AHC: Largest possible country?

The British Empire was sovereign. None of its components were. When Britain declared war on Germany in 1914, all components of the British Empire were automatically considered at war with Germany.

The British Parliament, sitting in London, had power to legislate for all components of the Empire. Local assemblies, up to and including the Parliaments of Australia and Canada, had power only as delegated from Westminster. The final court of appeals for all Empire territories sat in London.

Except for Canada and India, all components of the Empire used British money. (In 1910 Australia adopted its own pound, but it was pegged to the pound sterling until 1929.)

Components of the Empire had varying degrees of internal autonomy, but so do American states, Australian states, and Canadian provinces today. Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland all have considerable autonomy including local assemblies. But no one argues that the U.S., Canada, Australia, or the United Kingdom are not "countries".

I can't tell if you're serious.
 
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Hegemony isn't union. Leadership isn't ownership. Given those assumptions, we are geographically constrained.

Maximizing pure area requires as a starting condition that some huge, easily held region of the world is included. Probably, we're talking about either the west-Urals and Siberia, or Canada and Alaska. There's also Antarctica, Australia, and the Sahara, but.... The first manages to be both too worthless to occupy properly and too accessible to be easily claimed by a single power. The Sahara is much the same, but less easy and with the added feature of isolation from geographically large powers and potential powers. The latter is also true of Australia which, while otherwise ideal for our purposes, is heinously difficult to federate with anything more substantial than New Zealand.

Which brings up the other major factor: a superpower. A prerequisite is a huge, contiguous, and culturally uniform(-ish) area with enough water, agriculture, and resources to allow a state centered on it to easily project into both the easy spots mentioned above and a few more difficult ones. That requirement limits us to India, China, European Russia, west-central Europe, and that-place-where-America-is.

The trouble is getting both items adjacent. The first two, despite looking decent on a map, actually have enormous geographic, cultural, and economic obstacles to expansion beyond their core areas. Siberia is well blocked off from China, though they could do passably better in Central Asia, but India's pretty much stuck. West-central Europe is actually very small, relatively speaking, and what would they annex, anyway? And why? In essence, then, we're limited (doing it the easy way) to the *US and Russia.

China also had the potential, but getting it to commit to Central Asia again, and bother with North Asia, is a lot less simple than straight wanking the above two. Nor would I rule out British-based imperial federation entirely. But you have to do a lot of justification work and background to even get them started. And anyway, with Rule Britannia you can get India and Africa or you can get the Dominions, not both.
 
Why not both?

Not arguing, but you've laid out a solid argument for the rest, so would like to see what's behind this point.
 
:rolleyes:

Would you prefer if I said Chinese-American? African-American, brought-to-Virginia-slave-descended? African-American, Jamaican? Mexican-American? Columbian-American? Don't get all sophistical on me.

Bruce

Well, yeah, if you break it down to that then the US does have concentrations of ethnic groups. Italians and Irish in the Mid-Atlantic, French-Canadians in northern New England, Cajuns in Louisiana, African-Americans in the Deep South, Mexicans near the Southwestern border area, Cubans in parts of Florida, Swedes and Norwegians in parts of the Upper Midwest, Germans pretty much everywhere in the Midwest, etc.
 
Why not both?

Not arguing, but you've laid out a solid argument for the rest, so would like to see what's behind this point.

There are different models for political unification of a large and disparate area. It can be a gradual shifting relationship like the EU, UK, or Iroquois, right of conquest like the US and Napoleonic France, or revolutionary enthusiasm a la Soviet Russia and the US.

Gradualism is incredibly difficult even over areas that already have strong links. Imagine trying to start the EU with a random smattering of countries from every continent. Then imagine trying to go past all the goals of the EU and make it a political union with even limited proportional representation. With the dominions and Britain, say, it's possible. They share a monarch, a language (more or less), a close history, and myriad family connections. There's relatively minor ethnic and religious issues to work through. But what if you add in Africa and India? Heck, even one of them could kill the project. The chief role of the union would end up being one in which the rich parts pay to develop and subsidize the poor parts, and demographics would make that effectively permanent. In short, the only way to get here is by way of a pervasive global threat of Drakan (i.e. absurd) scale.

Conquest can't build that kind of relationship, because it entails conquest against the interests of the conqueror. This isn't really a British option except as an illustration of why they didn't go for this idea in OTL. If you're conquering India for money, you don't set up a relationship that'll have you paying them. If you're civilizing Africa, you don't put them in your government, because the assumption is that they aren't civilized yet. "Empty" areas like much of the Americas, Australia, and Siberia are an exception, but then they were already conquered, weren't they?

These biases and interests can be gotten around best by revolution. Revolutionary spirit is just hugely effective at making people act against their interests and enter political unions. The oppressed working class can nobly step up to help their global brothers to cast off their shackles, et cetera, et cetera. EdT's Fight and Be Right showcases this excellently. But it also demonstrates the limitations of the method. You're not going to get simultaneous revolutions to distract all the dominions from what they're agreeing to. They're too stable. Even if one could arrange simultaneous white revolutions in an Arab Spring analogue (not easy to do), they're not going to have identical interests and goals. Britain can convince itself of the glory of making right centuries of (aristocratic) oppression on the Ganges, sure. But what exactly do the Canadians feel they owe India? When did the Australians and South Africans drop their racial attitudes? How do you sell anyone in New Zealand on the idea of a huge portion of their economy disappearing and a flood of alien immigration?

Thus I'd argue it was an either/or situation, and avoiding the issue was a lot of what prevented progress in OTL.
 
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Siberia is well blocked off from China, though they could do passably better in Central Asia. .

Yes, they're well blocked off in a pre-modern era, but if we are assuming the industrial revolution comes to China first, their need for raw materials and such in their "modern era" (plus, of course, the Someone Should Tame those Annoying Barbarians to the North now that we can Actually Crush them For Good factor) could easily lead to a conquest of Siberia. It's not like the 2-3 million pre-industrial Russians or whatever are going to be able to avoid Chinese assimilation in the long run. And if China, say, colonizes Australia, the population difference between the homeland and the number of people Australia can support makes it likely it will remain a Chinese colony for a long time (North America, say, may be more of a problem).


Bruce
 
(snip.)
Thus I'd argue it was an either/or situation, and avoiding the issue was a lot of what prevented progress in OTL.

Thanks. And it seems both are serious problems - that is, neither is going to be easy or necessarily rewarding.

Not that OTL was better, but that's (part of) why empires falter - it's tough holding things together when significant components aren't sure they want to be "together" even if not actively hostile.
 
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Yes, they're well blocked off in a pre-modern era, but if we are assuming the industrial revolution comes to China first, their need for raw materials and such in their "modern era" (plus, of course, the Someone Should Tame those Annoying Barbarians to the North now that we can Actually Crush them For Good factor) could easily lead to a conquest of Siberia. It's not like the 2-3 million pre-industrial Russians or whatever are going to be able to avoid Chinese assimilation in the long run. And if China, say, colonizes Australia, the population difference between the homeland and the number of people Australia can support makes it likely it will remain a Chinese colony for a long time (North America, say, may be more of a problem).

Bruce

Well, if China gets going so early I'd put the number of Russians they'd find there at best at a tenth those numbers.

That said, the Chinese have an insane amount of raw materials right where they are. Gobbling up Siberia wouldn't make much of a contribution until they'd exhausted the easier stuff at home, and it would take modern tech to really exploit its potential. The Russians started late on that, after all, despite being much better suited to start. Colonization has to start with food and shelter, something that was easy enough for the Slavs but was a massive hurdle for most anyone else. The Chinese until relatively recently weren't interested for the same reasons we still haven't tried to exploit Antarctica. Sure there must be something there, but that something is there.

And the barbarians thing doesn't really help, because everything else was secondary to the Mongols. A China that was transforming early would absolutely do what the Qing did - subjugate Mongolia - but to get them into Siberia proper.... That's different. The Russians were the first Siberian threat, and that not until the 19th century. Again, it's not inconceivable, just not the natural next step to any obvious trends. The right convict-dumping program, could perhaps get somewhere given a few centuries lead time. And a Siberia with settlement begun by a Russia without a modernizing Europe at its back could be plucked by an industrializing China if the timing were just right.

And the Confucian worldview and bureaucracy are a great tools for holding onto and retaking things they consider Chinese. Unfortunately it's also an impediment to finding and annexing things way out there in the first place.
 
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There was a thread a little while back titled "largest British empire without india". That would probably win. British Isles, Canada, USA, Northern Mexico, some Central America, Australia, Patagonia. All lands that Anglo-Americans could settle and assimilate. Highly implauisible of course, but possible.
 
There was a thread a little while back titled "largest British empire without india". That would probably win. British Isles, Canada, USA, Northern Mexico, some Central America, Australia, Patagonia. All lands that Anglo-Americans could settle and assimilate. Highly implauisible of course, but possible.

Was it politically unified as a single state? Otherwise it wouldn't count.

Why implausible? The only thing that seems obviously off there is Patagonia.
 
Was it politically unified as a single state? Otherwise it wouldn't count.

Why implausible? The only thing that seems obviously off there is Patagonia.

Implausible to overcome the the decentralizing forces that would likely tear the empire apart as it did in OTL. British North America would have to stay under control of London until the 1830s/40s before the development of the steamship/railroad/and telegraph would counteract it.

Patagonia was empty until pretty late.
 
Implausible to overcome the the decentralizing forces that would likely tear the empire apart as it did in OTL. British North America would have to stay under control of London until the 1830s/40s before the development of the steamship/railroad/and telegraph would counteract it.

Patagonia was empty until pretty late.

You don't need to counteract them. If the British had stepped back a bit from free trade in the second half of the century but kept barriers to the dominions down, and had a series of sympathetic PMs, and given a lack of deliberate obstructionism in the colonial leadership, and nothing went too terribly wrong, the foundations could have been laid. That's definitely not the most likely outcome, but nor is it overwhelmingly unlikely.

Then if you assume this network of tightly bound economies exists in the 20th century and that there's been a few generations of serious talking about Federation, it becomes plausible. They don't need to stick to Britain 100% to end up together, they just need to have enough economic and political motivation for it when early 20th century technology begins to make it practical. Both of those could have been had, assuming the right 19th century.

Says I.
 
If Chile and Argentina could do it, I don't see why British settlers backed up by London wouldn't be able to.

Oh I dunno. I think the example of the Maori demonstrates pretty strongly that the settlers risked being left to their own devices if (when) they fell out with the locals.
 
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