babylon lives at the oasis of Tayma for about ten years. |
| c. 480–420 BCE | The Long Thirst: winter rainfall fails across northern Arabia, and raiding for water becomes endemic on the routes. |
| after 460 BCE | The first departure. The Achaemenids withdraw their desert garrisons and their empire breaks into highland principalities in the Zagros and Anatolia. Masr is restored under native kings and Babylon becomes a temple-city; no power polices the caravan routes. |
Main article: Nabataean Unification. See also: History of the United States of Arabia § Incense kingdoms
The kings of Petra and Hegra turned a toll network into a government by standardising what the routes shared: weights, coin, water rights and, above all, a written language. The kingdom lasted less than five centuries. The chancery hand, the water law and the habit of taking a dispute to a lettered arbitrator outlived it by more than a thousand years, and Arabian schools still teach the period as the moment the country had “one alphabet before one king”.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| c. 440 BCE | Aretas I is recorded at Petra as “king of the Nabatu, master of the water of Sela”. |
| c. 380 BCE | Obodas I takes Hegra, which becomes the kingdom's second capital. |
| c. 345 BCE | The Dedan settlement: Lihyan keeps its council and temple and places its wells under the Hegra registry. |
| 312 BCE | The notables of Damascus admit a Nabataean governor to protect the Ghouta canals. |
| 305 BCE | Aretas III turns back a Masri army at the Wadi al-Arish; the Sinai frontier stays quiet for eighty years. |
| 291 BCE | The Arabic Ordinance makes Arabic, written in the Nabataean chancery hand, the language of government — the ancestor of the Arabic script. |
| 287 BCE | The Water Ordinance puts every registered well under the Masters of Water and into the Well Rolls. |
| 262 BCE | The Covenant of the Wells is sworn at Hajr by Rabbel III and fourteen oasis leagues of the Najd: the conventional date of the Nabataean unification. |
| 188 BCE | Aretas V annexes Gerrha on the Gulf and joins the incense road to the pearl and copper trade. |
| 141–128 BCE | The War of the Two Capitals between the councils of Petra and Hegra. |
| 72 BCE | Himyar takes Najran and diverts the incense trade to the Red Sea shipping lanes. |
| 26–24 BCE | In North America the City of the Gods sends the Northern Expedition against the canal towns of the Gila; it besieges Skoaquik for six days and comes home with 3,900 of its 11,500. |
| 36 CE | Rabbel V dies without an heir; the kingdom dissolves into the Petra and Hegra leagues, each with a chancery and a Well Roll but no king. |
| 1st–6th centuries | Himyarite, Lakhmid and Ghassanid successors inherit the chancery, the water law and arbitration. In Europe the empires of late antiquity collapse without successors, and the continent's politics become tribal and sectional. |
| 2nd–5th centuries | In North America the Turquoise Road joins the canal towns of the Gila and the caravan city of Paquimé to the cities of Mesoamerica. |
| 3rd century | The Petra league, the last institutional descendant of the kingdom, ceases to be independent. |
| 268–273 | In North America the Turquoise Queen of the Great Houses breaks with the City of the Gods; she is beaten on the Conchos and before Paquimé, and taken after the fall of Chaco. |
| 363 | In North America the City's Eastern Expedition reaches the Great Bottom of the Mississippi and turns back; its general dies on the Arkansas. |
| 570 | In North America the Year of the Litter: a viceroy's march on Paquimé breaks on a spotted fever, and the Great Headgate on the Salt fails. |
| 598 | In North America the City of the Gods burns. |
Main articles: History of the United States of Arabia § The caliphal centuries, The trade in Europeans
Islam carried Arabic administration further than any empire before it, and no rival power in Anatolia or the Zagros ever displaced it in the eastern Mediterranean. The same continuity kept alive the trade in human beings, and the law of the caliphal period pushed its sources steadily outward: each people that converted was closed to enslavement, so the trade reached further into tribal Europe, whose peoples Arabic writers called the Saqaliba.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 604–628 | In North America the Messenger preaches the Path at Paquimé and Chukson. Within a century his successors, the Speakers, rule from the Pacific to the Mississippi. |
| early 7th century | Islam emerges in the Hejaz among people already literate and trading widely. |
| 7th–8th centuries | The Rashidun and Umayyad caliphates carry Arabic administration across northern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Iberian–Sahelian coasts. |
| c. 700 | The medieval trade in Europeans runs on three routes; between three and five million people are taken by 1500. |
| 742 | The Commonwealth of the Speakers moves its seat to Cahokia on the Mississippi; the country of the Sanctuaries becomes a place of pilgrimage. |
| 750 | The Abbasid caliphate: Baghdad, Damascus and Basra become the largest cities on the planet. |
| 9th century | The Darb Zubaydah pilgrim road is laid out from Kufa to Makkah. |
| 869 | The Saqaliba Revolt. European captives clearing the salt crusts of the Basra marshes rise under Sahib al-Saqaliba and build a capital among the reed beds. |
| 871 | The rebels sack Basra. |
| 883 | An Abbasid army destroys the rebel capital after fourteen years; the revolt becomes a founding story of the later abolitionists. |
| 10th century | The Sharifs of Makkah begin to administer the sanctuaries and the Hajj for whichever power holds the coasts. |
| 1066 | In Africa, the duchy of Tem crosses the Bight and conquers Sokoto, welding the two elites together. |
| 11th century | The settled interior of Arabia begins to contract: plague, the diversion of the spice trade, the silting of the Mesopotamian canals, the failures of the Ma’rib dam. |
| 1258 | The sack of Baghdad destroys what remains of the caliphate's tax base. |
Main article: History of the United States of Arabia § Interregnum and the Sharifate
With central authority gone, Arabia turned inward. Its historians call the two and a half centuries after the sack of Baghdad the Interregnum, and treat its localism and its readiness to settle disputes by force as an unresolved inheritance. On the far side of the Atlantic, meanwhile, Europe's tribal confederations began the crossing that would make North America as sectionally fractured as the Mashriq.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 1258 | Central authority falls back to the coasts and the holy cities; the Sharifate of Makkah alone keeps a continuous government. |
| 1258–1497 | The confederations: the Banu Khalid in the east, Al Rashid in Jabal Shammar, the Qawasim on the lower Gulf, the Zaydi imamate in the Yemeni highlands and the Ibadi imamate in inner Oman, with hundreds of emirates and oasis leagues between them. |
| c. 1350 | Cahokia is abandoned after drought and flood. No power is left in North America to meet the Crossing. |
| 1400s | European tribal confederations begin migrating to North America, carrying their sectional politics with them. |
| 15th century | On the eve of foreign colonisation the peninsula holds perhaps six to nine million people; the Gulf coast supports the largest pearling fleet in the world. |
Main articles: History of the United States of Arabia § Foreign colonisation, Servitude and the colonial trade
The powers that reached Arabia from 1497 came from Africa and South Asia, and they came to a country that plague and smallpox were already emptying. The first crowns built forts, missions and warehouses rather than settlements; their lasting effect was to connect the Arabian coasts to the older trade in Europeans and turn it into a plantation trade. The last to arrive, the Hindustani Empire, had the greatest effect: its thirteen princely colonies became the United States.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 1497 | The Kaabu navigator Mansa Jata rounds the Horn, opening a direct sea route between the Atlantic coast of Africa and the Arabian seas. |
| 1498 | Mansa Jata reaches Aden. Kaabu follows with fortified factories at Socotra, Muscat and Hormuz and tolls the Gulf and Red Sea trade for most of a century. |
| 1500–1650 | Plague cycles and smallpox arriving with foreign fleets, famine and the collapse of the caravan routes reduce the interior population of Arabia by 30 to 50 per cent. |
| 1507 | The Jolofian cartographers Ibrahima Faal and Mamadou Ndiaye name the whole landmass between the Mediterranean and the Gulf of Oman Arabia on a printed world map. |
| 16th century | Jolof founds missions and garrison towns on the Red Sea from Massawa to Jizan and claims the coast to Aqaba; Kong builds posts up the Euphrates from Kuwait to Deir ez-Zor, which its charters call Kong-Mésopotamie; Kaabu holds factories on the Mediterranean shore of Europe. |
| c. 1560 | The colonial trade in Europeans begins: the Kaabu and Jolofian crowns, and later Hindustan, turn the old Saqaliba routes into a bulk trade. By 1840 some 9.8 million people have been embarked and 1.6 million have died in transit. |
| 1571 | The Synod of Chukson: the Christian confederations of the Crossing take the holy places of the Path for their own by the Doctrine of the Two Testimonies. |
| 1607 | Hindustan charters the Red Sea Company to settle the Levantine and Hejazi coasts; the first settlement, at Jeddah's outer anchorage, survives by buying water from the Harb and shipping coffee. |
| 1626 | The Duala Company of Kamerun founds a commercial colony on the lower Gulf, later Magan Town. |
| 1638 | The Hassaniya crown settles a colony on the Tihamah coast; the Duala Company absorbs it within twenty years. |
| 1662 | The Lakhnau Servitude Ordinance: a child's status follows the mother, and conversion no longer frees a slave. By 1700 servitude in the Red Sea and southern colonies is hereditary and tied to European descent. |
| 1680 | Konrad, son of the first Christian Warden of the Sanctuaries, is killed at the fords of the Gila; American Christianity divides into Aldermannic and Kindred. |
| 1682–1701 | The Rashidi Wars keep the colonies on the coast. |
| 1721 | An Ifriqiyan mission and trading station lands on Qubrus; the island, an independent nation until now, becomes a colony of Ifriqiya, the crown that carries Denmark. |
| 1732 | Najd, chartered around Diriyah and Riyadh, becomes the thirteenth and last princely colony, and the only one without a coast. |
| 1739 | The Jizan rising, the largest colonial slave revolt, spreads along the Tihamah for three weeks. |
| 1740s | The Najd Awakening, the first movement shared by all thirteen colonies; its egalitarian wing preaches the first Arabic-language sermons against slavery. |
| 1744 | The Oath of Braunfels binds the House of Solms to the Plain Rule. |
| 1756–1763 | The Seven Years' War between Hindustan and Kong, fought in the Mashriq, ends with Kong expelled from the Euphrates and Hindustan deep in debt. |
Main articles: History of the United States of Arabia § Revolutionary period, Expansion and reform
The war debt of 1763 produced a revolution in Arabia; the wars of the African crowns produced, among other things, the sale of Mesopotamia. The republic that emerged spent its first seventy years expanding to the Gulf and arguing about whether servitude would expand with it. In Europe the same decades brought the first African conquest on the continent and the first colonies of freed people.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 1765 | The Stamp Duty is imposed on the colonies without the assemblies' consent. |
| December 1773 | The Jeddah Coffee Protest: merchants dump a Red Sea Company cargo into the harbour. |
| 1774 | The First Continental Majlis meets at Damascus; Najd sends no delegate. |
| 19 April 1775 | Fighting begins at Bab al-Hadid outside Aleppo. |
| 25 September 1776 | The Declaration of Independence, drafted largely by Tariq ibn Jaffar, two days after the Ali Resolution. |
| 1778 | The alliance with the Republic of Kong brings a fleet into the Red Sea. |
| 1781 | General Chatterjee surrenders at Zafar. |
| 3 October 1783 | The Treaty of Zafar recognises independence and fixes the western frontier at the Euphrates. |
| 21 June 1789 | The federal Constitution comes into force; Abd al-Rahman al-Hashimi is the first president. |
| 1791–1794 | The Charter of Liberties; Hejaz cedes the district of Umm al-Qura; the Sanctuaries Act places the custodianship of the holy cities in a constitutional trust. |
| 1803 | The Kuwait Purchase. Kong, needing money for its African wars, sells its Mesopotamian claim for 60 million riyals and the country doubles in size. |
| 1804 | In Europe, a jihad raises an emirate in the north of Anglia. |
| 1807–1808 | Hindustan abolishes the trade throughout its empire; the Arabian import ban follows on 1 January 1808. Recaptives landed by Sokoto's squadron found the province of freedom in Aquitaine. |
| 1811 | The viceroyalty of Masr begins its campaigns across eastern and southern Arabia. |
| 1812–1815 | The War of 1812 with Hindustan; the Presidential House at Umm al-Qura is burned in 1814 and the Treaty of Muscat restores the pre-war position. |
| 1818 | A Mexican army levels Braunfels for the Canadian Empire, and the first Solms state ends. |
| 1821 | The Treaty of Sohar buys out Jolof's claims on the lower Gulf; the Euphrates Compromise draws a line north of which slavery is barred. |
| 1822 | European Arabians repatriated from the Red Sea states found Brittany. |
| 1823 | The Qasimi Doctrine closes the Arabian seas to new colonisation by African and South Asian crowns. |
| 1829 | Masr abolishes slavery. |
| 1830 | Kong takes the northern coast of Europe. In Arabia the Desert Removal Act drives the Banu Khalid, Ajman and Mutayr to the Rub’ al-Khali margins on the Road of Thirst. |
| 1836–1848 | The Republic of Sharqiyah (1836), annexed in 1845; the Arabian–Masri War; by the Treaty of Ras Musandam Masr cedes Oman, Socotra and the Gulf littoral. |
| 1848 | The Tayma Convention demands the vote for women; pearl beds are found off Sur. |
| 1855–1858 | Bleeding Shammar; in Marwan v. Sandalji (1857) the Supreme Court holds that no person of European descent can be a citizen. |
Main articles: History of the United States of Arabia § Civil War and Reconstruction, Europe § The African colonial period
The half-century after 1861 made Arabia the world's largest industrial economy and left servitude legal in five of its states. It also completed the African partition of Europe: formal rule came late, took barely thirty years, and followed a pattern the atlases call the mirror rule — every European territory was governed by the state that carries its own coloniser's role. In the mine workshops of the Kongo, the motor carriage was invented twice within ninety kilometres.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 12 April 1861 | The Civil War begins with the bombardment of the federal arsenal at Ras Tanura; eleven states secede as the Islamic States of Arabia. |
| 1 January 1863 | The Manumission Proclamation frees everyone held in bondage in the areas still in rebellion. |
| 9 April 1865 | The last secessionist army surrenders at Wadi Hanifa; President al-Naqib is assassinated five days later. |
| 1865–1870 | The Reconstruction amendments. The Thirteenth reaches only the seceded states, and household servitude stays lawful in Hejaz, Jordan and the territories. |
| 1867 | Adharbaijan is bought from the Abyssinian Empire for 7.2 million riyals. |
| 1870s | The general partition of Europe by African powers begins. |
| 1877 | The compromise of 1877 withdraws the federal garrisons; the khidmah codes revive bondage in a new legal form. |
| 1879 | The Trans-Arabian Railway is completed at Buraydah, joining the Red Sea to the Gulf. |
| 1884–1885 | The Kimfumu kya Kongo takes Bosnia; Rhenia becomes the private estate of the Kamerunian sovereign; Bashir al-Ifranji, born enslaved, becomes president. |
| 29 January 1886 | Nsimba Malonga of Lubumbashi patents the motor carriage. The same year Kong's gift, the Manarat al-Hurriyyah, is dedicated at the mouth of Jeddah harbour. |
| 1888 | Mafuta Malonga drives her husband's third machine from Lubumbashi to Likasi and back: the first road test in history. |
| 1891 | The Leiningen of Wichita defeat the House of Solms, which goes into exile in Ludwigsland. |
| 1896 | A Manden army is destroyed in Russia; Kong annexes Sicily, Sardinia and Malta; Salim v. al-Ghamdi upholds “separate but equal”. |
| 1898 | The Gulf War with Jolof brings the Caucasus protectorates; Qumur is annexed. |
| 15 January 1902 | Karl of Solms retakes Dreifurt with forty riders. |
| 1902 | The partition of Europe is complete. By 1914 only Russia, Switzerland and Brittany answer to no power in Africa. |
| 1904–1907 | The Kimfumu's campaign in Bosnia kills most of two of its three peoples. |
| 1908 | The Kamerunian parliament annexes Rhenia after the rubber commission reports. |
| 1911 | Manden takes Finland; the Hegra archive is found in a sealed chamber behind the royal tombs. |
| 1912–1913 | The Rashid Model T at Mosul and the moving assembly line; Kong's protectorate over Iceland; the income tax and the central bank. |
| 1914 | Sokoto welds Anglia's northern emirate and southern kingdoms into one administration. |
Main articles: History of the United States of Arabia § Modern Arabia and the world wars, Motor vehicles § The people's car and the state plants
Both world wars were fought in Africa, with European regiments conscripted into African armies for theatres they had no stake in. Arabia entered the first late and the second after the attack at Yalang Yalang, and came out of it with half the world's manufacturing and a nuclear monopoly.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 1914 | The First World War begins; it is fought in the West African and Central African theatres. |
| 1916 | The American Revolt against the Canadian Empire, raised by the Keepers of Paquimé with Sokotan gold; Sokoto and Kong divide the empire's American provinces between them. |
| April 1917 | Arabia enters the war over unrestricted submarine warfare in the Indian Ocean; two million Arabian troops serve in Africa. |
| 1919 | The Kimfumu kya Kongo forfeits all its European possessions; Normandy is divided between Kong and Sokoto. |
| 1920 | Women win the vote under the Nineteenth Amendment; the prohibition of qat begins. |
| 1924–1926 | Karl of Solms takes Paquimé, Chukson and Waimas and is proclaimed King of the Sanctuaries. |
| 29 March 1929 | Federal cavalry break the Ikhwan al-Tawhid at the Battle of Sabilla; the Jeddah Exchange collapses seven months later. |
| 3 October 1930 | The Großfeld is struck in the pine country of the Ostmark. |
| 1931 | Arabian engineers lay out the Dire Dawa tractor and lorry works for the Derg Union's first five-year plan. |
| 4 July 1932 | The Kingdom of Solms-America is proclaimed. |
| 1933 | Faisal ar-Rashid's New Awakening; qat prohibition is repealed. |
| 1936 | The Nkangu programme in the Kongo: savings stamps for a people's car that almost no civilian receives. |
| 1936–1941 | Manden occupies Russia. |
| 3 March 1938 | Oil is struck at Dammam No. 7 in Sharqiyah. |
| April 1941 | Arabia is asked to garrison Qubrus, and holds it for Ifriqiya until the war ends. |
| 7 December 1941 | The Hindustani Imperial Navy attacks the fleet at Yalang Yalang in Qumur; Arabia declares war on Hindustan, and three days later on the Kimfumu kya Kongo and Manden. |
| 1944–1945 | The Allied advance into central Africa uncovers the Kimfumu's extermination of some eleven million people. |
| 14 February 1945 | King Karl meets President Faisal ar-Rashid aboard a cruiser off Sabine Pass: Arabian protection for American oil. |
| 8 May 1945 | The war in Africa ends. |
| July–August 1945 | The Alamut Project tests the first atomic bomb in the Rub’ al-Khali; two Hindustani cities are destroyed. |
| 2 September 1945 | Hindustan surrenders. |
Main articles: History of the United States of Arabia § Cold War, Europe § Independence and after
For forty-five years the world was organised around one rivalry, fought mostly by proxy: in Borneo and Sulawesi, in the Caucasus, in Zanjibar, and across a Europe that took its independence in the middle of it. At home Arabia finally abolished servitude, eighty-eight years after Reconstruction ended.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 1945 | The Concert of Nations is founded at Jeddah. |
| 1946 | Arabia offers Ifriqiya 100 million riyals for Qubrus; the offer is refused. |
| 1948 | Aztlan is founded in the far west of North America; the first of its wars with the American League follows. |
| 1948–1949 | The Recovery Programme for western and central Africa; the Kinshasa airlift; the Umm al-Qura Pact. The Derg Union's first atomic test ends the Arabian monopoly. |
| 1950–1953 | The Bornean War. |
| 1951 | Finland becomes the first European state granted independence, by international resolution. |
| 1953 | Qubrus ceases to be a colony and becomes a county of Ifriqiya, with seats in its parliament. |
| 1954–1962 | Sweden's war against Kong kills something near a tenth of its people. |
| 1955 | The Derg Union answers the Pact with the Harar Pact; the Jeddah bus boycott begins. |
| 1957–1958 | The Derg satellite and the Arabian Space Agency; the traffic standards of Mosul and Kinshasa; Galicia votes No to the Kong Community. |
| 1959 | Adharbaijan and Qumur are admitted as states. |
| 1960 | The Year of Europe: seventeen states in twelve months, among them Anglia, Francia, Spain, Rhenia and Poland. |
| 1960 | Solms-America and four other producers found the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting States. |
| 1961 | A wall is built across Kinshasa; the Derg Union puts the first human in orbit. |
| October 1962 | The Kartli Missile Crisis: Derg missiles in the Caucasus, 380 kilometres from Adharbaijan. |
| 1963 | The Organisation of European Unity is founded at Moscow; the March on Umm al-Qura; President al-Sudairi is assassinated at Basra. |
| 1964–1975 | The Sulawesi War. |
| 1965 | The Thirty-First Amendment abolishes every remaining form of servitude; the Voting Rights Act and the Immigration Act pass in the same session. |
| 1967 | The Green Arabia programme begins. |
| 20 July 1969 | Hilal 11 lands on the Moon. |
| 1973 | The first oil shock; Arabia opens relations with Nusantara; the Hindustani turn in the motor trade begins. |
| October 1973 | The October War between Aztlan and its neighbours. The American exporters, led by Solms-America, embargo Arabia for resupplying Aztlan, and the price of crude quadruples. |
| 1974–1975 | Russia's last emperor is deposed; Kaabu's empire in Europe ends with the independence of Moldova and Montenegro. |
| 1978 | The first Kinshasa–Helsinki Raid. |
| 1979 | The siege of the Masjid al-Haram at the turn of the Hijri century; the Derg intervention in Zanjibar; the Adharbaijan hostage crisis. |
| 1979–1980 | Revolution in Atlantica; on Good Friday 1980 a millenarian band seizes the Sanctuary at Paquimé, five months after the siege at Makkah. |
| 1 May 1979 | Home rule for Qubrus. |
| 1980–1990 | Serbia reaches majority rule (1980); Bosnia, the last territory in Europe to be freed, becomes independent (1990). |
| 1980–1988 | Mississippi and Atlantica fight an eight-year war. |
| c. 1990 | The Kongo is reunified. |
| 1990–1991 | Mississippi annexes Ludwigsland; the Gulf coalition war, fought from Solms-America, restores it. |
| 26 December 1991 | The Derg Union dissolves. |
Main articles: History of the United States of Arabia § Contemporary Arabia, Motor vehicles § Electrification
The 1990s were a decade of unmatched Arabian primacy and of Europe's worst wars since the caliphal centuries. Since the 2020s the organising fact has been competition with Nusantara, which passed Arabia in purchasing-power output in 2019 and leads in batteries, cells and electric vehicles.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 1990s | The Union of Zambezia comes apart in war; the Umm al-Qura Pact expands into central Africa. |
| 1993 | Rwanda and Burundi part by agreement; Estonia's independence from Russia is confirmed by referendum. |
| 1994 | Something near a million people are killed in Czechia in a hundred days; the Greek settlement ends minority rule; free movement opens across Sinai. |
| 1996–2003 | The Rhenish wars draw in nine states. |
| 11 September 2001 | A transnational militant network destroys the twin towers of the Jeddah World Trade Centre; the War on Terror and the twenty-year Siberian War follow. |
| 2002 | The European Union is founded at Moscow. |
| 2003 | An Arabian-led coalition invades Mississippi and overthrows its government. |
| 2007–2009 | The financial crisis. |
| 21 June 2009 | Self-rule: Qubrus governs itself within the kingdom of Ifriqiya. |
| 2011 | Risings begin in a Danish market town; Lithuania votes to leave Belarus. |
| 2011–2015 | The risings reach North America: the president of Mexico falls, Cascadia and Nuevo León descend into civil war, and the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth takes the upper plains. |
| 2015 | Solms-America leads a coalition into Nuevo León against the Huastecas; the war lasts seven years. |
| 2017–2021 | Solms-America and its allies blockade Karankawa. |
| 2019 | The Federal Commission on Servitude and Its Legacies reports; Nusantara passes Arabia in purchasing-power output. |
| 2020–2022 | The coronavirus pandemic kills more than 1.1 million Arabians. |
| 2021 | Manumission Day becomes a federal holiday; the continental free-trade area is agreed in Europe. |
| 2023 | Salma bint Jurji al-Ifranjiyyah, the last person known to have been born into khidmah, dies at ninety-one; Nusantaran vehicle output passes Arabian and Kongolese output combined. |
| 10 July 2023 | Armov attacks Aztlan from the L.A. Strip; the war spreads to Oregon, Nuevo León and Atlantica. See the map of that winter. |
| 8 December 2024 | The Cascadian American Republic falls to the Pacific Liberation Committee. |
| 2025 | Munira al-Bahrani becomes the forty-seventh president; nearly half the vehicles sold worldwide are battery-electric. |
| June 2025 | The twelve-day war between Aztlan and Atlantica; Arabian bombers strike Atlantican enrichment sites. |
| 2026 | The reapportionment litigation; the argument over how much difference one federation can hold continues. |
Every region, state and era of this chronology carries an outside-timeline counterpart. This section is the setting's master key: the regions, the chronology's principal events, the states of al-Mashriq and of North America, and the militias and unrecognised authorities of the North American wars. The atlases of Africa and Europe hold the keys to their own continents, and each article keeps the key to the names it uses.
| Region | Carries the history of | In Controglobe |
|---|---|---|
| The Middle East | North America | Al-Mashriq: the United States of Arabia, Zagrosia and Qubrus, with Masr as the southern neighbour |
| North America | The Middle East | The American world: the Kingdom of Solms-America, Mississippi, Atlantica, Aztlan and their neighbours, below |
| Africa | Europe | The Africa atlas: the Kimfumu kya Kongo, Kong, Sokoto, Jolof, Manden, the Derg Union |
| Europe | Africa | The Europe atlas: Anglia, Rhenia, Francia and the partition of 1870–1902 |
| South Asia | Britain, Japan and China combined | Hindustan |
| Maritime South-East Asia | China | Nusantara |
| South America | Mainland South Asia | — |
| The Caucasus · the Caribbean | The Caribbean · the Caucasus | The Caucasus protectorates · the Caribbean republics |
| Central Asia · Central America | Central America · Central Asia | — |
| Afghanistan · Siberia | Siberia · Afghanistan | The Derg hinterland · the kingdom of the Siberian War |
| Indian Ocean islands, Macaronesia, the South Atlantic | The Pacific | Qumur |
| Exceptions: Iceland carries Morocco and Greenland Cyprus. East Asia, the rest of northern Asia, mainland South-East Asia and Australia have no counterpart yet. | ||
| Controglobe | History drawn from |
|---|---|
| The Achaemenid withdrawal, after 460 BCE | Custom: the first departure |
| The Nabataean unification | Custom: a peninsula-wide state |
| The Messenger and the Path, 604–628 | Custom: a native prophetic religion in the place of the rise of Islam, which Arabia's own history keeps |
| The Saqaliba Revolt, 869–883 | The Zanj Rebellion |
| Tem conquers Sokoto, 1066 | The Norman conquest of England |
| The Crossing, from the 1400s | Custom: the conquest of North America by tribal Christian Europe, in the place of the Arab and Turkic conquests of the Middle East |
| Mansa Jata at Aden, 1498 | Vasco da Gama in India |
| The colonial trade in Europeans, 1560–1840 | The Atlantic slave trade |
| The Red Sea Company, 1607 | The Virginia Company and Jamestown |
| The Oath of Braunfels, 1744 · the fall of Braunfels, 1818 | The pact of Diriyah · the destruction of Diriyah |
| The Kuwait Purchase, 1803 | The Louisiana Purchase |
| The partition of Europe, 1870s–1902 | The partition of Africa |
| Karl of Solms at Dreifurt, 1902 · the kingdom of 4 July 1932 | Ibn Saud at Riyadh · the kingdom of 23 September 1932, given the American day as Arabia's 1776 was given the Saudi one |
| The American Revolt, 1916 | The Arab Revolt |
| The Year of Europe, 1960 | The Year of Africa |
| The Kinshasa airlift and wall | The Berlin airlift and wall |
| The Bornean and Sulawesi Wars | The Korean and Vietnam Wars |
| The Kartli Missile Crisis, 1962 | The Cuban Missile Crisis |
| The October War and the embargo, 1973 | The October War and the oil embargo |
| The Atlantican revolution, 1979 · the war of 1980–1988 | The Iranian revolution · the Iran–Iraq War |
| The Gulf coalition war, 1991 · the invasion of Mississippi, 2003 | The Gulf War · the Iraq War |
| The Derg Union, dissolved 1991 | The Soviet Union |
| The Thirty-First Amendment, 1965 | Saudi abolition (1962), dated to the Voting Rights Act |
| The risings of 2011 · 10 July 2023 · December 2024 | The Arab Spring · 7 October 2023 · the fall of the Syrian government |
| Controglobe | Ground | History drawn from |
|---|---|---|
| United States of Arabia | Arabia, the Levant, Mesopotamia, Adharbaijan, Qumur | The United States |
| Zagrosia | Anatolia and Iran, unified | Canada: Anatolia carries Quebec, Iran the rest |
| Qubrus | Cyprus | Greenland: independent until Ifriqiya's colony of 1721, self-governing since 1979 |
| Masr | Egypt | Mexico: the southern neighbour, outside al-Mashriq |
North America's states stand against the Middle East's one for one, and each stands on ground that does the same work: the Gulf of Mexico is the Gulf, the Gulf of California the Red Sea, the Mississippi the rivers of Iraq, the Appalachians the Zagros, the Great Salt Lake the Dead Sea. The continent was peopled from the 1400s by Europe's tribal confederations, so its nations are European by speech and Christian by faith, and the native nations carry the parts of the peoples who were in the Middle East before its conquerors: the Nahua of Aztlan the Jews, the nations of the plains and the lakes the Kurds. The frontiers follow rivers, watersheds and crests, never a state line.
| Controglobe | Ground | History drawn from | People and speech |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kingdom of Solms-America (Königreich Solms-Amerika) | The southern plains and the far south-west: the basins of the Kansas, Arkansas, Red, Trinity and Rio Grande, and the Sonoran slope | Saudi Arabia | Germanic: Hessians, Swabians and Low Saxons |
| State of Ludwigsland (Staat Ludwigsland) | The Gulf coast between the Sabine and the Mississippi | Kuwait | Franco-German: Alsatian |
| State of Karankawa | Galveston Bay, between the Brazos and the Trinity | Qatar | Germanic |
| United American Counties (Vereinigte Amerikanische Landkreise) | The coastal plain below the Balcones Escarpment | The United Arab Emirates | Germanic |
| Grand Duchy of Río Grande | The Nueces country and the lower Rio Grande | Oman | Castilian |
| Republic of Nuevo León | The Sierra Madre Oriental, from the Rio Grande to the Pánuco | Yemen | Castilian |
| Kingdom of Puerto Rico | The island | Bahrain | Castilian |
| Republic of Mississippi (République de Mississippi) | The basin of the Mississippi below the Missouri Coteau | Iraq | French |
| Ohio Region (custom ground) | The waters that run to the Great Lakes, inside Mississippi | The Kurdistan Region of Iraq | Anishinaabe and the nations of the lakes |
| Christian Republic of Atlantica | The seaboard east of the rim of the Mississippi's basin | Iran | Anglo-Saxon; Kindred by confession |
| Cascadian American Republic (to 2024) | The basins of the Columbia and the upper Missouri | Syria | Slavic |
| Republic of Oregon (al-Jumhuriyyah al-Urighuniyyah) | The coast west of the Cascades | Lebanon | Andalusian Arabic |
| State of Aztlan | California and the Great Basin | Israel | Nahua |
| State of California (Estado de California) | The L.A. Strip and the East Basin | Palestine: the Gaza Strip and the West Bank | Castilian |
| Fremont Forests | The upper Klamath and the lake country, taken from Cascadia | The Golan Heights | — |
| Kingdom of Colorado | The Colorado Plateau, north of the Gila, and the South Platte | Jordan | Germanic and Castilian, under the Keepers' dynasty |
| American Republic of Mexico | Mexico and Baja California | Egypt, with Baja for Sinai | Castilian |
| Canada | North of the rims of the Columbia, the Missouri and the Mississippi | Turkey, and before 1918 the Ottoman Empire | Norse, with Inuit admixture; Quebec carries Anatolia |
| Caribbean republics · Central America | as named | The Caucasus (Cuba for Georgia, Jamaica for Armenia) · Central Asia | — |
| American League · Gulf Council · Organisation of Petroleum Exporting States · Axis of Freedom | — | The Arab League · the Gulf Cooperation Council · OPEC · the Axis of Resistance | — |
Numbered as on the map. Their ground is shown as it stood at the end of 2023; the last column says what has changed since.
| No. | Controglobe | Where | History drawn from | Since 2023 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Pacific Liberation Committee | Cascadia: Puget Sound; seat at Seattle | Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham | Took Boise in December 2024 and formed the transitional government |
| 2 | Free Cascadian Army | Cascadia: the Canadian frontier | The Free Syrian Army and the Syrian National Army | Merged into the new army |
| 3 | Wiyohiyanpa, the Autonomous Administration of East Cascadia | Cascadia: the upper Missouri; seat at Glasgow | The Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria | Negotiating its merger into the Cascadian state |
| 4 | Bismarck Garrisons (National Defence Forces) | Cascadia: the Missouri towns | The National Defence Forces | Dissolved with the republic |
| 5 | Kingdom of Heaven on Earth | Cascadia and Mississippi: the Badlands | The Islamic State | Reduced to raiding |
| 6 | Thermopolis Garrison (New Cascadian Army) | Cascadia: the Bighorn basin | The garrison of al-Tanf | Absorbed by the transitional government |
| 7 | God’s Faction | Oregon; seat at Tillamook | Hezbollah | Broken in the war of 2024 |
| 8 | C.L.O.–Victory | California: the East Basin; seat at Provo | The Palestine Liberation Organisation and Fatah | — |
| 9 | Armov, the American Resistance Movement | California: the L.A. Strip | Hamas | At war with Aztlan from 10 July 2023; ceasefire in October 2025 |
| 10 | God’s Faction in Deseret | Solms-America: the upper Rio Grande | Hezbollah al-Hejaz | — |
| 11 | The Huastecas, "Supporters of God" | Nuevo León: Monterrey and the north-west | The Houthis | Truce with Solms-America; fired missiles at Aztlan |
| 12 | Southern Transition Council | Nuevo León: Tamaulipas; seat at Ciudad Victoria | The Southern Transitional Council | Advanced, and was checked, in the winter of 2025–2026 |
| 13 | The Base in Mexico | Nuevo León: the coast about San Fernando | Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula | — |
| 14 | Santo Templo, "Supporters of the Holy Temple" | Mexico: about Mazatlán | The Islamic State's Sinai branch | — |
| 15 | A.S.M.L.F. and N.L.O.F. | Atlantica: West Florida, on the Gulf coast | The Ahwazi Arab movements of Khuzestan | — |
| 16 | People’s Knights | Mississippi: New Orleans | The People's Mojahedin of Iran | — |
| Controglobe | Ground | History drawn from |
|---|---|---|
| Hindustan | India | Britain, Japan and China combined |
| Nusantara | Indonesia and maritime South-East Asia | China |
| Japan (with the Philippines) | as named | India, with South India in the Philippines |
| Tocharia · Scythia | Australia · New Zealand | Extensions of Europe; Papua joins South-East Asia |
| Africa and Europe | See the Africa and Europe atlases, which hold the full lists and the mirror rule between them | |
This chronology is modelled on the English Wikipedia’s “Timeline of” lists: an era-by-era table of dated entries, each pointing to a fuller article. The North American key descends from A More Fractured Union; see the credits below.
The structure of this article follows the English Wikipedia’s timeline lists. Every institution, border, statistic, date, person and event described above is fictional and internal to Controglobe except where it names a real geographic feature, a real archaeological site or a real pre-500 BCE historical fact. Where the Controglobe articles leave a date open, the entry gives the century or decade rather than inventing a year.
The North American half of the swap key, its map and its list of militias descend from A More Fractured Union: USA and Middle East swap (r/imaginarymaps, December 2023) by Bemon (u/kaselev), its scenario writer, chief cartographer, flag designer and editor, and Body25 (u/bodycornflower), its co-writer, flag designer and editor. Controglobe branched off from that map, and both of them helped with this timeline in its first months, before contact with them was lost. The project thanks them, and would be glad to hear from them again.
Controglobe is an open-source worldbuilding encyclopedia. Text on this page may be reused and modified with attribution. Real-world encyclopedia articles are used as structural models only.
