Culture of British North America (if the ARW was avoided)

Louisiana, Florida, and the Spanish/Mexican areas of OTL USA will be caught up in massive butterflies. Does no ARW/USA mean no French Revolution and eventually no Napoleon? If no French Revolution/Napoleon, then France is not looking to sell Louisiana and certainly not to Britain. If you have the Napoleonic Wars, then I can see Britain taking Louisiana when it wins. As for the Spanish/Mexican land that became part of the USA, way more difficult to predict.

Without a need to counterbalance the USA, there is no reason for Britain to go for a united Canada. Just like whatever parts of the "USA" that are British (see above) are going to be separate entities, so with Canada. Having several Dominions in North America is doable, a common British currency and a customs union makes the economics easier, but by splitting up the proto-USA & Canada in to smaller units, none can challenge the mother country.
 

Skallagrim

Banned
Louisiana, Florida, and the Spanish/Mexican areas of OTL USA will be caught up in massive butterflies. Does no ARW/USA mean no French Revolution and eventually no Napoleon? If no French Revolution/Napoleon, then France is not looking to sell Louisiana and certainly not to Britain. If you have the Napoleonic Wars, then I can see Britain taking Louisiana when it wins. As for the Spanish/Mexican land that became part of the USA, way more difficult to predict.

France is still on very thin ice economically, and I see that leading to some sort of break-down... if not 'on schedule' as per OTL, then shortly thereafter when the next war takes its economic toll. Consider that with the ARW and its costs being the straw that breaks the camel's back, France will try to maintain the status quo, having no impetus to change or go under. So: shit hits the fan come next crisis. It might end up being more of a "polite revolt", though, limiting the powers of the king and creating a more "British" system. (The OTL French Revolution came close to this, before things escalated.)

In any event, we won't be seeing the exact French Revolution as in OTL. Butterflies may well prevent Napoleon from rising to absolute power, which would in turn stop him from forcing Spain to secretly turn Louisiana over to France. That would mean Britain can't take it from France. A later war with Spain, of course, can't be ruled out...
 
So, a very light confederation of BNA and/or maintaining political separateness though they all have the feeling of sister colonies/dominions with some economic union, though not something like the Albany Plan? The AP arrangement called for joint-policy making of future western territories with Americans moving to settle and establish and London to approve new colonies. That could foster westward expansion faster and The Great Game between Britain, France, and Spain would be quite close for the New World now. Though, the Albany Plan was rejected by London and by the colonies because both feared a greater unifying authority for different and obvious reasons. It was still deferential to London however, but could it go through in some form after its rejection and during the POD of the 1760s, assuming its early enough to avoid the ARW?

I would see more compromise on part of the Bourbon monarchy during the French Revolution, since they don't have a revolutionary boogieman--the United States--to react against, and they are focused on keeping their thrones to challenge Britain. Perhaps even form something like the Holy Alliance from Turtledove's "The Two Georges", a Franco-Spanish political and military alliance, along with their colonial empires, as a way to balance power with the Britain-NA arrangement. I think Louisiana would fall in a British-NA invasion in another intercolonial war, and so would Florida if it was returned to Spain, though what about New Spain? Would it have an independence revolution or become a more autonomous dominion like BNA? Would Britain be able to take everything above the Rio Grande, and maybe Baja California in a war since they are not very settled?

If a Franco-Spanish alliance happened in response to this BNA confederation (something weak but obvious to everyone in its implications), wouldn't that also promote federalization of BNA so that they can be a entity to balance power with that F-S alliance. The Albany Plan was argued as a military alliance among all the colonies, and even called for a Union military, and this was right before the French and Indian War when it was proposed. I think a stronger case for federalism would be made on part of the colonies, and they could see it as a way to push for autonomy in exchange for protecting British interests in North America.

Then again, if there isn't another external threat but if Britain was more conciliatory towards the colonies, a looser association and later federalization closer to OTL probably would have happened. Taxation and political representation were the big issues, along with the encroachment of direct rule on the colonies would have to been addressed in the late 1760s to help keep them British.
 
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Honestly, I disagree on the idea of weak confederation for the colonies - I look towards the OTL Loyalists - specifically Galloway. Who's Plan of Union was basically an American Parliament in Union with the Westminster Parliament. Which failed by one vote. Have it succeed by gathering a number of more votes and we've butterflied the ARW.

In fact - it suggests that Two Parliaments and a Grand Council (click for details on the plan) were missed by a feather. There is your PoD. Now, I'd fully expect that this Parliament would have limited powers, and would likely lead to the establishment of western borders as part of the agreement when it returned from Westminster (essentially using the original proclamation line as the western border for those colonies, but still using the Fort Stanwicks Line for allowing settlement) the exact borders are disputable, but I reckon you've got a Proclamation, or Hard Labour Treaty line as your extremes. I also expect a level of protection for Native American territories - simply to ensure no more Pontiacs Wars)

That would still likely lead to more Parliaments later on, as the Westminster Parliament tries to limit the potential power of the (what I'd call) "Philadelphia Parliament".
 

Skallagrim

Banned
Honestly, I disagree on the idea of weak confederation for the colonies - I look towards the OTL Loyalists - specifically Galloway. Who's Plan of Union was basically an American Parliament in Union with the Westminster Parliament. Which failed by one vote. Have it succeed by gathering a number of more votes and we've butterflied the ARW.

In fact - it suggests that Two Parliaments and a Grand Council (click for details on the plan) were missed by a feather. There is your PoD. Now, I'd fully expect that this Parliament would have limited powers, and would likely lead to the establishment of western borders as part of the agreement when it returned from Westminster (essentially using the original proclamation line as the western border for those colonies, but still using the Fort Stanwicks Line for allowing settlement) the exact borders are disputable, but I reckon you've got a Proclamation, or Hard Labour Treaty line as your extremes. I also expect a level of protection for Native American territories - simply to ensure no more Pontiacs Wars)

That would still likely lead to more Parliaments later on, as the Westminster Parliament tries to limit the potential power of the (what I'd call) "Philadelphia Parliament".

It failed by one vote in America. That does not have to mean that Britain would just have said "Oh, sure, that's fine". Do we know how likely or unlikely the British would have been to embrace this suggestion?
 
It failed by one vote in America. That does not have to mean that Britain would just have said "Oh, sure, that's fine". Do we know how likely or unlikely the British would have been to embrace this suggestion?

There is no way I can see this passing in OTL.
 
It failed by one vote in America. That does not have to mean that Britain would just have said "Oh, sure, that's fine". Do we know how likely or unlikely the British would have been to embrace this suggestion?

Not the faintest idea. I can't see them being all warm to the idea, but they had tried to unify the colonies previously in the Dominion of New England. I think it'd likely involve restrictions on the territory of jurisdiction, limits on powers, fiscal contribution requirements, ostensibly to pay for the army. So I think there would likely be support for the idea in Westminster, but not a majority without a stipulation of those repayments so as to pay off the debts of the Seven Years war in some way, or even the offloading of not-unsubstantial quantities of the debt to the new Parliament.

If the options are between a potential costly rebellion, and the opportunity to offload a large quantity of debt and receive incomes to pay off the remainder, then it could go down very well in Westminster.

I personally think Galloway could make the case and would be willing to accept the concessions required since he would become a loyalist and move to Britain IOTL. But this I think would have to be part of the PoD - Galloway Wins the vote, and gets the Parliament.

EDIT : Addendum - I think it is entirely possible that if there are cases made to ally with Spain and France during any Congress' Galloway naming them may be an unspoken condition.
 
but they had tried to unify the colonies previously in the Dominion of New England
Which notably didn't include Virginia or the other southern colonies.
I can see smaller confederations but a single unit of all and future American colonies is asking for trouble with Westminster. Divide et impera is the name of the game.
 
Which notably didn't include Virginia or the other southern colonies.
I can see smaller confederations but a single unit of all and future American colonies is asking for trouble with Westminster. Divide et impera is the name of the game.

That's fair, the motivation for that was to limit the industrial development of the New England colonies vs the agricultural south.

Also, note : I specifically mention that it'd have to include territorial limits on the jurisdiction of the Philadelphia Parliament - specifically for that concern of an overwhelmingly powerful Parliament. It also doesn't include Quebec. So the Great Lakes, the St Lawrence Valley, ... Quebec, the rest of Canada, and potentially every development west of the Mississipi is NOT part of this Parliament. It may end up having their own Parliaments - take a hypothetical Louisiana scenario - Britain seizes it, and rather than deal with the issue of administering the territory, set up a Parliament in New Orleans in a similar manner, with fiscal expectations, creating division between New Orleans and Philadelphia, and is we take a look at the Great Lakes - you could have a Parliament in Ottowa/Montreal/Toronoto/ATL Detroit. If you include the British Caribbean in such a system, and via the Galloway Plan, you've got 4 seperate Parliaments in the New World, one in Britain (which I assume is superior in some way, and free to handle Extra-American Affairs) offloading the Administrative responsibilities and costs, and allowing more rapid local decision making.
 

Skallagrim

Banned
Here's the thing: I rather suspect @Faeelin's got it right. The Galloway Plan isn't going to be accepted by Britain, on account of the fact thst it's too late to come to such a solution. It could be done earlier, though. I don't think the Albany Plan back in '54 had any real chance, either, mostly because Britain was wary of giving the colonies more power, and because the colonies feared a central government with tax-raising powers. So that one was... well, too early.

But in 1764, Prime Minister George Grenville in OTL first proposed direct taxes on the colonies to raise revenue (needed to repay the war debt). But crucially to our scenario, he explicitly delayed passing the act, and apparently on the grounds that he wished to see if the colonies would propose some way to raise the revenue themselves instead. While probably not super-enthousiastic about such a notion, he likely knew that imposing direct taxation would cause all sorts of trouble. Letting the colonists cough of the money themselves was just plain easier. The colonists didn't come up with some brilliant solution, and the next year, Parliament passed the Stamp Act. We know what came of that: even though it was repealed a year later, the Declaratory Act that followed did insist that Parliament retained full power to make laws for the colonies "in all cases whatsoever". The Sons of Liberty had been founded already, grievences had come to the surface, and the whole issue became a ticking time bomb.

So, a POD: Benjamin Franklin, who was very annoyed when his Albany Plan was rejected by the colonial legislatures (accusing them of being "narrowly provincial in outlook, mutually jealous, and suspicious of any central taxing authority"), learns of Grenville's attitude and (presumed) motivation early on. He sees his chance. Assembling a gathering of colonial representatives, he puts the case before them. They may dislike a central taxing authority, but the alternative will surely be the British Parliament taxing them all directly. "It it must be done, best that we do it ourselves."

Franklin's proposal - which is, in fact, much like the Albany Plan and the Galloway Plan - is sent to Grenville, who correctly identifies it as an opportunity to prevent a lot of trouble later on. The Stamp Act is indefinitely postponed, and some negotiations on the exact furure of British North America follow. This becomes a whole congress, dealing with all sorts of tangentially related matters (such as the exact westward borders of the existing colonies, and the westward limit of expansion). In the end, a compromise is reached that both Parliament and the colonists find more or less acceptable. The North American colonies are placed under one or more central government(s), in which they enjoy representation, and which may tax them. Via this tax revenue, Britain is repayed for the costs of war. Because of the extensive negotiations, Americans are more at liberty to move west than they were in OTL. The Townshend Acts, the Tea Act, the Quebec Act and the Intolerable Acts are all avoided.

All of this depends on both sides being sensible and keeping a cool head, which is not a given-- but I do think there was a brief window to get the ball rolling there, and in OTL, the Americans let that window pass them by (apparently because they weren't even aware of it). A man like Franklin being slightly better informed at just the right time could make all the difference in the world.
 
Here's the thing: I rather suspect @Faeelin's got it right. The Galloway Plan isn't going to be accepted by Britain, on account of the fact thst it's too late to come to such a solution. It could be done earlier, though. I don't think the Albany Plan back in '54 had any real chance, either, mostly because Britain was wary of giving the colonies more power, and because the colonies feared a central government with tax-raising powers. So that one was... well, too early.

But in 1764, Prime Minister George Grenville in OTL first proposed direct taxes on the colonies to raise revenue (needed to repay the war debt). But crucially to our scenario, he explicitly delayed passing the act, and apparently on the grounds that he wished to see if the colonies would propose some way to raise the revenue themselves instead. While probably not super-enthousiastic about such a notion, he likely knew that imposing direct taxation would cause all sorts of trouble. Letting the colonists cough of the money themselves was just plain easier. The colonists didn't come up with some brilliant solution, and the next year, Parliament passed the Stamp Act. We know what came of that: even though it was repealed a year later, the Declaratory Act that followed did insist that Parliament retained full power to make laws for the colonies "in all cases whatsoever". The Sons of Liberty had been founded already, grievences had come to the surface, and the whole issue became a ticking time bomb.

So, a POD: Benjamin Franklin, who was very annoyed when his Albany Plan was rejected by the colonial legislatures (accusing them of being "narrowly provincial in outlook, mutually jealous, and suspicious of any central taxing authority"), learns of Grenville's attitude and (presumed) motivation early on. He sees his chance. Assembling a gathering of colonial representatives, he puts the case before them. They may dislike a central taxing authority, but the alternative will surely be the British Parliament taxing them all directly. "It it must be done, best that we do it ourselves."

Franklin's proposal - which is, in fact, much like the Albany Plan and the Galloway Plan - is sent to Grenville, who correctly identifies it as an opportunity to prevent a lot of trouble later on. The Stamp Act is indefinitely postponed, and some negotiations on the exact furure of British North America follow. This becomes a whole congress, dealing with all sorts of tangentially related matters (such as the exact westward borders of the existing colonies, and the westward limit of expansion). In the end, a compromise is reached that both Parliament and the colonists find more or less acceptable. The North American colonies are placed under one or more central government(s), in which they enjoy representation, and which may tax them. Via this tax revenue, Britain is repayed for the costs of war. Because of the extensive negotiations, Americans are more at liberty to move west than they were in OTL. The Townshend Acts, the Tea Act, the Quebec Act and the Intolerable Acts are all avoided.

All of this depends on both sides being sensible and keeping a cool head, which is not a given-- but I do think there was a brief window to get the ball rolling there, and in OTL, the Americans let that window pass them by (apparently because they weren't even aware of it). A man like Franklin being slightly better informed at just the right time could make all the difference in the world.

Franklin, Galloway and Grenville. Interesting team for that. Perhaps that is the PoD - Galloway is for some reason informed, shares this with Franklin and organises everything. He's the Loyalist, so there is the motivation - and it makes the Parliament and Grand Council aspects more ingrained than the Albany Plan which AFAIK was a bit more vague on the issue.

That could be a great timeline premise! Nicely wrangled Skallagrim :)
 
Franklin, Galloway and Grenville. Interesting team for that. Perhaps that is the PoD - Galloway is for some reason informed, shares this with Franklin and organises everything. He's the Loyalist, so there is the motivation - and it makes the Parliament and Grand Council aspects more ingrained than the Albany Plan which AFAIK was a bit more vague on the issue.

That could be a great timeline premise! Nicely wrangled Skallagrim :)

Yes, I had something similar in mind for a story with a POD that has negotiations in the late 1760s, ultimately ending in the acceptance of the Albany Plan, though several colonial confederations would be something London would prefer authority-wise. But Franklin argued for a union of all of the Atlantic colonies (Canada post-F&I War, Idk perhaps not right away), rather than a few confederations. Perhaps London would forced to go with it if it to avoid revolution and Grenville was more accomodating. What about Pitt, would be going with this plan?

Franklin's reasoning for a full union, and supporting the Albany Plan overall: http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch7s2.html

And how Skallagrim made a great Franklinism, a great pragmatic yet poetic statement. Excellent.
 

Skallagrim

Banned
Franklin, Galloway and Grenville. Interesting team for that. Perhaps that is the PoD - Galloway is for some reason informed, shares this with Franklin and organises everything. He's the Loyalist, so there is the motivation - and it makes the Parliament and Grand Council aspects more ingrained than the Albany Plan which AFAIK was a bit more vague on the issue.

That could be a great timeline premise! Nicely wrangled Skallagrim :)

Yes, I had something similar in mind for a story with a POD that has negotiations in the late 1760s, ultimately ending in the acceptance of the Albany Plan, though several colonial confederations would be something London would prefer authority-wise. But Franklin argued for a union of all of the Atlantic colonies (Canada post-F&I War, Idk perhaps not right away), rather than a few confederations. Perhaps London would forced to go with it if it to avoid revolution and Grenville was more accomodating. What about Pitt, would be going with this plan?

Franklin's reasoning for a full union, and supporting the Albany Plan overall: http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch7s2.html

And how Skallagrim made a great Franklinism, a great pragmatic yet poetic statement. Excellent.

Well, now the idea won't get out of my head! Maybe this scenario should be a timeline indeed, as @RogueTraderEnthusiast suggests. However, I've jut discovered that the subject of the current Map of the Fortnight contest is about... depicting all or part of British North America, 100 years after the failure of the American Revolution. My, my! I think I'll just make a nice map, and use this scenario for the backstory. And as you all know, when I write a backstory, it invariably ends up becoming a mini-TL anyway. ;)
 
Maybe for the next thread, international relations implications if the ARW was avoided. And what about technological advancement from that POD onward?
 
Also, would you think there lots of smaller provinces in a continent-spanning BNA, like from "Columbia and Britannia" or a lot but closer to the OTL number in Turtledove's "The Two Georges" where provinces west of the Mississippi and north of the Great Lakes are large in area, like OTL Canadian provinces?

The former has more carved out for indigenous peoples, particularly for the Plains Indians, though in the latter there a couple provinces for the east coast nations.
 

Skallagrim

Banned
I told you it would end up being a mini-TL.

All to showcase my map, which at least offers my (somewhat fanciful) answer to @SashaBonaparte148's question about internal division:

North_America_map_text_edit.png



Maybe for the next thread, international relations implications if the ARW was avoided.

My write-up for the MotF entry actually goes into that a bit, although I had to cut most of it for length. I'm running with a slightly contrived "France-bounces-back-and-avoids-revolution" scenario, leading to a Franco-Spanish (later Franco-Spanish-Austrian) alliance. I frankly admit to deliberately riffing off The Two Georges with that one.
 
A couple notes.

1. Whatever compromise comes up in the 1770s, a unionist parliament in Westminster is practically guaranteed by the 1800s, possibly shoehorned into the Act of Union. At most, there could be semi-devolved legislatures in North America with whatever powers Westminster can't exercise from a distance by sailing ship. I'd argue that Westminster representation for the colonies happens as soon as a friendly prime minister gets appointed, like William Pitt, just because it's a convenient excuse to dilute the rotten boroughs.

2. Other people have already touched on the Louisiana issue. A sale is basically ASB, so the question is whether Britain seizes it at the end of the French Revolutionary Wars and the alt-Napoleonic Wars (P.S. Nappy himself has a nontrivial chance of still becoming emperor in the ATL). I'd argue that seizure is unlikely, because no matter what happens, the American backcountry is likely to be unhappy and want independence, and by the 1810s Britain would keenly want to limit the backcountry's ability to expand endlessly to the west.

3. The Appalachian settlement line has about 0% chance of holding. Ditto the Quebec Act's provisions giving the Midwest to Quebec, which doesn't have the demographics to settle the area. Outright genocide may not happen, but the Indians aren't staying sovereign over anything interesting east of the Mississippi and probably end up in residential schools.

4. Slavery almost certainly goes away on OTL's British schedule. How it impacts race relations is unclear. OTL's Britain has far more racial integration than the US, as does Canada, but I don't know whether it's a natural state of affairs for countries that didn't have apartheid for a hundred years, or a consequence of Britain and Canada not having a large nonwhite population until recently (Britain was 97% white in 1971) and thus developing modern institutions re housing, schools, and policing based on egalitarian assumptions, which their hegemonic white majorities have since grudgingly had to extend to nonwhites.

5. A few people have talked about guns and the general American mythology of resistance to the government. This is almost certainly going to happen in any such TL. A more interesting question is how much local autonomy is likely vs. provincial power - the US doesn't have unusually strong subnational entities by German or Canadian or Swiss standards, but it does have unusually strong local municipalities. It's a New England tradition predating the Revolution, and the question is entirely whether that gets reformed in a TL in which there is no overarching white need to deprive black people of government services.

6. The prestige accent is probably RP, and OTL American accent is going to be weaker and more stigmatized, and likely absent from the entire Eastern seaboard. Yes, I know Canada has an American accent; but in the relevant era, i.e. the 20th century, it's been influenced by the US more than by Britain.

7. Canada was run by Tories in the early 19c, but ended up much less aristocratic than the US. Australia, same thing. Canada and Australia have high income mobility, the US and UK have low income mobility. Canada and Australia also have way stronger privacy protections than both the US and UK, so a lot of what Americans lump under civil liberties aren't necessary free US vs. tyrannical British world.
 
If Britain held North America, I'd expect to certainly see patterns of migration more akin to Canada or Australia or Brazil, where the migration stream seems much more dominated by the "mother country", at least until recently. The African-American diaspora would be more demographically important, and maybe Native Americans, if the drive to the west had anything to do with higher migration and the drive to the west had any effect on suppressing Native American population growth.

In terms of how developed the country would be, per capita income and per cap GDP would probably be similar (as there's never really been good evidence that migration streams have ever actually increased that rather than total GDP; per capita GDP is mostly linear, growth trends diverging only from Western European norms by WWII, despite major fluctuations in immigration to the US) but the country would probably have a lower total population and more focus on the east coast where culture would probably be more Anglo than it is today (NE US demographics have mostly replaced ancestrally "Anglo-Americans", who today are relatively most prominent in the least developed areas of the country that weren't attractive to later migrations).

I think it would be hard to call if the culture would be less egalitarian - Australian culture is not noticeably less egalitarian than American, for'ex, and probably more so if anything, despite sharing a more recent cultural root with the UK. If we look in terms of a very hard, in terms of wealth, Britain had a very low level of income inequality relative to the rest of Europe up until the 1950s (lower than Sweden and certainly than France) and wealth equality remains reasonable on the European scene (more equal compared to Scandinavia for'ex, though more from focus on the public having ownership as individuals, compared to state ownership supervised by the public). Long term status inequality as measured by changes in surname status rank also isn't particularly different in the UK vs other countries; even the highly egalitarian Nordics don't see upper class or high status surnames regress to the mean in non-wealth status and power indicators any sooner or later, so it's hard to say that British society really does have a particularly pronounced class structure (if so, the Establishment is relatively subtle and elusive to gross, culturally translatable simple indicators of socio-economic status).
 
If Britain held North America, I'd expect to certainly see patterns of migration more akin to Canada or Australia or Brazil, where the migration stream seems much more dominated by the "mother country", at least until recently.

That's not really an accurate description of Canada or Brazil. Canada got more white ethnic migration per capita than the US in the 1900s, and Brazil got so much European migration that the largest Italian city in the world is Sao Paulo. The big US-Canada differences are,

1. Canada got much less German migration in the mid-19c. Germans are around 15% of the US population.
2. Canada's English vs. French linguistic identity politics ensures that Anglophone Canadians of mixed ethnic background are more likely to identify as English-Canadian, whereas Americans tend to identify with the most ethnically marked portion of their ancestry.

I think it would be hard to call if the culture would be less egalitarian - Australian culture is not noticeably less egalitarian than American, for'ex, and probably more so if anything, despite sharing a more recent cultural root with the UK. If we look in terms of a very hard, in terms of wealth, Britain had a very low level of income inequality relative to the rest of Europe up until the 1950s (lower than Sweden and certainly than France) and wealth equality remains reasonable on the European scene (more equal compared to Scandinavia for'ex, though more from focus on the public having ownership as individuals, compared to state ownership supervised by the public).

"Certainly lower than France" is a bad example, since France had very high inequality until the 1960s. American inequality was slightly lower than in Britain and most of Europe until the mid-20c, when inequality went down everywhere but less in the US than in Europe. The destruction of capital stock in WW2 may have been involved, or it could be that postwar social democratic reforms happened all over Western Europe but not in the US. The question of WW2's impact matters, because a unified Anglo-American state is so much more powerful than anyone else by the late 19c that the only challenge from within Europe that could lead to an arms race and a world war involves borderline ASB alliances.

Long term status inequality as measured by changes in surname status rank also isn't particularly different in the UK vs other countries; even the highly egalitarian Nordics don't see upper class or high status surnames regress to the mean in non-wealth status and power indicators any sooner or later, so it's hard to say that British society really does have a particularly pronounced class structure (if so, the Establishment is relatively subtle and elusive to gross, culturally translatable simple indicators of socio-economic status).

Oh, God, that paper of Swedish surname analysis. I cringe whenever people cite it. What the paper shows is that the Swedish aristocracy (1% of the population) is overrepresented in the professions (they're about 6% of the professions studied, like law and medicine). It does not look at income, which is significant because the doctor vs. manual worker inequality in Sweden is much lower than in the US. It does not look at any definition of social status, like political representation, which is significant because Sweden's prime minister is a welder who went into politics via union activity, whereas left-wing leaders in the UK are from comfortable backgrounds. It does try to look at low- vs. medium-status names in the professions, but acknowledges that there is significant attrition, in which upwardly mobile people with low-status last names change their names, whereas aristocratic names are legally protected from the same upward mobility.
 
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