And, for that matter, improperly supplied defenders would often be the same; the bane of many a general trying to defend his country at the frontiers was an undisciplined, badly behaving soldiery that would make the local population think that maybe the invaders might be more palatable.
A House Divided: A TL
- Thread starter Utgard96
- Start date
Indeed. You saw that with the French Revolutionary Wars, where Germans and Italians initially supported the French, then after they invaded their lands they supported the Coalition, then after the Coalition came they supported the French, etc.
Alex Richards
Donor
How about anything to do with West Africa?
So, looks like California may join at least slightly later than OTL, but with more Mexican territories beforehand.
So it looks like America makes some annexations. New Leon being called New Leon and a state suggests annexation, although that could just be a stubborn Americanism.
Hoping California is annexed or reduced in size . Can't imagine independency would go all that well -- we saw what a sudden influx of Yanquis leads to in Texas and elsewhere...
Hoping California is annexed or reduced in size
. Can't imagine independency would go all that well -- we saw what a sudden influx of Yanquis leads to in Texas and elsewhere...
How about anything to do with West Africa?
Okay, I yield.
Incidentally, there may be slightly fewer chapters on really obscure topics in the near future, as I've moved to a considerably smaller city and won't have the research resources I had in Malmö/Lund. Still, I should be able to get a decent amount of stuff together.
I believe I've included a segment from New Leon State University Press in the past, just to nail it down.
Hoping California is annexed or reduced in size
My lips are sealed...
Like the lone star flag, could have done with a red stripe but at least no bear!
Example Masséna in the Peninsular War would allow his troops to pillage - consequently the French troops were afflicted with a bad case of guerrilleros. On the other hand British-Hanoverian troops under Wellington, were under orders to pay cold-hard-cash for supplies from the Spanish populace. Any British-Hanoverian troops that pillaged the Spanish people were afflicted with a bad case of hemp.
#24: Go Bind Your Sons to Exile
I can't really think of anything to merge this segment with, and the sheer volume of footnotes means it's actually pretty long all by itself, so I might as well put it out.
***
A House Divided #24: Go Bind Your Sons to Exile
“East of Suez, some hold, the direct control of Providence ceases; Man being there handed over to the power of the Gods and Devils of Asia, and the Church of England Providence only exercising an occasional and modified supervision in the case of Englishmen.”
***
From “The History of India”
(c) 1988 by Nicholas Blair
London: Robinson Publishers
When Maharaja Ranjit Singh, Sher-i-Panjab (Lion of the Panjab), died in 1839, his subjects could look on an empire unlike anything seen in the region since the time of the Great Mughals. [1] From a loose confederacy of twelve tribal states intermittently ruled over by the Pashtun Durrani Empire, the Sikh people of the Panjab had been unified into a single state under Ranjit Singh’s direct control, and backed by an understanding with the Honourable East India Company, they had carved an empire out of the entire upper Indus plain and the foothills of the Himalayas. [2] While its highest leaders were Sikh, the empire’s army and government included many Hindus and Muslims. Ranjit Singh enforced a ban on the slaughter of cows in keeping with Hindu tradition, and donated large sums of money to build and maintain Hindu temples in his empire. While the Muslim majority were given less deference, the Sikh were nonetheless less harsh on them than many other non-Muslim states in the region. [3] The capital city of Lahore was restored nearly to its Mughal-era glory, and its great palaces, temples and defensive works impressed European visitors. And most importantly, an alliance with the British East India Company protected the empire from one of the two most formidable powers in the region, and the collapse of the Maratha Confederacy had spelt the end of the other.
The Lahore Fort, seat of the Sikh maharajas.
The motivation behind the alliance had not been entirely based on goodwill from the British side. Since the end of the Napoleonic Wars, there had been a growing mistrust between the British and the Russians, with the latter successively moving their positions forward in Central Asia and the former viewing these advances as fundamentally directed against their interests in India. It is unlikely that Russia ever seriously considered invading India, with the exception of Tsar Paul, who ordered India be invaded in a fit of madness shortly before his assassination in 1801. [4] Nonetheless, the enmity between the two countries persisted – Britain viewing Russia as an autocratic, militarised behemoth, whereas Russia viewed Britain as an “aberration” from the natural order. [5] With this uncertainty along the northern border, it’s not difficult to see why the East India Company saw the developed, highly militarised Sarkar-i-Khalsa (army-state) of the Panjab as an ideal buffer.
However, for all his successes in life, Ranjit Singh had left one important matter unattended: his succession. The Panjab had grown into what it was under his firm leadership, and of his eight sons, no one had quite his adeptness at managing the patchwork of competing ethnic, religious and caste interests that his empire had become. His eldest son, Kharak Singh, was certainly not a second Sher-i-Panjab, and it didn’t take long before he found himself deposed in favour of his own son, Nau Nihal Singh. [6] Nau Nihal, who would eventually become known to the British as the “Young Tiger of Panjab”, did not get off to an auspicious start on the throne. A palace conflict was breaking out between the Sindhanwalia, a Sikh clique who enjoyed widespread support in the army, and the Dogra, a Hindu clique who represented the Hindu provincial interest, and in particular their home region of Jammu. [7] Nau Nihal decided to ally himself with the Sindhanwalia, and when the Dogra tried to launch a palace coup and install Sher Singh, Nau Nihal’s uncle, on the throne, Nau Nihal acted firmly, exiling Sher and many prominent Dogra-aligned officials to Company lands. [8]
These moves were taken by the Hindus in the Panjab to mean that Nau Nihal would end the pluralist policy of his grandfather and turn the state into a vehicle for the army and the Sikh religion. The Dogra formed alliances with individual East India Company officials, and when officers of the Khalsa army began forming panchayats [9] and proclaiming the arrival of the Sikh commonwealth promised by Guru Gobind Singh, [10] the Company became concerned that the state was decaying from the strong and stable buffer it had been under Ranjit Singh into a chaotic coalition of rival factions. Tensions would keep rising for a while, and the Company would move what troops it could spare into the North-Western Provinces, [11] further heightening tensions in the region both within the Panjab and between the Panjab and the Company…
Major-General William Elphinstone.
…Finally, on the 3rd of October 1842, at the end of the monsoons, the British army under Major-General William Elphinstone [12] marched on the Sutlej River, the southern boundary of the Panjab at the time. At roughly the same time, the Khalsa had begun a march south, with Nau Nihal himself leading the advance. [13] The forces met at Moga on the 12th, and the British set up firing lines along a ridge west of the town. The Khalsa acted correspondingly, but did not bring up their entire force – in particular, they kept a portion of their artillery well behind their lines, outside the British field of view. When Elphinstone ordered his cavalry to charge into the Khalsa lines, the Panjabis fell back, and before long the entire force of the Khalsa artillery – almost as strong as the total artillery force on the British side – laid into them, forcing them to retreat in confusion having lost a significant portion of their force. [14] The Khalsa then went on the counterattack, managing to drive the British from their positions by the evening, with both sides having taken heavy casualties.
Following the Battle of Moga, Elphinstone made repeated requests for reinforcements, but was turned down by the Governor-General in Calcutta, who was under severe economic constraints following the Opium Crisis. [15] When the armies met again at Sidhwan, and then again at Ajitwal, the battles ended indecisively, with the British inflicting heavy casualties but failing to turn the tide. Eventually, the situation became untenable, and at Jagraon on the 29th of November, the Khalsa were able to inflict a humiliating defeat on the British army. Elphinstone was forced back to Patiala, where the local Maharaja was a staunch British ally, and did not resume his campaign. The Khalsa offered terms, and on Christmas Eve, the Treaty of Ludhiana was signed by Nau Nihal and William Wilberforce Bird, the Deputy Governor of Bengal, acting on behalf of the East India Company. The treaty was largely status quo ante bellum, recognising the existing boundaries of the Panjab and Nau Nihal’s status as legitimate ruler. The British further agreed not to support any faction within the Panjab, and to commit troops in support of the Panjab against any attack from Afghanistan. [16] This final clause would come to be significant in the following years…
***
[1] A bit of an in-universe oversight here. The Mughal dynasty technically still existed at this time, but its authority did not extend far beyond the walls of Delhi, and when the emperor Bahadur Shah II backed the rebellion against British rule in 1857, his “empire” was summarily crushed and incorporated into the British Raj.
[2] In modern terms, the empire covered roughly the Pakistani states of Punjab (except some areas in the far south) and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, as well as the entirety of Jammu and Kashmir and the Indian states of Himachal Pradesh and Punjab.
[3] Not that that’s saying much.
[4] Being a pre-PoD event, this did, in fact, happen in real life.
[5] It is worth noting that as a British popular history book, this text may somewhat “embellish” the actual facts from time to time. This applies both to its characterisation of Russian foreign policy and of India itself.
[6] All OTL so far.
[7] IOTL the Dogra lent their name to the dynasty of Rajputs that became the Maharajas of Jammu and Kashmir after the Anglo-Sikh wars shattered the Sikh empire. Their status as a Hindu group ruling over a majority-Muslim territory would create enormous problems during the partition of India IOTL.
[8] IOTL, within months of coming to the throne, Nau Nihal was killed by falling rocks outside the Lahore Fort (yes, really), and in the ensuing power vacuum, the Dogra manoeuvred Sher Singh onto the throne. He would himself last barely two years before being murdered by an outraged army officer who hadn’t received his pay, and Ranjit’s widow Jind Kaur became regent for her infant son Duleep Singh.
[9] Governing councils of five elders, a common form of village leadership in ancient and medieval India that survives as a local government institution IOTL.
[10] The last of the great gurus of Sikhism, lived in the 17th century. Founded the Khalsa, a Sikh warrior caste who would be bound by a strict code of honour, and believed that if they remained true to this code, the Sikhs would eventually form an enlightened society with no rulers but the Sikh people as a whole.
[11] OTL Uttar Pradesh.
[12] IOTL led the disastrous 1839-42 expedition to Afghanistan. Died a prisoner of war several months before the date of TTL’s Anglo-Sikh war.
[13] IOTL, the Khalsa were led by a general named Lal Singh, who sold intelligence to the British in advance of every engagement and consequently ensured his own defeat. Obviously I don’t know how good Nau Nihal would’ve been at leading an army, but I figure he can’t be that bad.
[14] This rather blatant feint would likely not have worked in nine-tenths of cases – yes, the British had a tendency to treat native Indian states with patronising scorn, but in the case of the Khalsa, who had been trained in modern tactics by the French and used as a buffer against the Afghans and Russians for decades, the average British commander would be well aware that they were dealing with a formidable opponent. However, William Elphinstone was not the average British commander.
[15] See #20. With opium revenue all but gone, the position of the EIC has been much weakened compared to OTL, and this may be expected to have continued consequences for India as we move forward.
[16] Compare and contrast OTL’s Treaty of Lahore – even from the name (Lahore being the Sikh capital at the time), you can tell that document was a treaty written by the British, for the British. It forced the Sikhs to cede a large part of their territory to the East India Company, and to submit their court to the presence of a British resident – by 1850, a second war had come and gone and the Punjab was under direct Company rule.
***
A House Divided #24: Go Bind Your Sons to Exile
“East of Suez, some hold, the direct control of Providence ceases; Man being there handed over to the power of the Gods and Devils of Asia, and the Church of England Providence only exercising an occasional and modified supervision in the case of Englishmen.”
***
From “The History of India”
(c) 1988 by Nicholas Blair
London: Robinson Publishers
When Maharaja Ranjit Singh, Sher-i-Panjab (Lion of the Panjab), died in 1839, his subjects could look on an empire unlike anything seen in the region since the time of the Great Mughals. [1] From a loose confederacy of twelve tribal states intermittently ruled over by the Pashtun Durrani Empire, the Sikh people of the Panjab had been unified into a single state under Ranjit Singh’s direct control, and backed by an understanding with the Honourable East India Company, they had carved an empire out of the entire upper Indus plain and the foothills of the Himalayas. [2] While its highest leaders were Sikh, the empire’s army and government included many Hindus and Muslims. Ranjit Singh enforced a ban on the slaughter of cows in keeping with Hindu tradition, and donated large sums of money to build and maintain Hindu temples in his empire. While the Muslim majority were given less deference, the Sikh were nonetheless less harsh on them than many other non-Muslim states in the region. [3] The capital city of Lahore was restored nearly to its Mughal-era glory, and its great palaces, temples and defensive works impressed European visitors. And most importantly, an alliance with the British East India Company protected the empire from one of the two most formidable powers in the region, and the collapse of the Maratha Confederacy had spelt the end of the other.
The Lahore Fort, seat of the Sikh maharajas.
The motivation behind the alliance had not been entirely based on goodwill from the British side. Since the end of the Napoleonic Wars, there had been a growing mistrust between the British and the Russians, with the latter successively moving their positions forward in Central Asia and the former viewing these advances as fundamentally directed against their interests in India. It is unlikely that Russia ever seriously considered invading India, with the exception of Tsar Paul, who ordered India be invaded in a fit of madness shortly before his assassination in 1801. [4] Nonetheless, the enmity between the two countries persisted – Britain viewing Russia as an autocratic, militarised behemoth, whereas Russia viewed Britain as an “aberration” from the natural order. [5] With this uncertainty along the northern border, it’s not difficult to see why the East India Company saw the developed, highly militarised Sarkar-i-Khalsa (army-state) of the Panjab as an ideal buffer.
However, for all his successes in life, Ranjit Singh had left one important matter unattended: his succession. The Panjab had grown into what it was under his firm leadership, and of his eight sons, no one had quite his adeptness at managing the patchwork of competing ethnic, religious and caste interests that his empire had become. His eldest son, Kharak Singh, was certainly not a second Sher-i-Panjab, and it didn’t take long before he found himself deposed in favour of his own son, Nau Nihal Singh. [6] Nau Nihal, who would eventually become known to the British as the “Young Tiger of Panjab”, did not get off to an auspicious start on the throne. A palace conflict was breaking out between the Sindhanwalia, a Sikh clique who enjoyed widespread support in the army, and the Dogra, a Hindu clique who represented the Hindu provincial interest, and in particular their home region of Jammu. [7] Nau Nihal decided to ally himself with the Sindhanwalia, and when the Dogra tried to launch a palace coup and install Sher Singh, Nau Nihal’s uncle, on the throne, Nau Nihal acted firmly, exiling Sher and many prominent Dogra-aligned officials to Company lands. [8]
These moves were taken by the Hindus in the Panjab to mean that Nau Nihal would end the pluralist policy of his grandfather and turn the state into a vehicle for the army and the Sikh religion. The Dogra formed alliances with individual East India Company officials, and when officers of the Khalsa army began forming panchayats [9] and proclaiming the arrival of the Sikh commonwealth promised by Guru Gobind Singh, [10] the Company became concerned that the state was decaying from the strong and stable buffer it had been under Ranjit Singh into a chaotic coalition of rival factions. Tensions would keep rising for a while, and the Company would move what troops it could spare into the North-Western Provinces, [11] further heightening tensions in the region both within the Panjab and between the Panjab and the Company…
Major-General William Elphinstone.
…Finally, on the 3rd of October 1842, at the end of the monsoons, the British army under Major-General William Elphinstone [12] marched on the Sutlej River, the southern boundary of the Panjab at the time. At roughly the same time, the Khalsa had begun a march south, with Nau Nihal himself leading the advance. [13] The forces met at Moga on the 12th, and the British set up firing lines along a ridge west of the town. The Khalsa acted correspondingly, but did not bring up their entire force – in particular, they kept a portion of their artillery well behind their lines, outside the British field of view. When Elphinstone ordered his cavalry to charge into the Khalsa lines, the Panjabis fell back, and before long the entire force of the Khalsa artillery – almost as strong as the total artillery force on the British side – laid into them, forcing them to retreat in confusion having lost a significant portion of their force. [14] The Khalsa then went on the counterattack, managing to drive the British from their positions by the evening, with both sides having taken heavy casualties.
Following the Battle of Moga, Elphinstone made repeated requests for reinforcements, but was turned down by the Governor-General in Calcutta, who was under severe economic constraints following the Opium Crisis. [15] When the armies met again at Sidhwan, and then again at Ajitwal, the battles ended indecisively, with the British inflicting heavy casualties but failing to turn the tide. Eventually, the situation became untenable, and at Jagraon on the 29th of November, the Khalsa were able to inflict a humiliating defeat on the British army. Elphinstone was forced back to Patiala, where the local Maharaja was a staunch British ally, and did not resume his campaign. The Khalsa offered terms, and on Christmas Eve, the Treaty of Ludhiana was signed by Nau Nihal and William Wilberforce Bird, the Deputy Governor of Bengal, acting on behalf of the East India Company. The treaty was largely status quo ante bellum, recognising the existing boundaries of the Panjab and Nau Nihal’s status as legitimate ruler. The British further agreed not to support any faction within the Panjab, and to commit troops in support of the Panjab against any attack from Afghanistan. [16] This final clause would come to be significant in the following years…
***
[1] A bit of an in-universe oversight here. The Mughal dynasty technically still existed at this time, but its authority did not extend far beyond the walls of Delhi, and when the emperor Bahadur Shah II backed the rebellion against British rule in 1857, his “empire” was summarily crushed and incorporated into the British Raj.
[2] In modern terms, the empire covered roughly the Pakistani states of Punjab (except some areas in the far south) and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, as well as the entirety of Jammu and Kashmir and the Indian states of Himachal Pradesh and Punjab.
[3] Not that that’s saying much.
[4] Being a pre-PoD event, this did, in fact, happen in real life.
[5] It is worth noting that as a British popular history book, this text may somewhat “embellish” the actual facts from time to time. This applies both to its characterisation of Russian foreign policy and of India itself.
[6] All OTL so far.
[7] IOTL the Dogra lent their name to the dynasty of Rajputs that became the Maharajas of Jammu and Kashmir after the Anglo-Sikh wars shattered the Sikh empire. Their status as a Hindu group ruling over a majority-Muslim territory would create enormous problems during the partition of India IOTL.
[8] IOTL, within months of coming to the throne, Nau Nihal was killed by falling rocks outside the Lahore Fort (yes, really), and in the ensuing power vacuum, the Dogra manoeuvred Sher Singh onto the throne. He would himself last barely two years before being murdered by an outraged army officer who hadn’t received his pay, and Ranjit’s widow Jind Kaur became regent for her infant son Duleep Singh.
[9] Governing councils of five elders, a common form of village leadership in ancient and medieval India that survives as a local government institution IOTL.
[10] The last of the great gurus of Sikhism, lived in the 17th century. Founded the Khalsa, a Sikh warrior caste who would be bound by a strict code of honour, and believed that if they remained true to this code, the Sikhs would eventually form an enlightened society with no rulers but the Sikh people as a whole.
[11] OTL Uttar Pradesh.
[12] IOTL led the disastrous 1839-42 expedition to Afghanistan. Died a prisoner of war several months before the date of TTL’s Anglo-Sikh war.
[13] IOTL, the Khalsa were led by a general named Lal Singh, who sold intelligence to the British in advance of every engagement and consequently ensured his own defeat. Obviously I don’t know how good Nau Nihal would’ve been at leading an army, but I figure he can’t be that bad.
[14] This rather blatant feint would likely not have worked in nine-tenths of cases – yes, the British had a tendency to treat native Indian states with patronising scorn, but in the case of the Khalsa, who had been trained in modern tactics by the French and used as a buffer against the Afghans and Russians for decades, the average British commander would be well aware that they were dealing with a formidable opponent. However, William Elphinstone was not the average British commander.
[15] See #20. With opium revenue all but gone, the position of the EIC has been much weakened compared to OTL, and this may be expected to have continued consequences for India as we move forward.
[16] Compare and contrast OTL’s Treaty of Lahore – even from the name (Lahore being the Sikh capital at the time), you can tell that document was a treaty written by the British, for the British. It forced the Sikhs to cede a large part of their territory to the East India Company, and to submit their court to the presence of a British resident – by 1850, a second war had come and gone and the Punjab was under direct Company rule.
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Ah, the Sikh Empire! It gets to survive! With its quite high literacy rate, it may actually be a middle power, which is an exciting possibility.
They weren't, actually. They were Rajputs, retroactively named after the main Hindu ethnic group of Jammu and Kashmir.
They weren't, actually. They were Rajputs, retroactively named after the main Hindu ethnic group of Jammu and Kashmir.
I see - I will admit that researching India from a provincial town in Sweden hasn't been easy, and there may be more inaccuracies in the update.
The only reason I know this is because I'm a Dogra - the ethnic group; as far as I know, I'm not related to any royalty.
Just saying you have an out!
But seriously, this update, hell, this whole thing is great. I'm still not really sure where you're going (or indeed if you have a specific end game in mind) but I'm loving the way that you're setting up a pretty enormously different 19th century from such a comparitively innocuous PoD.
Alex Richards
Donor
So Britain doesn't gain the Punjab but still ends up getting dragged into Afghanistan?
Hooh boy is that the worst of both worlds.
Hooh boy is that the worst of both worlds.
What do you expect? Britain has Ernest Augustus as their king, after all.
Well, all these military adventures are of course conducted by the East India Company, not the actual British government. In theory, anyway - they grew harder and harder to distinguish as the Company had its trading privileges removed and became more purely an administrative corps. Who occupies the throne has less effect than the Company's financial position, which is seriously in the doldrums ITTL - among other things, they've had to abandon the doctrine of lapse to avoid incurring any more administrative expenses.
Well, yeah. Ernest Augustus is only stopping Britain from reforming its political system here. All in all, these effects, such as Viscount Palmerston resigning, the Opium Crisis, and the failure to conquer the Sikh Empire are going to make the nineteenth century less fortunate for Britain.
Probably before - actually, you know what, since that was the first prominent application of the doctrine after TTL's Opium Crisis, let's say it's the specific case that leads to its abandonment.