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So I was thinking back to earlier thread's I've posted which have asked what life would be like in an occupied USA, and remembered how most people agreed that such a situation after 19th century was nigh impossible to ever occur.

As I pondered this the other day, I was reminded of the Stars and Stripes trilogy by Harry Harrison and it's basis in a what if based on a different outcome of the Trent Affair. Now I know that many write the series off as somewhat ASB, and I definitely understand where they are coming from, I really did enjoy this series, especially when I read them in high school.

The idea that I got when I started thinking about the Trent Affair in the light of a possible occupation of the United States in the 19th century was this: What if the POD that Harrison uses in his series, that Prince Albert dies without being able to change the dispatch the British send to the USA which results in rising tensions and ultimately war, takes a very different path. The British don't land troops in the South, instead just focusing their Navy on ending the Union blockade of the Confederacy, and then sending troops down from Canada to attack the Northern States.

As I let this scenario play out in my head, I ultimately envisioned Britain extending full recognition to the Confederacy, and then conquering the Union, breaking it up into new Dominions (some joined with territory in Canada). Lincoln and some of the Union leaders are captures and tried for war crimes, while others escape West, ultimately to Free California, which is not occupied and eventually sets itself up (with support from other European powers) as an independent republic and an unofficial successor to the United States.

The retaking of the United States (at least the northern half), creates shockwaves in Europe, so that by the early 1900s, France and Germany eye Great Britain with great suspicion, unsettled by Britain's renewed strength in the Americas. Coupled with tension in Africa (think Fashoda Incident), war will ultimately come, GB vs. Germany and France.

In North America, the war breaks out over Colorado, which since the end of the "Great North American War" has been disputed between Britain's dominions and California, and nominally operates independently as the Republic of Colorado. One side or the other tries to fully occupy this territory, sparking of the American theater of an alt-WWI. In this theater, the British Dominions in North America would face off with California. The Confederacy would remain somewhat neutral (it has close ties with Britain, but many people in the South felt uncomfortable with the British annexation of the North so it's a somewhat rocky relationship). In addition, California has been building what we nowadays would term terror cells in the British dominions, so that when war eventually came, they could hopefully spark a new revolution to end what they term as the "illegal occupation of the United States by Great Britain."

That's about as far as I got. I know full-well that some of this is totally outlandish, but at the very least it was a fun mental exercise, and I wanted to see what everyone thought about the whole scenario, and what if any of it sounds plausible. And even if none of it really is, it would be cool to see what other people think this sort of world would look like, along with what possible outcomes of the alt-WWI might be, and what things would look like moving forward from there.
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