Maybe have capitalism simultaneously start in India and China alongside Western Europe so we can see how much current timeline capitalism sucks because capitalism sucks in general and how much current timeline capitalism sucks because the Occidentals are an avaricious warlike tribal people with no regard for the sanctity of life.

I wrote a quick page of flash fiction sketching out a world where Chinese ships reached California a couple hundred years before the Conquistadors reached South America, tl;dr the Chinese empire can’t exert power on the continent the way the European empires could, indigenous cultures adopt some Chinese technologies and state organization principles, and the Spanish and English arrive on schedule but find their ability to conquer stymied by Aztecs with arquebuses and cannons.

My second choice is that a major slave rebellion is successful in Ancient Rome, resulting in a class-based overthrow of the previous state apparatus. The former slaves reform the existing Patron-Client networks to eliminate the patrons all together, resulting in a society economically organized around circles of associated producers and craftspeople who are of equal social rank and work together while sharing a commons. Eventually as the Roman state breaks down from the inevitability of its size and outside pressures, the resulting “fuedal” system is not one dominated by noble lords and their systems of alliances, but a complex web of cities and townships which associate freely with one another, slowly forming into complex realms with distributed, instead of centralized, leadership structures.

Flip those positive and negative charge symbols around, Benjamin Franklin.

Fossil fuel deposits are more evenly distributed and whatever hasn’t been burnt by 2025 are rapidly less recoverable. Maybe zap those gas hydrates out of existence while we’re at it.

It’s really quite rude to give the hairless primates the tools of industrialisation and extinction in one hit.

Make central Australia a bit deeper, with a sea connection to the northern and southern coasts so the interior can stay forested.

give the native americans horses far earlier by way of the viking settlements in canada

Having access to horse domestication would have done a lot to advance the development and size of native american civilizations. Beasts of burden in particular to help with nomadic migration and agricultural exploitation.

they also did so well as horse riders in our timeline they made rifles obsolete and made the empires invent the revolver just to combat them. and thats with only a century of horse domestication. Give it to them far before european settlement and theyll be able to put up even more of a fight.

Every European has an ass where their face should be and vice versa.

Chinese not abandoning their large ships probably leads to their technology not stagnating and their trade with and/or settlement in Western North America. Really crazy change to history.

Fossil fuels never existed

At the advent of agriculture and the transition away from pastoralism and nomadism, I wish that all tribes had enforced a collectivist mentality regarding possessions instead of allowing chains of inequality that have lashed out for millennia.

I think inequality is one of those things that is really difficult to erase once it has already been normalized. It allows for accumulation of power, and then uses that power to fight against the fragmented opposition to itself. I think there would have been so much less suffering if that issue had been nipped in the bud back at the start of “civilization.”

I’d ensure Spartacus’s slave revolt succeeded, resulting in Rome falling to a grand slave revolt, smothering in the cradle the pro-debtor/creditor government and empire. Probably just delay it emerging later down the line but who knows. But best part is this stops a lot of follow-on bad happenings such as Christianity being proclaimed the official religion of Rome, certain unifications don’t occur under wartime conditions against Rome. Maybe they even implement a kind of early universal suffrage and it ends up failing but it means that 17th century enlightenment thinkers have more to chew on which means they and the French revolution see certain flaws in liberal thinking and advocate a more radical course of action leading to the US founding fathers being a bunch of, republican, class traitors and hardcore abolitionists which leads to a crumbling of the capitalist world order over time that means the German revolution succeeds and European capital is murdered off in a bloody series of revolutions ending by the year 1980. While simultaneously anti-colonial sentiment creates uprisings across the globe that further weaken capital. Thus global communism by 2040.

(Yes I know there are problems with this but let me dream)

I think it would be a funny prank to destroy a merchant’s reputation by swapping his ingot inventory with shitty low-grade copper

Going back in time to prevent my ancestors from leaving Europe just so I can have affordable healthcare.

Marx gets a gundam

Extend the life of Kublai Khan and expand the Mongol Empire into Western Europe

I’d teach Vivaldi about breakdowns so he could open up the fucking pit