It's not one big PoD that's required, it's lots of little ones. I'm told my "why the Chinese play cricket" is fairly good but the number of prods, pushes, boots and occasional use of an electric cattle prod to get the TL to go that direction is kind of staggering.
What do you think would happen if the British Empire didn't fall?
- Thread starter LukeDoesWriting
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It's not one big PoD that's required, it's lots of little ones. I'm told my "why the Chinese play cricket" is fairly good but the number of prods, pushes, boots and occasional use of an electric cattle prod to get the TL to go that direction is kind of staggering.
Yes.
Greater England is a fair description of how at times the UK has been viewed and there was an Anglicised British and Settler elite running the Empire. But "Little Englanders" were against Imperial acquisitions.
I’m flattered. But I’m talking about a more general national mindset as opposed to a political faction…as I think you well know…
Little Englander doesn’t refer to a political faction (it was applied to both Liberals and Conservatives from the outset) it is a “mindset” and one that is explicitly characterised by opposition to imperialism. A British empire with a Little Englander national mindset would be one that at most would follow OTLs path of gradual dissolution. So unless that’s what you meant no I don’t “well know”, I can certainly guess, just as I can guess at why a certain subset of British people like to torture the phrase into a context where it makes no sense.
Indeed, although having been raised by a sort of proto Scottish nationalist I can’t allow any use of England in place of Britain to go unremarked!
tonycat77
Banned
We'd be plagued by more know it all posh accented YouTubers who claim they're the ultimate law in philosophy, politics and science.
If that ain't bad enough, another imperialistic power droning more people and investing in "ESG" as the new catchall term to avoid any third worlder from ever ascending from poverty.
The EU vs empire stuff would be interesting to watch though.
If that ain't bad enough, another imperialistic power droning more people and investing in "ESG" as the new catchall term to avoid any third worlder from ever ascending from poverty.
The EU vs empire stuff would be interesting to watch though.
RuneGloves
Banned
It all really depends on how the empire stays around. I'm going with otl increasingly liberal democracy, which migration wise is already large scale, 1 million people every couple years, I'd assume this would be even larger with everyone having British passports.
And as for welfare, that does apply differently to Gibraltar or Falklands, idk about Hong Kong. But I'd expect a lot of activism for British welfare expanded into the large developing colonies.
The good question is what part should be cut loss and what part should be kept, the British Empire was not viable in a liberal democratic world order and neither was it in communist world order, a surviving empire would be a mega-version of Apartheid South Africa and neither the British general population nor colonial subjects was willing to accept that. Of course all these thing is in no WW2 timeline or a timeline where Singapore holds.
So let start with pierce which need to be cut: India, Nigeria, East Africa, Southern Africa, Ghana.
So what should the British keep, the dominions outside South Africa are pretty obvious. But outside that Britain should focus on low population area with high value resources. So establish a continued British protectorate over the Persian Gulf states. I would suggest unite South Yemen, Oman, UAE, Dubai, Bahrain and Kuwait into a UAE style federation with the British monarch as president (similar to the emir of Abu Dhabi being president of UAE). This gives the British greater control over the global oil production. Do the same thing with Malaysia. Beside that keep control over strategic important position, so keep Zanzibar a protectorate (use the Zanzibar Genocide as excuse to intervene) and place South Asian refugees from East Africa on the island, this give the British base to intervene in East Africa. Keep Singapore, Suez, Aden (maybe as a British possession in the Greater UAE), and reach a agreement to extend the lease over Hong Kong. Beside that establish a informal empire over the weaker states much as the French did with that post-colonial empire.
So let start with pierce which need to be cut: India, Nigeria, East Africa, Southern Africa, Ghana.
So what should the British keep, the dominions outside South Africa are pretty obvious. But outside that Britain should focus on low population area with high value resources. So establish a continued British protectorate over the Persian Gulf states. I would suggest unite South Yemen, Oman, UAE, Dubai, Bahrain and Kuwait into a UAE style federation with the British monarch as president (similar to the emir of Abu Dhabi being president of UAE). This gives the British greater control over the global oil production. Do the same thing with Malaysia. Beside that keep control over strategic important position, so keep Zanzibar a protectorate (use the Zanzibar Genocide as excuse to intervene) and place South Asian refugees from East Africa on the island, this give the British base to intervene in East Africa. Keep Singapore, Suez, Aden (maybe as a British possession in the Greater UAE), and reach a agreement to extend the lease over Hong Kong. Beside that establish a informal empire over the weaker states much as the French did with that post-colonial empire.
Sigh. In common parlance, Little Englander is indicative of an Anglocentric world view and certainly isn't confined to a 'certain subset'. It hardly needs torturing to make it fit into a context, whatever you mean by that. But staying away from that particular rabbit hole, I take it to mean that any hope of the British Empire and its possible ATL successors such as an Imperial Federation or a closely tied British Commonwealth would be undermined by the refusal of the home country ie England, to embrace a wider identity, seeing as many in England find the concept of a United Kingdom difficult to compute, let alone pooling their sovereignty with the rest of such an ATL Commonwealth. Greater Little England would indeed be the ultimate oxymoron and would have no hope of lasting once everyone else in the ATL Commonwealth realised nothing much had changed in the 'home country'.
I was referring to the foreign habit of referring to England rather than Britain or the UK. And to the general feeling that England (or Anglicised Brits)is all that matters to the Empire.
I think you may have to back to at least the 1840’s and butterfly the rise of Free trade as the British politicians shibboleth. The repeal of the Corn Laws was a conflict between rich landowners who profited from the Laws and a rising middle and lower class (with the influence being in the former) who benefited from their repeal. It was probably inevitable that they would be repealed eventually.
However, those who rallied around the cause of Corn Law repeal followed it up with a ideological belief that unilateral free trade would bring a host of benefits to Britain as all nations rushed to join the system only to be outcompeted by British Companies. Needless to say other nations did not find this so appealing, particularly since Britain only really removed tariffs on those items that it had a competitive advantage in. It wouldn’t be until 1860 when the British finally agreed to lower tariffs on French products that more open trade began to take place (and Britain began to benefit from it), with other nations scrambling not to be left out of a trade deal between the worlds two largest economies. These would take the form of a number of bilateral deals rather than the multilateral deals the Free Trade prophets had predicted.
But by then the faith was too deep set. The 1860 treaty was seen as vindication of Free Trade Ideals, and to be called a protectionist in British politics in the later half of the 1800’s got you similar attention that being called a socialist in America at the height of the Cold War did. Meanwhile Free Traders ended the preferential status of products from the Colonies (mostly Canadian wheat and lumber at this point) and began to see the colonies as financial burdens rather than as extensions of the metropole.
You don’t have to butterfly Free Trade, just the ideological commitment too it under all circumstances. Do that, and you have a start toward a more closely connected British Empire, at least with what would become the Dominions.
However, those who rallied around the cause of Corn Law repeal followed it up with a ideological belief that unilateral free trade would bring a host of benefits to Britain as all nations rushed to join the system only to be outcompeted by British Companies. Needless to say other nations did not find this so appealing, particularly since Britain only really removed tariffs on those items that it had a competitive advantage in. It wouldn’t be until 1860 when the British finally agreed to lower tariffs on French products that more open trade began to take place (and Britain began to benefit from it), with other nations scrambling not to be left out of a trade deal between the worlds two largest economies. These would take the form of a number of bilateral deals rather than the multilateral deals the Free Trade prophets had predicted.
But by then the faith was too deep set. The 1860 treaty was seen as vindication of Free Trade Ideals, and to be called a protectionist in British politics in the later half of the 1800’s got you similar attention that being called a socialist in America at the height of the Cold War did. Meanwhile Free Traders ended the preferential status of products from the Colonies (mostly Canadian wheat and lumber at this point) and began to see the colonies as financial burdens rather than as extensions of the metropole.
You don’t have to butterfly Free Trade, just the ideological commitment too it under all circumstances. Do that, and you have a start toward a more closely connected British Empire, at least with what would become the Dominions.
I was thinking that India would be Hungary.Well there was one guy...
If the British empire loses India, I think most would characterize that as it having "fallen." To me, this means that the liberal democratic world order needs to be butterflied away entirely, which requires at least a pre-WW2 POD.
You bring up settler colonies, which makes me think, why did white settlers never colonize the tropics in large numbers? The answers, of course, are (1) long travel times and general remoteness, (2) malaria and other tropical diseases, (3) high population density of natives. If these 3 factors can be mitigated, then that would open up the whole Empire for white settlement and likely allow British rule in these areas to be more deeply entrenched.
(1) will be solved on its own with the advances in air travel starting in the 1960s. (2) can already be solved by antimalarial drugs and insecticides by 1940. (3) is the biggest issue; as long as Europeans and natives live near each other in a colonial setting, there are likely to be attacks against the former, which is not conducive to colonization.
Britain was highly stratified by class before WWII, and every European country held varying degrees of white supremacist views, which does lend itself well to a colonialist system. Let's say that after World War 1, the colonial powers go more Imperialist as a whole, including Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, and the Low Countries. They end up in a war against the USSR; the US goes isolationist and stays neutral in the conflict, supports the Soviets for political reasons (Let's say Britain caused a fuss in South America again and the Americans are still mad about it).
The war grinds to a stalemate; without resources and manufactured products from the US, the Imperial faction goes harder on industrializing their colonies in order to make up the difference. They manage to set up a system where nouveau-riche natives who follow European customs are set up as a native "Aristocracy" and are rewarded with a decent portion of the trade income.
At some point, the war ends. The Imperial faction creates a UN-like body whose goals are (1) preventing war between its members, and (2) suppressing native rebellions (call it "enforcing the rule of civilized law worldwide"). The prevailing ideology becomes not a liberal-democratic one, but an imperial-democratic one: Certain rights and freedoms are guaranteed, but the default system is un-egalitarian, stratified by class, race, and geography. However, by necessity it is significantly more liberal than the previous imperial system, which keeps Mau Mau-type rebellions from spreading too much.
By the 1970s, advances in air travel and medicine allow whites to travel to colonies en masse. Large parts of the colonies are set aside for whites in an Apartheid-like system. There is virtually no visa restriction on travel within the empire for citizens of the metropole, but of course there exists a complicated tiered citizenship system for non-Europeans. I think that this system would be stable as long as it remains profitable; if it becomes a point of national pride to avoid the fate of Spain and the Ottoman Empire, then it may become politically verboten to advocate for the independence of colonies, especially as whites continue to move there.
Non-European countries in this system would probably develop economically faster than in OTL, and avoid the larger civil wars, but at the cost of extremely high inequality in terms of both socioeconomic status and human rights. More powerful European cities such as London or Paris would probably resemble Dubai in that imported guest workers would handle all the menial jobs under poor conditions for low pay.
It's unlikely that this global system would be as homogenous as I portray it here; certainly, the liberal-democratic world order that exists in OTL has not resulted in the entire world becoming fully liberal and democratic; quite the opposite, most countries pretend to be democracies but operate corrupt or despotic regimes. I expect something analogous to come about here: A large plurality of colonies probably present themselves as fully-fledged members of the Empire, but in reality have little imperial oversight nor authority outside the capital cities.
In this TL, the existence of the United States and Latin American countries would be counterpoints to this imperial system, since they would be independent nations not beholden to a European power. I'm sure that this new imperial ideology could be bent in such a way to accomodate them (For example, perhaps the Latin American countries "count" as European due to their cultural background) but something must be done about the US's rhetoric of liberty and equality.
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In my tl I have a longer lasting British empire end in civil war bc of a extended conflict in India.
The parallel doesn't fit to me as the Austrian and Hungarian parts were much closer to equal than any kind of India and U.K. proper analogue.
RuneGloves
Banned
British people are in a limited quantity. They couldn't possibly achieve notable population size in tropical areas, even with small african populations of the early 20th century.
Even Canada was around 60% British by ww2, and that had severe constraints on British influence there. Now you could just say, let in Euros, then you get more Quebecs, Irelands and Boers. White dominions weren't loyal, British populations were.
I agree.
They just lost 10,000,000 people, that is not in the slightest conductive to settlement. Immigration yeah, if they have the easy option of moving away from war ravaged lands to already built modern New York, but they're in no mood or mentality to build settlements from scratch.
RuneGloves
Banned
I mean, it's like referring to Germany as Prussia or the USSR as Russia. It's innermost core. Like if you were to refer to the Republic as Coruscant.
Doesn't have to be a whole lot of people, just has to be enough that sending them back home would be logistically unfeasible, at least when compared to sending more troops.
Despite not being a military history/equipment buff, I have wondered what an integrated Commonwealth military would be like, especially if it stood a little more distanced from NATO a la OTL France and especially if it retained something of the financial firepower lost in the course of the World Wars. I also wonder how this more powerful, global military might have affected the Commonwealth's own military/industrial complex. I can imagine that much of that military/industrial complex would be Anglo-Canadian in nature. Perhaps two or three manufacturers, including one that would retain Britain's lead in civilian jet liners.
Perhaps this military/industrial complex would also have a knock on effect on a Commonwealth space programme. Perhaps not full Ministry of Space stuff but maybe something along the lines of a successful Megaroc, followed by a two man capsule of the type featured in Stephen Baxter's alternate history short story (a companion piece to his Voyage), Prospero 1: https://www.google.com/search?q=ste...7j33i160l4.4183j0j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8