AHC: French Dominance Over Britain By End of the 18th Century

A fairly simple challenge, have France, rather than Britain, be a dominant world power by the end of the 18th century in economy, military, colonies, etc. Mostly asking because I know a lot about Britain during the 18th century, but embarrassingly little about France in that period. :eek:
 
A fairly simple challenge, have France, rather than Britain, be a dominant world power by the end of the 18th century in economy, military, colonies, etc. Mostly asking because I know a lot about Britain during the 18th century, but embarrassingly little about France in that period. :eek:
pretty hard, but French vicory in the SYW would go a long way towards French domination. that and the Southern Netherlands after the Austrian Succession War.
 
Funny how threads pop up in groups, a thread about the Battle of Plassey just opened.

But yeah, if France hadn't lost India and more generally the 7YW it would have reversed it. Thing is, I don't know enough about this war as it is quite difficult to find proper sources which don't focus exclusively on the war in the Northern American theater.

If the French win this war and can give similar terms to the Brits, they would have all of India at their disposal to gather resources. Such a PoD can be achieved by two things: Dupleix doesn't get fired and slightly better communication lines between Europe and India, allowing the French to know about the war before the British and defend India better.

After that, that would be the end of English presence in the Americas, with an already pretty big Quebec
 
Funny how threads pop up in groups, a thread about the Battle of Plassey just opened.

But yeah, if France hadn't lost India and more generally the 7YW it would have reversed it. Thing is, I don't know enough about this war as it is quite difficult to find proper sources which don't focus exclusively on the war in the Northern American theater.

If the French win this war and can give similar terms to the Brits, they would have all of India at their disposal to gather resources. Such a PoD can be achieved by two things: Dupleix doesn't get fired and slightly better communication lines between Europe and India, allowing the French to know about the war before the British and defend India better.

After that, that would be the end of English presence in the Americas, with an already pretty big Quebec
There's no way the French could have conquered the English colonies,at least the thirteen colonies given the large population.
 
There's no way the French could have conquered the English colonies,at least the thirteen colonies given the large population.

Indeed. keeping the statu quo is already quite a feat.
Napoleonic victories in the Near East mke Egypt and Palestine French would strengthen France a bit but nowhere near enough.
 

Saphroneth

Banned
I suspect you'd have to PoD things quite a way back.

Would it be silly to have French support for Scotland in the Three Kingdoms War to prise apart the eventual components of the UK?
 
There's no way the French could have conquered the English colonies,at least the thirteen colonies given the large population.

It's not about straight up conquering, more about gaining it in a treaty afterwards if the war turns too sour for the British. Basically, you give up North America or we burn London/Hannover kind of thing.
 
It's not about straight up conquering, more about gaining it in a treaty afterwards if the war turns too sour for the British. Basically, you give up North America or we burn London/Hannover kind of thing.
How the heck is that supposed to work?Have fun trying to assert French authority there.The British couldn't conquer the thirteen colonies during the Revolutionary War despite having support from loyalists there and legitimacy as lawful government.How the hell are you going to do it when the French are seen as clear foreign invaders?The colonial governments will most likely refuse orders from London to surrender authority to the French and continue the war on their own with or without Britain.
 
The Seven Years' War is far, far too late to have a French-dominated North America. By that stage the British population advantage was so great that the French considered it a victory if they simply kept the lands they already had. If they won the Seven Years' War the French could perhaps have kept all they had, but there would be another war later, and then another, and eventually they'd lose it. By that point the demographic pressure of Anglo-American expansion was too strong to resist, by Paris and, as it turned out, London too.

I would argue that for the French to dominate North America you need a PoD before Great Britain even exists. Basically, sometime in the early to mid-17th century in the era of Franco-Anglo-Dutch conflicts (in various combinations), the English should lose one of their big groups of colonies (either New England or the South, the latter being basically Virginia + a bit extra at the point in time we're speaking of) to the French; at a point in time when there are only ~10,000 English people in each of those regions, it could reasonably be subdued (though still leaving a Quebec-style population behind whih, judging by how few people Quebec had when it was conquered, would have ballooned into a population vastly larger than Quebec's by the modern day). Having such temperate land could plausibly be argued to change the French colonisation strategy to something more like the English one, with mass white settlement and betraying Native Americans in order to take their land more frequently, then moving on to the next treaty which in due course would be broken once the settlers wanted to move further west. That would prevent there from being nominal control over vast swathes of the interior (via Native American alliances), as OTL France enjoyed, but it would create a far more deeply-rooted and longer-lasting French colonial presence in North America. With that, one can imagine the French establishing a dominance in North America as great as the British achieved in OTL, though there would be an inconvenietn Anglophone population much larger than the OTL Francophone population.

As for Europe, that's quite a lot easier. The English/British got ridiculously lucky in several wars. Even as late as the American Revolutionary War there could have been a successful French invasion of Great Britain if the British were less lucky; just lose a few big naval battles and that's all that is required. With most of the big European wars in the 18th century coming down to France vs Great Britain, this should suffice to grant France victory there; it's not much of a stretch for the French army to do well in Germany. As for India, the British East India Company can hardly break away, due to its dependence on the metropole; if Great Britain is invaded and the French are sitting in London the British will be only too eager to make concessions to France in India for the sake of the preservation of the security of the British homeland.

Combine these ideas and you have a France that is dominant in North America, India and Europe. This France then faces the problem that OTL Great Britain faced, which is how to keep such dominance after acquiring it; the French North American colonists may not stay loyal forever, and other European powers will be as terrified of utter French hegemony as they were terrified of utter British hegemony in OTL. But I hope this ramble has been vaguely in line with the intentions of the OP.
 
I would argue that for the French to dominate North America you need a PoD before Great Britain even exists. Basically, sometime in the early to mid-17th century in the era of Franco-Anglo-Dutch conflicts (in various combinations), the English should lose one of their big groups of colonies (either New England or the South, the latter being basically Virginia + a bit extra at the point in time we're speaking of) to the French; at a point in time when there are only ~10,000 English people in each of those regions, it could reasonably be subdued (though still leaving a Quebec-style population behind whih, judging by how few people Quebec had when it was conquered, would have ballooned into a population vastly larger than Quebec's by the modern day). Having such temperate land could plausibly be argued to change the French colonisation strategy to something more like the English one, with mass white settlement and betraying Native Americans in order to take their land more frequently, then moving on to the next treaty which in due course would be broken once the settlers wanted to move further west. That would prevent there from being nominal control over vast swathes of the interior (via Native American alliances), as OTL France enjoyed, but it would create a far more deeply-rooted and longer-lasting French colonial presence in North America. With that, one can imagine the French establishing a dominance in North America as great as the British achieved in OTL, though there would be an inconvenietn Anglophone population much larger than the OTL Francophone population.

That early on, I'd think the Anglophone population would either be expelled, leave on its own, or be assimilated (linguistically if not also religiously). Enlightenment ideas of tolerance were a century away.

But I don't think it'd be essential for France to conquer them. A France that can simply hold on to OTL New France - and people it with a lot more settlers - would be in a pretty dominant position. There's a lot of blue on this map:

new_france_map_large.jpg
 
That early on, I'd think the Anglophone population would either be expelled, leave on its own, or be assimilated (linguistically if not also religiously). Enlightenment ideas of tolerance were a century away.

But I don't think it'd be essential for France to conquer them. A France that can simply hold on to OTL New France - and people it with a lot more settlers - would be in a pretty dominant position. There's a lot of blue on this map:

new_france_map_large.jpg

You're right, but the problem was that they didn't meaningfully settle that land. Those large amounts of French "cities" are trading outposts more than cities.

What they can do is stop expansion westward as part of a treaty, maybe. Perhaps if the French win the SYW they can declare no English beyond the Appalachians. I would still expect a followup war in Ohio/Kentucky if they truly do intend to hold on to the territory, though.
 
That early on, I'd think the Anglophone population would either be expelled, leave on its own, or be assimilated (linguistically if not also religiously). Enlightenment ideas of tolerance were a century away.

But I don't think it'd be essential for France to conquer them. A France that can simply hold on to OTL New France - and people it with a lot more settlers - would be in a pretty dominant position. There's a lot of blue on this map:

That's the problem. The reason why there was so much blue on that map was France's colonisation style, which had far fewer European settlers coming in en masse to take land (as the English and later British colonisation style was) and far more treaties with Native Americans friendly with the French, so the French could nominally lay claim to vast portions of the North American interior so their empire looked huge on a map, but the number of actual Frenchmen there was absolutely tiny. Simply saying that New France could have been powerful because it was big on the map is extremely inaccurate. The opposite is true. A North American empire built with the colonisation style such that it would be plausible to have that sort of giant amount on the map would be, and was, weaker than an empire built on mass settlement, which couldn't stretch far into the interior (well, not quickly—it could in time, with gradual westward expansion, as OTL proved) but could actually build up a respectably large European-transplant population in the lands it did have.

The Seven Years' War is far too late. The French can't stop the Anglo-Americans from holding the lands they have and expanding further westward, by that stage; they tried and failed; the British tried and failed too. The demographic pressure was just too strong. They might have won the Seven Years' War, as the British might have won the American Revolutionary War, but unless they stopped their opposition to Anglo-American expansion there would be another war in a decade or a few, and then another, and sometime they would lose. Even if it took decades, the French would lose and the Anglo-Americans would win; by that stage it was already inevitable, unless the Anglo-Americans were so extremely politically fractured that they couldn't combine their efforts (which wouldn't happen because the American Revolutionary War itself wouldn't have happened if France hadn't been rendered almost irrelevant in North America—still too much danger and fear presented to the colonists by the French and the Native Americans allied to them for the colonists to break away from the major European great power opposing those enemies).
 
I definitely agree that the Seven Year's War is too late. France needed to step up its recruitment of colonists to North American back under Louis XIV. They did so from 1663-1672 and then pretty much stopped.

As far as population density goes, I don't entirely agree. Obviously New France needed a lot more settlers than it received. But it probably could have increased its European population by a factor of ten without seriously affecting relations with most of the tribes in that area. A New France with 700,000 instead of 70,000 will still have a low population density and won't need to drive Native American tribes off most of that land, so it can still maintain many of its alliances. (Those tribes who might become alienated by the French ITTL aren't going to find the alternative, the British, much more palatable. France can still promise to give them land further west.) At the same time it would have a lot more available colonists to serve in the militias.

The key would be to firmly control the regions close to the border with the British colonies. Farther west, they could maintain a light presence as those areas would be out of reach of the British.
 
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As for Europe, that's quite a lot easier. The English/British got ridiculously lucky in several wars. Even as late as the American Revolutionary War there could have been a successful French invasion of Great Britain if the British were less lucky; just lose a few big naval battles and that's all that is required.

I agree with pretty much everything you said in your post except this bit. It wasn't luck that won the British naval battles. They were better trained and better commanded. However, I agree that if they were particularly unlucky at sea, and the French land on mainland Britain and keep open supply lines, the British are screwed.
 
I don't think colonisation differences were entirely due to "styles" determined by respective governments. The British colonised more rapidly because they had the climactically better coastal land. Cities like Boston, New York and Philadelphia were far better placed to have substantial growth than Quebec city and Montreal. And then once those places were built up, the interior is more viable due to logistical connections and trade with the eastern seaboard than it would be with the St Lawrence valley. A Chicago or a St Louis that is cut off from eastern seaboard is never going to attract that many settlers.
 
I'm glad we agree for the most part.

I agree with pretty much everything you said in your post except this bit. It wasn't luck that won the British naval battles. They were better trained and better commanded. However, I agree that if they were particularly unlucky at sea, and the French land on mainland Britain and keep open supply lines, the British are screwed.

This being the crucial point, and why I said the French need to win multiple naval battles, not just one. One Trafalgar-esque victory would be pretty and glamorous, and insufficient; more lasting naval superiority is necessary for supply.

Still, though, the sheer number of OTL major wars where France tried and failed to achieve the necessary conditions for a French invasion of Great Britain is impressive. I don't mean to include the French Revolutionary Wars and Napoleonic Wars—I don't think there was ever any realistic hope of that at all, in those wars, so weak was the Revolutionary French navy—but if we look at the American Revolutionary War, the Seven Years' War, the War of the Austrian Succession, the War of the Spanish Succession and the War of the League of Augsburg it still seems that, even if they did have a major advantage, the English (later British) got such a clean sheet that it still sounds like, if that sort of thing came up in someone's TL, people would be suspicious. Not that I believe in some sort of conspiracy, I just think it sounds lucky.

I don't think colonisation differences were entirely due to "styles" determined by respective governments. The British colonised more rapidly because they had the climactically better coastal land. Cities like Boston, New York and Philadelphia were far better placed to have substantial growth than Quebec city and Montreal. And then once those places were built up, the interior is more viable due to logistical connections and trade with the eastern seaboard than it would be with the St Lawrence valley. A Chicago or a St Louis that is cut off from eastern seaboard is never going to attract that many settlers.

Hence my suggestion that if the French took those places the manner of their colonisation would change and thus achieve significantly greater numbers of European settlers, independent of any change in state policy w.r.t. (for instance) the common suggestion of letting French dissidents such as Huguenots, not just royally approved people, come in.

I don't doubt you know more about this than I do, I just doubt that we're actually disagreeing.
 
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