With no PoDs prior to the Act of Union in 1707, how can the subsequent "British Empire" be as large, powerful, and economically dominant as possible? As of then, they had naval and trading posts in Europe, Africa, and India, in addition to their more estaished possessions in Ireland and the Western Hemisphere, so I expect they had the necessary footholds to expand further; so how do we make that happen, and how far coukd we take it?
 
Maybe prevent their period of Instability during the Revolutionary era? There were lots of small scale revolts in Scotland and Ireland during that time so if you butterfly that away, Britain would be in a much better position to experience economic prosperity after those Revolutionary wars ended.
 
Honestly I'm not sure it's really possible for Britain to have an 'empire' of the likes of Franco-Spain.

The long term trends that ensured global dominance for the catholic powers were well established by 1700. Britain always packed a punch but to have a truest vast empire it would have to somehow defeat it's rivals, which is pretty ASB.

Maybe Britain could grow to dominate North America? Anything beyond that would surely bring them into confrontation with the Spanish and French.
 
This is really not that difficult. Britain has pretty sizable coal deposits, and coal was THE fuel of the industrial revolution. And the first country to industrialize would get a big first mover advantage.

Just have the industrial revolution start in Britain and not in France as IOTL.

There are people who argue that it was some defect of the Protestant viewpoint as opposed to the Catholic viewpoint that kept the industrial revolution from starting in Britain, but the evidence is much stronger for it being happenstance.

Also avoiding all the revolutions also should help.
 
This is really not that difficult. Britain has pretty sizable coal deposits, and coal was THE fuel of the industrial revolution. And the first country to industrialize would get a big first mover advantage.

There's still a bit of a double-edged sword there, because the infrastructure laid down in an early industrial revolution will resist getting replaced by more efficient machinery later on. That's why France eventually fell behind later adopters of industrial technology in Austria, New France and Brazil, although it's certainly still an imposing economy. More successful English industry in the 18th century would probably suffer the same fate eventually.
 
The British would have secured even more of France in this world, finally allowing people to use a rowboat to travel from the Pyrenees to Jutland while only landing on English soil.
 
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