Your challenge, with a POD no earlier than 1600, is to make Britain rule the entire world by the year 2008 to form the world government of Earth, a democratic and stable state, with no ethnic groups getting slaughtered in the process. Can you do it?
Challenge: Make the British Empire a World Government
- Thread starter Puget Sound
- Start date
Your challenge, with a POD no earlier than 1600, is to make Britain rule the entire world by the year 2008 to form the world government of Earth, a democratic and stable state, with no ethnic groups getting slaughtered in the process. Can you do it?
Too many people complained about a part of my challenge last time, so I started a new thread with the challenge changed so they wouldn't complain.
Anaxagoras
Banned
Hmm. . . well, my Scottish relatives like to say that God created scotch to prevent the Scots from taking over the world. So imagine a POD where the Scots all become teetotalers, seize complete control of the British government and then take over the world. Yeah, sounds good.
Your challenge, with a POD no earlier than 1600, is to make Britain rule the entire world by the year 2008 to form the world government of Earth, a democratic and stable state, with no ethnic groups getting slaughtered in the process. Can you do it?
PG
I must admit I think the idea of any group establishing a universal state, without a major external threat to it or a good bit of violence in the process, is ASB. The chances of it staying democratic and stable is also pretty slim I fear.
Unless you have something like the worldwide pandemic that wiped out 99.5% of the affected population in the autumn of 1940 but because of Britain's position as an island at war it managed to convert to block any visiting, not just Germans, until the pandemic burnt itself out.
[This still leaves most ethnic groups slaughtered but not by deliberate human action which I suspect is what you meant].Steve
Oh, come on people.
While rather (OK, very) improbable, it's not ASB at all, IM(H)O
If Britain can keep the 13 colonies, that would be a good start (and an absolute prerequisite). After some decades of fumbling, they manage to patch together a stable political system. Each 'Dominion' get representation in an Imperial Parliament/Senate/what-have-you, representation based on e.g. monies paid to the Imperial Exchequer or by number of Voting Citizens (where you be a voting citizen you have to own e.g. 160 acres of land or have income equivalent to, say $10,000 in today's money. This keeps the uppity poor, Indians (ie from India) and blacks disenfranchised - so the middle class whites can run things longer. (An Imperial Parliament with one man one vote would make it a glorified Indian parliament, which would be politically impossible)
Note that such a system would be more democratic than Athenian democracy, so would be considered a democracy, even if it weren't universal manhood sufferage.
Once the *Empire gets thoroughly started, Imperial Preferences (customs, access to markets, etc.), mean that other countries would WANT to join. By 2008 you could easily have such an Empire be the world government.
While rather (OK, very) improbable, it's not ASB at all, IM(H)O
If Britain can keep the 13 colonies, that would be a good start (and an absolute prerequisite). After some decades of fumbling, they manage to patch together a stable political system. Each 'Dominion' get representation in an Imperial Parliament/Senate/what-have-you, representation based on e.g. monies paid to the Imperial Exchequer or by number of Voting Citizens (where you be a voting citizen you have to own e.g. 160 acres of land or have income equivalent to, say $10,000 in today's money. This keeps the uppity poor, Indians (ie from India) and blacks disenfranchised - so the middle class whites can run things longer. (An Imperial Parliament with one man one vote would make it a glorified Indian parliament, which would be politically impossible)
Note that such a system would be more democratic than Athenian democracy, so would be considered a democracy, even if it weren't universal manhood sufferage.
Once the *Empire gets thoroughly started, Imperial Preferences (customs, access to markets, etc.), mean that other countries would WANT to join. By 2008 you could easily have such an Empire be the world government.
Trouble is disenfranchising the uppity poor and non-whites leads to... trouble.
Also, your idea that countries will join because of the economic advantages might get some in but not all. The French for example would rather drown themselves in a bucket of garlic than join the British Empire.
The trouble with any world empire is there are an awful lot of people in the world. How can a few million Brits rule the billions of Indians, Chinese, Africans etc? Even on the smaller scale of the OTL British Empire this was the problem in the end.
And if the Brits aren't ruling (e.g. you create an Imperial Parliamnet dominated as you say by India), is it a British Empire?
Too bad the POD is after 1600. I had this vague idea of Elizabeth I accepting the offer of the Netherlands of being its queen. This leads to a Anglo/Dutch-Spanish war, in wich the Anglo-Dutch manage to capture a lot of the Spanish (and portuguese) colonies (and all of the Netherlands of course). The Anglo-Dutch union leads to England becoming the protector of protestantism and when trouble in Germany starts (OTL 30 year war) England enters the war on the site of the protestants. In the end protestant Germany leaves the HRE and form their own protestant empire with the king (or Queen) of England as emperor. Sweden and Denmark may even join. Now you have England ruling over the Netherlands (including Belgium) and a large part of Germany, it also has all the Dutch and British colonies and a good part of the Spanish and portugese colonies. Throw in a couple of wars against France and this empire captures most of the French colonies. Already it controls a large part of the world. Getting the rest of it is still very hard. Too bad its POD is in the late 16th century, before 1600.
This was, specific mechanisms aside, exactly what the British Empire did historically. In Africa it led to the rise (and success) of national liberation ideologies during the 1950s and '60s. In the UK itself it produced successive 19th C reform bills that eventually introduced universal suffrage and the loss of Ireland. Property disqualifications and disenfranchisement become non-starters from the 19th C onwards
How can they be non starter from the 19th onwards when they were still being practised into the 20th? hell the US didn't stop disenfranchising until the 60's.
It became more difficult in OTL but that doesn't mean it had to in an ATL or that it couldn't be kept for far longer than in OTL.
It became more difficult in OTL but that doesn't mean it had to in an ATL or that it couldn't be kept for far longer than in OTL.
Valdemar II
Banned
I guess this had to be said, I can't see any possible way to make the British Empire a World Government, while it owned large part of the world in OTL the truth was that most of it was moneylosing wasteland and that it is meaningless without large part of Europe, and if it becomes dominating power in Europe the rest will join together in a anti-british alliance, which would crush Britain.