Shadow Wars is a sweeping speculative history that excavates the forgotten, suppressed, and possibly imagined wars of the long 18th century. It offers a provocative counter-narrative to the canonical history of revolution and empire, delving into hidden corners of global conflict where the lines between history and myth blur, and where truth is buried not by time—but by design.
Set between the years 1750 and 1845—a period of radical political upheaval, expanding colonialism, and rapid industrial transformation—Shadow Wars chronicles a series of conflicts that may or may not have happened. Nation-states, secret societies, breakaway republics, religious orders, and stateless peoples wage war not only for land and power, but for autonomy, memory, ideology, and silence. Each chapter reconstructs a war that fell into history’s blind spot: too inconvenient for empire, too complex for legend, or too threatening for the archive.
 
Written in the style of alternate history but structured as an academic chronicle, the book draws on fabricated primary sources, imagined field reports, recovered dispatches, and haunting oral histories. Yet each war resonates with eerie plausibility, echoing real-world events with strange distortions—conflicts that feel as though they might have simply slipped through the cracks.
Among the lost and silenced wars explored:
The Coal War (1763–1769): A subterranean uprising of English miners, led by secret societies and armed with proto-industrial sabotage techniques, pushing back against Crown agents and the violent onset of capitalism.
The Indigo Revolt (1755–1758): In the colonial hinterlands of Bengal, a nonviolent yet devastating campaign of economic sabotage by indigo farmers aims to destroy the British trade network—not through open war, but by vanishing from the system entirely.
The Siege of New Carthage (1792–1794): A naval war of liberation led by freed African mariners who seize and defend a fortress-island off the coast of West Africa from French and Spanish colonial forces, attempting to establish a sovereign, abolitionist republic.
The War of the Radiant Cross (1781–1784): A revolutionary insurrection within the American Revolution itself, as utopian radicals reject both monarchy and the emerging United States, and attempt to establish a decentralized egalitarian commune in the Appalachian frontier.
The Purge of the Violet Banner (1774–1777): An apocalyptic religious war in the Hindu Kush between an esoteric matriarchal cult and encroaching Mughal and Afghan warlords, remembered only in half-burned folktales and banned manuscripts.
The Copper Prince’s Crusade (1798–1801): A private war of conquest by a self-proclaimed Byzantine heir, backed by secret financiers, who aims to restore an empire of “enlightened tyranny” across North Africa before being betrayed and erased.
The Red Thorns Rebellion (1801–1806): A Transylvanian revolt led by herbalist-witches and matriarchal elders, resisting both Habsburg repression and Ottoman spies in a war fueled by ancestral lore and deadly toxins.
The Hundred-Day Forest War (1812): Amid the backdrop of Anglo-American conflict, a coalition of indigenous nations and deserters declare independence in the forests of the Great Lakes, creating a forest republic that survives only long enough to become legend.
The Autumn War (1833–1835): In the Mississippi basin, a war erupts between indigenous machinists and the agents of industrial empire. Their weapons are strange machines—part sacred relic, part steampunk experiment. They are buried with their makers beneath rust and red leaves.
The Sand Engine Rebellion (1839–1843): In the Persian Gulf, nomadic tribes and spiritualists wage a war against imported European machinery, believing the sand itself is sacred. War camels wired with explosives face off against early armored engines in a surreal desert conflict.
 
Through these accounts, Shadow Wars builds an alternate tapestry of the late Enlightenment and early Industrial Age—one populated not only by kings, generals, and treaties, but also by visionaries, fugitives, mystics, pirates, and machinists. It reframes the 18th and early 19th centuries not as a tidy progression of progress and empire, but as an era riven with secret rebellions, alternate ideologies, and forgotten futures.
 
Blending Borges, Calvino, and counterfactual history with political myth and archival fiction, Shadow Wars is a meditation on the silence between pages of history books—a space where suppressed revolutions, buried ideologies, and lost causes speak in whispers.