A Radically Different British Colonial Empire

So for all the Anglophiles out there, do you think it would be possible to have a greatly powerful British Empire without colonizing any of the areas they did OTL. What POD would bring this about (perhaps an early British colonization of the New World?) and what are your opinions in general. As always all comments and corrections are greatly appreciated.
 
Define colonize. The parts that remainj have a good deal of Britons living their or have no other ethnic group to connect to. The former dominions had a fair deal of British settlers to fill in empty land. The United States was their partner for a time and Latin America their larder where they owned a lot of the stuff and only needed to compete with the Americans who married into British noble families once they got wealthy enough, though the Americans seemed to focus on food and the British on... Non-fruit food.
 
It's India and the settler colonies that made Britain powerful. To get a British Empire as powerfol as IOTL without India you'd need to have a decent replacement for India - both in terms of income, manpower and strategic location. The only things I can imagine is South East Asia (pretty much all of it) or China (large parts of it). And then you'd need to replace the settler colonies. This is harder, since there isn't that much land adequate for European settlement that the British didn't hold. The British surely need Argentina and Chile populated with British settlers. Namibia and the Angolan highlands would be a good settler colony in Africa. In Northern America the British could keep parts of what IOTL became the US and loose Canada. But then it gets difficult...
 
I have occasionally wondered, what if the British foiled the American Revolution (either by defeating the Continental Army or by politically preventing things from getting to that point in the first place) and decided to cast their lot entirely in the Western hemisphere? Let India go if the French were after-it had served its purposed for a century or so but we're on to new and better things. The collapse of Spanish America into independant countries could have perhaps been hurried with British help to become a collapse into new British colonies, instead.

Assembling a British America (north & south)-say it gells by, oh, 1850-can have some interesting knock off effects

  1. Effect on the Royal Navy: Does it need to span the globe? Or just make the Atlantic Ocean into an English lake? What about Malta/Gibralter? With no Mediterranian needed for communication with India, why spend time & money there?
  2. Colonial Rivalries: Leave the French alone in Africa...what does the French Empire look like? No French Indochina? Fewer post ARW French-British conflicts? What effect would French power (dominance?) in the Med have on eventual Italian unification?
  3. Economics: The Empire (if still intact) would be an overwhelingly dominant prortion of the world's GNP.
  4. Wars: Well, no successful ARW for the history books. Would the Indian Mutiny be replaed by the Confederate one? US troops & manufacturing come into WWI (and WWII, if they still happen) from the start. Britain is the west's counterpoise to the Soviet Union (if that still exists).
Britian ought to be able to remain the world's dominant power for another century. And what OTL Americans would now be peers or otherwise on the Honors Roll?
 
The Franklins, a Penn, some first families, a new Baron of Baltimore... I wouldn't doubt that a lot of it would go to absentee landlords who stay in London most of their lives.
 
Any successful defeat of the revolution will involve compromise from a position of strength, and we'll likely see a two-tier parliamentary system based on the Governor Councils and Assemblies of pre-revolution days, or perhaps even a full recognition of the 'Continental Congress' as a legal body by the British (which is what the pro-American MPs in Britain wanted).
 
In any event, England had strong interests in staying out East, for trade etc. It is unlikely that any English ruler or wider interests could just detach from the East to focus on the West.
 
Let India go if the French were after-it had served its purposed for a century or so but we're on to new and better things.

You seem to have forgotten the reason for empire (at least pre-Victorian days) which was to open up new markets - the British Empire is differne tfrom all others because at its heart it is all about buying and selling.

America is fine for raw materials, but has little need of the products of England, unlike India which was civilised and a market for finished goods.

If Britain was to "let go" of India it would have had to get cast iron guarentees that the India markets would still be accessible as well as the spices from the Pacific.

The English went to America for gold. If the British are to abandon India then AMerica needs to produce something to replace it and fast!
 
You seem to have forgotten the reason for empire (at least pre-Victorian days) which was to open up new markets - the British Empire is differne tfrom all others because at its heart it is all about buying and selling.

America is fine for raw materials, but has little need of the products of England, unlike India which was civilised and a market for finished goods.

If Britain was to "let go" of India it would have had to get cast iron guarentees that the India markets would still be accessible as well as the spices from the Pacific.

The English went to America for gold. If the British are to abandon India then AMerica needs to produce something to replace it and fast!
Wasn't about a forth of British production going to outfit the American colonists who kept funneling agricultural goods, ships, and the like to Britain? Maybe you should specify what you mean by America as there were many combinations to be had by that word. As for the gold... They went for the gold but stayed for the indigo, tobacco, cod, lumber, free space, pelts... I trust you have hear of the Triangle Trade. You may also know from the issue of gold how most of it was going to purchase goods in China, as they refused to accept anything other than precious metals, pearls, gems, and the like.
 
So for all the Anglophiles out there, do you think it would be possible to have a greatly powerful British Empire without colonizing any of the areas they did OTL. What POD would bring this about (perhaps an early British colonization of the New World?) and what are your opinions in general. As always all comments and corrections are greatly appreciated.

Dobry dien ( going by your name, not location).

India was truly huge for the british. I discovered this in researching my own tl. Controlling india meant controlling saltpetre production KNO3, which meant controlling gunpowder.

During the napoleonic wars, britain had the only army and navy that could afford to spend gunpowder on live fire exercises.
 
So for all the Anglophiles out there, do you think it would be possible to have a greatly powerful British Empire without colonizing any of the areas they did OTL. What POD would bring this about (perhaps an early British colonization of the New World?) and what are your opinions in general. As always all comments and corrections are greatly appreciated.

Well, how about just switching around British and non-British colonies?

Instead of South Africa, the British can take Algeria, and even create their own apartheid state, with Europeans ruling over local Arabs and Berbers. To play up the French parallels, Britain could seek an empire from Dakar to Djibouti, and even be forced out of Sudan. Instead of India as the crown jewel with the British monarch being "Emperor of India," Britain could take China, with the British monarch being "Emperor of China" instead. Instead of Malaysia and Singapore, how about Britain decides to switch and take all of the Dutch East Indies (after some alternate Napoleonic-style war) instead?

I'm not sure about Canada, but so far the arrangement already has a huge British empire controlling about the same amount of people and territory as it did historically.
 
You seem to have forgotten the reason for empire (at least pre-Victorian days) which was to open up new markets - the British Empire is differne tfrom all others because at its heart it is all about buying and selling.

Something they learned from the dutch, the dutch colonial holdings were even more centered on trade than the british ones.
 
Make England a bit more heavy handed and more absolutist by changing the system of government. The country's government must develop as France and Spain did and will have less interest in trade as opposed to glory and empire for their own sake. England will find fewer allies in its attempts at conquest and will be less economically dominant than it was in reality. It may lose some colonies to the Dutch, the French and others but its huge coal deposits, large population, natural protection from attack and well-disciplined military tradition will ensure that it remains a great power for many years.
 
Top