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This. The UK, France and Spain were willing to use soft political power, economics and if that failed a little gunboat diplomacy to get their way. It is worth remembering, though, that the UK, by and large, supported the Monroe Doctrine from the 1820s onward. They didn't want France or other...

Note to self, write in long hand-cursive 500 times, "I will not confuse John Tyler and Zachary Taylor on AH again." Mia culpa. You're right, I think. A John Tyler splinter would throw the election to the Clay. Just a 3,000 vote swing in New York alone would have given us a Clay presidency.

Insights, no... opinions... well, sure. But opinions are like assholes... we all have them and most of them stink. :) First, let me concede up front, my research into the early 1840s has been Texas and Southern economics centric and that has a tendency to bias my view. First, if Clay wins in...

The others who have answered are largely correct. There are some great treatises online about the economics of slavery. I don't want to make this response TL/DR. But the cliff notes version is that with the development of the cotton gin in the 1790s the slave economy grew exponentially over the...

The thing about Clay is that he was a pragmatist. I agree with @Amadeus that if Clay could have packaged a deal that appealed to northern Whigs and southern Democrats, annexation could have been on the table. But there are a couple of points to consider. 1) Would a Texas/Oregon or...

@Dan Greenhouse I watched some of the old Sliders episodes, but I don't recall that one. Print will probably follow the ebook by a week or two. My goal is to finish book 5 by the end of October. From there, it'll go to my editor. From there, it's usually 4 to 6 weeks before it is published...

Different world. Before one assumes that the middle class will be the same in this timeline as ours, one needs to track the previous 70 years. In the timeline postulated by the TIN, it's just as likely that the colonies will 1) be politically integrated into the British union or 2) a...

One of my personal heroes is William Wilberforce. He was instrumental in leading the British to end the slave trade and free the slaves in the British held territories. Even so, in a world in which the Southern Plantation economy remains a key component in Britain's economic arsenal, it would...

Using the trajectory of history from 1800 to 1815, it's highly unlikely they could do anything. The war was very unpopular in New England, and the US didn't effectively mobilize. As others have said, the navy, while well trained and sporting some very impressive heavy frigates, was tiny, just a...

Indeed. More potential states = More potential stresses on the fabric of American civil life. That's one of the reasons why the "annex all of Mexico" crowd was small. While Northern Whigs were pretty much against the war, somewhat more so than the Southern Whigs, both regional factions were...

These Mexican states referenced in the OP were not "more populated." Those states made up no more than 9% of the whole of the Mexican population of the time. Maybe as much as 900,000 people spread across 5 states. I think you'd have a multi-tiered system, with a slight bit of fluidity at the...

I'm leaning in that direction, too. Regarding citizenship, it's hard to argue that any treaty between the US and Mexico won't require citizenship extended to the Mexican population. That was certainly the case with the Treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo which ended the Mexican-American War and brought...

It's really worth it to develop an understanding about debt peonage in Mexico. Much of northern Mexico was heavily invested in debt peonage during the mid-19th century. As I understand it, one of Benito Juarez's key things he was trying to do was liberalize that system. But 1846 wasn't 1867. The...

True. I'm more familiar with the Maximilian and Juarez period than the Porfiriato period. But I'm most familiar with the Centralist period of the 1820s to 1840s. But that's mostly because it intersects so closely with my interests in Texas history. That's why its usually more constructive to...

It's a good thing Mexico didn't have any issues with industrialization, infrastructure, economic issues or a heavily repressive debt peonage system at that time. :rolleyes:

While it is true the South collected negligible taxes on exports, that was largely due to their idiotic trade policy on cotton and later on the union blockade. The confederate congress passed both import tariffs and export taxes. So, the political will was there to tax imports and exports. I...

Well, unless I'm a time traveling Jeff Davis, I'd not want to anticipate the boll weevil in a TL. Let the chips fall where they might. :rolleyes: If cotton prices remain high between the time of the CSA victory and their historical crash around 1876, the CSA could make a big dent in their...

Well, that's why I came down pretty hard on the side of "Why would they do that?" I'm just not sure there'd be enough interest in trying to push west past Texas... of course, the scenario I discussed upthread speculated on a much more successful battle of Glorietta Pass for the South, and one...

I recommend looking over the current top 100 Alternative history books available on Amazon at the moment. True, too many are not AH and even more are romance, but you've got Man in the High Castle, and Stephen King's 11/22/63 listed. Further down the list you've got John Birmingham's "Girl in...

I guess this is kind of a tangent of the thread. The proceeds of cash crops eventually work their way into the economy and into the govt treasury, so the question of cotton production matters when discussing the ability of the CSA to both protect itself and project power (which gets to the heart...