Too big to succeed? 'Rightsize' an overextended nation or empire

[Aluma]

The British Empire: Anything outside the island of Great Britain.

Thats how I know its you

I think Britain could have done well without India and Africa

I know people like to bring up India as the Empire's "crown jewel" but it only really served to fund a Britain that was already filthy rich from portuguese gold, they didnt need that to achieve their Industrial Revolution at all if only they stopped funding continental coalitions and - like Spain should also have done - ignored mainland Europe

This would still leave Industrial Britain with Canada(and America if they dont fuck up, as it was them funding continental conflicts that caused the American Revolution) and maybe Oceania would be more than enough for a stable modern British Empire that remains a superpower

 

[Mitridates the Great]

Thats how I know its you

I think Britain could have done well without India and Africa

I know people like to bring up India as the Empire's "crown jewel" but it only really served to fund a Britain that was already filthy rich from portuguese gold, they didnt need that to achieve their Industrial Revolution at all if only they stopped funding continental coalitions and - like Spain should also have done - ignored mainland Europe

This would still leave Industrial Britain with Canada(and America if they dont fuck up, as it was them funding continental conflicts that caused the American Revolution) and maybe Oceania would be more than enough for a stable modern British Empire that remains a superpower

Yes, the absurd thing is how people here argue that IT WAS NECESSARY for Britain to constantly get involved in continental wars and force the outbreak of wars when there were none, even though in fact it would have been better for EVERYONE if they didn't do it. Just as it would have been better for Spain to forget about the rest of Europe...

 

[Aluma]

Yes, the absurd thing is how people here argue that IT WAS NECESSARY for Britain to constantly get involved in continental wars

Well if it was against France can you really blame them?

 

[Mitridates the Great]

Well if it was against France can you really blame them?

Not ever was against France, what's the excuse then?

 

[Aluma]

Not ever was against France, what's the excuse then?

Yeah why would you devote your military to anything other than messing with France?

 

[Basileus_Komnenos]

First French Empire: Naples should have stayed with Joseph, they had no bussiness in the mess that was Spain at the time, Holland stayed with Louis, Italy would have gone to Eugene, Warsaw never to exist to appese the russians.

Agreed. Napoleon would have been better served concentrating his resources towards the broader continent. Not to mention his system where he had French troops forcefully occupying his allied/puppet states wasn't a viable long-term approach.

Honestly he should have made a better effort to integrate the local peoples into his empire/client states. This would have avoided the alienation that many Italians, for example felt towards the Napoleonic regime. It boiled over and led to the assassination of its finance minister.

Napoleon had no business trying to pull a Philip IV on steroids with the Pope, outright annexing Latium into his Empire. The more prudent policy would have been to keep the Pope as an ally like his ancient predecessors had done historically. Heck if Napoleon had more diplomatic skill, he might have even stolen the Imperial Crown from the Habsburgs and the Pope would have probably aided him.

Yeah, Charlemagne's court and Charlemagne's empire adopted actual Roman culture despite not being direct continuation of Roman state and actual Roman state had adopted Greek culture in aftermath of Arab and Slavic invasions, and Ottomans weren't Romans because they didn't have actually have anything in common with them, spoke totally unrelated language to that of Ceasar, they weren't even direct continuation of Roman state like ERE, they were outside invader who took over ERE by brute force. Confucius was Chinese and neither Jesus nor Muhammad were Romans, that's the difference.

If you look at the Carolingians and the Ottonians, their customs were mirroring the Byzantines, aka the Romans. They were copying fashion trends that were popular in Constantinople. And as for the issue of language, the Empire was a multi-cultural and multi-lingual entity full of many different peoples. It didn't truly become "Greek" until the 13th Century where after the Fourth Crusade it was firmly confined to the "Hellenic" lands which it didn't fully control.

Greek was the lingua franca of the Eastern Mediterranean going back to Alexander the Great. The Romans were actively using Greek in the law and administration with Leo the Thracian legislating in Greek while Justinian himself published the final volumes of his Civil Law Code in Greek.

The idea of the Empire using Greek instead of "Latin" to somehow postulate that the Empire wasn't Roman, falls apart upon closer scrutiny.

 

[jacob ningen]

Agreed. Napoleon would have been better served concentrating his resources towards the broader continent. Not to mention his system where he had French troops forcefully occupying his allied/puppet states wasn't a viable long-term approach.

Honestly he should have made a better effort to integrate the local peoples into his empire/client states. This would have avoided the alienation that many Italians, for example felt towards the Napoleonic regime. It boiled over and led to the assassination of its finance minister.

Napoleon had no business trying to pull a Philip IV on steroids with the Pope, outright annexing Latium into his Empire. The more prudent p heolicy would have been to keep the Pope as an ally like his ancient predecessors had done historically. Heck if Napoleon had more diplomatic skill, he might have even stolen the Imperial Crown from the Habsburgs and the Pope would have probably aided him.

If you look at the Carolingians and the Ottonians, their customs were mirroring the Byzantines, aka the Romans. They were copying fashion trends that were popular in Constantinople. And as for the issue of language, the Empire was a multi-cultural and multi-lingual entity full of many different peoples. It didn't truly become "Greek" until the 13th Century where after the Fourth Crusade it was firmly confined to the "Hellenic" lands which it didn't fully control.

Greek was the lingua franca of the Eastern Mediterranean going back to Alexander the Great. The Romans were actively using Greek in the law and administration with Leo the Thracian legislating in Greek while Justinian himself published the final volumes of his Civil Law Code in Greek.

The idea of the Empire using Greek instead of "Latin" to somehow postulate that the Empiinore wasn't Roman, falls apart upon closer scrutiny.

On Napoleon, even though I started the thread that gives him better results in Palestine and Egypt, https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...em-had-assented-to-the-1538-sanhedrin.547421/ he shouldnt have been campaigning there at all as neither the Porte Mehmet Ali Pasha or the Banu Tuqan or Banu Zaydan were interested or capable of backing a Bourbon or Orleanist restoration. Napoleon should have stuck to ensuring no restoration of the Ancien Regime backers were able to mount a counterrevolution and then stopped.

 

[CalBear]

1) Might I be cheeky and suggest the Imperial Federation if it got started?

As much as the main populations of the UK, what eventually became the Republic of Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand are very, very similar culturaly, socially and politically, it would be very difficult to see how something like that could be governed with pre-computer revolution technology in the way it would have to be to say compete directly with the US as a superpower after say 1950. Leaving aside the internal stability issues which Federation might solve by allowing for a high degree of what was then called Home Rule within populations like the two Irelands and Quebec focused on purely social welfare policy like health, education and housing. Coordinating economies across two oceans to the degree necessary to make a Federation work would be extremely difficult, even if it did make the Federation incredibly well provisioned in natural resources, an obvious internal market and potential space to expand. Geopolitically also, the interests of the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand will differ, with Australia and New Zealand more interested in Japan than Canada is during the interwar period as an example.

2) I remain utterly amazed that Russia is as stable as it is given how huge it is, how limited a lot of the infrastructure is one it gets away from the Muscovy core and how questionable that looked in the 1990s when it appeared for a moment that the Chechens for one were going to make a go of it on their own. And they want to get bigger and annex places filled with people who don't want to be run by them. Regardless of what you think about that particular conflict, this seems like an invitation for long-term stability problems, particularly given their demographics issues. Clamping down on other options in government will only get you so far. The Soviet Union broke partly because of its governance and it is stunning (and maybe down to the Professor for the Dark Arts Governor of the Central Bank) that they haven't bigger domestic problems than they do now.

3) I will also be cheeky and stick to what has absolutely come to pass - the EU.

They are asking people from Portugal to Cyprus and Ireland to Finland to be governed by the same mostly unelected people despite having distinctly different linguistic, social, cultural, economic and legal traditions and relationships with the state, tied together only by some vague notion of being 'European' without bothering to be clear about what that actually means and nowadays instead of being at all proud or impressed by the reality of what it does mean to the ordinary person on the street, being actively embarrassed or ashamed of it.

Pan-Germanism, Pan-Iberianism, Pan-Scandinavianism, some form of Yugoslavism, even a form of Briths Unionism that sees things in-terms of a concert of Anglo-Celtic peoples that bemoans the departure of Ireland, is based on something tangible and clear - shared governance and legal norms, shared culture and language, shared history etc. You can understand and sell that to the public, albeit with great care in some cases and it exists in a form be it the Nordic Council or even, if you want to be really broad about it, the Commonwealth. I have absolutely no clue what Political Europe is really supposed to be about except for "we'd rather not have another Franco-German war that mutates into a world war again" - and yet what's the chances that the average German would be allowed to even think about that in the 1950s with direct occupation by the Big Four. Japan didn't, it went utterly the other way without having to be contained by any other entity.

Did anyone in Europe except from a few eccentrics in the 1950s and 60s actually want what we have got? Does it feel organic to existing political trends? No. Nordic togetherness does, there actually was a fairly broad base of people in Germany and Austria that thought being in the same country made sense. Poland and Lithuania tagteaming if they wanted to, cool. Political Europe as it is currently governed from Brussels came from nowhere except the imaginations of some elite politicians and economists who were thinking in-terms economics and not in-terms of people - and that limits its appeal straightaway.

And to try to do that without a firm democratic basis where the Commission - who holds basically all of the power and can only be removed in its entirity when one Commissioner is found to be corrupt or otherwise criminal, which the Parliament will NEVER do. The notion of an unelected Eurocrat being able to send men and women into a war their homelands have no ability to opt out off and no ability to influence without having to answer to Parliament is terrified and very plausible given the direction of travel. There lies the root of at least some of Hungary's very particular objections. Unelected Eurocrats already seem to want to stop Europe farming for some weird reason.

I am all in-favour of multi-national unions, I'm British, I am born and bred in one, when they are based on something substantial, real and authentic to the cultures that live within it and developed from organic political trends that were already in the offing and not imposed from above, and when the constitutional arrangements are such that we can get rid of those making the decisions when we think we must and where we see our constituency MP semi-regularly. We don't have that in Political Europe, you shouldn't need to get a member state to threaten to jail their people for using their ancient weights and measures handed down from time immorial, if you do, you have have abandoned legitimacy. You shouldn't need to soft-sell the ultimate goal of a federalised Europe as 'only' a trade bloc when that is clearly not what it is at all, either in-order to get states to join under what in the British case was basically false presences - if you do, you have abandoned legitimacy. Threatening to withhold COVID vaccine because some country or other didn't do things exactly the way the Commission wanted it done, does not exactly shower the Commission with glory - it knowingly chose to abandon legitimacy at that moment because it preferred compliance to respect and the consent of its members, no matter who. These tendencies are why I was utterly unsurprised by Brexit - the difference is that I never believed for a moment the British political class was capable of executing properly or wanted to.

Please refrain from current political discussion outside of Chat.

 

[Zygmunt Stary]

A common misconception. Rome, whilst de facto independent by the eighth century, was de jure still part of the Roman Empire. Since the Emperor in Constantinople could no longer defend them, Pope Leo III and the people of Rome, Roman subjects all, acclaimed a new Emperor who could, this being a traditional way for new Emperors to be chosen.

TL;DR Charlemagne and his successors were as legitimate as the Emperors in Constantinople, and Rome fell either in 476 or 1806, not 1453.

Well, the continuity was disrupted by the episode of Odoacer and Ostrogoths ruling over Rome, but overall I agree about legitimacy of HRE, especially about "people of Rome" part - Emperor's power ultimatelly always derived from popular mandate, so thus Charlemagne having mandate of people of OG Rome made him legitimate Emperor.

What’s fine for one system of government can be overextended for another system. When Diocletian massively expanded the Roman bureaucracy and centralized the state more he recognized that it was too big to be ruled by a single person, because the central government was larger than in the Principate. After that point only one emperor (Constantine) ruled a unified empire for a significant time period and eventually it split because it was so large. And Constantine ruled during relatively peaceful times, not like Justinian’s time where there were problems at every corner. The fact that the Lombards weren’t challenged by Rome until over a century later and cities like Ravenna, Rome, etc. had to be given autonomy shows that there were too many other problems for Italy to be effectively governed

That's actually a fair point, tho it's "not too big to rule in general" but "too big to rule by the system of government existing in Justinian's time".

 

[Zygmunt Stary]

. And as for the issue of language, the Empire was a multi-cultural and multi-lingual entity full of many different peoples. It didn't truly become "Greek" until the 13th Century where after the Fourth Crusade it was firmly confined to the "Hellenic" lands which it didn't fully control.

The main language was Greek since the times of Heraclius and even before Fourth Crusade, Latin-speaking "Westerners" called Byzantines/Romans "Greek"

If you look at the Carolingians and the Ottonians, their customs were mirroring the Byzantines, aka the Romans. They were copying fashion trends that were popular in Constantinople.

Well, I'd argue fashion isn't especially important part of the culture, and the language, philosophy etc. were all inspired directly by ancient Rome.

Greek was the lingua franca of the Eastern Mediterranean going back to Alexander the Great. The Romans were actively using Greek in the law and administration with Leo the Thracian legislating in Greek while Justinian himself published the final volumes of his Civil Law Code in Greek.

The idea of the Empire using Greek instead of "Latin" to somehow postulate that the Empire wasn't Roman, falls apart upon closer scrutiny

Yet, the main language of Empire before ERE was always Latin, Cato the Elder openly despised Greeks and their culture, Augustus himself (founder of Roman Empire) wanted to avoid being seen as "Easterner" and "Greek" and exploited Roman animosity towards Greeks to discredit Antonius and Cleopatra.

 

[Hearkener]

Yeah, Charlemagne's court and Charlemagne's empire adopted actual Roman culture

Define "Roman culture" for me, please. The traditions, beliefs, political systems and material culture of Romulus Augustus' WRE were fundamentally unrecognizable to that of Tarquinius Superbus' Rome. So what exactly did Charlemagne's empire adopt? They still maintained a distinctly Frankish-Germanic heritage in their material and political culture that would be the bedrock of the French feudal system.

despite not being direct continuation of Roman state and actual Roman state had adopted Greek culture in aftermath of Arab and Slavic invasions,

Define "Greek culture" as well. I made no mention of that idea; what I did say was that the Empire adopted Koine Greek as its official language, with zero allusions to "culture". Notably, this happened before the Caliphate's invasion, at a time when the "Slavic" peoples that raided the empire weren't much more than a minor annoyance.

and Ottomans weren't Romans because they didn't have actually have anything in common with them,

Both the Ottoman Empire and ERE shared a territory with largely the same subjects, ruled from the same city and used a very similar governmental system. S

spoke totally unrelated language to that of Ceasar,

Uhm ackshually, their government language was Persian, which is in fact related to Latin - indeed, Persian is a closer relative of Latin than Greek is.

they weren't even direct continuation of Roman state like ERE, they were outside invader who took over ERE by brute force.

So if the Ottomans weren't a continuation of the ERE - why should the Great Yuan be considered a Chinese dynasty?

Confucius was Chinese and neither Jesus nor Muhammad were Romans, that's the difference.

There was not yet a concept of being Chinese when Confucius lived, though. He did write in an ancestral language to Mandarin Chinese, for a state that the modern PRC claims to descend from, and that's about it.

All Chinese conquest dynasties adopted Chinese language pretty quickly, Ottomans didn't (the European counterpart of the Qing, if one would want to search for it would be Franks and other Germanic barbarians adopting Latin).

The Great Yuan court mostly used Mongolian, as it was their native language; ditto for the Manchu. "Chinese" was mostly used to communicate with the natives, who also suffered horrendously racist persecution by both empires for not being Mongols/Manchu.

 

[Comte de Dordogne]

3) I will also be cheeky and stick to what has absolutely come to pass - the EU.

They are asking people from Portugal to Cyprus and Ireland to Finland to be governed by the same mostly unelected people despite having distinctly different linguistic, social, cultural, economic and legal traditions and relationships with the state, tied together only by some vague notion of being 'European' without bothering to be clear about what that actually means and nowadays instead of being at all proud or impressed by the reality of what it does mean to the ordinary person on the street, being actively embarrassed or ashamed of it.

Pan-Germanism, Pan-Iberianism, Pan-Scandinavianism, some form of Yugoslavism, even a form of Briths Unionism that sees things in-terms of a concert of Anglo-Celtic peoples that bemoans the departure of Ireland, is based on something tangible and clear - shared governance and legal norms, shared culture and language, shared history etc. You can understand and sell that to the public, albeit with great care in some cases and it exists in a form be it the Nordic Council or even, if you want to be really broad about it, the Commonwealth. I have absolutely no clue what Political Europe is really supposed to be about except for "we'd rather not have another Franco-German war that mutates into a world war again" - and yet what's the chances that the average German would be allowed to even think about that in the 1950s with direct occupation by the Big Four. Japan didn't, it went utterly the other way without having to be contained by any other entity.

Did anyone in Europe except from a few eccentrics in the 1950s and 60s actually want what we have got? Does it feel organic to existing political trends? No. Nordic togetherness does, there actually was a fairly broad base of people in Germany and Austria that thought being in the same country made sense. Poland and Lithuania tagteaming if they wanted to, cool. Political Europe as it is currently governed from Brussels came from nowhere except the imaginations of some elite politicians and economists who were thinking in-terms economics and not in-terms of people - and that limits its appeal straightaway.

And to try to do that without a firm democratic basis where the Commission - who holds basically all of the power and can only be removed in its entirity when one Commissioner is found to be corrupt or otherwise criminal, which the Parliament will NEVER do. The notion of an unelected Eurocrat being able to send men and women into a war their homelands have no ability to opt out off and no ability to influence without having to answer to Parliament is terrified and very plausible given the direction of travel. There lies the root of at least some of Hungary's very particular objections. Unelected Eurocrats already seem to want to stop Europe farming for some weird reason.

I am all in-favour of multi-national unions, I'm British, I am born and bred in one, when they are based on something substantial, real and authentic to the cultures that live within it and developed from organic political trends that were already in the offing and not imposed from above, and when the constitutional arrangements are such that we can get rid of those making the decisions when we think we must and where we see our constituency MP semi-regularly. We don't have that in Political Europe, you shouldn't need to get a member state to threaten to jail their people for using their ancient weights and measures handed down from time immorial, if you do, you have have abandoned legitimacy. You shouldn't need to soft-sell the ultimate goal of a federalised Europe as 'only' a trade bloc when that is clearly not what it is at all, either in-order to get states to join under what in the British case was basically false presences - if you do, you have abandoned legitimacy. Threatening to withhold COVID vaccine because some country or other didn't do things exactly the way the Commission wanted it done, does not exactly shower the Commission with glory - it knowingly chose to abandon legitimacy at that moment because it preferred compliance to respect and the consent of its members, no matter who. These tendencies are why I was utterly unsurprised by Brexit - the difference is that I never believed for a moment the British political class was capable of executing properly or wanted to.

I largely agree with you.
However, I'll avoid giving any more details, at the risk of current policy.

 

[Zygmunt Stary]

Define "Roman culture" for me, please. The traditions, beliefs, political systems and material culture of Romulus Augustus' WRE were fundamentally unrecognizable to that of Tarquinius Superbus' Rome. So what exactly did Charlemagne's empire adopt? They still maintained a distinctly Frankish-Germanic heritage in their material and political culture that would be the bedrock of the French feudal system

Using Latin as primary means of communication, putting emphasis of Rome as actual city, deriving legitimacy of Emperor from popular mandate are three ideas of pre-division Rome which were preserved in Charlemagne's empire, and they weren't as prominent in ERE. And well, the Germanic heritage blended in with post-Roman institution, not to mention institutions of roman West also contributed to feudalism - colonate was direct precedessor to the knight-serf relationship.

Define "Greek culture" as well. I made no mention of that idea; what I did say was that the Empire adopted Koine Greek as its official language, with zero allusions to "culture". Notably, this happened before the Caliphate's invasion, at a time when the "Slavic" peoples that raided the empire weren't much more than a minor annoyance.

Wasn't Latin official language up until Heraclius?

Both the Ottoman Empire and ERE shared a territory with largely the same subjects, ruled from the same city and used a very similar governmental system. S

That doesn't make Ottoman Empire Roman, and no, the "subjects" changed from the times when ERE controlled Anatolia by inclusion of ethnic Turks.

Uhm ackshually, their government language was Persian, which is in fact related to Latin - indeed, Persian is a closer relative of Latin than Greek is.

Primary means of communication was ancestral language to modern Turkish and the actual goverment language was Osman - mashup of Persian, Arabic and Turkish, so 2/3 of it's consistent elements were not related to Latin at all.

 

[Zygmunt Stary]

So if the Ottomans weren't a continuation of the ERE - why should the Great Yuan be considered a Chinese dynasty?

They ruled over largely Mandarin Chinese population. That's it.

There was not yet a concept of being Chinese when Confucius lived, though. He did write in an ancestral language to Mandarin Chinese, for a state that the modern PRC claims to descend from, and that's about it.

Well, still neither Jesus and Muhamad spoke Latin or Greek. They weren't Romans, nor their ancestors.

The Great Yuan court mostly used Mongolian, as it was their native language; ditto for the Manchu. "Chinese" was mostly used to communicate with the natives, who also suffered horrendously racist persecution by both empires for not being Mongols/Manchu.

Manchu, despite their limitations on settlement of Chinese in Manchuria, adopted Chinese as means of everyday communication.

 

[CommieScum]

The British empire - most of India was unnecessary as was parts of inland Southern Africa

Much of India was in fact ruled indirectly through client princes - with the British keeping the useful bits. I understand this was also the case for parts of Africa like Nigeria.

 

[Mitridates the Great]

Much of India was in fact ruled indirectly through client princes - with the British keeping the useful bits. I understand this was also the case for parts of Africa like Nigeria.

The doctrine of lapsation states that Britain wants to annex the more of India that they can do - simply they take the issue slowly.

Doctrine of lapse - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[CommieScum]

The doctrine of lapsation states that Britain wants to annex the more of India that they can do - simply they take the issue slowly.

Doctrine of lapse - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I have used these maps here before, let me again

Do you see a pattern? The British took what they wanted to one way or another. The doctrine of lapse was anyway only used under company rule until 1858. Indeed, some states it was applied to under company rule like Udaipur were actually later reinstated after the 1857 revolt.

 

[Socrates]

Any parts in particular you think were worth keeping?

An Atlantic Empire of the British Isles and North America would have been very viable logistically once you have steam ships. Just need to get the right constitutional balance.

 

[Whiteshore]

Not to mention the anti-theism of Marxism becoming literal state doctrine.

Or the KMT, in addition to rejecting the Imperial System and all that with the San-Min Doctrine, being disproportionately comprised of Christians vis-a-vis its leadership.

 

[Whiteshore]

Agreed on these, though I would note that the Ottomans were much less inclined to derive their legitimacy and statecraft from the previous Eastern Roman regime than the conquerors of China were to their predecessors, especially later on as the Ottoman Empire became more majority Muslim and their expansion into Christian Europe stalled and reversed. That in turn meant their status as Caliph and inheritors of the Turkic and Islamic empires' legacies became more important to their political legitimacy, which they emphasized more than their Roman influences (Kayser-i Rûm and basileus stopped being used by the Ottomans by the end of the 19th century). The more recent identity shift informs contemporary views of the Ottomans' identity more than the early sultans' claim to the Roman legacy, after all.

Had they managed to conquer more Christian (especially Italian/old Roman) lands and their core population was smaller in comparison to those they conquered, they probably would've emphasized their Roman ties more, like how the Yuan emperors wrote poetry in Han Chinese and the Manchu increasingly assimilated into Han Chinese culture linguistically and culturally. It's rather akin to how the Northern Yuan (seen as a Mongol dynasty) and Western Liao (seen as a Khitan dynasty), despite their dynastic claims, aren't seen as Chinese dynasties both for political reasons by those who ousted them and the identity shift in what gave them political and cultural legitimacy.

On that note, the Bataids from Moonlight in a Jar are honestly something close to what you described of an Ottoman Empire-equivalent which is less "Turkish" and more "Roman" in flavor, especially with how after a few generations, they (and the broader elite) wind up being Greek-speaking Muslims culturally. In fact, one could argue that if the Ottomans or an equivalent dynasty, along with the broader elite and the residents of Konstantiniyye, were Grecophone Muslims and not Turkish in language and culture, we'd probably recognize them as an Islamized version of Rhomania the same way the Mughals are viewed as an Indian Muslim Empire or the Safavids as a Persian Muslim Empire despite their Turkic roots.