I have an odd tradition. Every year, I try and get a big map out on August the 28th, no matter the external circumstances, to coincide with the anniversary of when I first got an account here seven years ago. I don't always get things done on time, but I do make sure to post the map, even if it's a couple of days late.
Here are the links to the old maps, in case you were curious.
This year I feel like changing things up a bit, although this is largely a change forced on me by circumstance. Y'see, for nearly two years now
I've been slowly grinding away at completing the R-QBAM, a replacement for the QBAM in an actual, named projection, rather than the unknowable mess that is the old QBAM.
Back in February, I got the Indian subcontinent finished, and decided that as a quick break from work expanding the basemap, that I'd instead turn my hand to a historical patch.
One of my main bugbears with the old QBAM is how inconsistent some of the associated resources can be, and one of the most annoying of those the conventional QBAM map of the Princely States of the British Raj, which looks OK at a first glance but gets rather badly flawed if you try and dig a little deeper. I'll spare you all the details on the why and how (
if you're interested, I have a more in-depth discussion (with citations no less) buried in the replies in this post), but suffice to say it's rather badly wrong. Every now and again I would try and fix the Raj patch myself, sometimes getting fairly far along in a WIP before slamming headfirst into the wall that was the inconsistent flawed basemap I'd been using. Most of those attempts died as WIP's and never got posted,
though I did post this WIP all the way back in 2017. Actually finishing a Raj patch became one of my long-term to-do projects, and once I'd finished adding the Indian subcontinent to the R-QBAM, I figured that the stars had finally aligned for me to give it another shot and actually finish it this time. I had a shiny new basemap, that I knew was accurate and detailed enough and came with a tonne of interconnected supplementary resources thanks to the defined projection. Over the years I had also found a tonne of new cartographic sources and historical maps that would come in useful, and I felt that my own map-making abilities had generally improved enough that I felt the task was actually doable this time. I figured it would take me maybe three weeks, a month at a pinch.
It ended up taking five months.
Highlights of the cartographic odyssey that would unfold over the next half a year include
debunking a wikipedia hoax,
finding a bit of the Raj where the British government was technically a vassal state of itself,
the fractal petty states of Gujarat,
the annoyingly vague administration of Assam,
and the mess of petty khanates and autonomous tribal areas on the North-West Frontier.
It has been quite the challenge, digging through often incomplete or inaccurate period sources and scouring historical maps, before trying to explain in detail why I made the choices I did, citing the above sources in some truly monstrous walls of text. I would quote the original posts here to get my point across, but considering two of those posts were such a massive walls of text that I had to split them across multiple posts, I'll just provide the raw links instead.
It started with a base-geography patch, tweaking the basemap to remove artificial reservoirs and account for the surprisingly substantial changes to the Ganges and Indus deltas over the last century.
Next was the first progress update, adding southern India and dealing with the aforementioned wikipedia hoax that really threw me for a couple of days,
followed by some necessary addendums to that post a day later.
That was in turn followed by the addition of much of western India, Bengal, the Himalayas and a first pass of Assam.
Next came Central India, a particularly confusing mess of pretty states that required a concerted effort to simplify enough to even depict. It was here that I dealt with Panth-Piploda,
that would later become the Raj's smallest province, but that back in 1914 was governed as if it were a Princely State even though it was itself British administered (don't ask).
Then a smaller patch adding the Indian Punjab and more of the Himalayas, before diving into the frankly awful mess of petty states that made up Gujarat.
It took me over a month to make sense of the states of the Saurashtra peninsula (then known as Kathiawar)alone. The penultimate update was so big that I had to split it into two parts,
with the first part tweaking Assam, and Adding Rajasthan and most of Pakistan,
followed by a second part adding the rest of Gujarat, which was by far the gnarliest part of the whole endeavour.
I then took a break for a month to add Quebec to the basemap (why do I apparently hate myself), and returned today to post the final parts,
adding northern Pakistan and Kashmir.
And for all that, it's not really finished. A complete map of the Raj would also have Burma/Myanmar and some chunks of the Middle East, but for the former I haven't even added Myanmar to the basemap yet, while I don't particularly feel up to the latter challenge right now. It's not completely finished, but is at least finished enough that I can leave it be for now and move on to other things (in this case, the rest of Canada; again, why do I hate myself?).
In most years, I'm brainstorming ideas for an August map over the summer, but this year, as the Raj patch slowly ground on, and on, I realised something; that I may not have the time to produce a fully fleshed-out scenario before the deadline on August 28th. But then I further realised that I didn't have to post an AH-map to keep the tradition going, just a major cartographic work that I was proud of and fully reflected my skills as a map maker. And the Raj patch, which I had spent months slaving over, definitely meets the criteria. Which is why, unlike the previous times I've done this, I'll be posting an OTL historical map this time.
With that little explanation out of the way, I present to you an accurate, detailed and intensively researched map of the Indian subcontinent in July 1914, on the eve of the First World War, at the height of the British Raj. In addition, a further map showing the territorial control of the approximately 600 states depicted on the first map and the associated colour key, in addition to a list of states arranged geographically by region.
Full map;
View attachment 852831
Territorial extent;
View attachment 852832
ADDENDUM 1 - FULL LIST OF PRINCELY STATES;
