Dystopian British Empire
- Thread starter xsampa
- Start date
Post 1900: Get the Conservatives to stay in power, double down with a mainstream Fascist movement, and have the powers-that-be develop the same mindset of the examples I listed where the Empire is going to remain the Empire, and any attempt to break it up will be met with force. Churchill's opinion on keeping India was fairly wicked, as an example. Constant policing wars and plans of coup and assassination against a seated government that will permit independence. And much worse brutality and exploitation of native populations. Both British and native populations drive one another to extremes through complete opposition to one another's interests and conflict to achieve those interests, spiraling the situation into pell-mell. Which will eventually lead to backlash in Britain itself as the independence of determined populations is inevitable, and the world is Britain's quagmire for young men to die in which quickly becomes a sour issue. At the end, you have Britain as the sick old man of the world, exhausted from outdated Imperialism in the 1970s, and with demonstrations in the streets, the ouster of the sitting government, and transition to a post-colonial era after much more suffering than the OTL. My examples here are all kicking and screaming as Rome falls. I don't know nearly enough to give an opinion on *how* to make Britain a dystopia during its height in the century prior. Though I do know *what* a British dystopia would likely look like given the examples I listed earlier.
Last edited:
Derek Pullem
Donor
This fails on the OP as it does not increase the size of the OTL Empire (except possibly by holding on to the Iraq mandate). Question was not how to make the British Empire more dystopian but how to make it significantly larger and dystopian.
Madeleine Birchfield
Banned
The British Empire also had slavery which were only banned by 1833, because the most profitable Anglo plantations on the North American continent had already seceded from the British fifty years ago, which allowed the British to ram through anti-slavery laws against the objections of the remaining Caribbean planters. It could get a lot worse.
This is highly inaccurate. Sugar plantations were vastly more profitable than cotton plantations. The Jamaica lobby has control over a vast number of MPs in a way the southern American colonies never did. Even the timeline doesn't make sense, as the USA gained independence in 1782, meaning 1833 was a whole half century later.
In reality the driver the main cause of abolition was the reform of parliament. The Jamaica lobby couldn't block legislation once the Reform Act happened and the rotten boroughs were abolished.
Madeleine Birchfield
Banned
Would this all still be true in a world where Britain still has the American south and the developing textile industries in Liverpool and Manchester and the like are dependent upon the cotton plantations in the early 1830s?
Maybe we could see the people there see themselves as Sinicized descendants of the Baiyue as opposed to "bona fide" Chinese in such a scenario?
Maybe find a way for the metropole to become more authoritarian? Another possible POD could be a "Dominion of Southern America" scenario gone horribly wrong.
It's probably because British Empire is still in recent memory (and also because a lot of its evils are better documented). The mongols are demonised quite a bit too, but maybe not on this forum because most people aren't educated in the history of the mongol empire. On the other hand, romans are not demonised at all because most of the people on this forum are too educated in the history of the roman empire (and also because they probably enjoy larping as romans/byzantines)
In India I'd say only coastal cities like Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata were benefitted, while most of the inland cities were left to rot. And no particular province had it any better, there were massacres in Punjab as well as (deliberate) famines in Bengal.
I think you're underselling quite a bit of the atrocities in settler colonies. Not just while they were still colonies, but even after that, you still have native children being taken away from their parents to be raised the "right" way. The British Empire was the sum of the (racist/sexist) institutions it imposed on its colonies as well as the mindset it inculcated in its citizens.
Fair enough, it could have been worse.
In any case, I think one way to do it is to make the Franco-British Union that was proposed during WW2 happen. Britain has more resources and then in 1945 develops the nuclear bombs while they promptly drop on Berlin. This quickly ends the war in Europe (ideally while Russia was either struggling with the Nazis or when they finally reached Berlin only to have that blow up in their faces) and the US was still fighting out in the Pacific.
So now we have a tripolar world, with UK controlling most of Europe and major parts of Asia & Australia. US controlling most of the Americas and USSR controlling Russia & other communist states. The cold war ITL leads to worsening tensions and the UK wins the Suez Crisis this time to the disapproval of the other two superpowers. Eventually UK gets into a war with US over Canada, which it loses and decides that the "lower-races" were at fault and commits a genocide or two. Eventually UK invades USSR, but then the US has to bomb London.
xsampa
Banned
Quite possibly. The Brits will use historiography (see lumping various invasions as “Muslim” in Indian history) to divide groups. Furthermore, the importation of Indians and Malays to major port cities will also weaken the Chinese identity of Greater Canton and Fukien.
xsampa
Banned
Separated at Birth: A Timeline has Drakia undergo this and absorb half of SubsaharanbAfrica while enslaving the locals.
There were no deliberate famines in Bengal. That is a stupid myth. Amritsar was tragic but it was an anomaly. Up until that point British rule was rather popular in Punjab. There was a lot of land development and infrastructure which helped raise a lot of boats and it was seen as having impartial justice between Hindu, Muslim and Sikh. Just look at the horror that happened when the British were not there to keep them apart.
Yes. The first vote for abolition in a reformed parliament was not close. As soon as you broke the corrupt system in the unreformed parliament and brought in a mass electorate (although still 4% of the public) slavery is finished. And I can't see the unreformed parliament hanging on any longer. Reform nearly happened in the 1790s but got pushed back decades by the French Revolution scaring the establishment. The Days of May showed Britain would have likely had a revolution had it been held up any longer. You would have had to have a dictatorship implemented to hold out, which there was no appetite from anyone to do. Perhaps if you went back with a POD in the 1600s to bring back the Stuart's and kill parliamentary independence.
I fear it is you who is falling for stupid myths. The 1943 famine in Bengal was a due to decisions made by the British Government that starving subjects in Bengal were of a much lower priority than the people of the British Isles. Their use of scorched earth tactics against the Japanese in Burma and refusal to allow imports into Bengal was among the main reasons for the famine (which also includes the natural disasters which afflicted Bengal during this time).
British rule was only popular in Punjab in so far as they left the people of Punjab alone. When they introduced the colonisation bill which let the Government take over any land which did not have an heir, the people of Punjab protested and formed secret societies which aimed at freedom.
And the horrors that happened when the British were "not there to keep them apart" happened because of their decision (along with the leaders of the Tehrik-e-Pakistan movement) to partition the country along religious lines. Had the transition to self-rule happened over a period of years (like the leaders of the Indian National Congress wanted) instead of just two months, those horrors would not have been. Ideally, this transition would have occurred after World War 1, as the British had promised (but then again the cliche of Perfidious Albion rings true sometimes).
In any case, I do not want to clog up this thread with stuff about India. You can PM me if you want to continue this discussion.
Wait didn' code geass did this with britannia? The only difference is that napoleans does drive britain from the british isles.
But might there not have been an appetite to submit to some sufficiently firm and "visionary" dictator, if this were the only way to make a really profitable system politically viable?
I think you overestimate the British abolition as an expression of British virtue anyway, and are ignoring the geographic-economics of capitalist slavery. Basically, slavery is favored in a capitalist system when there are opportunities for intensive production in locations where the surrounds would offer a lot of refuge and alternative means of survival to a labor force; with some ASB thing (or a realistic world society that has moved on to abolish slavery) compelling free labor only, wages would be sky high and yet intensive overworking of the labor force would have limits--severe ones from a capitalist point of view, in fact. Importing forced labor and chaining it down is rational then.
But when such a site, be it for mining or plantation work, fills up, when political control of the countryside is strong and escapees have no where to run, and the land is all bought up and refugees have no place to subsist independent of the labor market--then rationality tips toward free labor.
By the 1830s, the sugar islands had had something like a century to populate and spread such control over, while in America fresh frontier lands for slave plantations still beckoned. This I think accounts for the thirty year gap--even so, under the British system other forms of constrained servitude, even those as close to plain old slavery as blackbirding, not to mention "coolie" contract-labor, were quite prominent. Also, as I understand it it was pretty common in European colonies including British ones to do stuff like impose head taxes which could only be paid in the currency of the realm, which, in colonized territories, was not a form of money that could be gotten by traditional economic trading but only by going to work for some colonial enterprise; this in effect forced a labor draft.
It may not be reasonable to denounce the British system as the very abyss of depravity, though the OTL scale of it, casting the net onto every continent on the globe, explains the apparent hyperbole of Irish people muttering about the Enemy of Mankind as literal and sober observation. I think your resistance to the idea that it was somewhat dystopian OTL relates to general resistance to the idea liberal capitalism can be dystopian, but I think any reasonable consideration of facts shows how it is in fact generally so, for all more or less liberal capitalist regimes.
The thread OP question is can it be both more extensive--it doesn't raise the question of durability and we can go any way we like on that--and also more dystopian. And more dystopian has several dimensions.
There is a conflict between being more illiberal and more successful, in that certainly much British success related to a deepening culture of liberalism. On one hand this meant more legitimacy for loyalist democracy, for such movements as Chartism to be compromised with with gradual extension of franchise and gradual legitimizing of claims of common working people, which had some salience to the rising claims of colonized peoples to consideration as well, versus the hard-edged Social Darwinism linking the British establishment to success or failure in market terms. OTL British dominance of the global capitalist system peaked in part due to the ornery resistance of British firms to being cartelized, along German or American models, into largely centralized super-enterprises that ruthlessly rationalized the general industrial system. British industry rose to great heights collectively then reached a plateau as German and American industry caught up and surpassed it. In America a facade of decentralizing ideology, known as "trust busting," put a fig leaf of deniability on the ongoing centralization of control into the hands of great corporations; in Germany they were more forthright and the central cartels were acknowledged and assumed as basically necessary and progressive in terms of efficient innovation in modern terms.
So, had Britain remained more forthrightly class-stratified, with the franchise for Parliament ruthlessly reserved for the propertied, perhaps that would have undermined the growth of industry in the 19th century phase when enterprises relatively small compared to the kind of firms that would dominate by say 1900 were favored, and perhaps Continental powers and the USA would pull even and surpass even earlier. The topic of demographics has come up; could the people of one damp island spread out enough, with enough loyalty, to ruthlessly dominate the globe even more than OTL? In South America British success was by indirect means; everywhere, in the formal dominions and protectorates as well as in the informally dominated places British influence radiated via local elites raised up by association with British interests and more or less following British orders, largely through private channels. If the British system were more formally centralized, might the ability of British influence via such indirect channels have been stunted?
Would a more dystopic empire be one where all British subjects, including those born in Britain, be under a harsher plutocratic rule, or might we have as much or more democracy in Britain linked to a racist white-supremacist ideology mobilizing even low class Britons to hold themselves a master race organized to firmly rule "lesser breeds without the law" as Kipling so bluntly put it in "White Man's Burden?"
I don't think it is strictly necessary Britain hang on to the OTL USA, or even frustrate independent US ambitions in continental "Manifest Destiny;" we can go either way with this. Nor is it necessary that the various "white dominions," including perhaps a successfully retained British North America, be run in a more conciliatory fashion, to perhaps still have a reservoir of loyalist colonials who can be relied on as imperial troops to dominate others.
There are lots of ways to go with this.
My personal taste is biased toward being seduced by the prospect of a less dystopian but more extensive and durable Empire, and that is down to frankly some bias toward a more romantic view of the Anglosphere generally and a notion that unity is better than division--provided the united entity is reasonably just. I do think, soberly, that empire and justice are in conflict fundamentally, that no great power exists without a lot of brutality and ruthlessness. Britain could not rule a world empire on progressively liberal lines, without turning into an Indian Empire, which would not happen; if Britain could not maintain a Raj on the basis of white supremacy then sooner or later they'd be out of India, and without India the Empire remaining tends to fall apart. Perhaps an ATL where India does not come under unified British rule via the EIC but remains partitioned between rival European powers and perhaps eventually some Indian principality gains the ability to toss the lot of them out, but Britain does keep a grip on North America instead, could compensate for no-India or just part of India held marginally with American resources. But again fully exploiting American resources will tend strongly to turn the Empire into an American Empire, even if the British grip on North America is on rather illiberal lines, which I think likely to evolve either if the Revolution is preempted or if the Patriots (Rebels in this TL of course, and much deplored) are overcome. The key to ongoing British control of North America would be via firmly establishing an American gentry, and might go hand in hand with general illiberalism. For an illiberal Britain to dominate the 19th century it would be necessary to somehow coordinate the rise of industrialism with a less laissez-faire political ideology, to hold that key and important minorities ought to rule while still keeping their status tied to differential success or failure industrially, and such a regime will be beset by ongoing grassroots radicalism, which need not triumph to persist.
In such a setup, I suppose colonial forms of racism would be imported into the home islands more so than OTL (where it was quite bad enough, not American in extremism to be sure, but in the ATL it might be and perhaps worse).
There is a lot of ATL potential here, I wouldn't delve into it too deeply because it is ugly and painful, not because I doubt it might be a plausible possibility.
No, it was the Japanese that cut off the supply of food from Burma into Bengal because, surprise, surprise, people don't usually supply the enemy through the front line. There was no food shipped from Bengal to the British Isles in 1943 and not even do the anti-British wing of Indian nationalists make this argument. The Governor-General requested food be donated from the other Indian provinces to Bengal, but the process towards independence had already begun and the Indian-elected provincial assemblies refused to do this. Churchill then tried to arrange to ship food from Sri Lanka to Bengal, but the problem was that while the food was available, spare ships were difficult. (There was this little thing called the Second World War going on.) He actually wrote to the US President requesting more ships to help alleviate the famine. So the claim that the British deliberately caused famines is just fundamentally untrue.
That's not true. Britain was very active in infrastructure development in Punjab, and much of Western Punjab was transformed by British investment to allow for much more effective agriculture. As a result the province boomed and Lahore quadrupled in population in just 60 years due to it becoming a major commercial hub. Yes, the Colonization Act and the Land Alienation Act were very unpopular (you seem to be confusing the two), but it was hardly a policy of benign neglect before that. And even after that, vast numbers of Sikhs enthusiastically supported the British war effort.
So Britain is guilty of both having a dystopian regime over India and also for not keeping that dystopian regime going long enough? Partition was inevitable after Nehru and Jinnah could not come to terms about the relative centralization of India. Jinnah wanted some autonomy for Muslim states and Nehru insisted on centralization to build a socialist country. Britain then did her best to ensure as few as people as possible ended up in the "wrong" state. The horrors of partition are on the local Pakistanis and Indians that carried them out.
Yeah... no.
Nobody gets to claim "least dystopian" when they on sheer scale of numbers did more damage than any other empire. You can argue about severity in comparison in particular colonies, but in terms of sheer numbers and horrors, the British and their legacy beat out everybody else by miles. It's only through looking up excuses, caveats, and other "mitigating factors" that they ever look anything approaching good.
I recognize that this board continues after 10 years to fetishize maps that are mostly pink, but could we for once admit that the British were utter monsters to anyone other than themselves without a bunch of desperate defenders resorting to Whataboutism to justify the Empire's atrocities and thus feel better about their map fetish?
Starforce
Banned
In total amounts killed the British were among the worst and nobody even bats an eye at it, it's quite sad really. The British get nothing against them for it. You know what they say, the victors are the writers of history...
I would argue that the British Empire already was dystopia to a degree, though in order for them to truly be I think they would need more racial elements involved.