Why would it be? It has an acceptable Anglicized name already. Not as if these isles are undiscovered territory.
And considering Catholicism and the orders reign supreme here, it's unlikely Britain would want it.
Largest possible British Empire?
- Thread starter Caiaphas
- Start date
Why would it be? It has an acceptable Anglicized name already. Not as if these isles are undiscovered territory.
And considering Catholicism and the orders reign supreme here, it's unlikely Britain would want it.
Not really disagreeing, but I wonder when the Philippines actually became majority catholic: my impression was that Spanish control before the 19th century was pretty patchy once you got beyond Luzon, and even in Luzon the highlands were only loosely controlled.
Actually IMHO Pompejus makes an excellent point some chauvinists here don't want to see. You can't just grow, grow and grow, there's a certain to what Britain can control and the pace at which they can grow.
Sure at one point certain settler colonies, perhaps partially settled by non-Brits, can provide indirect growth too.
Still everything at once, will result in Imperial overstretch. Nor do I find convincing, that no other European power will have a colonial empire of their own, and Britain's navy isn't invincible either, some of the Anglo-Dutch wars were won by the Dutch Republic. Though certainly after the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars it was by far the most powerful.
IMHO the British Empire might have been somewhat bigger than OTL, but not that much.
I generally don't bother to debate with people who start throwing out insults to those that disagree with them, but I'll overlook it as it's the first time I've seen you do it.
You claim that overstretch will happen, but I've yet to hear a mechanism for how this overstretch works or any historical evidence that it was happening in the British Empire. For example, if the UK gained Indonesia and Argentina, why does that threaten their rule in South Africa or India any more?
Chauvinism IMHO isn't that insulting, in Dutch it means exaggerated patriotism (and in general is used to mock that); though apparently in English it also has some other connotations, so maybe stating some seem very patriotic would have been better in hindsight.
Controlling Indonesia and/or Argentina will require resources to control, sure you gain some in the process, not to mention there are only so many British people (or any other European people for that matter) to begin with. With everyone overseas, who will do the work back home?
There are benefits and costs to expansion and there is a certain limit (certainly on pace) on expansion set by the population. It also may not threaten the rule in South Africa (if I were I chauvinist I'd say you stole the Cape Colony
) or India (to be fair there was a trade between possessions in India and Indonesia), but it probably will slow down the expansion of your rule there.
Last edited:
Now you're just being deliberately silly. The number of Brits working and soldiering in the Empire (the non-white bits) was always pretty tiny compared to the total population of Britain.
And as to Chauvinist:
chau·vin·ist
ˈSHōvənəst/
noun
noun: chauvinist; plural noun: chauvinists
1.
a person displaying aggressive or exaggerated patriotism.
a person displaying excessive or prejudiced loyalty or support for a particular cause, group, or gender.
"what a male chauvinist that man is"
synonyms: sexist, bigot, antifeminist, misogynist, woman-hater, hater; informalmale chauvinist pig
"he's a chauvinist"
adjective
adjective: chauvinist
1.
showing or relating to excessive or prejudiced loyalty or support for a particular group or cause.
"a chauvinist slur"
synonyms: jingoistic, chauvinistic, excessively patriotic, excessively nationalistic, flag-waving, xenophobic, racist, racialist, ethnocentric; bigoted, sexist, male chauvinist, antifeminist, misogynist, woman-hating
That one was a jest, but ultimately Britain can't be everywhere at once. The people available for working and soldiering in the Empire is/was finite.
Then I'd say the the basic meaning is the same, but it isn't used in the same way; that is to say things considered as synonyms aren't in my native language (chauvinist isn't used like that in those cases).
Anyway my point, which I made a bit bluntly, was that I got the impression, while reading this thread, that some got a bit carried away.
Could the Empire have become even larger, possibly, but even Britain would have encountered certain constraints while doing so.
Last edited:
Of course it's finite. But it's a finite number that's much, much larger than the number of people needed to administer the entire world. India was ruled by about 1,000 Brits. As for soldiering, more colonies means more soldiers available, not less.
There are plenty of reasons why the Brits can not rule everywhere, but they all come down to certain places being impossible to annex, not about the collective being too much.
British Republic
Banned
If you can prevent the formation of the USA then you would have the chance to create a BNA extending as far south as Northern Mexico and Cuba. That in turn would not only considerably increase the size of the British Empire, but it might also help its survival to the present day.
Likewise if that option is off the table there are other options when it comes to expanding the British Empire beyond its OTL heights:
Likewise if that option is off the table there are other options when it comes to expanding the British Empire beyond its OTL heights:
- The Dutch East Indies remain with the UK after the Congress of Vienna.
- The British Government takes Henry Morton Stanley (thus he does not approach the Belgian King for support) more seriously and thus the British make colonial gains in what is now the DRC.
- The British successfully push though their conquest of the Rio De Plata Region.
- They end up offering the highest price for Russian America, thus they gain Alaska.
- Rather than get involved in the bloodbath that was WW1, perhaps a POD that involves the UK giving up its interest in the affairs of Mainland Europe and thus spends the war invading and taking control of the Asian and African colonies of Mainland European Powers or at least the more valuable ones.
- Britain successfully builds the Canal in Central America, thus gaining a foothold in the region.
Look at Latin America and see how long it became majority Catholic, add a generation, and there's your answer.
Visayas was the first to be converted, so really it's only in Mindanao (because of the sultanates) and the highlands that the Church had little influence. Or so I assume.
WW1 stalemate
Germany knocks out France super late in the Great War (where the USA stayed neutral). German demands however are too extreme for the British to accept, and the fighting continues. With German puppet governments installed in the former Entente powers on the European mainland, Britain sponsors governments-in-exile that allows them to take over their former allies' colonies, and maybe even formally incorporates some of them into the Empire later.
Other than the occasional encounter at sea, not much fighting happens any more, and by the late 1920s the two Empire's reach some sort of informal armistice, whereby Britain allows Germany to trade with the rest of the world on the condition that Germany refrains from building up a new surface fleet.
Germany knocks out France super late in the Great War (where the USA stayed neutral). German demands however are too extreme for the British to accept, and the fighting continues. With German puppet governments installed in the former Entente powers on the European mainland, Britain sponsors governments-in-exile that allows them to take over their former allies' colonies, and maybe even formally incorporates some of them into the Empire later.
Other than the occasional encounter at sea, not much fighting happens any more, and by the late 1920s the two Empire's reach some sort of informal armistice, whereby Britain allows Germany to trade with the rest of the world on the condition that Germany refrains from building up a new surface fleet.
India was also concurrently ruled by a million other elites and was slowly progressing towards including natives in administration. India was also the backbone of Empire and Indian troops were used in a multitude of colonial and non-colonial conflicts. Thus British administrators had to work with Indian sentiments. It is the reason the British pre-1857 played to caste sensibilities, and created the whole martial race thing to help control the empire after. The problem is as empire is not stagnant but an evolving organism, the inhabitants of the empire also wanted to see change. Before WWI, the Indian Army was largely non political and cared little for those types of movements. They began to be influenced by those ideas as history marched forward, and by WWII, you had enough doubters to support the INA. And of course their rule over places meant they couldn't rule others as well; that was the whole reasoning behind dominion status in the first place!
These problems were even anticipated by British leaders since they had been very against any new 'British India'. One was difficult enough to administer, and to pretend that it was simply a small group of Englishmen ruling on top is wrong and is a sign of chauvinism in the historical sense. Otherwise Britain ought to have simply used soldiers from India to conquer China and gone on and on like a Leviathan to then get world domination. Politics doesn't work like that and the argument for a larger British Empire shown here ignores internal factors within that same Empire.