Anglo migration across north America without the Industrial revolution?

Canaan Osborne

Banned
Without the Industrial revolution and its subsequent cheap human shipping between Europe and America and ending of subsistence agriculture how does the Anglo-Celtic migration across north America proceed. Would a lack of railways prevent commercial agriculture away from the Mississippi watershed out west? Would the cotton boom never happen? Would new environmental lifestyles appear? How much more territory would Native Americans control? Would Anglo populations still come to dominate the west coast? What are some new cultures that would appear. Also for this scenario we are assuming the American Revolution still occurs as it was independent of the Industrial Revolution.
 

twovultures

Donor
Without the industrial revolution, it is entirely possible IMO that the American expansion is stopped at the Great Plains. You've mentioned railroad infrastructure limiting the westward expansion, but in addition without industrial weapons such as the gatling gun and modern revolvers, the horse nations of the Great Plains are able to maintain a much fiercer military resistance. The lack of trains, steamships and fewer white migrants means less exposure to diseases as well, and so more Native Americans in general to fight back. However, I think the Trail of Tears still occurs with many eastern tribes exiled to the west, especially since a less urban US in this scenario could mean more pressure to take farmland for whites.
 

Carl Schwamberger

That what people describe as the industrial revolution was well underway during the English 1650-1775 colonization period & in full throttle when the frontier line moved into the Ohio, Kentucky & Tennesee or Alabama regions its difficult to separate. Much of the earliest effects of the industrial revolution enabled the English colonization that enabled the subsequent settlement. Later without the industrial revolution its difficult to see how the mass of European immigrants could reach north America and populate the settlement that swept across the eastern and central portion of the greater Mississippi basin from 1800 to 1850. The sort of early or preindustrial ship technology & numbers that got fishermen to Newfoundland, or the Puritans to New England could not have transported the millions of west Europeans who enabled the rapid settlement wave of the 18th and 19th Centuries.
 

Richard Osborne

Banned
twovultures said:
Without the industrial revolution, it is entirely possible IMO that the American expansion is stopped at the Great Plains. You've mentioned railroad infrastructure limiting the westward expansion, but in addition without industrial weapons such as the gatling gun and modern revolvers, the horse nations of the Great Plains are able to maintain a much fiercer military resistance. The lack of trains, steamships and fewer white migrants means less exposure to diseases as well, and so more Native Americans in general to fight back. However, I think the Trail of Tears still occurs with many eastern tribes exiled to the west, especially since a less urban US in this scenario could mean more pressure to take farmland for whites.
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Yes but white settlers made it to oregon and California on wagon trains.
 

Thoresby

twovultures said:
Without the industrial revolution, it is entirely possible IMO that the American expansion is stopped at the Great Plains. You've mentioned railroad infrastructure limiting the westward expansion, but in addition without industrial weapons such as the gatling gun and modern revolvers, the horse nations of the Great Plains are able to maintain a much fiercer military resistance.
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The Great Plains cultures were doomed by the invention is the flintlock musket. They can fight harder and for longer but as the Russians demonstrated in Central Asia you don't need the full panoply of the industrial revolution to crush horse nomad cultures. You just need numbers and muskets and sedentary farming cultures are always going to have the numbers and East Coast has the resources to produce the muskets and powder to arm those numbers.
 

Canaan Osborne

Banned
Thoresby said:
The Great Plains cultures were doomed by the invention is the flintlock musket. They can fight harder and for longer but as the Russians demonstrated in Central Asia you don't need the full panoply of the industrial revolution to crush horse nomad cultures. You just need numbers and muskets and sedentary farming cultures are always going to have the numbers and East Coast has the resources to produce the muskets and powder to arm those numbers.
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Yes but the great plains are unfarmable without steel plows. I can see the eastern great plains getting overrun by semi-nomadic white for white-native mixed (ala the Metis) buffalo hunters and cattle and horse herders with farms near rivers that they return to. The western and northern great plains would probably stay native american dominated but they might semi-domesticate buffalo.
 

Thoresby

Canaan Osborne said:
Yes but the great plains are unfarmable without steel plows. I can see the eastern great plains getting overrun by semi-nomadic white for white-native mixed (ala the Metis) buffalo hunters and cattle and horse herders with farms near rivers that they return to. The western and northern great plains would probably stay native american dominated but they might semi-domesticate buffalo.
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They wouldn't be put to the plough but the white population was growing fast enough naturally pre 1830 (when US industrialisation really started) that land hunger would be there and there is a very viable Anglo farming model for the great plains, cattle ranching. Even without railways cattle can walk a long way to market and it can still be economically viable.
 
Umbric Man

Umbric Man

Honestly, Thoresby has it right.

America's population was exploding all throughout the 18th and 19th centuries pre-industrialization, and the Appalachians aren't a big enough hurdle at all to stop westward migration - especially once the east coast is linked to the Mississippi watershed via canals, roads, and other waterways and footpaths. The population's simply way too big to not just stop moving west, especially with the mostly flat and fertile land east of the Rockies, and come the Great Plains, Anglo-Americans will begin ranching and they'll still drive Amerindians out for their cattle herds' safety. And Anglo-Americans were already reaching Texas in the 1820s and would've reached the Northwoods region (eastern Dakotas, Minnesota, etc.) around the same time if the Northwest Territory wasn't already organized ahead of time (small amounts of squatter colonists were trying to settle Ohio in the early-mid 1780s but driven out by the army until first official settlement at Marietta in 1788, slowing northerners' westward settlement patterns vs southerrners'). And Americans were already sailing to the Pacific coast to trade with California in the 1790s and claimed the Oregon Country in 1805 via Lewis and Clark - if they somehow gained full control of that land that early, you betcha that immigrants would push specifically to the Pacific coast to settle - decades early - and begin trading links with East Asia.

The future USA, barring most of its southwest, is blessed by the Intracoastal Waterway and many big mountain passes in the Appalachians connecting its land east of the Rockies in a huge natural highway system, land that ended up being is a truly gigantic amount of relatively flat, rich, and traversable farmland. And even the Oregon Country has several big mountain passes if need be to let Americans cross into the otherwise lovely and useful Columbia River basin. Even the southwest is easier to access from the Mississippi watershed and Pacific Northwest than Mexico if push comes to shove, and it is easily the most isolated, rugged, and non-farmable region within America by and far.
 

MorningDew

The ironic thing is: even if not a single farmstead was attempted west of Iowa, the great plains nomads were doomed sooner or later. Eventually they would drive bison to near extinction themselves, though it would be quite a bit longer.

But industrial tech or not, the anglos have 2 things that hopelessly outclass them, guns and numbers. Look at how Russia conquered its own steppe nomads.
 

MorningDew

Actually this would make for a great p.o.d, an America trapped* before full industrialization takes hold. Keep it that way long enough and you might end up with otl us and Canada having a population like modern China. I wonder what I could do with this...

(*"Trapping" requires asbs, but still good for thought)
 

Canaan Osborne

Banned
MorningDew said:
The ironic thing is: even if not a single farmstead was attempted west of Iowa, the great plains nomads were doomed sooner or later. Eventually they would drive bison to near extinction themselves, though it would be quite a bit longer.

But industrial tech or not, the anglos have 2 things that hopelessly outclass them, guns and numbers. Look at how Russia conquered its own steppe nomads.
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The natives could adopt cattle herding. The western great plains are unfarmable without steel plows.
 

snerfuplz

I think you could do it if the entire British Isles became dependent on a few varieties of potatoes in time for the Potato Blight during the Hungry 40's (1840's) like Ireland was in OTL. Perhaps if the British Isles returns to a pre-Black Death population levels were overpopulation strained agriculture (and arable land) capacity forcing the population to over-rely on the potato
 

raharris1973

I am convinced that if you stall 1760s tech levels for 100 years, you are still going to have Anglos from coast-to-coast and on select river networks throughout OTL's lower 48 states by the 1860s. Pockets or horse natives will last independently longer, but tech developed after the 1760s was not needed for English-speaking American population to increase to the point of wanting to farm throughout the North American temperate latitudes, nor was it needed to enable migration from Britain and Europe to America and east-west migration within America.
 

Carl Schwamberger

raharris1973 said:
I am convinced that if you stall 1760s tech levels for 100 years, you are still going to have Anglos from coast-to-coast and on select river networks throughout OTL's lower 48 states by the 1860s. ...
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The 1760 were industrial enough for this migration/settlement. To stall or slow it over a century you need to go back to the pre or embryonic industrial levels of the 16th or 17th Centuries. Matchlocks and crossbows, not flintlocks and percussion caps, blunderbusses, not rifled bores, a higher portion of the population with industrial skills, greater literacy, better designed wagons, improved road and canal building techniques. The advances of Macadam and Telford in road construction for wagons guaranteed a transportation revolution even if railroads had not come. Folks conflate the industrial revolution with only step power or railroads, but there was a more important advance in all other technological sectors that enabled denser settlement, larger urban areas, increased trade, and better life expectancies.
 

Canaan Osborne

Banned
raharris1973 said:
I am convinced that if you stall 1760s tech levels for 100 years, you are still going to have Anglos from coast-to-coast and on select river networks throughout OTL's lower 48 states by the 1860s. Pockets or horse natives will last independently longer, but tech developed after the 1760s was not needed for English-speaking American population to increase to the point of wanting to farm throughout the North American temperate latitudes, nor was it needed to enable migration from Britain and Europe to America and east-west migration within America.
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California was unfarmable without Chinese irrigation techniques and I doubt Chinese co UK ld get to the west coast without steam ships.
 
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