Late-1700's
On the day the Articles of Confederation were signed, the United States found itself flung back to an empty world. They later discovered they were transported back to 4500 BCE, before any major cities were founded in the Americas. The three million Americans ISOTed were shocked to find the lack of anyone on their borders. Many people thought of it as an escape from European influence, a sign that the American experiment would carry forward. Others thought that it was a message from God showing how the Americans were doomed to fail. After people realized what had happened, food began to run out, and state governments had trouble working together. In 1784, Virginia seceded from the United States, tired of the restrictions implemented. In such a time of crisis, Virginia couldn't make any compromises with the federal government. After fighting off any militia the federal congress could afford to send in, they made an effort to switch many of their tobacco farms into ones that could produce food for the people in the country.
Quickly, other states seceded from the United States as well. New York abandoned ship next, hoping that they could first quell the rebellion of Iroquois while also being allowed to build up their own military. After Georgia and North Carolina followed. In 1794, the United States was formally disbanded, with acting congress leader Alexander Hamilton renaming himself the "President of Pennsylvania and Delaware". Each country had trouble finding their footing, and one or two nearly collapsed entirely from the lack of authority and clear laws. One such country was North Carolina, which never expanded due to the fact that the government never responded to the people's need for food. Those who could afford it packed up and moved to the west, where the breakaway Republic of Hawkins was formed in 1798. Needless to say, the two decades after the Poena (The given name for the event, after the Latin word for "punishment") were plagued by death and destruction, and the collapse of a nation that had tons of potential.
Early-1800's
In 1803, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island banded together to form the Republic of New England. Within a year, Connecticut joined as well. They were arguably the immediate success story after the Poena, though they didn't have the initiative to become the major military power of North America. After their brief stint in 1804 in which they lost Vermont to the New Yorkers, they decided it best to quietly expand up the coast, the first country to really expand into virgin land. They interacted with the few natives in the area, and flooded the region with poor serfs who didn't really have a place to farm. In the post-Poena climate, even the elite found themselves farming for their families, if only to keep themselves alive. The colony of New Quebec was one of the larger ones; settlers from New Hampshire and even Vermont created New England's only Francophone colony. Pennsylvania and New York, seeing the success of New England's farming programs, began to expand west.
After the chaos of the late-1700's, the two countries were better equipped to nail down their old claims to American land. In 1811, New York and Pennsylvania signed a treaty to divide up colonial land, and tried to peacefully expand. Eventually, the same would be done between Pennsylvania and Virginia, dividing up the Mississippi Basin. At this point in time, however, the countries down south weren't as successful. Georgian expansion into Florida was met with stiff resistance by the majorly hunter-gatherer natives, as well as the few Georgian Native Americans who decided to fight alongside their ancestors. They were able to expand, but it was grueling in comparison to the north, which was a swamp-less region where the natives had mostly been wiped out from American disease. Virginia used the virgin land to expel their natives out of the country, convincing Georgia to do the same. The Confederation of the Five Fires was formed in 1814 out of the wreckage of previous settlement, but it was unstable due to constant intervention from Virginia. It ended up collapsing to expanding Virginian armies in 1823.
In 1821, South Carolina formally renamed itself to the Kingdom of Drayton, after the governor (John Drayton) who had ruled with an iron fist for nearly two decades. He was the one who cemented South Carolina's place in the sand, turning it into a backwater until 2016. Luckily, there wasn't a John Drayton ruling over every country. In most places, exploration continued, albeit tentatively. This was, of course, until the Quebecois Revolts rocked the New English colonies, offsetting exploration for a while. Many of the French settlers, already having a solid foundation of agriculture, disconnected themselves from the government they had few ties with. As the earlier New English colonies were poorly absorbed, it was easy for the thousand-or-so settlers to stop calling themselves New English and begin calling themselves Quebecois. Even still, New Quebec was the second independent state outside of the original US (or the third, if you count Hawkins, which most people don't), and the prospect of an actual non-American nation had become almost foreign in the world's two generations away from "home". So, colonial expansion slowed down ever so slightly, with New England taking the brunt of the economic collapse, until the 1830's.
In 1831, a man named Christian Seddon approached the President of New York with a prospect. Instead of trying to directly absorb all their colonies, why not form some colonial businesses much like the East India Company of the Old World? The president liked the idea, and a second rendition of the Hudson Bay Company was formed in the north. Since it was basically a business, it was able to generate revenue both for the people who ran it and for the state. In addition, it actually populated the virgin lands because workers had to move there to work. New York became pretty rich off using the idea, and many other countries followed suit in similar ways. While the early-1800's were okay for expansion, it was the second half of the 19th century where things would begin to expand in really big ways.
Late-1800's
The late 19th century, at least in most history textbooks, is normally classified as the "Age of Exploration". Civilization moved from merely the eastern half of North America to Europe, Africa, and South America. In 1856, the Amplus Company of Pennsylvania, a trading company that had existed since the 1830's, founded the settlement of Villelibre on the site of OTL Lorient. It was the first real settlement in Europe since the Poena, and was basically a dumping ground for the few French Pennsylvanians who dared to break the law. However, after the Amplus Company proved that Europe was a viable settlement option, people began to move back to their ancestral homelands. Many Pennsylvania Dutch formed settlements in the lands formerly known as the Netherlands. People whose families had been loyalists in the war moved to East Anglia or Wales, where they'd eventually break away from New York to form the New Kingdom of Britain. Priests from Massachusetts worked to painstakingly rebuild Rome, and went on to rebuild Jerusalem decades later. However, the ultimate settlers were the companies. The people back home needed more food, more slaves, more of everything. The settlements in Spain, France, and Scotland were essentially all turned into gigantic farms, so that the artisans could turn from farming back to anything else they cared to do (and maybe buy food from the companies in the process ). Virginia moved from forcing most of its populace to work in food farms for their whole lives to inventing a rudimentary version of the steam engine in 1878. Pennsylvania became rich enough off of its French colonies to re-brand itself as the "United States of the North", especially after population began to boom. The nation with the most success was New York, as they began to kick off something of an Industrial Revolution after producing new kinds of ships in the 1890's.
In contrast to the profitable nature of the European colonies, the African colonies were startlingly different. New York claimed most of Western Africa, mostly in order to get chocolate and ivory. As slavery was abolished completely for them in 1887, the colonialism was much tamer than it was from Virginia and Georgia. Obviously it wasn't without it's flaws, as the North Americans were notorious for ignoring the natives. New York commonly "encouraged" its freed slaves to settle down in Africa, where they were given land and slightly safer conditions than back home. Of course, Virginia didn't abolish slavery until 1978, and Georgia never really got over that phase in their life. In South America, the colonies at play were far more Americanized. Instead of the companies holding agricultural ownership in Europe, or the slave colonies in Africa, the South American colonies were formed by people with little political investment at all. It was mostly just a means of expansion for Virginia, Georgia, and other smaller countries. The settlements of Rossjour, Tiswe, and Norport were all Virginian settlements along the coast, founded in 1892, 1894, and 1898 respectively.
In addition to all the colonies, there were some new independent countries that fared swimmingly. Cinctorres, for example, was a town founded on the Yucatan peninsula. Mostly formed out of Spanish immigrants from Georgia, it quickly expanded and interacted with the more sophisticated hunter-gatherer tribes. It would end up forming the Union of Tabasco in 1977. Or, further north, there was the Union of Scottish America, which later separated into the Kingdom of MacBaird and the State of Gowson. With the Scottish and Irish being persecuted by Virginia (who had recently absorbed Hawkins at the time, a nation with a large Scottish population) and the USN, many fled to the Pict Lake (OTL Salt Lake) to set up shop. It was honestly pretty profitable in spite of the Virginians, and tended to gather religious people who needed somewhere shady to do their business. Ultimately, the second half of the 1800's was a pretty good time, but that boom in population began to quiet, even during the forefront of invention...
1900's
The 1900's could be described as the Age of Industrialization, but it was also the age of corrupt business. Not that business wasn't corrupt in the 1800's, but any corruption that was previously there only seemed to get bigger with time. The 1900's began with the Industrial Revolution spreading into the USN and New England. Of course, with the steam engine only being invented twenty years earlier, it was a bit difficult for any significant progress to occur until the mid-1920's. But, with industrialization came bigger business, business less tailored to the likes and dislikes of federal governments. The Amplus Company began branching out, from colonialism and trade to producing things like garments and toys from their vast factories in Villelibre. Sadly, in addition to small trinkets becoming a commodity for the first time, slaves also made their reappearance. In Virginia, abolitionist movements had gotten so close to winning in the 1910's, but the surplus in industry meant they needed people to work in the factories. The colonies in Africa, while they were on the grow, were also extremely bad regarding basic human rights. There was also a bit of a Gold Rush that happened from 1910 to 1925, where a large group of Germans migrated to formerly unexplored California to settle down, and discovered an abundance of gold in the process. After that, many more immigrated to the area, some companies massively profiting from reselling slave-mined gold for a higher price.
After getting rich off their own product, many businessmen saw it their duty to expand their wealth and the so-called American Way to the rest of the world. A man named John Bateman was the cause of a large religious revival movement causing people to flood into Mesopotamia and Egypt. Bateman was the owner of the Bate-Ulster Company, and took it upon himself to bring the "joys of American industry and sophistication" to the agricultural societies of the 44th century BCE. In 1951, he journeyed across the Mediterranean and met up with missionaries in New Jerusalem, where he was directed east towards the city of Uruk (or Erech, as the religious Americans liked to spell it). Founded around the same time the Americans landed, Uruk was a bit shaken by diseases spread by the New English who settled in New Jerusalem. However, it was still even more glorious than it was before American contact, with the king wielding a gun and its citizens using paper currency. Of course, Bateman disrupted the agreements the people of Uruk had with New Jerusalem, and forced the king to give him political power. He called Americans to take back the civilization that had created them (that civilization being the Mesopotamians), to show their complete and total domination over the Earth. Many of the more conservative folk followed his dogma, setting up their own little states in what Bateman called the "League of Erech". He was followed by supporters in "Philistine" (even though none of the natives actually called it that) and Egypt. On the side, Keftiu was a kingdom heavily influenced by American culture, but was never fully taken over by it (although civilization there wouldn't have existed for another few millennia without some form of influence or another). With the spread of business to the ancient world, Islamic freed slaves from the Njinga family took it upon themselves to rebuild the Muslim Holy Land. By 2016, the Njinga Caliph is arguably one of the more powerful people in the Middle Eastern region, but that doesn't mean much considering how small the other fifteen countries in the area really are.
In 1983, there were some big steps made on the military side of technology. While the wars of the past were mostly small and contained (such as when Virginia took over North Carolina in the '60's, and no one batted an eye), the next war had the opportunity of breaking out in five continents. Something of an arms race between Virginia and New York occurred, where New York slowly gained the upper hand. The aeroplane, which had been invented only fourteen years earlier in Syracuse, was militarized and used to transport guns and ammunition across the continent. The idea of the "trackless train" (kinda like a bus, it was never adapted into a car) was invented in 1978, along with the gas engine. Both were used to plan military ventures if any nation were to declare war on the other. By the year 2000, nearly every country that knew what was good for them spent a significant portion of their budget on innovating new military technology.
2000's
So far, the 21st century has been marked by an odd lack of exploration. After the Mesopotamian Boom ended and aeroplane technology became more developed, most of the former exploratory companies focused on connecting the regions they owned in more intuitive ways. If we were going off of OTL standards, technology would probably be somewhere around where it was in 1940 in 2016. The Oil Boom is currently all the rage in the Middle East, and even smaller countries like Goldstaub (the original German settlement in California) are starting to get rich. There was even a World Union formed in 2003, potentially initiating scientific exploration of Asia and Africa. Of course, that doesn't mean everything's somehow perfect and happy. Two hundred and forty years since the Poena, it looks like the world is getting ready to have a war, especially with the tension building between New York's ally of New England and Virginia's ally of Georgia. And with the idea of a "bomb made by splitting atoms" floating around, it might not end well...
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