Sorry for the late replies on these- not around here much really at the moment as things are rather busy both life-wise and work-wise. It doesn’t leave much time for alternative history, sadly. I’ll have a go at these questions though…
Been reading this TL again and I now find myself smiling at parts that I once barely noticed, such as Milner's ascendency in the Unionists as Randolph's protégé for one, which do bring some questions to mind. I'm not sure whether this question has been asked before, but how was Joe Chamberlain's time in office? Was there any major difference between Randolph's time or did the more cautious of the Cabinet prevent him from doing anything too Radical e.g. Home Rule All-Around, I'm assuming that the fellow OTL Social Imperialists such as Leo Amery had better luck in terms of gaining office with the help of Haldane and Chamberlain.
I saw the Chamberlain era as being one of consolidation and radical reform that never quite gets off the ground; he’ll have made an attempt at Home Rule all Round, and indeed an Imperial Federation, but I don’t think that either will have made that much progress. The latter I suspect will have involved a grand Imperial Conference with lots of stirring words from Dominion Prime Ministers and vague promises made, amounting to very little; enough to break Cecil Rhodes’ heart and send him to an early grave, no doubt. Frankly, the Chamberlain government has got enough on its plate implementing and tweaking Randolph’s social settlement, not to mention making Imperial Preference work, so he’ll have plenty to occupy him. It’s very much the golden age of Social Imperialism/High Unionism that future New Democrats (thanks Borgen for nicking my idea…
) will look back to with great nostalgia.
Edit: Sorry, the one major reform you'd definitely see under Chamberlain would be female suffrage, probably in conjunction with a 1918-style franchsie extension. This gives us Annie Besant as the first female MP come the 1902 election...
I'm also interested in whether figures like Baldwin and F.E Smith were Liberal-Conservatives from the start or whether they left the Unionists after Curzon and Bottomley pushed the party in all sorts of sordid directions before Lloyd George officially split from the party. What were the relations between the New Democrats and the Liberal-Conservatives, I'd imagine that some factions would be arguing for a merger to unite against the singular threat as with the OTL L-G coalition but it seems that the aftermath of Winston's shambles produced a coalition with the Action Party instead.
It’s a very small detail, but the Prologue actually establishes Baldwin as a Liberal-Conservative; I saw him as an increasingly unhappy Unionist MP into the 1920s, but not willing to join Lloyd-George’s breakaway group thanks to his exasperation with the Welsh Wizard’s divisiveness. His failure to defect, along with Austen Chamberlain’s inaction, is one of the things that makes the New Democrat project go off at half-cock and fail to produce a genuine opposition to the Unionists. I figure that he resigns the whip in disgust sometime in the early Bottomley administration and ends up becoming reasonably prominent in the Liberal-Conservatives by the end of the decade.
As for Smith, I see him as being elected a Liberal-Conservative from the start, and his flamboyance combined with Reginald McKenna’s dryness being quite an effective and stable leadership combination for the party in the late 1920s and early 1930s. I imagine as a result the Liberal-Conservatives will punch well above their weight in the Commons, despite their relatively low number of seats.
As for New Democrat/Liberal-Conservative relations, I expect it to be an exercise in frustration; Lloyd George will be desperate for the two parties to unite or at least align in order to form a united front, while Smith and McKenna will see the New Democrats as far too radical, and Lloyd Georgite personal vehicle, rather than a genuine party. Their concern (and this is an emotional issue as much as a practical one) would be that any agreement would see their party taken over from within by the New Democrats, much as the old Conservative Party was torn apart by the Unionists a generation earlier. There’s actually not much common ground between the two parties in policy terms either, even though a combination is politically sensible; the New Democrats are leftish Unionist radicals who feel their old party has betrayed its founding tradition and ossified, while the Liberal-Conservatives are the very traditionalists who the radicals abandoned and tried to destroy in the 1890s.
Once again, fantastic TL to read again, as I'm sure you've heard a dozen times before.
Thanks, I really must go back and reread it properly myself.
1) What's the status of Anarchism as of 1940 ITTL? I know that you mentioned that the actions of the 'Spartacist' illegalists during the War of the Dual Alliance will have contributed more to the stereotype of the violent criminal, but is this enough to lead to the decline of Anarchist movements as a whole? Does anarcho-syndicalism still have the same impact it had on trade unions in countries such as Spain or the US as OTL (I'm assuming that the IWW is still around here...)? Were there any significant Anarchist tendencies present in Great Britain by the time of the Revolution?
Well, it’s worth noting that TTL’s Syndicalism has much more anarcho-syndicalism in its DNA than OTL’s Communism, so on that level anarchism has done quite well, although obviously I’m not sure that Anarchists ITTL or OTL would see it that way. Overall I’d say that Anarchism has a pretty similar trajectory to OTL in many respects; while events in Guyana, and the assassinations of people like King Leopold etc by anarchists remain extremely controversial, it’s not like IOTL there weren’t plenty of anarchist ‘spectaculars’ too; I see there being a steady diet of such killings, punctuated by serious industrial disputes, well into the 20th century. Indeed, I think many will see the period between the assassination of Vice President Johnson in 1909 and the end of the Portuguese revolution in 1918 as the golden period of Anarchism; by the beginning of the 1920s there have been major (and successful) political and industrial crackdowns in the USA and UK, and there’s a ‘lost generation’ of young anarchists thanks to their penchant for getting machine-gunned in the Portuguese and Mexican revolutions. By the late 1930s the remaining members of the movement are generally émigrés meeting in Parisian and Zurich cafes, reminiscing about 1918; if only General Pinto hadn’t toppled the Correia regime and restored the traditional governing structures of the Portuguese state!
I imagine there was a British anarchist tendency, although I don’t see it being massively successful in the Revolution; maybe there are a few smaller Unions still stubbornly holding such beliefs and being gradually squeezed by their bigger, more mainstream competitors, their leaders being a bunch of boiler-suited intellectuals sipping Victory Gin in the Chestnut Tree café in Highgate, wondering where the revolution went wrong…
IWW is around, but by 1940 it’s a Syndicalist organisation very closely linked to the FWR, and very heavily scrutinised by the American authorities. I could see CNT being in a fairly similar position. One thing I’ve never really clarified is the proto-syndicalist movement’s relationship with the Second International, which ITTL exists until 1934 and the middle of the Great War; needless to say, the Third International is based in London and is firmly Syndicalist. There’s probably some interesting stuff to write there but I don’t really have the time to do the research.
2) Reading the bits on the Congo, the implications that Kimbanguism could have for the struggle for black rights in the US are something I've been wondering about; if you could shed some light on the reactions towards the Kimbanguist Church from civil rights leaders such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey (I can see Garvey being a big name in Douglass, though I'm unsure of how he'd view the FWR), I'd appreciate it. Considering that IOTL the civil rights movement in the 1920s and 30s was often tied to the far left, I think the response would be somewhat mixed. Of course, all this really depends on how things have developed for African-Americans ITTL; was there a Great Migration here, or are there more Southern blacks?
I think the implications that Kimbanguism has for the civil rights movement are fascinating too, not least because things have developed very differently in the USA. There’s still a migration of blacks north ITTL, but it’s nothing on the scale of OTL, not just because of the lack of WW1, which as I understand it did a lot to stimulate the migration, but also because ITTL foreign immigration remains fairly unrestricted into the late 1920s ; there’s also black emigration to the Congo, but that’ll be in five figures and something that’s more significant culturally than in demographic terms. As a result of all this, by 1940 ITTL American blacks are more rural , more southern and- presumably- poorer than their OTL counterparts.
Kimbanguism is beginning to spread into the American south by this point, although congregations are still small and isolated; I reckon we’re maybe five or six years off the inevitable moral panic when the powers-that-be register what the new faith actually involves. I’m not immediately knowledgeable enough to work out the consequences of all this, but I imagine it’ll be quite interesting.
As for Garvey, he’ll have been responsible for bringing many of the American back emigrants over to the Free State. I can see him having been a putative big cheese in Douglass before his death in the late 1930s, but nowhere near as important as he things he is, and doubtless a bit of an embarrassment to many of his more sober contemporaries. I did mention Du Bois in an earlier post; he’s the President of the University of Africa, which he set up in Douglass in the mid-1910s to act as a centre of learning (and breeding ground for pan-Africanism) for American and African blacks. His relationship with the Kimbanguists is rather complex; he finds their religious fervour distasteful and his own brand of black (inter)nationism is rather more influenced by Socialist and Syndicalist thought, yet at the same time recognises how the faith drives racial pride and community cohesion. The Kimbanguists for their part see him as a useful go-between themselves and the FWR, but strongly distrusts his political views.
3) Is Taurida a republic or a monarchy? I'm guessing the later, since politically it seems to be a very Tatar-dominated place, and thinking about the Tatar nationalist movement IOTL I can't see a Habsburg monarch working very well. I think with Taurida being a more cosmopolitan and progressive place (the impression I get, with your earlier mention of Noman Çelebicihan), it'd have a higher population of Jews, with those immigrants from Russia who didn't migrate to Jerusalem or Altneuland settling in the Crimea; just a thought, I think it'd be interesting.
I’d assumed that Taurida was a monarchy, on the basis that there’s bound to be a minor archduke somewhere willing to convert to Islam and be crowned Khan; adopting random ethnicities in the vague hope of getting a crown out of it was almost a Hapsburg family tradition. Having a foreigner in charge might also appease the Russian and Ukrainian majority.
A republic seems quite possible though as well; I’m not wedded to either idea and there’s nothing definitive that’s been written about the place yet. I entirely agree that it’s a probably a very cosmopolitan place, and probably something of a dumping ground for people fleeing Russia (and Turkey for that matter) who have decided to stay rather than moving on to somewhere else. A large Jewish community would be very interesting- maybe where quite a few of the Salonikan Jews ended up?
4) What's art like at this point? Anything like Dadaism or Cubism pop up here? From what I've seen I understand that the avant-garde is generally frowned upon by Unionist Britain, and is probably not encouraged in Russia either, but has it gained popularity in, say, China, or German Europe? The FWR looks like it's big on abstract art; that sounds fun.
I honestly don’t really know enough about art to comment; certainly Unionist Britain was very stodgy, arts-and-crafts and traditional, and the FWR is very avant-garde; I expect that modernism has gone off in all sorts of weird and interesting directions in continental Europe too, although I'm sure the Tsarist regime frowns on such things. Beyond that, I'm open to suggestion really...
5) And another "What Happened to These People", because I'm curious:
Interesting choice of people! Let’s see…
The
Aisin Gioro Xianyu we know from OTL was never born ITTL, butterflies having completely altered the circumstances and political career of her father the Prince Su. However, the Prince’s 14th daughter, born ITTL in 1908, holds the same name. Beautiful and intelligent, she quickly became one of the leading lights in Peking society and found herself at the centre of a major Imperial Court scandal in 1932 when she eloped with an American corporate lawyer named Lewis Wilkie, who was visiting the Chinese capital on behalf of the Firestone Company to negotiate a contract to support the Imperial Army’s motorisation effort. The marriage proved an unexpectedly happy one, but President Borah’s appointment of Wilkie as Governor of the Congo Free State in 1935 has put it under some strain; as of 1940, Xianyu Wilkie is getting increasingly involved in social reform programmes in Douglass, much to the horror of the Congolese white expatriate community, none of whom know what to make of her.
Alexandra Kollontai, the “Angel of Oporto”, is a martyr of the Portuguese revolution. Having turned her back on her aristocratic roots to marry for love, only to see her husband killed by rioters in Kazan during the Boxer Rising, the newly-widowed Kollontai returned to St Petersburg to work as a teacher, during which time she gradually began to come into contact with political radicals. After being arrested and beaten in 1906 for writing subversive publications, she left Russia and studied in Germany, Switzerland and the UK, becoming close to Annie Besant, Britain’s first female MP, and allegedly embarking on a relationship with Victor Grayson, later the leader of the British Socialist Party. In 1915, like many other idealistic European Socialists, Kollontai abandoned her political activism and travelled to Portugal to join the Republican revolution there, taking up a teaching position at the Polytechnic Academy of Porto. Her academic role lasted only a few weeks; Royalist forces soon surrounded the city and Kollontai abandoned her position to act as a nurse for the defenders. When the Republican lines collapsed in early July 1915, she was captured by the victors, given a summary trial, and shot; the Praça de Kollontai, where the University of Porto’s rectory is situated, stands in her memory.
As of early 1940,
Emma Goldman is bed ridden and close to death at Castle Williams Federal Prison in New York, after her stroke the previous year. After being arrested and imprisoned for allegedly inciting a riot in 1893, Goldman and her lover Alexander Berkman left the USA and went to Europe to study midwifery. She was present in Paris for the collapse of the Boulanger regime, and while studying in Switzerland met Luigi Lucheni, the assassin of King Leopold II. When this fact camer to the attention of the authorities in 1899, it was enough to get her expelled from France; she returned to the USA with Berkman to begin a new round of political activism. After a few years she had established herself as one of the most prominent anarchists in the nation; then, in September 1909 Berkman armed himself with a gun, went to the World’s Fair in New York, and assassinated Vice-President Johnson. Goldman was soon arrested along with her lover; while she strenuously denied her involvement she was tried as a co-defendant and was convicted, with both her and Berkman receiving the death penalty, although Goldman’s sentence was eventually commuted to life imprisonment.
The young
Nestor Makhno became involved in revolutionary politics after taking up a job as an iron foundry worker in Huliaipole. After being arrested, put on trial and then acquitted twice in quick succession, in late 1907 he was finally ‘shot resisting arrest’ in extremely dubious circumstances; in Grand Duke Sergei’s Russia, a plea of innocence generally meant the defendant nevertheless remained guilty of wasting police time…