AHC: New Zealand more populous than United Kingdom

fluttersky

fluttersky

By area, New Zealand is slightly larger than the UK (268,000 km^2 vs 243,000 km^2); the two countries also have similar climate.

However, the UK has 65 million people, while NZ only has 4.5 million.

Is it at all possible that NZ can have more people than the UK in the present day, with a PoD no earlier than 1600?

Bonus points if this can happen without a nuclear holocaust.
 

The Uchronian

fluttersky said:
By area, New Zealand is slightly larger than the UK (268,000 km^2 vs 243,000 km^2); the two countries also have similar climate.

However, the UK has 65 million people, while NZ only has 4.5 million.

Is it at all possible that NZ can have more people than the UK in the present day, with a PoD no earlier than 1600?

Bonus points if this can happen without a nuclear holocaust.
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Probably not; I think you *might* be able to get away with just under 30 million, max; and 8 to 16 million is probably not hard to do(because, let's face it, N.Z. was actually rather underpopulated IOTL), but no way you'd be able to match the UK.

Australia might come close, and Canada could potentially even *exceed* the U.K., but New Zealand? Not large enough, and too many mountains.
 

mosodake

CaliBoy1990 said:
Probably not; I think you *might* be able to get away with just under 30 million, max; and 8 to 16 million is probably not hard to do(because, let's face it, N.Z. was actually rather underpopulated IOTL), but no way you'd be able to match the UK.

Australia might come close, and Canada could potentially even *exceed* the U.K., but New Zealand? Not large enough, and too many mountains.
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New Zealand has quite a bit more land area than the island of Honshu, which is also very mountainous but has over a hundred million people. Granted, the weather is better in Japan, but the land area isn't a constraint.
 

Chairwoman Roxelana

New Zealand is too far away from the rest of the world, and has been populated for too short of a time for it to be able to reach the UK's Population. My brief search says New Zealand hasn't even reached England's Population in 1700.
 
fluttersky

fluttersky

TurkishCapybara said:
New Zealand is too far away from the rest of the world, and has been populated for too short of a time for it to be able to reach the UK's Population. My brief search says New Zealand hasn't even reached England's Population in 1700.
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Yep. NZ can support 60 million people, but that many people simply wouldn't be present, without some sort of stimulus to boost migration to NZ.

Two ideas for how this could potentially happen:
One, a little cliché: Nazi Germany wins WWII, demands New Zealand off the UK. It then gets turned into a huge squalid deportation camp for the "Untermensch".

A better idea, and more interesting:

In the American Revolutionary War, the entire British America (including Canada) becomes part of the USA. With efforts in America destroyed, Britain focuses its attention to Oceania and India. The new city of Auckland becomes the main base for Britain's operations in the Pacific. Britain encourages colonisation and exploitation of New Zealand.

The British King decides to temporarily relocate to Auckland, under constant fear of an invasion by Napoleon. Several wealthy landowners follow.
Napoleon focuses on eliminating his main rival the UK, before tackling the continent. After a careful ambush, the French manage to take over the UK and capture its navy.
The British Empire in Auckland is severely weakened, with only a few million people and no capability to retake the British Isles. With the ferocious wave of nationalistic hatred of the French in the remnant British Empire, Britain vows to retake the home isles one day given the power.
A program is initiated whereby women are strongly incentivised to have as many children as possible, to restore the population available for recruitment into the Navy.

In Europe, Napoleon solidifies his control of Western Europe. Liberation looks unlikely for now.

In the British Empire (Oceania), fertility rates soar. A hundred years later, New Zealand is home to forty million people.
 
Maeglin

Maeglin

Difficulties:

- Mountains. New Zealand has lots of them.
- Late settlement. Maori arrived circa A.D. 1200. European settlement was mid-nineteenth century.
- Isolation. The nearest significant land mass is 1200 miles/2000 km to the west.
- In the nineteenth century, the warmer island was full of dense bush and Maori who were very adept at shooting back.
- Some quite nasty rivers that were responsible for their share of drowning deaths.
 
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Dathi THorfinnsson

Getting people there earlier would help a lot for this goal.

One major advantage NZ has over Australia is rainfall. Australia's probably limited in size below the UK by the aridity of much of its land,

Hmmm... Somebody, don't know who, gets blown off course and ends up in New Zealand (maybe before the Maori arrive?). Anyway, they discover jade, and realize that if they can get it home, they can make profit selling it to the Chinese.

They set up a mine, bring in farmers to support it, and a settlement slowly grows. As Chinese merchants find out about this new land, some of them adventure that far afield in search of jade and (whatever else NZ has to offer).

Realizing the tropical crop package used by the first settlers really only works well on North Island, the Chinese merchants bring some northern Chinese wheat and millet farmers, and set up mines and settlements on South Island.

Populations grow.

By today, NZ is settled as thickly as China, Java, Malaya or Japan, and has the requested population.
 

SinghKing

Banned
Dathi THorfinnsson said:
Getting people there earlier would help a lot for this goal.

One major advantage NZ has over Australia is rainfall. Australia's probably limited in size below the UK by the aridity of much of its land,

Hmmm... Somebody, don't know who, gets blown off course and ends up in New Zealand (maybe before the Maori arrive?). Anyway, they discover jade, and realize that if they can get it home, they can make profit selling it to the Chinese.

They set up a mine, bring in farmers to support it, and a settlement slowly grows. As Chinese merchants find out about this new land, some of them adventure that far afield in search of jade and (whatever else NZ has to offer).

Realizing the tropical crop package used by the first settlers really only works well on North Island, the Chinese merchants bring some northern Chinese wheat and millet farmers, and set up mines and settlements on South Island.

Populations grow.

By today, NZ is settled as thickly as China, Java, Malaya or Japan, and has the requested population.
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Okay- perhaps a Srivijaya Borobudur vessel (just like the one which made it 8,000 kilometres westwards across the Indian Ocean, and ended up populating Madagascar IOTL; new mitochondrial DNA studies prove that all native Malagasy people today can trace their heritage back to 30 founding mothers from Indonesia 1200 years ago, iro 830CE)- or a few? Especially if these settler communities continue to pursue the thalassocratic path, establishing colonial empires held together by naval supremacy (perhaps even extending to Melanesia, Polynesia and Australia?)

Alternately, if you want a later POD, you could go with a Majapahit merchant expedition; or either the Tidore or Ternate Sultanate (in the event of either of these two fierce rivals in North Maluku getting the upper hand, conquering the enemy's capital, and subsequently driving the defeated Sultanate to seek to establish new colonies and vassals further eastwards, beyond West Papua)? And the Chinese (Song Dynasty) can find out about it and start getting involved themselves when Zheng He's fleet passes through Java on his first voyage, and Zheng He subsequently decides to explore the trade route, via the Lesser Sunda Islands and Melanesia to New Zealand (already established locally by this stage, but with knowledge of this route, and the lands along the way, largely unknown beyond the Indonesian Archipelago), on one of his later voyages; perhaps his 4th expedition, in 1413?
 

SinghKing

Banned
Richard V said:
No reason the Polynesians couldn't settle the place a thousand years earlier.
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Thing is, the longer that this community's disconnected from the rest of humanity (especially the Old World), the more massive the die-off from disease epidemics is going to be once it gets re-connected with the rest of civilisation, and you'll lose a larger share of the indigenous population. And I didn't notice the OP's other stipulation earlier, which makes this AHC considerably more difficult; "with a PoD no earlier than 1600?" :(
 

SlideAway

It's a post-1900 POD but the only way I can imagine it happening is that a global nuclear war leaves much of Western Europe, the Soviet Union, and North America in a massively depopulated, radioactive state.

Maybe in this scenario, the UK is depopulated both by bombings themselves and by a mass movement of refugees to New Zealand (relatively shielded from radioactive fallout).
 

funnyhat

The only way this can happen is if Britain somehow has no other settler colonies for a long time, so it has to send them all to New Zealand. Have British North America be snuffed out early on by some combination of the French/Dutch/Swedes/Spanish, and Australia go to the Dutch. Although even then, I don't know if you could get enough Brits to make that super-long journey to NZ to get its population that high.
 

Namayan

fluttersky said:
By area, New Zealand is slightly larger than the UK (268,000 km^2 vs 243,000 km^2); the two countries also have similar climate.

However, the UK has 65 million people, while NZ only has 4.5 million.

Is it at all possible that NZ can have more people than the UK in the present day, with a PoD no earlier than 1600?

Bonus points if this can happen without a nuclear holocaust.
Click to expand...

This is possible. A chinese or austronesian wank will do this. Those are the two nearest with millions of population
 
Julius Vogel

Julius Vogel

I don't think the Polynesians would have had much luck without better crops or animals earlier on.

The other problem is that NZ is pretty far away from everyone.

The NZ colonial government spent a huge amount of money on trying to encourage more settlers (albeit British only usually till the early 70s), with some success, but many moved on once they realised NZ was not for them (recessions, missold benefits, etc). Opening up more widely, to non British Europeans or non Europeans may have helped a bit but even then I suspect we would not see a huge increase.

Pre Britain/19th century technological advances in shipping, which group of people would be likely to migrate in huge numbers to NZ? I don't think any would really. Migration is much more attractive when it is safe and until recently, spending weeks or months in a ship was a good way to get ill or die.
 
morbidteaparty

morbidteaparty

I can't see New Zealand having a population larger than 10 million at the most. Certainly if widespread migration of non-British peoples was targeted you could see it having a population boom during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well as becoming something of a haven for those fleeing the totalitarianism of the 1930s and 1950s, but even then it would be hard to see it having a massive population increase (though if you were to pursue this, Wellington has distinct Greek and Italian minorities, and peoples from the former Yugoslavia settled near Auckland. There's also a strong Scandinavian and Dutch connection from the nineteenth century.)
 
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