Dreams of Liberty: A Failure at Princeton

[Stretch]

Just wondering, but could a version of the map with the countries labelled below with the colors they represent be added? Just that it's a bit hard to guess what country is what color.

 

[ETGalaxy]

Just wondering, but could a version of the map with the countries labelled below with the colors they represent be added? Just that it's a bit hard to guess what country is what color.

I probably can’t do a would map because that would take ages, but if there’s a specific region you’re interested in, I’m happy to do a map of that area.

 

[ETGalaxy]

The reworked version of Chapter Six has just been posted, now with a reverse American Revolutionary War, more William Howe, and communist puppet states in Acadia and West Florida.

 

[ETGalaxy]

Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Decade of Despair

As any writer of speculative fiction would tell you, history is often driven by seemingly unimportant moments that cascade into major world-reaching events. To an extent, this was the origin of the Decade of Despair. The origins of this economic and political calamity can be traced back to the War of Malacca, which, despite being notorious in the present day due to the increased influence of its belligerents later on into history, was a more or less ignored conflict outside of Southeast Asia and the Hanoverian Realms. Even those who lived in Germania, a nation that was actively fighting in the War of Malacca, did not care much for a conflict that was very remote to anyone who was not actively participating in the relatively small war effort. To the residents of Hanover and Amsterdam, the War of Malacca was yet another distant war in the name of Germania’s empire that had more or less no effect on their daily lives. To the residents of nations completely uninvolved in the War of Malacca, the conflict was a distant footnote in newspapers, only passionately followed by enthusiasts and ministers who anticipated the brewing of storm clouds from the effect that the constant military defeats in the East Indies had on one of the globe’s most influential economic forces.

As the War of Malacca came to an end and soldiers from Riebeeckia settled back into their lifestyles away from the frontlines of the Malay Archipelago, these storm clouds began to form. The War of Malacca was a decisive victory for the Hanoverian Realms, but the victors had nonetheless taken a toll in a conflict the likes of which the loyal forces of Empress Victoria had not faced since the War of Indian Unification. Furthermore, the War of Malacca had been no easy victory. If the Burmese had managed to secure the quick offensive throughout the East Indies that they had attempted in the initial phases of the War of Malacca, the end result of the clash would have likely gone in favor of the Konbaung Dynasty. Regardless, the numerous battles fought throughout the Malay Archipelago left the Hanoverian East India Company’s most profitable colony, Hannoveraner Malaiisch, in an economically awkward position due to much of the infrastructure that the colony depended on, such as well-kept ports and bureaucratic headquarters, being devastated by the War of Malacca.

This time of financial instability hit the HOK at a time when it needed to make money more than ever. The company’s private armed forces had played an important role in the War of Malacca, and financing a war effort is, of course, an expensive endeavor. Following the Treaty of Calcutta, the HOK found itself in deep debt and unable to pay both employers and its military. Total collapse of the HOK was avoided in the short term via wealthy investors and bailouts from the Germanian government, however, these were investments that the stalling company simply could not pay back, thus meaning that the money was often lost altogether. Once the HOK’s charter expired in October 1852, the company was effectively bankrupt and subsequently dissolved on October 5th. The colonial holdings of the HOK were seized by the Germanic Empire, with their fate to be decided at a later date, but as news of the collapse hit the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, the center of the markets of the Hanoverian Realms, panic set in. Stocks quickly became worthless and the ripple effect of the heavy loss of investments into the HOK spread out across the entirety of the stock exchange, thus causing a gradual recession. This recession ultimately resulted in a stock market crash over the course of October of 1852, which snowballed into bank failures, deflation, and general bankruptcy. All of this contributed to the Great Crisis of 1852, the largest depression the global economy had faced since the General Crisis of 1640.

Panic outside the Bank of Amsterdam during the Great Crisis of 1852.

While the Great Crisis had immediate economic impacts on the Hanoverian Realms, whose economies quickly collapsed and unemployment rates skyrocketed, it would gradually lead to the downfall of neighboring markets across Europe within the following months. The effects of the Great Crisis would later spread across the planet to nations tied to Europe’s economy in one way or another, however, it was in these nations that the Great Crisis had varying degrees of social impact. In the states of the Columbian Coast, whose international economies were tightly strung to those of Europe, the effect of the Crisis in the powers of this region, such as Columbia and Virginia, were comparable to the effects felt back across the Atlantic. Conversely, in the mostly autarkic Bogota Sphere, the Great Crisis caused a brief and subtle recession and a decline in access to shattered European markets at most. In Africa, where coastal states were still building up industrialized and globalized economies that had yet to be completely strung into the chaotic complexities of 19th Century international capitalism, the effects of the Great Crisis of 1852 were felt even less.

But back in the Germanic Empire, one of the largest and most powerful economies both in Europe and abroad, the impact of a stock market crash of domestic origins was catastrophic. Unemployment rates would skyrocket, and as the people of Germania grimly welcomed in the new year, national unemployment rates exceded twenty-five percent. Backlash against the Imperial government’s response was soon felt by the Bundesrat, which was harshly criticized for bailing out the HOK. To prevent backlash from being targeted at the Germanian nobility, Empress Victoria would demand the resignation of the Minister of Finance from her cabinet and, more importantly, would call for a general election within the House of Commons to take place on November 1st, 1852. Likewise, numerous nobles of the internal kingdoms of the Germanic Empire saw the writing on the wall and followed suit by replacing their electors to the House of Lords.

The general election of 1852 would be the first time in Germania’s history under the constitution of 1833 that the ruling Imperial Union Party (PKU) faced a threat of being removed from power. Forged in 1833 by wealthy conservative statesmen from across Germania as a way to maintain their grip on power under the constraints of the new Germanian constitution. As property owning men, the class that had formed the PKU to begin with, were the only class capable of voting within the Germanic Empire, the PKU maintained a monopoly on political authority within the Bundesrat throughout much of its early history, often finding itself to be the sole party within the Bundesrat at all. However, as populism swept the world throughout the 1840s, the PKU would face legitimate opposition for the first time in its history as the Tuisto Party (TP) began to quickly acquire seats. Originally formed in 1834 as a collection of liberal Germanian statesmen who supported increasing popular sovereignty, increasing individual rights, and establishing a distinct Germanian national identity influenced by ancient Germanic culture, the TP had since become a populist party that had extended its manifesto to improve working conditions, limit gender inequality, and regulate the powers of Germania’s financial aristocracy.

Following the 1845 general election, the Tuisto Party secured enough seats within the House of Commons to effectively form Her Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition, even if its membership was vastly outnumbered by that of the PKU. Through skillful negotiation mixed with movements to get the public on its side, the TP managed to pass an amendment to the Germanian constitution through the PKU-controlled Bundesrat in 1847 that gave suffrage to all men at least twenty-one years of age, regardless of whether or not they held property. The massive expansion of suffrage within the Germanic Empire prompted the subsequent 1847 Germanian general election in which, alongside the entry of an assortment of other minor parties into the House of Commons, the TP extended its numbers at the expense of the PKU’s, with the two parties’ numbers being much more comparable in the aftermath. Therefore, as a party with growing public support, a message of massive populist societal reform that would undo the mistakes that led to the Great Crisis, and general disdain for the failures of the ruling party, the Tuisto Party was in an excellent position going into the 1852 general election. Surely enough, on the morning of November 2nd, 1852 Germanian newspapers reported on a sweeping Tuisto victory within the House of Commons, thus meaning that Heinrich von Gagern, once deemed a radical by the rulers of the Bundesrat, was now the Speaker of the House of Commons and therefore the most powerful democratically elected official in all of Germania.

Speaker of the House of Commons Heinrich von Gagern of the Germanic Empire.

While the speakership was a position that technically held little power, with Gagern’s official role within the House being to preside over its sessions and ensure that they were carried out in an orderly fashion, Gagern was also the leader of the Tuisto Party within the House of Commons and therefore the party’s de facto political leader overall. Once the new legislature was officially assembled on November 21st, 1852, Speaker Gagern would set out to push his populist legislation through both houses of the Bundesrat and the empress, starting with the first progressive income tax in Germanian history. In order to pass such a bill, as well as similarly progressive legislation, Heinrich von Gagern sought to get close to Empress Victoria by often meeting with Her Majesty as a way to persuade her to support his agenda. In regards to the conservatives of both the House of Lords and the Germanian cabinet, Gagern became notorious for arranging private meetings with these individuals to make dealings behind the scenes of open political debate and maneuvering. Gagern also made good use of depicting himself as a moderate of the Tuisto Party, which won him a decent amount of cooperation from the PKU.

Surely enough, by negotiating with his ideological rivals, Heinrich von Gagern would eventually get his progressive income tax to be passed through the Bundesrat and approved by Victoria. Throughout the subsequent weeks, Gagern would oversee the ratification of numerous new stock market and banking regulations by the Germanian government, including the regulation of trading and debt securities by the Imperial Ministry of Finance. These reforms were begrudgingly supported by conservatives who conceded that more oversight of the stock market was necessary if the Great Crisis were to be avoided, and both Riebeeckia and India would mimic many of Gagern’s regulation reforms, which were revolutionary for the time period. Of course, these reforms came slowly in both Germania and abroad and were simply not enough to recover from the fallout of the Great Crisis, instead being measures designed to avoid such a catastrophe yet again. Just like the rest of Europe, the Decade of Despair was unavoidable for Germania and would wreak havoc on the entirety of the nation for the next handful of years.

In the context of Germania, the Decade of Despair predominantly reared its head in the form of riots. The goals of the riots that were commonplace throughout much of the Germanic Empire circa 1852 and 1853 varied from desperate attempts to seize resources to specific ideological aspirations fueled by the mass discontent of the Great Crisis, however, very broadly speaking, the general ideological goals of the riots, or at least the best organized and longest-lasting ones, were the expansion of the rights of the people of Germania, a nation that had no bill of rights outside of a general outline of the judicial process. While Heinrich von Gagern and much of the Tuisto Party sympathized with the goals of the riots, even if he did condemn the method itself, the PKU and the Germanian nobility, including Empress Victoria herself were infuriated that their subjects dare rise up in opposition to the Germanian state. Under the leadership of Victoria herself and her cabinet ministers, the Imperial Germanic Army would be mobilized against the Germanian Riots of 1853 starting in January 1853, with a nationwide curfew being subsequently implemented. Seeking to avoid the fate of her grandfather, Victoria ordered her military forces to only contain riots rather than actively fight against, but violence at the hands of the armed forces was seemingly inevitable, with panicky Germanian soldiers firing into a crowd of protestors, who had been throwing rocks at them, in the city of Jever on February 4th, 1852.

The Jever Massacre quickly caught national attention and infuriated rioters, with subsequent violence becoming so widespread that many anticipated a civil war. These fears were only further exaggerated when, after many days of clashes in the streets against soldiers, a mob of Jeverish revolutionaries overthrew the Principality of Jeverland’s monarchy on February 9th, 1852 and declared the Republic of Jeverland as an independent city-state, thus severing all ties with the Germanic Empire. The Germanian monarchy fervently opposed such a declaration, as did Heinrich von Gagern, who saw the secession of Germanian territories counterintuitive to his goal of establishing a new national identity for the Germanic Empire, thus prompting an immediate military response that was universally approved by the entire Imperial apparatus of state. Interestingly enough, the Jever Revolution also turned away many liberal revolutionaries across Germania, who opposed secession in favor of a complete reformation of the Germanic Empire itself and therefore interpreted the secessionists in Jeverland as a separate movement altogether. As a consequence, there were no attempts to copy the Jever Revolution elsewhere in Germania.

After no more than a week, the Republic of Jeverland was defeated by the Germanian armed forces when the city of Jever fell and the Principality of Jeverland was later restored on February 15th, 1852. After the defeat of the Jever Revolution, many Germanian conservatives called for similar military action against the numerous spontaneous riots across the rest of the Germanic Empire. Gagern was openly and furiously in opposition to such calls, going as far as to give an impassioned speech before the House of Commons in which he denounced military action against rioters as treason to both the Germanic Empire and its people, with such drastic measures “surely condemning the sacred institutions of our people’s mighty empire to a fate shared with the fallen British Kingdom.” As the Germanian Riots of 1853 raged on, Heinrich von Gagern would organize meetings with both Empress Victoria and the PKU leadership to negotiate a resolution to the riots that would not end in bloodshed.

In their private meetings, Gagern would eventually persuade the Empress to publicly endorse his plan for the drafting of a Germanian declaration of rights, akin to the constitutional titles that already existed within the world’s various liberal democracies, from Riebeeckia to France to Columbia. With Victoria on Gagern’s side, it was only a matter of time until the Convention of Rights was organized in Hanover, with representatives from across Germania arriving to codify a declaration of rights into the Germanian constitution as a slew of amendments. Even the United Dominion of Riebeeckia would send an ambassador to the historic convention, with famed General Otto Bismarck being personally dispatched to Hanover by Chancellor Maartin Van Buren as an advisor from a Hanoverian Realm that had already had its own declaration of rights. After numerous days of debate, “The Amendment of Rights for the Germanic Man” was ratified by the Convention of Rights and then later implemented into the Germanian constitution with approval from both the Bundesrat and Empress on March 3rd, 1853.

With its ratification by the Germanian government, the Amendment of Rights guaranteed the freedoms of speech, assembly, petition, press, and religion (this was particularly important in a nation with a very distinct divide between Protestants and Catholics amongst its constituent monarchies) to all Germanian citizens (as was the case in the time period, however, these rights did not extend to colonial territories), while also enshrining the right to an eight-hour workday, the right to every Sunday as a national holiday, and the abolition of child labor as a way to appease disgruntled workers and populists following the uproar of the Great Crisis. The Amendment of Rights would also provide governmental change by giving the Bundesrat the ability to nominate and recall executive ministers, powers that had previously been exclusively reserved to the ruling Germanian monarch. The ratification of the Amendment of Rights did not end the Germanic Empire’s economic woes, and just like the rest of Europe, Germania would have to suffer the Decade of Despair for the next handful of years. However, what it did do is peacefully advance goals of the liberal and subsequent populist movements that defined much of 19th Century politics within Germania, thus moderately liberalizing the state and likely averting a civil war.

In the aftermath of the Convention of Rights, Heinrich von Gagern and the Tuisto Party’s goals moved towards promoting their vision of a new and distinctly Germanic national identity within the Empire. The program of Kulturgebaude (“Cultural building”) would encompass Germania for the next handful of years as Gagern promoted a resurgence in ancient Germanic tribal cultural and artistic elements through a combination of national art exhibitions, architectural programs, as well as a slew of new educational curriculum that highlighted the Germanic tribes. This latter element of Kulturgebaude was arguably the most influential, as it was through the new curriculum that ancient Germanic history, culture, and art were thrusted upon the psyche of Germanian schoolchildren. Even the ancient Germanic language was resurrected, as Common Germanic became widely taught, with the vast majority of Germanian children speaking at least some Common Germanic by 1860.

All programs of Kulturgebaude served the purpose of creating a unified national identity throughout the Germanic Empire, which was viewed by the Tuisto Party as a necessity in order to shift Germanian society away from orbiting around its aristocracy and instead around its people. While outdated in the eyes of a present day that saw the horrors of nationalism at its absolute worst throughout the Titanomachy, this philosophy was actually very commonplace throughout European monarchies in the 19th Century due to many of these states being founded upon the basis that the purpose of states was to serve as a divinely-ordained domain of a monarch. While the idea that states should serve as an apparatus to advance the rights of their people had emerged at this point, it was much more prominent in republican and communist nations where the value of popular sovereignty had no divine right to clash with. In conservative monarchies, the concept of states being the spheres of specific national identities aligned much better with monarchism as the monarchy was often interpreted as a part of this identity, therefore allowing for a form of nationalism that argued that the state should have an identity beyond that of the monarchy to revolve around to serve as both a means of advancing liberalism and preserving monarchism.

The mixture of 19th Century liberalism with nationalism as a tool of working around monarchism became the basis for a new school of liberal thought deemed heutigism, which advocated for a decline in social and economic inequality, the establishment of basic universal rights, increased access to education, a capitalist market, and the basis of the state becoming a national identity rather than aristocracy. The de facto ideology of the Tusito Party, the heutigist ideology would spread to neighboring absolute monarchies, such as Prussia-Poland and Russia, as its concepts were codified by TP statesmen and philosophers in Germania. Throughout the Decade of Despair and the following years, heutigism would become the predominant populist ideology throughout eastern Europe, as it was viewed by many as a solution to both the Decade of Despair and already abhorrent conditions for the general masses of Europe’s remaining absolute monarchies. For some intellectuals, heutigism won support for the ulterior motivation of forging national identities that harkened back to pre-Roman Paganism, with ancient Roman cultural influences becoming more controversial across Europe following the communist revolutions of the 18th Century that greatly admired the Roman Republic.

As the Germanic Empire gradually recovered from the Great Crisis, Heinrich von Gagern would turn to the question of what to do with the former colonial empire of the HOK. With the collapse of the conglomerate, all of its holdings in southeastern Asia and Australasia were immediately annexed into the Germanic Empire as colonies directly administered by Hanover, however, numerous statesmen and nobles within Germania did not want to suddenly directly manage such a large colonial empire. While the annexation of previously corporate territory had been something conducted once before when the VOC collapsed and its colonies were integrated into the direct rule of Hanover, acquiring the expensive colonies of the HOK during a global depression was not an appealing option. Some statesmen proposed that what had once been Hannoveraner Malaiisch would become an independent dominion of the House of Hanover ruled by its current colonial administration, however, this seemed unsustainable. Instead, a convention of Germanian, Riebeeckian, and Indian ambassadors was organized within Singapore to negotiate the partition of the HOK’s colonies in March 1853.

As the nation that had done the most fighting during the War of Malacca, was the closest to the Malay Archipelago, and was the least affected by the Great Crisis of 1852 out of the three participants of the Congress of Singapore, the Kingdom of India was in the best position to acquire territory from the remains of the HOK. With little fuss from foreign ambassadors, India was awarded Java, numerous smaller islands to the east, and northern Sumatra by the Congress. While the northernmost part of Indian Sumatra fell under the control of the restored Sultanate of Aceh as a princely state of the Kingdom of India, the rest of India’s new territory was directly administered and integrated into the central Indian government, just as territories invaded in the War of Indian Unification had been decades prior. Much of the region had once been within the sphere of influence of the Chola Dynasty many centuries prior, and King Krishnaraja Wodeyar III made sure to emphasize this legacy throughout the assimilation of his new holdings.

As for the United Dominion of Riebeeckia, the nation had much less authority in Southeast Asia and had suffered much more from the Great Crisis of 1852, however, Chancellor Maartin Van Buren nonetheless took interest in staking out a Riebeeckian holding within the highly lucrative region. The UDR was ultimately not rewarded much at the Congress of Singapore, however, it did nonetheless acquire the entirety of the island of Timor, which was definitely not something to scoff at. With infrastructure on the island already in place from its time as a Portuguese, Brazilian, and later HOK colony, the Timor Territory was able to be turned into a highly profitable trading port for the United Dominion, which found itself with close access to the markets of Asia, Australasia, and even the Pacific as a consequence. As for the rest of Hannoveraner Malaiisch, the colony would simply be transferred over to the Germanic Empire as the colony of Germanisch Malaiisch, which remained independent of the Germanic East Indies, thus dividing the Malay Archipelago into two separate Germanian colonies.

Far away from the Malay Archipelago, the nations of the Columbian Coast would face the effects of the Great Crisis just as severely as Europe. The Decade of Despair would more or less encompass the entirety of the region, with economic recessions being felt from Acadia to New Africa during the 1850s. However, for the most part, the Great Crisis of 1852 had little long-term effects on the Columbian Coast or, for that matter, much of the New World at all. Domestically, the nations of the region faced slight political upheaval as new leaders entered office in an attempt to solve the economic crisis, but there were no large ideological shifts faced in this region, and most of the economies in the New World hit by the Great Crisis had recovered well before the Decade of Despair ended for Europe. In the end, the biggest effect the Decade of Despair had on most nations along the Columbian Coast was that it accelerated the process of regional reliance on trading networks with Africa due to the continent barely being hit by the Great Crisis.

The exceptions to this rule were the Confederation of Columbia and the Republic of Virginia. Within Columbia, which had already undergone a dramatic shift in its political landscape two decades prior following a domestic recession in the late 1820s, the poorly-handled aftermath of the Great Crisis had a profound effect on the general election of 1852 and the subsequent political landscape of Columbia going into the prelude of the First Potomac War. Following the end of Prime Minister Robert Owen’s administration in 1841, New York MP Thurlow Weed was nominated by the National Republican Party for the prime ministry and narrowly beat New York City Mayor Samuel Tilden in the 1840 election. Being more socially moderate than many of his fellow National Republicans, Weed primarily focused on implementing a protectionist economic policy (tariffs against the Comintern were particularly prominent throughout his administration) and reinforcing the centralization of the Columbian economy. The protectionism of the Weed ministry would be particularly controversial, with many businesses throughout western Columbia frequently trading with Gallia Novum, thus causing Weed to lose his re-election bid to Joshua Reed Giddings of Pennsylvania, Prime Minister Owen’s former Minister of the Treasury.

Prime Minister Joshua Reed Giddings of the Confederation of Columbia.

The ministry of Giddings was more or less unremarkable, with a very large portion of his time being dedicated to “damage control” caused by the Weed ministry. For example, the first year of the Giddings administration was predominantly spent undoing the slew of tariffs implemented by his predecessor, with the undoing of harsh protectionist policies against Gallia Novum being a top priority. As the former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Giddings also took great interest in foreign policy throughout his ministry and would pursue building up both diplomatic and economic relations with the world beyond the Columbian Coast. Most notable of these agreements was the Treaty of Dover, in which the Confederation of Columbia and the Hanoverian Realms agreed to a reduction in trading barriers, a limitation on barriers for accessing ports, and the establishment of a non-aggression pact between the two parties present at the Treaty of Dover.

While many of Giddings’ actions were ultimately beneficial to the economy of the Confederation of Columbia, this of course does not necessarily translate into a beneficial situation for the people. While corporations and merchants thrived, the Giddings administration paid very little attention to the stagnating wages of Columbian workers and, despite a handful of attempts by his ministry, the highly centralized concentration of wealth financed by the Bank of Columbia that was a priority for the Weed administration ultimately stayed in place, in part due to a National Republican majority within the House of Commons following the 1846 midterm election. Joshua Reed Giddings was a far cry from the aivd populism and egalitarianism of Robert Owen, and as such lost much of the support of the Columbian working class that had so often voted for the Liberty Party throughout the last two decades. As a consequence, Giddings would lose his re-election bid in 1848 to William Buchanan, an outspoken social conservative, protectionist, and Thurlow Weed’s former ambassador to New Granada.

Buchanan would be the man that would lead the Confederation of Columbia into the Decade of Despair.

Prime Minister William Buchanan of the Confederation of Columbia.

The son of a wealthy merchant and educated woman who had grown up in what would eventually become the easternmost reaches of the province of Howe, Buchanan would first enter politics in 1816 upon being elected to the Appalachian provincial House of Commons as a Whig, where he would push for, among other things, private deregulation, increased banking centralization, and tariffs on goods imported from Gallia Novum. Six years later, William Buchanan was elected to the national House of Commons, where he would continue to affiliate with the Whig Party up until the Panic of 1828 and his subsequent switch over to the Anti-Masonic Party. Buchanan would rise through the ranks of the Anti-Masonists throughout the Ritner administration and would eventually wind up becoming the Leader of the Opposition following the 1836 general election.

Upon being nominated by the National Republican Party for the prime ministry in 1848, Buchanan was, for better or worse, one of the most notorious members of the party in all of Columbia. A far cry from the moderation of Thurlow Weed, Buchanan would promote one of the most socially conservative agendas in Columbian history by severely limiting immigration (immigration from Great Britain and France, as well as the immigration of any Catholics, was completely banned by his administration), providing tax benefits to Protestant churches, and vetoing any national programs aimed at increasing social equality, particularly amongst women. Buchanan was also avidly in favor of tariffs and would, with a National Republican parliament on his side, reintroduce many of the protectionist policies implemented on the Comintern by Weed and repealed by Giddings, thus creating a sort of tug of war regarding tariffs between the National Republicans and Libertists.

An ambitious politician who sought to enforce his reactionary agenda upon the Confederation of Columbia, Buchanan believed that he was to become one of the greatest prime ministers in Columbian history, aided by a National Republican parliament, even after a handful of seats were lost to the Liberty Party. Of course, this was not to be. The Great Crisis of 1852 had to occur at the worst possible time for William Buchanan, with the November 10th election being a little over a month away from the total collapse of the global economy that Columbia was very much integrated into. By this point, the Liberty Party had already chosen its candidate, egalitarian MP Orestes Brownson of New York, who was quick to criticize Buchanan for his poor handling of the Columbian economy and called on a dramatic economic and political shift to combat the fallout of the Great Crisis. With little opportunity spared to implement recovery methods as the depression gradually got worse by the day, William Buchanan would handedly lose the 1852 election, thus handing the prime ministry over to the eccentric Orestes Brownson on January 20th, 1853.

Prime Minister Orestes Brownson of the Confederation of Columbia.

Born to Loyalist farmers originally from Vermont that had moved to New York during the Wars of Dissolution, Brownson had very different origins than that of his predecessor, William Buchanan. Receiving little formal education, Brownson briefly got himself involved with Universalism early into his adulthood, going as far as to become the editor of a Universalist journal. However, this period of his life was short-lived, as Brownson eventually began to express disillusionment with his own religious beliefs and would leave the Universalist church prior to leaving for New York City. It was in New York City that Brownson would get involved in politics by joining the Working Men’s Association, a socialist political party formed by a collection of trade unionists in New York who adhered to the ideals of Charles Fourier. While only focusing on electoral activities within the New York province, the Working Men’s Association saw impressive success in provincial and urban elections, with Orestes Brownson actually being elected to the New York City Council in 1829.

From here, Brownson would become a prominent leader of the Working Men’s Association, which was collectively becoming a prominent force for labor rights in and of itself. In 1834, the party would vote to join the Libertists due to negotiations with New York Liberty Party members, who also happened to support much of the Working Men’s Association’s platform, which was reflected in Prime Minister Robert Owen’s policies, and Brownson would subsequently run for a seat in the House of Commons on behalf of the Liberty Party in the 1834 general election. In Parliament, Brownson would be a staunch ally of Robert Owen and consistently advocated for increased labor rights throughout both the Owen ministry and subsequent administrations. MP Orestes Brownson carried the torch of the age of Robert Owen’s radicalism through the reigns of two National Republicans, even as the Liberty Party consolidated around Giddings’ moderation. As the Libertist base grew tired of the increasingly gilded policies of moderate party leadership, Orestes Brownson would thus ride in on a wave of working class support to the 1852 Liberty Party prime ministerial nomination, which he in turn rode to victory alongside general outrage at the National Republican handling of the Great Crisis and defeated incumbent Prime Minister William Buchanan.

Upon entering the prime ministry in January 1853, Orestes Brownson was faced with recovering the Confederation of Columbia from the greatest global economic crisis since the 17th Century. Prime Minister Brownson would quickly call on the immediate dissolution of many of the monopolistic banks and corporations that had collectively lost billions of sceats and sent Columbia careening into the Decade of Despair, with the Liberty Party-dominated Parliament approving of this agenda by passing the Acts Against Monopolism, as the prime minister branded them, throughout the late winter and early spring of 1853, which dissolved the largest corporations in the Confederation into much smaller corporate successors, with Brownson hoping that such actions would prevent large industrial entities from infringing on labor rights and accumulating enough wealth to have a dangerous effect on the Columbian economy. Furthermore, many of the Acts Against Monopolism effectively nationalized much of the wealth and resources of large corporations as a means to fund the greater ambitions of the Brownson ministry.

These resources were in turn used for a number of recovery programs put forth by Brownson to pull the Confederation of Columbia out of the horrors of the Decade of Despair. The first of these programs was the Yeoman’s Act of 1853, which would redistribute acres of land seized from wealthy individuals to poorer families, particularly those who had been economically hit hard by the Great Crisis. Serving as a means to both aid those struggling from the fallout of the Great Crisis and to chip away at the social power of the oligarchic ruling class of Columbia, the Yeoman’s Act established a program in which families and individuals would apply for plots of land of up to 160 acres to occupy as personal property until one’s death. The Yeoman’s Act would narrowly pass through Parliament and was ratified into law on March 2nd, 1853 by Prime Minister Brownson in the face of ardent National Republican opposition. Despite being a partisan issue of the day, the Yeoman’s Act proved to be highly successful and popular amongst the general public, for whom the program became a pivotal means of providing relief from the greatest economic catastrophe in centuries. With Libertist support surging as a consequence, “Every Man a Yeoman” in obvious reference to the Act became a rallying cry for Orestes Brownson during his 1856 re-election bid.

After the passage of the Yeoman’s Act, the Brownson ministry continued to push for economic relief, including wage boosts, continued anti-monopolization practices, and the nationalization of numerous banks, all of which became the consistent themes of legislation throughout the Brownson administration, as such actions were viewed as necessary for economic recovery and the overall ideological goals of the Liberty Party. Furthermore, Brownson, who admired the efforts of Heinrich von Gagern to reign in reckless market leadership via government stock exchange regulation, would implement a similar policy within the Confederation of Columbia via the National Regulation Act in May 1853. However, as the effects of the Great Crisis began to calm down, Orestes Brownson would begin to heavily promote communalism and education reform as a substantial priority of his administration. After all, before the global economy had collapsed, a pivotal aspect of Brownson’s campaign had been communalism for the sake of promoting egalitarian prosperity. With things finally stabilizing and the public on his side (especially after the expansion of the Liberty Party to contain a majority of seats in both houses of Parliament following the 1854 midterm election), Orestes Brownson decided to advance such policies when the wind was to his back.

Education reforms initially began as slightly increasing funding for Public education programs, which was no doubt appreciated by Brownson’s supporters, however, the goals of the prime minister were far more ambitious than funding increases. In a policy borrowed from his days within the Working Men’s Association, Orestes Brownson envisioned a communal education system in which local community councils would democratically manage educational affairs with input from students, teachers, and the wider community alike. Furthermore, Brownson believed that schools could serve as the backbone for generating public discourse and concluded that his community-managed assemblies would promote this. The idea that schools could generally become the backbone for overall communal living taking effect was greatly admired by Brownson and fueled his call for schools to, among other things, distribute meals to students, provide community service, and invest in public libraries.

These grandiose ambitions of Brownson to turn the education system into the sword of communalism would be hotly debated even within his own party, as many moderate Libertists were extremely hesitant to enact explicitly communalist policies. Radical populism had gripped the Liberty Party for decades at this point, but hardline communalism was something that the classical liberal old guard of the party was extremely hesitant about, even as Robert Owen-esque populists like Brownson made up a majority of the Libertist leadership and base at this point. It would take Robert Owen’s eldest son, one of Pennsylvania’s most prominent MPs, and Orestes Brownson’s minister of education, Robert Dale Owen, to pass Brownson’s educational plan into effect. An ardent supporter of communalism himself, Minister of Education Owen was firmly behind the proposals of the prime minister and would passionately advocate for them in Parliament, subtly build up public support, and gradually force the Libertist old guard to concede to the approval of Brownson’s education plans. One by one, these communalist bills slipped through Parliament and were ratified by the prime minister only for their implementation to be presided over by Robert Dale Owen. For overseeing these programs from their conception to their enactment, the Brownson ministry’s numerous communalist educational bills were nicknamed the Dale Acts.

Minister of Education Robert Dale Owen of the Confederation of Columbia.

Going into 1856, Orestes Brownson was very popular amongst the Columbian people and appeared to be able to ride a wave of populist support to a decisive re-election. As the masses rallied around Brownson’s re-election bid, the National Republican Party would nominate former Delaware Governor William Tharp, who ran a campaign advocating for a return to the pre-Brownson status quo, a reinforcement of tariffs upon the Comintern, and a foreign policy that would economically and politically isolate Columbia from European affairs as to severe ties from the failing global economy. Tharp campaigned well, but after the very successful first term of Orestes Brownson, which had overseen gradual economic recovery and extensive welfare programs, very few wanted a return to the National Republic status quo that had most recently led the Confederation of Columbia into the Decade of Despair. Therefore, Orestes Brownson was handedly re-elected to the prime ministership in 1856, winning a stable majority in every province except Delaware, where Tharp narrowly emerged victorious on home turf.

The second term of Prime Minister Orestes Brownson would be much less eventful than the last, as Columbia was on a steady path to economic recovery at this point and the Libertists believed that simply a continuation of the relief programs of the last four years would safely lead Columbia out of the Decade of Despair. The Yeoman’s Act was extended and Minister of Education Robert Dale Owen would continue to preside over the nationwide implementation of the Dale Acts while Parliament provided his ministry with increased funding. There were, however, a few pivotal new policies introduced in the otherwise quiet second term of the Brownson ministry. In September 1857, the Ministry of Agriculture would be created to overlook national agricultural regulation, production, and policies. As much of the land redistributed in the Yeoman’s Act was farmland, much of the early responsibilities of the Ministry of Agricultural revolved around the redistribution system of said Act and making sure that farmland up for redistribution was arable to begin with.

The far more important action undertaken by Orestes Brownson during his second term was the creation of numerous new provinces, something that had not been done since the secession of Appalachia from Pennsylvania in 1809. By the 1850s, it was clear that political power within Columbia had effectively consolidated around the provinces of New York and Pennsylvania, which were much larger and more populated, than New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Howe. Just by looking at the list of prime ministers, it was clear that a solid majority were from New York alone. While many didn’t see the point of further partitioning Pennsylvania after the establishment of Appalachia out of its westernmost reaches, New York remained very large and very populated and calls for its dissolution into smaller provinces had emerged every now and then over the last few decades.

The partition of the province of New York was something that Prime Minister Orestes Brownson had never really advocated for (he was, after all, from New York), however, in June 1858, National Republican MP Fernando Wood, a resident of Manhattan and long time proponent advocate for the increased autonomy of New York City as a means to increase its economic influence, would propose a bill to the House of Commons that would establish the Province of New Liverpool out of Manhattan, Long Island, and Staten Island. While Wood’s proposal likely wouldn’t have gotten far in local New York politics, by introducing it to the national Parliament, which held the authority to establish new provinces with the approval of the prime minister, he managed to interest numerous MPs of both the National Republican and Liberty parties who sought to weaken New York’s power within the Confederation. As the New Liverpool proposal began to be hotly debated within the House of Commons, local secessionist movements that endorsed said proposal also began to emerge throughout New York City and Long Island, thus generating local support.

After lengthy debate, the Bill for the Declaration of the Province of New Liverpool narrowly passed through both houses of Parliament on July 6th, 1858 despite the protests of Albany and would subsequently be ratified by Prime Minister Orestes Brownson, who had more or less remained quiet on the subject but conceded that the establishment of a new province from New York was justified by local support. Therefore, once the national Columbian government recognized the Province of New Liverpool and a provincial constitution was ratified on July 21st, 1858, the seventh province of the Confederation of Columbia was officially created. The creation of a new province by Fernando Wood from New York opened up the door for groups across the province’s frontier, who were disgruntled with their treatment by Albany, to call for secessionist movements of their own. In the end, a total of three more provinces would be created from New York. The first of these would be the Province of Haudenosaunee, which was established on January 3rd, 1859, and was more or less the Iroquois Confederacy, as the white Columbians referred to it, being granted provincehood. A few months later, the remaining western reaches of New York would secede and form the Province of Erie on August 12th, 1859.

While the Confederation of Columbia would quickly recover from the Great Crisis and adopted a new domestic political situation in the process, its neighbor to the south was a different story. Like Columbia, the Republic of Virginia was to hold a general election in 1852, with President-General Edward Houston of the nationalist Washingtonian Party running for his fifth term, for the first time in Virginian history since the days of Henry Lee III, unopposed. In the fifteen years since he first assumed power in January 1837, President-General Edward Houston had militarized Virginia into the state with the third largest standing armies in the New World behind New Granada and Mexico (this was, however, admittedly helped by the rapid reduction in the sizes of the Peruvian and Brazilian armed forces by the Treaty of Belem) an industrialized economic powerhouse, and a heavily centralized regime in which the Washingtonian Party had no chance of losing power. With the Washingtonians and military effectively jointly managing the apparatus of state by nominating and financing the political campaigns of sympathetic officials, the Republic of Virginia had effectively succumbed to oligarchic republicanism while the Centrist and Liberal-Democratic parties gave up on national politics and focused their resources on local affairs.

As the Republic of Virginia fell under the sway of Houston’s regime, so to did it fall under the sway of the Washingtonian Party’s nationalist cult of personality that revolved around the Forefathers of the Columbian Uprising, particularly General George Washington, who Edward Houston often referred to as the “Great Martyr.” To the Washingtonian Party, these men had fought for the cause of a great American Republic in the form of the United States of America and it was the duty of the Republic of Virginia to carry on this cause that the Forefathers had died for. The “Lost Cause” mentality, as this philosophy began to be known as, was the driving force for much of Virginia’s political ideology throughout much of the Houston administration, and this was reflected in education, cultural rhetoric, and even architecture. Perhaps the most notable physical example of the Lost Cause was the Pillar of the Great Martyr, a titanic monument built in honor of George Washington nearby Mount Vernon, his former residence, that began construction in 1839 and, upon its completion in 1867, was briefly the tallest structure on Earth.

The Pillar of the Great Martyr.

The effects of the Lost Cause mentality extended beyond monuments to fallen revolutionaries and the glorification of the United States of America in the textbooks of Virginian school children. The ideology was very much a driving force in both foreign political affairs for the Republic of Virginia, with the interpretation of the Confederation of Columbia as a successor state to the Kingdom of Great Britain reigniting hostile relations between the two states after heads of government from both Columbia and Virginia preceding Houston had spent decades attempting to secure decent relations. This never translated into expansionism to unite the Columbian Coast under a single banner, just as it had been during the days of the United States, due to Edward Houston prioritizing the buildup of domestic power in advance and envisioning Virginia’s role as that of a guiding force for Columbian republics anyway, however, it did cause Virginia to place a heavy focus on getting what had once been the Union of Atlantic States to be economically reliant on the Republic of Virginia as Houston’s foreign ambassadors consistently snuffed out foreign competition via trading pacts and tariff reductions.

During the Houston administration, the only expansion the Republic of Virginia would see was in its small colonial empire in West Africa, which had proven to be immensely lucrative since its establishment in the late 1830s. Expansion throughout much of the 1840s was limited to slight border reinforcement, however, around 1848 the Bate Empire, which was situated between the Virginian West Africa and Ashanti Empire and was to the north of Cote du Poivre, began to limit trading relations with Virginia as Imperial Ashanti Company made moves to economically influence the Bate Empire into the orbit around the ever-growing and ever-industrializing Ashanti Empire. The coalescing of the Bate Empire into the Ashanti sphere of influence was critical, as the state’s capital of Kankan was a pivotal trading center in the region, and the growing exclusion of Virginian West Africa from trade with Kankan would effectively cut off Virginia from any fostering of profitable trading relations with the region. In the eyes of President-General Edward Houston, this required conquest to ensure direct rule over Kankan and thus Virginian control over the vital trading center.

The Bate War would begin on October 3rd, 1848 and was, for all intents and purposes, a quick and mostly painless war for Virginia. The Bate Empire may have been better equipped than it was less than a decade ago thanks to trading with the industrialized Ashanti Empire, but it still stood no chance against the vastly larger and more modernized Army of Virginia, and the only chance of survival for the Bate Empire was intervention on their behalf from Ashanti, which never arrived, as the empire was still consumed in the Kwakan Wars and didn’t want to waste resources in a war of attrition against Virginia. The leading Virginian military officer in the Bate War was General Richard Randolph Lee, the youngest of former President-General Henry Lee III’s three sons, who had used both his heritage and military capabilities to rise to the top of the ranks of the Army of Virginia, being second only to the president-generalship by 1848. Lee made quick work of the Bate Empire by leading a rapid and aggressive offensive that mounted higher casualties than he would have liked but nonetheless ended up winning the Bate War for Virginia in less than a month, with the Bate leadership unconditionally capitulating following Richard R Lee’s decisive victory at the Battle of Kankan, circa October 27th, 1848.

The subsequent result of the Bate War was the establishment of the Gates Colony (named in honor of Continental Army General Horatio Gates) out of, in the words of the Gates Colony Charter, “the territory previously encompassed by the Bate Empire and all other surrounding territories currently occupied by the Army of Virginia.” The establishment of the Gates Colony in the middle of a crucial trading region would cause the neighboring New Occitanians and Ashanti to question the sudden Virginian takeover and push forward their own claims in the area, thus prompting local Virginian colonial authorities to organize a conference at Kankan to partition what remained of the land surrounding the Gold Coast between Virginia, Ashanti, and New Occitania. Signed on December 1st, 1848, the Treaty of Kankan would recognize a handful of westward Ashanti claims, extended the New Occitanian colonies of Cote du Poivre and Cape Mesurado northwards, and, arguably most significantly, recognized the Gates Colony and solidified its borders. As an added compensation for what was basically the handover of a crucial trading center to the Republic of Virginia, all three signatories also agreed to lower tariffs on each other and Virginia agreed to not restrict access to Kankan, except during any potential wartime between the signatories.

The Virginian state of affairs going into the 1852 president-generalship election and the Decade of Despair was more or less the one that had been forged at the Treaty of Kankan. No expansion had occurred since Richard Randolph Lee’s conquest of the Bate Empire while foreign and domestic affairs more or less remained consistent throughout Edward Houston’s fourth term. The Virginian general election was held on September 30th, 1852, days before the collapse of the Hanover East India Company and over a month before any of the effects of the Great Crisis would really hit Virginia. Not that the Great Crisis would have affected Houston’s chances anyway, given that he had built up what bordered on a cult of personality at this point and ran unopposed, thus making the 1852 president-generalship election effectively meaningless. Once the Great Crisis did impact the Republic of Virginia, things would begin to change. In a matter of days, the prosperous economy that Edward Houston had spent over a decade constructing came crashing down as the president-general frantically churned out bailouts and dissolved banks that were only losing money. And of course, always an admirer of militarization, President-General Houston would encourage joining the Virginian armed forces, which would provide sustainable food and income to its soldiers.

For the most part, Edward Houston’s response to the Great Crisis was supported fairly well by the people of Virginia. What remained of the Liberal Party made a bit of a resurgence in support, but the power of the Washingtonian Party was too strong to collapse under the pressure of even an economic depression at this point. But at the end of the day, Edward Houston would not oversee the recovery of the Republic of Virginia from the Decade of Despair and would only witness the entry of Virginia into the largest economic crisis of the 19th Century. On January 19th, 1853, as the president-general was giving a speech to a vast crowd of supporters in front of the Capitol building, the residence of the House of Burgesses, a lone man by the name of Francis White Johnson discreetly pushed to the front of the crowd, where he stood just mere feet away from Houston’s podium. Having recently lost his lumber mill to the Great Crisis and given no compensation from the national government except pressure to join the military, the disgruntled Johnson rapidly pulled out a pistol and, in a matter of seconds, fired towards the capital. As the startled crowd screamed at the sound of a single gunshot and police officers tackled Francis White Johnson to the ground, the assassin looked up and realized that he had accomplished his task.

President-General Edward Houston had been shot and killed.

President-General Edward Houston just after being assassinated.

With Edward Houston dead, sixteen years of the Republic of Virginia having one ruler came to a brutal end. In the case of the president-generalship being vacant, according to the constitution of Virginia, it was the duty of the House of Burgesses to elect the next president-general, but this would of course take time to organize and conduct, and in the meantime the line of succession for the interim president-generalship would pass down the military chain of command, which meant that General Richard Randolph Lee suddenly found himself leading the Republic of Virginia following the assassination of Edward Houston. As the leading military officer, who had recently returned from a decisive victory, of a highly militaristic state, Lee already found himself with strong popular and political support behind his administration, which was especially needed during the time of a great national crisis.

In order to combat the Great Crisis, President-General Ricard R Lee would quickly set up numerous military infrastructure projects focused on the construction of mechanized infantry (based off of the designs of the Kingdom of New Granada utilized during the Amazon War), naval, and aerial forces as a means to employ those that had fallen victim to the Decade of Despair. All the while, Lee navigated his way through a chaotic political situation by reinforcing his already strong support within the armed forces and amassing support within the Washingtonian Party. This was done in order to get the House of Burgesses to elect the power-hungry Richard R Lee to the president-generalship, as Lee believed that his centralized military authority was not only necessary to pull Virginia out of the Decade of Despair, but necessary to achieve his Pan-Columbian vision of rebuilding the extent of the United States of America. Surely enough, Lee’s attempt to remain the president-general was successful, and the House of Burgesses almost unanimously elected the bold general on February 19th, 1853.

With his back to the wind and the Washingtonian oligarchy behind his rule, President-General Richard Randolph Lee would start to tighten his group on the Republic of Virginia by centralizing his authority. Rival military and political authorities were ousted from power in favor of ideological allies while the House of Burgesses was pressured to pass legislation that turned Virginia into an increasingly autocratic state. In May 1853, the Sedition Act, which banned the publication of anything at odds with the leadership of Lee, the Virginian armed forces, or the Washingtonian Party, was ratified and in June 1853 habeas corpus was suspended via the Security Act. With the aforementioned legislation giving the president-general the power to effectively purge political dissidents without any legal consequences, Richard R Lee would culminate his republican seizure of power by pushing the Executive Act through the House of Burgesses in November 1853, which granted the president-generalship to pass bills without approval from the legislative branch and eliminated the legislative branch’s ability to overturn the veto of the executive branch with a three-fourths majority vote. With the passage of the Executive Act, Lee had turned himself into a de facto autocrat and was all the bit closer to achieving his Pan-Columbian ambitions.

Over the next year, Robert Randolph Lee would exert his newfound power upon the Republic of Virginia to ensure both the total loyalty of the political ruling class and the armed forces and the promotion of his Pan-Columbian ideology, the latter of which was spread through Washingtonian Party manifestos distributed to households and schools alike to enforce the mindset that it was the “divine destiny” of Virginia to unite the Columbian people under a single banner as a powerful continental empire that would eliminate all remaining traces of the long-forgotten British Empire in favor of a Virginian-esque culture and society. This was partnered with continued militarization programs (empire-building is never a peaceful endeavor) that were unprecedented even by the standards of Edward Houston’s aggressively militant administration. The length of time all Virginian men were required to serve in the military was extended from three years to six, oligarchic corporate boards were assembled with the purpose of directing the development of military infrastructure, and the assets seized from failing corporations following the Great Crisis were utilized to finance the buildup of the Aeronavy of Virginia.

The 1854 Virginian general election would be little more than an imitation of democracy, as the Liberal Party had been purged from the apparatus of state altogether while all Washingtonian Party candidates had been selected by the party’s oligarchy upon which President-General Lee sat atop. Nonetheless, with many remaining opponents to Lee within the House of Burgesses either being ousted via primaries or refusing to run for re-election altogether, the strength of the tyrant of Richmond was further solidified, and it was after the general election of September 30th, 1854 that Richard Randolph Lee made his final move to reign supreme over Virginia and finally begin his campaign of imperialistic divine destiny. On October 14th, 1854, President-General Richard Randolph Lee would rise to the top of a podium (one that notably had much more security surrounding it so as to not repeat the mistake of 1853) in front of a crowd in Williamsburg. It was here, in the former capital of colonial Virginia, that Lee would speak the Williamsburg Address to the Republic of Virginia in which he declared that the time had finally come for the Virginian nation to embrace its divine destiny.

“Three score and eighteen years ago our Yankee Forefathers sought to bring forth on this continent, a new Empire of the West, conceived in liberty from foreign tyranny, and dedicated to the union of the Columbian states. However, the Great Martyr George Washington was tragically slain in the crusade for this new empire and the Perfidious Albion would encase the North American continent in its chains of oppression yet again. But my fellow Virginians, we mustn’t forget our victory in the righteous crusade for independence of 1797, a crusade fought in continuation of the legacy of the Great Martyr against what remained of Perfidious Albion upon this very continent.

Now we are engaged in a period of great turmoil as our Continental brothers find themselves divided under petty differences, and while our mighty nation remains true to the values of our Yankee Forefathers, our neighbors continue to squabble amongst one another, and no Continental unity can long endure. We therefore are called to a great battle-field of the next war for the fate of Columbia. We have been called by our Forefathers and the Lord himself to pursue Virginia’s Divine Destiny, a noble duty that shall end the squabbles that plague this continent once and for all. By taking up the duty of our Divine Destiny, we shall carry on the legacy of our Yankee Forefathers, many of whom gave their lives eons ago so that a single Columbian nation might live. It is altogether necessary that we should carry on this legacy in the oncoming crusade for the fate of the North American continent.

It therefore is for us the living, we who welcome the journey that must be undertaken in the name of our Divine Destiny, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought who fought for the long-envisioned Empire of the West have thus far so nobly advanced. It is for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that our fallen Forefathers shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have give birth to a new and invincible empire—and that the dream of those who have come before us, from the Great Martyr George Washington to President-General Edward Houston, shall not perish from the earth.

If we are to dedicate ourselves to the great task of accomplishing our Divine Destiny, then we must recognize that we must dedicate ourselves to forging the nation that shall best lead us to victory in our grand crusade. History has shown time and time again that decentralized republics, no matter how noble their intentions, cannot succeed in the pursuit of great empire-building. My fellow Virginians, our Divine Destiny calls on us to build an empire, and every empire requires an emperor to sit atop its throne. There are undeniable gifts of imperial means of governance that we mustn’t reject, and the time has therefore come for a Yankee Emperor to lead us to a glorious victory. As my family has been dedicated to fighting for our Divine Destiny since the age of the Great Martyr, my fellow Virginians, I humbly request that, with consent from the House of Burgesses, I become the first Yankee Emperor. For the Divine Destiny!”

-President-General Richard Randolph Lee of the Republic of Virginia’s Williamsburg Address

As the crowd of fervent nationalists assembled at Williamsburg erupted into applause at the call by the president-general to declare himself the emperor of a continent-spanning empire, the days of the Republic of Virginia became numbered. The following days would be spent forging propaganda endorsing the declaration of a Continental Empire, as Richard R Lee already had the political authority to declare himself emperor and simply wanted to ensure that popular support was decisively on his side before doing so. On November 1st, 1854, the fateful day finally arrived. The president-general called upon an assembly of the House of Burgesses to vote on implementing a new constitution for Virginia that would replace the half-century old Republic with the Holy Continental Empire, a highly aristocratic federation of monarchies tied together by the centralized autocracy of its emperor. With the House of Burgesses being little more than a cabal of Richard R Lee’s loyalist advisors at this point, the constitution of the Holy Continental Empire was ratified unanimously, thus forging a state that would define the next two decades of North American history.

Flag of the Holy Continental Empire.

Before the Wars of Reunification began, the Holy Continental Empire (HCE) was actually politically very similar to the Republic of Virginia. The passage of legislation that had turned Richard Randolph Lee into a de facto dictator during his president-generalship meant that the only change necessary to establish him as an autocratic monarch was the transformation of his position into a hereditary one held for life. There were, however, a handful of other pivotal changes within the constitution of the HCE that made its government distinct from its predecessor. For starters, as the name implied, the Holy Continental Empire was an explicitly Christian state, thus repealing the guarantee of freedom of religion from the days of the Republic of Virginia in favor of a theocratic institution that Richard R Lee viewed as pivotal to the Pan-Columbian national identity. The HCE was also federally divided into constituent monarchies, defined as “electorates,” which could generally administer domestic affairs however they pleased, as long as said administration did not contradict Imperial laws.

There were some exceptions to this rule, as some electorates held varying degrees of autonomy from the central monarchy. Some electorates, for example, were ruled by the same monarch as the entirety of the Holy Continental Empire, thus meaning that they were de facto directly ruled by the central government. Alternatively, the Sahelian Protectorates of Virginian West Africa, which were integrated into the Holy Continental Empire shortly after its formation as electorates, only ceded foreign, militaristic, and economic affairs to the Imperial regime. The Continental legislative assembly was also substantially altered from its predecessor, the House of Burgesses. The Imperial Continental Congress was divided into a lower house, the House of Delegates, which was more or less a carbon copy of its unicameral predecessor and was, in theory at least, designed around popular representation, and an upper house, the House of Lords, which consisted of two representatives appointed by executive of each electorate.

Of course, at the center of the entirety of the Holy Continental Empire was its emperor, none other than Richard I of the House of Lee himself. As the ultimate executive of the HCE who also served as the reigning absolute monarch of three electorates, the Kingdom of Virginia, the Kingdom of Lee, and the Principality of Gates (the colony of Washington City was integrated directly into the Virginian electorate), Emperor Richard held supreme authority over the core territories of his empire and would rule over them with an iron fist. In order to turn his already very aristocratic and powerful family into literal nobility, Richard I would cede his relatives noble titles and would hand a select few positions of power as his representatives to Lee and Gates that would preside over day-to-day affairs in the name of His Majesty. After centuries of holding power in Virginia, the family now ruled over the state as their effective personal domain, with Richard Randolph Lee sitting upon his self-constructed throne of absolute power.

The age of Emperor Richard had begun.

Emperor Richard of the Holy Continental Empire.

Shortly after the declaration of the Holy Continental Empire, Emperor Richard would mobilize forces against the Appalachian Mountain Republic, as the first target of the Wars of Reconstruction in the name of divine destiny. On February 2nd, 1855 an ultimatum was sent from Richmond to Nashville, which demanded that Appalachia recognize Richard’s brother, Sydney Washington Lee, as their monarch. There was of course, no way that the Appalachian government would hand over its power to the HCE’s emerging dynasty, and Emperor Richard knew this, as his ultimatum to Appalachian President Lazarus Whitehead Powell was little more than a means for the Holy Continental Empire to secure a casus belli to declare war on its western neighbor. After seventy-two hours, the ultimatum went without any response and, in a speech to the Imperial Continental Congress, Emperor Richard would announce his intent to declare war upon the Appalachian Mountain Republic on February 5th, 1855.

The Appalachian War, or, as the HCE advertised it, the First War of Reconstruction, was a quick endeavor. The Appalachian mountain range did prove to serve as an effective obstacle for Richard’s forces, which he had recently named the Imperial Continental Army (ICA), to push through, but the HCE ultimately had much greater manpower than the Appalachian Mountain Republic and gradually made its way through the rough terrain and into northern Appalachia, with Lexington being secured by the ICA on April 11th, 1855, subsequently becoming a launching point for further Yankee incursions. More important to achieving victory for the HCE than its larger manpower, however, was its technological advantage. The Ohio River was filled with heavily armored Imperial Continental Navy (ICN) ships, which obliterated the lackluster naval forces of Appalachia with quick ease. On top of this, it would be in the Appalachian War that the ICN first utilized ironclad warships, an infamous staple of the First Potomac War, during a conflict. Having begun being designed following the Amazon War, in which similar iron-hulled warships were constructed by both New Granada and Brazil (although both sides rarely used them, as such technology was still in its infancy), by 1855, the ICN had plenty of ironclad ships and used only a handful to dominate the Ohio River and sink the Appalachian navy into the abyss.

On top of the usage of ironclad warships to decisively occupy the Ohio River and thus seize control of Appalachian settlements along the waterway, the Holy Continental Empire put the Imperial Continental Aeronavy (ICAN), which Richard R Lee had been particularly keen on building up throughout his reign over Virginia and later the HCE, to good use. While the Appalachian Mountain Republic barely possessed any aircraft and the ones it did have were managed by its army rather than a separate branch of the Appalachian armed forces, the ICAN was amongst the most sophisticated aeronavies in the world, having been built up over many years to ensure that the Holy Continental Empire would rule the clouds. Steam-powered airships had been commonplace within industrialized military forces since the days of the War of Indian Unification circa the 1830s, and the HCE armed forces had been sure to continue to develop this technology, alongside very early electric-powered vehicles, as airships became larger, faster, and able to carrier larger equipment, including aerial bombardments and organ guns. With some of the most effective airship models in the world, a diverse array of deadly aeronavy forces would become as common of an occurrence as clouds in the sky of the war-ravaged Appalachian Mountain Republic, which was constantly bombed by Yankee forces.

The HCAS Hancock, the first fully controllable aerial warship, which was used for reconnaissance missions and bombing runs, circa March 1855.

To the Holy Continental Empire, the Appalachian War was little more than a propaganda stunt to test out military technology and bolster public support for the Wars of Reconstruction. To the Appalachian Mountain Republic, the Appalachian War was total destruction the likes of which North America had never before witnessed. The aggressively relentless bombardment of Appalachia, which often targeted populated centers of strategic importance, was often condemned by the neighboring international community as nothing short of barbaric carnage. Concordia and Gallia Novum both levied limited sanctions on the HCE, which was already beginning to be perceived as an increasingly rogue state in the region, while Prime Minister Orestes Brownson, despite not wanting to harm foreign relations during a period of great domestic economic instability, issued a letter personally to Emperor Richard urging him to call off the aerial bombardment of civilian targets. “If what the Appalachian Nation claims is true,” wrote Brownson, “this tactic has brought upon a fierce storm of fire and bloodshed. Only in Hell does it rain fire; we need not bring this torment to Earth as well.”

Of course, these condemnations from the international community were ignored by Emperor Richard I, who embraced the brutality of the century of imperialism with open arms. As the Holy Continental Empire dug deeper into the Appalachian Mountain Republic, defeat was becoming inevitable for Powell’s fledgling state. This didn’t, however, stop the people of Appalachia from relentlessly fighting the scourge of divine destiny. It would be during the Appalachian War that some of the first ever anti-aircraft weapons were developed, with one-pounder guns being modified to shoot upwards as horse-drawn wagons carried them off to the frontlines. These early anti-aircraft guns were highly makeshift and could not turn the tides of the Appalachian War (not to mention many airships just flew at higher altitudes to evade gunfire), however, they did boost morale in an otherwise defeated state. In the end, the fall of the Appalachian Mountain Republic was unavoidable. After the ICA emerged victorious at the Battle of Bowling Green on March 3rd, 1855, the Appalachian armed forces began to capitulate, and as aerial warships began to bomb Nashville, President Lazarus W Powell decided to accept that there was no saving Appalachia and unconditionally surrendered to the Holy Continental Empire on March 8th, 1855.

The Treaty of Lexington was simple enough, and prioritized the complete integration of Appalachia into the HCE. Territory once claimed by colonial Virginia (albeit never really controlled due to the Proclamation Line of 1763) was annexed directly by the Kingdom of Virginia, whereas the remaining southern Appalachian territory that encompassed Nashville became a new Continental electorate, the Dominion of Appalachia, with Sydney Washington Lee being crowned the king of Appalachia. The quick Appalachian War was thus a decisive victory for the Holy Continental Empire, which had substantially expanded its territory and proved to the world that it was a force to be reckoned with. As increased domestic nationalism and militarization, all fueled by the fearsome flames of the Washingtonian Party, burned across the HCE, the Wars of Reconstruction were far from over. The Decade of Despair was far from over, and so too was the construction of Emperor Richard I’s envisioned Yankee Empire.

Back in Europe, the Decade of Despair had a number of effects that expanded outside of the Germanic Empire. While not leading to any immediate revolution or uprising, the proliferation of radical ideologies in this time period throughout a population of disgruntled Plebeians, was a constant theme of the Europe of the Decade of Despair. In the Roturier Kingdom of France, a new and vile ideology would be created in 1853 as the Great Crisis caused many businesses to go bankrupt. One of these businesses was a textile factory in Trier, a culturally German city within the Rhineland territory annexed into France following the Benthamian War. This particular factory was managed by Leon Heinrich Marx, who, like much of the city’s population, spoke German first and didn’t give Paris, which was keen on enforcing French culture on the region, much support. The son of Heinrich Marx, an irreligious follower of the ideals of the Enlightenment, Leon Marx had been fascinated by Enlightenment philosophy throughout much of his life, and he fused many of these ideas into his support for Rhenish nationalism during his early adulthood, participating in Rhenish secessionist newspapers and political organizations, especially during his college days.

The early nationalist philosophers of the 18th Century were particularly influential on Marx’s early years, with Johan Gottfried Herder, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, and even “The Communist Manifesto” of Lafayette and Sieyes all being heavily influential on the young Leon Marx. Upon graduating from the University of Bonn in 1841, Marx would move back to Trier where, after struggling to develop a legal career and subsequently failing to make his writing career profitable, he would decide instead to purchase a local factory in 1844. As the years came and went, Leon Marx’s factory operation proved to be surprisingly successful, becoming one of the most wealthy men in Trier. However, this wealth, like nearly all profitable capitalist endeavors do, came at a cruel price, as Marx’s workers suffered abysmal conditions, low pay, and egregiously long working hours. The brutal industrialist attempted to justify his actions by writing his first ideological manifesto, called “The Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie,” in 1850 in which Marx argued in favor of a plutocratic vanguard that could finance the secession of the Rhineland, although this didn’t change the inherent fact that Marx’s factory was a vicious place to work.

When the Great Crisis hit in 1852, France, whose northern regions often traded with Germania (even if staunch communists to the south were not enthusiastic about such relations), was soon hit by the global recession. Leon Marx’s factory would start to steadily quickly lose revenue while the French government took action to seize control of economic activity in order to (unsuccessfully) prevent a total domestic depression. The restructuring of the national economy, on top of an already collapsing global economic system and disgruntled factory workers turning to leftist populism in retaliation, ultimately caused Leon Marx to file for bankruptcy. More bitter than ever, Marx spent much of the winter of 1853 writing editorial articles in local newspapers to make ends meet as he cobbled together his political and economic views into a new manifesto, “Das Kapital.”

Published on March 1st, 1853, “Das Kapital” reaffirmed communist theory that all of history was effectively defined by a class struggle between the Patrician nobility and the Plebeian commoners. However, unlike roturierist and even Benthamist communists, Marx completely rejected democratic institutions by claiming that they did not allow for intellectual economists to rise to power and maximize the economic productivity envisioned by classical liberal philosophers. Instead, Marx reinforced his views from “The Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie” by arguing in favor of overthrowing Patrician aristocratic systems and replacing said systems with a plutocracy. “Das Kapital” argued that only if the state could be seized by the class of private property-owning Plebeian industrialists, which Marx deemed the “bourgeoisie,” who would then consolidate power via forming a plutocratic vanguard party, could a functioning (at least by Marxist measures of success) global economy in which a collection of plutocratic states would associate to maximize profit be established. The ideals outlined in “Das Kapital” would forge the basis for the ideology of companism, for which Leon Marx would be credited as the founder of.

Philosopher and industrialist Leon Marx, the founder of the ideology of companism.

While companist theory did find support within circles of Marx’s fellow bourgeoisie industrialists and even a handful of liberal intellectuals across Europe, and “Das Kapital” was widely published, the highly elitist teachings of Marx were entirely disregarded by populist and working-class groups. In the Roturier Kingdom of France, the anarchist philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon dominated radical circles via his advocacy for mutualism, a libertarian socialist ideology that, among other things, advocated for the abolition of the state in favor of a system in which the means of production were to be owned by their workers via cooperatives, which would exist within a free market system. Furthermore, Proudhon advocated for accomplishing this system via the utilization of democratic mutual-credit banks that were to loan wealth to workers seeking to establish cooperatives and land to individuals seeking to use their contemporary property. Since the fermentation of mutualist theory in Proudhon’s 1840 manifesto “What is Property?,” the libertarian socialist ideology grew to reign supreme amongst Latin European socialists, with Proudhon himself being elected to the French Tribune in 1848 as a member of his Mutualist Party, which admittedly held very few representatives within the government of France.

Mutualism would gradually proliferate throughout France and neighboring Comintern member states, throughout which it gained a sizable (even if often suppressed) following. The growth in support for mutualist theory would only surge amidst the Decade of Despair, when the capitalistic status quo had proven itself to not only lead into economic ruin but fail to provide any stable means of recovery for the already socioeconomically unfortunate masses. Outside of the Comintern, however, mutualism failed to gain as much footing due to the rise of local socialist theory. That wasn’t to say Proudhon was unheard of outside of the Comintern, as many of his ideas were adopted by other socialist ideologies and much of his analysis would form the cornerstone of subsequent socialist and anarchist philosophy, but it was to the east of the Rhineland where rival forms of socialism began to emerge.

Throughout the German states of Central Europe, socialism was already proving to be an extremely diverse and broad term encompassing many ideologies. In the Germanic Empire, Friedrich Engels would head the nation’s predominant socialist movement, the Socialist Workers’ Party, whose platform was based off the communal ideals of David Ricardo, Charles Fourier, and Robert Owen in which exchange value was to be abolished in favor of a planned economy managed by federated communes. A form of scientific socialism, Engels’ ideas, which were emphasized by the Socialist Workers’ Party, formed the basis of the early socialist ideology of Engelianism. Alongside the philosophy of Engels were varying degrees of Christian socialism, an ideology that argued in favor of socialism by utilizing interpretations of Christian theology as their justification. This current of socialist thought was beginning to decline in Germania due to the increasing dominance of Engelianism and similar stains, however, Christian socialism did remain popular in numerous other nations, including the Confederation of Columbia, the United Empire of the Danube, and the United Kingdom of Prussia and Poland. In the latter, for example, in 1834 Carl Wilhelm Schuster formed the League of Emancipation, a Christian socialist organization that agitated for communalism, unionism, and the replacement of the United Kingdom with a socialist republican state, with the League of Emancipation often distributing propaganda and organizing rallies throughout Prussia-Poland demanding the emancipation of the working class.

League of Emancipation rally in Berlin, circa 1854.

It is during the Decade of Despair and the growth in socialist movements abroad in which the distinction between fructarian and solidarist socialism began to emerge. While neither of the two terms would technically be created until the rise of proletarism circa the 1880s, circles of fructarianism (socialism that supports the existence of free markets and exchange value) and solidarism (socialism that rejects markets in favor popularly-managed distribution) would start to go at each other’s throats, thus beginning to develop the inter-socialist dichotomy that transcends more or less the entirety of the post-Second Radical War Vrijheidist Sphere. Predominant fructarian Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, for example, wouldn’t stray from publishing literature in which he criticized solidarists and, in return, solidarists would often do the same towards their pro-market counterparts.

Due to socialist movements popping up throughout the industrialized world following the Great Crisis, many of these movements decided that it would be within their interest to confederate together into an international organization committed to common socialist goals. This would ultimately come to fruition in May 1856, when a collection of socialist organizations and philosophers congregated in Amsterdam to forge both a unified international organization dedicated to socialism and an ideological manifesto to which the organization would adhere to. The Amsterdam Congress would dedicate the bulk of its time to the latter, as fructarian and solidarists were both represented at the convention and delegates agreed that common goals should be developed prior to the ratification of any unified international socialist organization. Entire weeks came and went as the delegates vigorously debated what theory should and should not be agreed upon, with figures ranging from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon to Friedrich Engels to Mikhail Bakhunin all pushing forth their visions for the post-capitalist revolutionary society. It should also be noted that the Amsterdam Congress was a uniquely egalitarian assembly for the time period, with individuals of different classes, genders, nationalities, races, and even continents of origin (delegations from the Kingdom of India and a handful of European colonies in the Middle East were notably present) all speaking and participating in the historic conference.

Delegates of the Amsterdam Congress, circa May 1856.

Over time and via the process of lengthy debate, what was ultimately named the “Manifest Voor Universele Vrijheid” (“Manifesto for Universal Freedom”), now more colloquially referred to as the “Vrijheidist Manifesto,” was gradually assembled as the Amsterdam Congress voted in favor of the ratification of its individual segments. In the end, the Amsterdam Congress would ultimately dedicate the “Vrijheidist Manifesto” to the principles of both regional and workplace direct democracy, worker-self management, federalism, equality regardless of religion, race, sex, or nationality, and international solidarity with socialist movements dedicated to the Manifesto’s principles. The ideals of the “Vrijheidist Manifesto,” often referred to as “the Five Pillars of Socialism” by its subsequent adherents circa the 20th Century, would collectively form the ideology of vrijheidism, a very broad strain of decentralized, egalitarian, and internationalist socialism that has dominated much of socialist history since the publication of the Vrijheidist Manifesto in 1856. While the 19th Century remained the domain of reactionary capitalism, in due time vrijheidism would, of course, go beyond being reserved to the oppressed fringes of ideological radicalism, and would one day forge a unified bloc against the tyranny of the Titanomachy.

With the Vrijheidist Manifesto complete, the creation of a unified international socialist organization for its followers was a relatively straightforward task. The Amsterdam Congress would declare this organization the Association for the Universal Revolution, now retroactively referred to as the First Universal, whose existence was ratified on June 1st, 1856. On top of commitment to the struggle for vrijheidism, the Amsterdam Congress decided that the First Universal would be led by a triumvirate of three chancellors, who were to be elected via a simple majority by the First Universal’s congress, which was to convene at least once every June 1st for exactly one week to discuss international policy, although a simple majority of chancellors could organize a congress at any given time. Furthermore, it was the duty of the chancellors of the First Universal to establish local committees to organize the revolutionary struggle and to accept local organizations into the association when a congress was not in session. Over time, however, in order to make the First Universal more efficient and decentralized, more and more of the general actions of the First Universal were delegated to varying committees.

As the Decade of Despair carried on, the First Universal would gradually expand throughout the world as millions of disgruntled workers abandoned support for capitalism in favor of vrijheidist socialism. The brightest days of the socialist movement were numerous decades away, however, thanks to the Amsterdam Congress, the revolutionary society envisioned by several radical philosophers was all a bit closer to coming into fruition. In the meantime, the rest of the world struggled to survive the aftermath of the Great Crisis. One day in the near future, the global economy would begin to stabilize, but the process to recovery would not be without great socio-political shifts, the rise of tyrants, and the collapse of institutions as old as the Age of Enlightenment. In the midst of economic ruin, storm clouds were brewing the likes of which had not been seen since the Benthamian War. The clock was ticking down to the Equatorial Revolutionary War, but before the world could be turned upside down in the Indian Ocean, the order consolidated half a century ago by Jeremy Bentham and his cronies would be tested. In the Roturier Kingdom of France circa 1856, the aristocracy of the House of Bourbon would turn on an increasingly republican government after Hamilton Bonaparte of the Jacobin Club was elected consul in 1855. Hiding above the brewing storm clouds of warfare, vultures were beginning to descend upon the Roturier Kingdom, and King Louis XVIII would rather die than be picked apart by these vultures.

The Bourbon War was on the horizon.​

 

[ETGalaxy]

Chapter Eight has just been updated, now with more details on the British invasion of Ireland and Jeremy Bentham's rise to power. I'm definitely enjoying refining the specifics of the early Plebeians' Republic, so expect continued focus on that in future retcons. As for the next chapter, I plan on retconning the chapters relating to the Benthamian War first, as this next chapter will relate heavily to events and geopolitics within the Comintern.

 

[ETGalaxy]

Chapter Nine has just been updated. Nothing too drastic was added, just a few extra details about the invasion of Iberia.

 

[ETGalaxy]

Chapter Eleven: Across the Alpines has just been updated, with the biggest new additions being the British invasion of Denmark-Norway and additional information about how the Helvetic Republic works.

 

[ETGalaxy]

Chapter Twelve has just been updated, which means that I have everything ready lore-wise to begin writing Chapter Twenty-Nine.

 

[ETGalaxy]

Map of Germany following the 1801 Treaty of Paris.​

 

[Wendell]

Interesting developments.

 

[ETGalaxy]

Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Bourbon War Part One

The Amsterdam stock exchange crashed during what was seemingly a period of stability for the Roturier Kingdom of France. The 1840s had been a generous decade for the French due to the collapse of both the Ottoman and Chinese empires, which allowed for their partitions by European colonial powers, including, of course, the Roturier Kingdom. This expansion brought upon great wealth and influence for France that had not been achieved by Paris since the prelude to the Seven Years’ War all those years ago, however, like all imperialism, this expansionism came at the great expense of local populations, who became the pawns of oppressive and profit-driven colonial regimes. But the people of cosmopolitan France, who experienced a steady boost in their standard of living throughout the 1840s, didn’t care much about the tyranny their nation wielded abroad. Thanks to decades of modernization, trade with the British, and economic reform, by 1852 the once-agrarian France had become an industrialized juggernaut, only outpaced in industrial production in Europe by the Plebeians’ Republic and Germanic Empire.

Politically, the Roturier Kingdom of France had also entered a period of relative stability due to the consolidation of political power into the Tennis Court Party under the leadership of Consul Alexander Lucien Bonaparte, the heir to the great Bonaparte political dynasty of France. With no other party being large enough to contest its strength, the PCT held a de facto monopoly on the French apparatus of state throughout the first term of the administration of Alexander Lucien Bonaparte. The strength of the PCT was only reinforced by its support from King Louis XVII, who had long been an admirer of the Imperialist Party beforehand, thus meaning that every major position of power in the Roturier Kingdom of France was under the umbrella of the Tennis Court Party. But even upon the formation of the PCT in 1848, its dominance in French politics was far from absolute. The conservative Democratic-Royalist Party was far from the prominent opposition force that it had been decades prior, however, in its place a number of new parties adhering to various ideologies began to secure seats in the Plebeians’ Tribune, such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s fructarian socialist Mutualist Party.

By far the largest opposition party in France during this time period was the Jacobin Club, which came to be led by Hamilton Bonaparte, a veteran of the Venezuelan War for Independence and the cousin of Alexander Lucien Bonaparte himself. A charismatic, if controversial, figure, Hamilton would lead the Jacobins to great victories in the 1848 tribunal election after making a splash in the previous year’s consulship election. The Jacobin Club greatly expanded its voting base in the immediate aftermath of the 1847 election and would continue to run on a hardline Benthamist platform. The Jacobins advocated for a number of policies, including increased economic and political centralization, colonial industrialization, and an aggressive military buildup, however, its most polarizing position was its demand for the total abolition of all French nobility. Republicanism to this degree was far from a novel concept in the Roturier Kingdom of France, but the victories of the Jacobin Club in 1848 marked the first point in French history in which an explicitly republican political party formed the national opposition.

The Jacobins’ republicanism was very much a double-edged sword. On the one hand, many adhered to the traditional roturierist philosophy of viewing constitutional monarchism as a necessity for the success of liberalism both domestically and abroad. On the other hand, there was a growing current of the French population that viewed monarchism as obsolete at best and flat out immoral at worst. By the midpoint of the 19th Century, a number of great world powers, including Great Britain, were republics, and monarchs were ultimately an inherently undemocratic elite. Under the reign of Louis XVI and Louis XVII, monarchist tyranny had never reared its ugly head, as the vast majority of times both kings simply went along with the interests of the establishment of the French civilian government. But in the spring of 1851, King Louis XVII fell ill due to a scrofulous infection and would pass away on May 23rd, 1851 at the age of sixty-six. He was succeeded by his eldest son, who was crowned King Louis XVIII of France a few months later.

King Louis XVIII of the Roturier Kingdom of France.

Unlike his two predecessors, who more or less went along with the interests of the civilian government and were oftentimes very supportive of its liberal administrations anyway (this was especially the case with Louis XVII, who was still a child during the French Revolution), Louis XVIII was an outspoken reactionary who sought to ensure the preservation of his aristocratic privilege by actively intervening in the governance of France. Louis XVIII ascended to the French throne just a few months before the 1851 consulship election and certainly spurred up controversy by making a number of anti-democratic statements (he would go as far as to assert that the French Revolution was a mistake), however, Alexander Lucien Bonaparte simply decided to more or less ignore his aristocratic peer and insisted that he was merely adjusting to his role as the King of the French. Hamilton Bonaparte, who was nominated for the consulship by the Jacobin Club yet again, was not as kind to Louis XVIII. In the eyes of the Jacobins, the king was the embodiment of everything wrong with monarchism, for the reactionary man was simply the product of a reactionary institution, but the threat that Louis XVIII apparently posed to French democracy managed to cause many moderate communists to turn to the Jacobins as a deterrent against Louis’ counterrevolutionary ambitions.

Unlike its predecessor, the 1851 French election was not a landslide victory for the Tennis Court Party. Campaigning on a platform of standing up for the well-being of the plebeians (it should be noted that, like the Radical Party, the Jacobins adhered to a utilitarian worldview), Hamilton Bonaparte, while still losing to his cousin, performed substantially better than he had back in 1847. Hamilton was able to not only win over a number of more moderate voters by running in direct opposition to the views of King Louis XVIII, but was also able to generate mass enthusiasm amongst his base, something that Alexander was nowhere nearly as capable of. As for Louis, he endorsed the Democratic-Royalist candidate Pierre Guizot, and as a consequence Guizot was one of the best performing Democratic-Royalist candidates in years by securing just over ten percent of the national vote. In the end, Alexander Lucien Bonaparte won re-election by the skin of his teeth via a slim plurality over Hamilton, while the Jacobin presence in the Plebeians’ Tribune (which also held a general election in 1851) dramatically increased. With one election, the dominance of the PCT was over as quickly as it had begun while the Jacobin Club was on the rise.

For the first time in French history since the early 1790s, the position of the monarchy was truly at stake.

Only a year after the 1851 general election, the Great Crisis of 1852 would strike France at a point of political turbulence. King Louis XVIII had become a consistent thorn in the side of the Bonaparte administration by vetoing bills for progressive income taxes, welfare programs, and worker protections. Simply put, if it promoted socioeconomic equality, Louis XVIII would veto it. More often than not, these vetoes would be overridden by the Tribune, but on some occasions significant pieces of legislation were permanently struck down by Louis XVIII, whose resistance to egalitarianism was a constant nuisance for even many conservative legislators. Things only got worse during the Decade of Despair, when mass relief programs were necessary to recover the French people from the depression. Such provisional welfare programs were, as was to be expected by this point, vehemently opposed by the wealthy King Louis XVIII. Whatever relief did manage to overcome Louis’ veto was often watered down and, thanks to being delayed via a veto, arrived much later than it needed to in order to efficiently respond to the crisis at hand. As a consequence, the Roturier Kingdom of France entered a depression far worse than anything any of the other great European powers faced, including Germania. In a matter of months, many of the factories scattered across France, which previous administrations had dedicated great effort into proliferating, closed as their owners went bankrupt, which only further contributed to mass unemployment.

In late 1852 the Roturier Kingdom of France started to ingest loans from the Plebeians’ Republic of Great Britain, which was nowhere as nearly as affected by the Great Crisis due to its more centralized (although notoriously kleptocratic and hierarchical) economic structure, therefore causing France to accumulate a massive debt. All the while, as poverty and unemployment gripped the French working class, the elite of nobles and plutocrats were much better off due to their hordes of wealth, not to mention that corporate bailouts for oftentimes aristocratic businessmen were some of the few relief bills that King Louis XVIII rarely vetoed. The Decade of Despair understandably led to a skyrocket in support for the Jacobin Club, which rightfully called out the corrupt interests of the French aristocracy, particularly Louis XVIII, for why France was suffering so much in comparison to other powers afflicted by the Great Crisis of 1852. In the eyes of roturierism, the purpose of the constitutional monarchy was to be an asset for the interests of liberalism and as a check on potential corruption within the civilian government. Under Louis XVIII’s reign, this defense flew out the window as the constitutional monarchy proved to be a position that was as oligarchic as it was corrupt. All the while, the success of the Plebeians’ Republic during the Decade of Despair made Benthamist communism look increasingly appealing to the people of France.

The 1854 tribunal election truly did signify the beginning of the end of the Roturier Kingdom of France when the legislative rule of the Tennis Court Party was toppled by the Jacobin Club securing a plurality of seats in the Plebeians’ Tribune, thus allowing them to form a ruling coalition within the Tribune via an assortment of minor parties, independents, and disgruntled PCT members. Also notable was the replacement of the Democratic-Royalist Party by the Mutualist Party as the third largest (by a distant margin) organization within the Plebeians’ Tribune and the election of Leon Marx to the Tribune as a representative of his own personal party, the Companist League. Following the 1854 election, the momentum of the Jacobin Club seemed to be unstoppable going into next year’s consulship election. Facing increasing unpopularity and blame for the economic catastrophe France was facing, Consul Alexander Lucien Bonaparte announced that he would not seek a third term, thus causing the Tennis Court Party to nominate Censor Adolphe Thiers, a prominent advocate within the ranks of the PCT for progressive taxation and land reform.

Censor Adolphe Thiers of the Roturier Kingdom of France.

MT Hamilton Bonaparte would be nominated by the Jacobin Club for the consulship yet again, this time with the wind behind his sails. Bonaparte would run yet another hardline republican campaign, advocating for the immediate formation of a French constitutional assembly with the intent of forging a Benthamist republic. Amidst the economic crisis, Hamilton Bonaparte would be sure to emphasize populist appeal to his platform by advocating for the rejuvenation of French industry and the introduction of good-paying jobs via the bolstering of a strong military-industrial complex. King Louis XVIII realized that the election of Bonaparte would spell certain doom for his position of power and therefore begrudgingly endorsed the center-left Adolphe Thiers as the lesser of two evils, but for those who had turned on the reactionary king, this endorsement was a poisoned chalice for the Thiers campaign. In what was arguably the most vital election in the history of the Roturier Kingdom France, millions of French men and women set out to the polls to cast their ballots for the consul on December 1st, 1855. The socioeconomic conditions of France ensured that the status quo could not be perpetuated, and so in a desperate bid for revolutionary change, Hamilton Bonaparte would decisively win the 1855 French consulship election.

Hamilton Bonaparte following his inauguration as the consul of the Roturier Kingdom of France, circa January 1856.

Surely enough, Hamilton Bonaparte made sure to keep his campaign promise of being the final consul of the Roturier Kingdom of France, and following the beginning of his administration on January 25th, 1856 a constitutional assembly would be formed shortly thereafter via a three-fourths majority vote by the Plebeians’ Tribune and Senate circa early February 1856. All the while, King Louis XVIII, who was notably not present at Hamilton Bonaparte’s inauguration, threatened that he would not recognize the legitimacy of any French Republic. Chaos was on the horizon for France, however, at the time the Jacobins merely scoffed at the panicked declarations of the doomed king. The French constitutional assembly was truly a sight to behold, with Supreme Consul William Molesworth of the Plebeians’ Republic even paying a visit to the event as an observer. Politicians from across the political spectrum, be they absolutists, companists, roturierists, mutualists, or, of course, Benthamists, were all present and laid out their proposals for the new French government. As was to be expected by this point, the interests of monarchists were ignored by the bulk of the assembly. Hamilton Bonaparte had been elected to the consulship on the promise of transforming France into a republic, and this was a promise that he was determined to keep.

While the presence of roturierists and socialists prevented the Jacobins from descending France into a Benthamist dictatorship for the time being, the new French republic was far more centralized than the Roturier Kingdom. Elections for local leadership, for example, were completely abolished in favor of the appointment of local administrators by the executive magistracy. More importantly, the French political structure was completely reorganized. The Senate was abolished in favor of the recreation of the stratocratic Century Assembly, although rather than have its members (centuries) be elected positions as was the case in the Roman Republic, French centuries were appointed directly by high-ranking military officers, and more often than not these positions would often be filled with military officers themselves. Given that the armed forces of France was managed by the executive magistracy, the Century Assembly was effectively influenced by the magistrates akin to how the Senate was before it, and would serve as an upper house that the Plebeians’ Tribune required approval from for its bills to be passed. More controversially, the French constitution ceded the ability to single-handedly pass laws to the consul, so long as said laws were not vetoed by the Century Assembly. This therefore made the new French government highly autocratic, although it was hoped by more anti-authoritarian delegates at the constitutional assembly, who were constantly outvoted by Benthamists and centralists, that the centuries would be able to put a check on the consulship’s vast authority.

After weeks of debate, the constitutional assembly had finally formed a new French government. After having existed for over sixty years, the Roturier Kingdom of France was no more, and with it the ancient French monarchy, whose position of power dated back well over a millennia, was tossed into the dustbin of history alongside the aristocracy of Great Britain, Spain, and Italy. In its place stood a new republic forged upon the principles of Benthamism, which the constitutional assembly declared the French Popular Republic (FPR). Much like the Plebeians’ Republic of Great Britain before it, the FPR was structured along the lines of defending the philosophy of utilitarianism rather than natural rights, and while the constitution did enshrine some rights, such as freedom of speech, religion, and assembly, it was clearly stated that the protection of these rights was ultimately amenable depending on whatever the national government believed was utilitarian. Furthermore, just as had been the case in the Plebeians’ Republic, the French constitution could be suspended at any given time in favor of ceding total power to the supreme consulship. At the end of the day, the French Popular Republic was a state not built upon liberty, equality, or fraternity, but rather a state built upon the promotion of efficiency, the maximization of well-being (or at least whatever the regime defined as “well-being”), and the projection of national strength.

Flag of the French Popular Republic.

Following the ratification of the FPR’s constitution on March 2nd, 1856, Hamilton Bonaparte was selected by the constitutional assembly to become the acting supreme consul until the supreme consulship election scheduled for April 1st of that year, an election that Bonaparte was anticipated to win anyway. Upon assuming the supreme consulship, Hamilton Bonaparte was the sole executive leader of the French government as the republican constitution no longer recognized King Louis XVIII as a monarch, let alone an individual who held any political authority. A number of Democratic-Royalists and Tennis Courtists would resign from the Tribune due to strong opposition to the abolition of the constitutional monarchy, but for the most part the legislative assembly of France would stay intact following the dissolution of the Roturier Kingdom. Even the bulk of the nobility, while frustrated that they had lost their political privileges, accepted the formation of the French Popular Republic, as the former aristocracy still held onto their piles of wealth and often still maintained some degree of political influence as a consequence, be it in France or abroad.

But King Louis XVIII, now simply the wealthy Louis Bourbon, was infuriated by the loss of his position as the French head of state. In his eyes, the constitutional assembly and the subsequent declaration of the FPR was an illegitimate violation of his divine right to rule as the King of the French. To Louis Bourbon, the abolition of the monarchy was treason and could not persist and his reign had to be restored, through force if necessary. Louis Bourbon refused to abdicate and would instead flee to the Viceroyalty of Algeria, where he was welcomed by the conservative Viceroy Lucien de Montagnac. It was in the Viceroyalty’s capital of Algiers that Louis and Montagnac agreed that the French Popular Republic was an illegitimate state, and on March 12th, 1856 Lucien de Montagnac announced that he recognized the authority of King Louis XVIII rather than that of Hamilton Bonaparte’s civilian government, thus meaning that the Viceroyalty of Algeria became the first domain of Louis’ pretender government. With Algeria under his control, King Louis XVIII would announce in front of a crowd within the city of Algiers on March 13th that the civilian government of France had turned on its monarch and thus decreed the restoration of the pre-revolutionary Kingdom of France.

Flag of the Second Kingdom of France.

King Louis XVIII’s restoration of the Kingdom of France was undoubtedly an act of hostility against the sovereignty of the French Popular Republic. When the news of the crisis in Algeria arrived in Paris, the French Popular Army (simply the French Royal Army under a new name) was quickly mobilized under direction of Supreme Consul Hamilton Bonaparte and naval forces prepared to push towards North Africa. All the while, French colonies were faced with the decision of which side in the inevitable civil war to join. The Beylik of Tunis, a protectorate which directly bordered Algeria and would be unable to repel an invasion from the west, was the first colony (after, of course, Algeria) to recognize the authority of the Second Kingdom of France. French holdings in China were split when the Viceroyalty of Anhui declared its support for the Royalists whereas Jiangsu remained loyal to the Republicans. Despite the conservative sympathies of their administrators, the Middle Eastern colonies of Alexandretta and Kurdistan would stay loyal to Paris, as would the rest of France’s colonial governments, which remained under the control of the French Popular Republic.

And so, as the French Popular Republic mobilized its armed forces and the Second Kingdom of France extended its reach to a number of colonies, war was inevitable. On March 18th, an emergency Comintern assembly was hosted in Paris at which the Plebeians’ Republic of Great Britain and her socius republics committed to militaristically aiding the FPR in the eventual conflict whereas the roturierist Swabia and Franconia, which still regretfully recognized Louis XVIII as their head of state, pledged their neutrality. For about a week, the western Mediterranean Sea became eerily tense as the Republicans and Royalists both mobilized their forces, hoping that the other would back down but knowing that sooner or later an attack would have to be launched. This attack was launched on March 21st, 1856 when King Louis XVIII gave the order for Royalist naval forces to siege the island of Formentera. In a matter of hours, the island had fallen to the counterrevolution after Frenchman had fired upon Frenchman. Military officers who had been peers in the Italian Revolutionary War a decade prior were enemy belligerents in the Siege of Formentera, a bitter signature of the chaotic war that was to come. This war, which was the largest military engagement on the European continent since the Benthamian War and would remain the largest until the Industrial War several decades later, came to be known as the Bourbon War.

One would think that the Comintern would quickly defeat the Royalists. After all, the Second Kingdom of France only controlled a handful of colonies, whose infrastructure was lacking compared to the metropole, and had substantially less manpower. This would prove to not be the case. Louis XVIII would use his connections to the rich and powerful both in France and abroad to spark insurgencies, thus allowing for the Royalists to gain a number of footholds in Europe. This was most effective in southern France, where military officers and aristocrats supportive of the Second Kingdom of France would concentrate their rebellions against the FPR in due to its proximity to Algeria and because the bulk of Republican forces being sent to fight in the Bourbon War first had to move through this region. Terrorist attacks, often staged by disgruntled Democratic-Royalists, became commonplace whereas guerrilla warfare by Royalist militia cells would disrupt Republican supply lines to the point that by mid-April 1856, the Bourbon War became stagnant as Hamilton Bonaparte directed the French Popular Army to redirect its priorities towards pacifying southern France.

But the Second Kingdom of France was not just fighting a war against the French Popular Republic and King Louis XVIII himself was interested in the expansion of his counterrevolution beyond just France. The Spanish wing of the House of Bourbon, while having not tasted power for over half a century, still survived in exile as a consequence of the 1801 Treaty of Paris releasing the vast majority of nobles imprisoned by the Revolutionary Plebeians’ Army. Among these remaining Spanish aristocrats was Karl Louis von Bourbon, the grandson of King Charles IV of Spain, who was a native to Vienna that had fought on behalf of the United Empire of Danubia in the Venetian Theater of the Italian Revolutionary War. A prominent and wealthy aristocrat within Vienna’s high society, Karl Louis had never believed that the opportunity for him to reclaim the throne of his grandfather would ever present itself. In fact, by the time of the outbreak of the Bourbon War in 1856, Karl Louis had never stepped foot in Spain, which remained controlled by a British puppet regime extremely hostile to its former monarchist rulers.

This certainly did not mean, however, that Karl Louis von Bourbon was uninterested in recreating the Kingdom of Spain, and Louis XVIII approached him over leading an offensive in the southern reaches of the Spanish Communist Republic, the Viennese aristocrat eagerly accepted the offer and soon arrived in Algiers to inspect his army before heading off to the Spanish-occupied Balearic Isles circa late April 1856. On April 30th, General Karl Louis von Bourbon would occupy the city of Valencia following a vicious naval fight by the Royalists to secure such a beach head. From Valencia, the Royalists would conquer the surrounding territory, reaching as far south as Alicante following a battle for the city on May 5th. With a sizable chunk of land under his control, Karl Louis von Bourbon publicly pronounced himself King Charles V of the Kingdom of Spain on May 7th in front of the people of Valencia, while a manifesto declaring the restoration of the Spanish monarchy was subsequently distributed throughout Europe by the Royalists and sympathetic powers.

King Charles V of the Kingdom of Spain.

Following the Valencia Restoration, a number of insurgencies in the name of Charles V would emerge throughout Spain. Led by Consul-General Leopoldo O’Donnell, the Spanish Communist Republic was a controversial regime amongst the people of Spain. On the one hand, the SCR had introduced a number of land reforms that did raise the standard of living for a large portion of the peasantry and, thanks in large parts to funding from the Plebeians’ Republic (especially during the supreme consulship of William Molesworth), a number of major Spanish cities had turned into industrial powerhouses. On the other hand, poverty still gripped much of the Spanish Communist Republic as the rise of industrialized capitalism forced millions of peasants from the poverty of agrarianism into the horrid squalor of the poor houses. Furthermore, much like the Plebeians’ Republic, the SCR was ultimately a very totalitarian government in which a secret police force, called the Social Investigation Brigade (BSI), was employed by the consul-generalship to sustain a primitive surveillance state, not to mention a totalitarian government that remained a blatant puppet of Great Britain.

For many Spaniards, the days of the Kingdom of Spain, while a distant memory by the 1850s, were viewed as a better time in which, rather than being a satellite of Great Britain, Spain was a great global power with a vast empire and sphere of influence. Under the rule of Charles V, the Kingdom of Spain was little more than a puppet of the Second Kingdom of France and Charles V’s Army of the Land was little more than a localized extension of the French Royal Army, but Louis XVIII made it clear that this status as a French dependency would not last should the Royalists emerge victorious in the Bourbon War. This sort of nostalgia for the Bourbon monarchy attracted a handful of Spanish nationalists to the Royalist cause, however, the bulk of insurrectionary support for King Charles V came from poor Spaniards who turned to his revived Army of the Land out of desperation for a better life. It was hoped that military service for the Royalists would bring with it socioeconomic benefits not found in the Plebeians’ Army of Spain. Furthermore, as the Iberian Theater of the Bourbon War progressed, the Royalists became known for their leniency towards looting, especially if it was conducted by guerrillas behind enemy lines, which further incentivized rebellion in the name of Charles V as effective mercenaries.

As Spain descended into what was more or less a civil war, the Royalists made decent advances in the southeast. From Valencia, the Army of the Land would push inwards towards Madrid while French naval forces occupied a number of coastal cities as far down south as Almeria. The securing of the Spanish coastline would make the intervention of the Revolutionary Navy in the Mediterranean Theater of the Bourbon War difficult, as the Second Kingdom of France managed to mostly prevent an entry of naval forces through the British-controlled Strait of Gibraltar. From Valencia, the Kingdom of Spain would capture Minglanilla on May 13th, 1856 and would emerge victorious at the Battle of Valeria on June 1st. The sabotage of communist supply lines by Royalist guerrillas proved to be a great asset of the Army of the Land, and many foreign analysts began to predict that Madrid would fall by the end of 1856. This would, however, not prove to be the case. By mid-June 1856, the Revolutionary Plebeians’ Army had fully mobilized to fight in the Bourbon War and an expeditionary force had arrived in Iberia. During the summer of 1856, the Iberian Theater would transition into a messy war of attrition as trenches were dug throughout the countryside to contain rival factions. However, a consistent feature of the Iberian Theater was the vagueness of where the actual frontlines were. Guerrillas fighting for both belligerents would dominate combat and would not adhere to the rigid fronts schemed up in the war rooms of armchair generals. As a consequence, just about all of southeastern Spain was, at one point or another and in one form or another, a warzone.

The earliest days of the Occitan Theater were not much different from the Iberian Theater. Due to France’s recent history with monarchism, many more Royalist partisans fought for ideological reasons than they did in Spain, but their ranks were still filled with numerous mercenaries. The guerrilla war in southern France would ultimately prevent the Republicans from effectively waging war in the Mediterranean Sea, which allowed for the Second Kingdom of France to gradually secure beachheads in coastal settlements occupied by Royalist partisans. Among these beachheads was Marseille, which completely fell under the control of the forces Louis XVIII on May 28th, 1856 following a lengthy and fearsome battle consisting of both guerrilla militias and organized military battalions. The influx of the French Royal Army into the metropole allowed for the Royalists to turn the Bourbon War into a defensive conflict for the Comintern, something that had never really been fought by its members. Without foreign aid, the Royalists would always be outnumbered by the Comintern, but if they managed to make deep inroads before the war machines of the Plebeians’ Republic and FPR fully mobilized, victory through sewing instability that would usher in the collapse of the enemy from within was possible.

As the French Royal Army was deployed into Occitania, King Louis XVIII decided to further bolster his support in the region by striking a deal with local nationalists. Under the administrations of the Imperialist Party and subsequently the Tennis Court Party, French nationalism was constantly promoted through national policies, often at the expense of regional cultures. Among these cultures was that of Occitania, whose local language was oppressed via its prohibition in education and any literature. This harsh reprisal against Occitan culture fueled large regional resentment against the policies of Paris, thus causing Occitanian separatist movements, most notably the increasingly prominent and somewhat heutigist Occitan People’s Party (PPO), to rise in local popularity. The vast majority of Occitanian nationalists were republican due to the Imperialist Party traditionally being supportive of the constitutional monarchy as a means to promote a unified French national identity, however, their goal was ultimately the independence of Occitania, regardless of what France looked like.

When the Bourbon War turned Occitania into a battlefield, many nationalists took to the streets to fight for their independence, something that PPO leader in the Plebeians’ Tribune Joseph Roumanille personally endorsed. While the Occitanian guerrillas initially fended off both the Republicans the Royalists by seizing Occitan villages in the name of their independent republic, King Louis XVIII decided to approach the PPO with a proposal in which the Second Kingdom of France would support the secession of Occitania and back the PPO’s fight for independence under the condition that an independent Occitania would be a constitutional monarchy that recognized Louis XVIII as its king and allowed the Second Kingdom of France to move military forces through the region. While few Occitan nationalists were enthusiastic about keeping a French king around as their figurehead ruler, the PPO could not defeat both the Republicans and the Royalists by itself, so the bulk of the party would accept King Louis XVIII’s deal. The two parties would sign the Treaty of Avignon on June 11th, 1856, which consolidated Royalist-occupied Occitan territory into the Kingdom of Occitania, which subsequently fell under the rule of a PPO-led provisional government headed by Joseph Roumanille as its prime minister.

A number of more vehement Occitanian republicans would refuse to fight for the Royalists, with the young MT Frederic Mistral subsequently leaving the PPO to form the Occitan Republican Party (PRO), however, the Treaty of Avignon ultimately won over enough Occitanians to bring the majority of the region under the control of Royalist forces. By this point, the armed forces of the Plebeians’ Republic had been fully mobilized as an expeditionary force of the Revolutionary Plebeians’ Army was deployed to fight in the Occitan Theater, however, the dominance of the Royalists over Occitania meant that, at least for the time being, the British could merely deter the French Royal Army from advancing any further north. In coordination between the high command of both the RPA and the FPA, a series of trenches would be dug in the northernmost reaches of the Occitan region, and throughout the summer of 1856 the Royalists would not advance beyond Lyon. Sooner or later, the outnumbered Royalist coalition would have to break and the Comintern would emerge victorious over western Europe yet again.

Soldiers of the French Popular Army drinking nearby Lyon, circa July 1856.

For the French Popular Republic, the Bourbon War would cause the already authoritarian fledgling government to descend into autocracy under the reign of Hamilton Bonaparte. As internal instability gripped much of France as hostilities broke out, Bonaparte and his allies in both the Jacobin Club and the military advocated for an assumption of dictatorial powers by the supreme consul in order to preserve the republic through the utilization of an iron fist against the counterrevolutionaries. With support from the Century Assembly, Bonaparte would successfully push for the suspension of the French Popular Republic, which went into effect on April 10th, 1856. Without any official approval from the Plebeians’ Tribune (although it should be noted that a number of Jacobin MTs did support the suspension of the constitution), Supreme Consul Hamilton Bonaparte had become the unrivaled autocrat of the FPR, just as Jeremy Bentham had become many decades prior.

Upon assuming dictatorial power, Hamilton Bonaparte quickly sought to consolidate power within his government by going after whatever forces he considered dissenting. Remaining monarchists were purged from the apparatus of state and replaced with local Jacobins while the supreme consul replaced critics of his government, ranging from socialists to classical liberals, with Jacobin MTs in order to guarantee that the Jacobin Club would hold a supermajority of seats within the Plebeians’ Tribune. Outside of the government, the media was tightly regulated to promote the interests of the Republican war effort while labor unions were either considered insurrectionary groups and violently suppressed by the state or were taken over by national officials, thus turning the remaining legal French labor unions into government proxies. In a matter of weeks, Hamilton Bonaparte had brutally weakened one of the most unionized workforces of the 19th Century, although much of the French labor movement, particularly revolutionary socialist unions, simply went underground as illegal secret societies. One of the most prominent revolutionary labor organizations, the Bureau du Travail (BDT), would adhere to vrijheidism and became the de facto French wing of the First Universal during the reign of Hamilton Bonaparte. As for French socialist political parties, Bonaparte’s purges would often target these organizations, thus causing the Mutualist Party to be banned circa May 1856. This would cause a number of prominent French socialists, such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, to evade the purges by going into exile.

Socialist philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the founder of mutualism, living in exile in Naples, circa February 1858.

Under the dictatorship of Hamilton Bonaparte, political power would essentially revolve around an oligarchy of the French armed forces, with the Century Assembly having considerable influence in the government as a de facto advisory board despite the suspension of the constitution. After all, the initial months of the French Popular Republic coincided with a war for the survival of the new administration itself, so out of both necessity and a personal admiration for military command structures that Hamilton Bonaparte had inherited whilst fighting in Venezuela, the Jacobin dictatorship was effectively a stratocracy. Among the highest ranking military officers of the regime were Field Marshal Francois Certain Canrobert, the leader of the French Popular Army, and Henri Dupuy de Lome, a aeronautic architect who had participated in the Italian Revolutionary War before becoming chief aeronaut of the French Popular Air Force (FPAF) shortly before the beginning of the Bourbon War. Together, from the perspective of both the land and sky, these two men would scheme alongside the supreme consul on how to win the Bourbon War on the frontlines of Occitania and how to maintain domestic control during wartime via their triumvirate of stratocratic administration.

For France, the homefront of the Bourbon War extended well beyond Occitania. In the north, many monarchists would wage insurgency campaigns throughout a number of French cities and acts of domestic terror carried out by Royalists were commonplace. The invention of auctorite, a small explosive stick made of nitroglycerin, sorbents, and stabilizers, by the Swedish-Russian inventor Immanuel Nobel in 1853 for the purpose of making demolition operations easier, was a particularly effective tool for Royalist terrorists, who would often throw sticks of auctorite into public spaces. The bulk of Royalist terrorism in the Bourbon War was barely organized outside of a handful of independent militias, but it was nonetheless effective in harming Republican infrastructure and scaring much of the French population. While government and military infrastructure were the predominant targets of terrorists, civilians were constantly harmed in the process and, more often than not, some terrorist cells would in fact target civilian property.

In many of France’s largest cities, auctorite attacks would become an ever-looming presence in day to day activities. Major French cities would eventually set up checkpoints to ensure that, among other resources utilized in terrorist attacks, auctorite could not make its way to targets. Checkpoint systems had varying degrees of success, but they would never totally eliminate the threat of Royalist terrorism while being a constant presence in the lives of civilians. Domestic terrorism was far from an organized endeavor, however, it did certainly benefit the Royalist war effort by harming enemy morale, destroying domestic Republican infrastructure, and sparking internal instability that required the deployment of soldiers away from the Occitan Theater. Royalist terror became such a thorn in the side of the French Popular Republic that British expeditionary forces were actually sent to cities where terrorism was common to patrol them for insurgencies. To many, domestic terrorism was the defining trait of the Bourbon War and rather than the trenches of southern France, the conflict was affiliated with the city blocks destroyed by auctorite sticks. Therefore, regardless of how far away you lived from the frontlines, no Frenchman was safe from the violence of the Bourbon War.

Because of the secession of a number of French colonies to the Second Kingdom, the Bourbon War was far from an exclusively European affair. The center of the Second Kingdom of France in northern Africa itself would have to fend off against British incursions from the protectorate of Tripolitania. Under the leadership of General John Campbell, the Revolutionary Plebeians’ Army launched an initial offensive into Tunis from Abu Kammash, however, after a handful of weeks the Boughrara Offensive came to an end when Campbell’s men were forced to fall back following a defeat at the Battle of Medinine on April 12th, 1856. From this point onwards, the Royalists would actually hold the advantage in the North African Theater throughout much of the Bourbon War. After all, the base of operations for the Second Kingdom of France was northern Africa, therefore meaning that much of its forces were consolidated on said front. In a matter of days,the French Royal Army was launching a counteroffensive into the Eyalet of Tripolitania and began besieging its capital city of Tripoli on May 1st, 1856. Two days later, Tripoli completely fell into Royalist hands.

Following the Battle of Tripoli, the French Royal Army would continue its eastward offensive along the Tripolitanian coast. Even as the Iberian and Occitan theaters grinded down into a stalemate, the North African Theater continuously progressed in favor of the Royalists, although the summer of 1856 did bring with it a slowdown of the Tripoli Offensive due to the arrival of reinforcements from the Revolutionary Dominion of Aegypt. The experienced General Aimable Pelissier, the Royalist commanding officer in the Tripoli Offensive, proved to be one of the most skilled officers in the French Royal Army and managed to get as far as Abugrein by the dawn of July 1856. Alongside the forces of the Revolutionary Plebeians’ Army, he would have to combat what remained of the local Tripolitanian military, which had become subject to the British high command following the Eyalet’s transition over to a protectorate status under the Plebeians’ Republic but nonetheless retained some degree of regional authority. The locality of Tripolitanian forces made them an integral piece to the British defense of the colony, with a number of these battalions effectively adopting old janissary tactics and utilizing modern weapons, such as organ guns and Mike Faraday’s chemical weapons.

The Chinese Theater of the Bourbon War was a far quicker endeavor than the fight in North Africa. By choosing to align with the Royalists while the neighboring Jiangsu remained loyal to the French Popular Republic, the Viceroyalty of Anhui was landlocked in a war against the combined might of France’s Asian colonial empire. Anhui attempted to make initial gains in the hope that the Dependency (the term that colonies of the FPR adopted to replace “viceroyalty) of Jiangsu could be rapidly overwhelmed before Comintern forces in East Asia were fully mobilized, however, this attempt failed when Anhui Royalists were defeated at the Battle of Nanjing on March 31st, 1856. From this point onwards, Jiangsu, Corea, and British Sinae would all converge upon Anhui, which simply could not hold back this united force. Some military battalions from neighboring colonies of monarchist powers, such as New Granada and Danubia, would cross the border to fight on behalf of the Anhui Royalists as volunteer forces, however, this was far from enough to save the Viceroyalty of Anhui from its doom.

Anhui was able to use the Chao Lake as a physical barrier against the RPA forces invading from Sinae, but this only lasted for a bit. By the end of April 1856, the Revolutionary Plebeians’ Army and the French Popular Army had both begun to bombard the outskirts of the Anhui capital of Hefei. The British victory at the Battle of Feixi on April 19th, 1856 caused the beginning of the end of the collapse of Royalist defenses for the city, and the FPA crossed the Dianbu River after emerging victorious at the Battle of Cuozhen on April 23rd. Two days later, the Comintern finally won the Battle of Hefei, therefore causing the government of the Viceroyalty of Anhui to subsequently capitulate. The Treaty of Wuhu would officially bring an end to the Chinese Theater of the Bourbon War by negotiating the conditions of Anhui’s surrender. As a punishment for being loyal to the Second Kingdom of France, Anhui was completely annexed into Jiangsu, which was reorganized into the Dependency of Jiangbei. Furthermore, the people of what was once Anhui were forced to pay an additional tax to both Corea and Sinae as a sort of war reparation.

The Chinese Theater of the Bourbon War may have been a short affair, but this speed would not be duplicated on the other fronts. By the time the fall of 1856 arrived, the war effort in Iberia and Occitania had more or less remained stagnant since the preceding summer. The subsequent winter brought much greater advances, as the Royalists had managed to successfully conquer Catalonia via a ground invasion from the north and south and a naval attack from the east. The Battle of Sort on January 11th, 1857 would bring an end to the invasion of Catalonia, and only four days later the Treaty of Tarragona restored the Principality of Catalonia as an absolute monarchy ruled by King Louis XVIII, thus bringing the state into a personal union with his French and Occitanian monarchies. Corsica, which had withheld an invasion by the Royalists throughout much of the Bourbon War by evading the stability inflicted upon Spain and southern France, would also finally fall upon the victory of the French Royal Army at the Battle of Bastia on January 17th, 1857. While Corsica did have a history of attempts at independence, the most recent historical independent had been a republic rather than a monarchy, not to mention it was on no frontline that required strong local support from nationalist forces, and the island was, like the Balearic Isles before it, therefore completely annexed into the Second Kingdom of France.

The Royalist victories in Catalonia and Corsica were definitely important, but they did not have much of an effect in any of the major theaters of the Bourbon War. As the two regions were overrun by the French Royal Army, trench warfare in Iberia and southern France kept their respective fronts stagnant whereas the North African Theater continued to progress well for the Royalists, but was nonetheless a slow endeavor, especially once the British ramped up the distribution of weapons to Tripolitania. When the first year of the Bourbon War came to a close, the situation within most of its theaters was a period of stagnation. Neither side was on the verge of victory, nor was either side on the brink of collapse. The fate of western Europe was still up in the air, and without an end in sight this region would continue to be condemned to yet another clash between revolution and reaction.​

 

[ETGalaxy]

Hey everyone! Apparently this chapter was too long to be posted in its entirety, so as a consequence I had to split in half. This means that Chapter Thirty should be posted tomorrow! This was definitely a chapter that I enjoyed writing, if only due to a lot of the dynamics of the Bourbon War being interesting to write, and hopefully both chapters will make for an entertaining read.

 

[generalurist]

Damn sounds like France is becoming a horribly ugly mess.

 

[ETGalaxy]

Damn sounds like France is becoming a horribly ugly mess.

Yeah, the war in France is certainly chaotic, which is more or less the only situation that the Royalists can even hope to gain some degree of footing.

 

[ETGalaxy]

Chapter Thirty: The Bourbon War Part Two

When winter came to an end and the spring of 1857 began to dawn across Europe, the biggest change to the Bourbon War would emerge not from the already active belligerents, but from states straddling neutrality in the midst of the clash between communists and counterrevolutionaries. Since their formation by the 1801 Treaty of Paris, Swabia and Franconia had been subject to a personal union with France, which allowed for the two nations to remain within the French sphere of influence but became a liability when the French Popular Republic was declared and Louis XVIII, who was still the Swabian and Franconian constitutional monarch, started his own pretender government.

By simultaneously being members of the Comintern and subjects of King Louis XVIII, Swabia and Franconia were forced to carefully straddle a line of neutrality. Both of the two factions of the Bourbon War wanted Swabia and Franconia to intervene on their behalf, thus turning their internal governments into a frontline of the Bourbon War waged with political maneuvering rather than any firearms. Louis XVIII would copy his tactics of aggressive vetoing that he had utilized in the Roturier Kingdom of France to push the two German states towards diplomatic relations with the Royalists whilst republican movements within the civilian government received funding from foreign Benthamist powers. Led by a populist administration that was elected in 1853 and sympathized with their British and French socius, the populist civilian government of the Commonwealth of Franconia grew frustrated with the antics of their king and would declare the Republic of Franconia, an initially Ochist state, on February 14th, 1857. Only a few days later, anti-monarchist protests in Stuttgart culminated in the overthrow of the government of the People’s Kingdom of Swabia by the Benthamist Utilitarian Party on February 22nd, 1857, therefore leading to the creation of the Swabian Republic, a Benthamist oligarchy ruled by the Utilitarians and their leader, Friedrich Hecker.

Consul-President Frederich Hecker of the Swabian Republic.

The formation of both the Franconian and Swabian republics would soon trigger counterrevolutions thereafter. In Franconia, King Louis XVIII would go about organizing a coup by military officers still loyal to his claim to the abolished Franconian throne, and on March 3rd, 1857, the conservative General Karl Theodor Wittelsbach (who, interestingly enough, was the son of the exiled Prince-Elector Maximilian, the last ruler of the Electorate of Bavaria) violently occupied the Franconian capital of Wurzburg, thus forcing the members of the civilian government who had managed to escape capture by Wittelsbach’s coup to evacuate to the Bavarian Republic. Following the Wurzburg Putsch, the Commonwealth of Franconia was restored as a de jure absolute monarchy, however, due to the nation’s landlocked position, and therefore geographic isolation from Algiers, the restored government was de facto ruled by Karl Theodor Wittelsbach, who was appointed by King Louis XVIII to be his regent. Under the leadership of Wittelsbach, the Commonwealth of Franconia became a reactionary military junta determined to not only aid the Royalists in bringing down the French Popular Republic but to also restore absolute monarchism to southern Germany, a region that had been dominated by liberalism for decades.

The Swabian Republic, while able to avert a coup unlike its neighbor to the north, was still victim to counterrevolutionaries. The initial days of Frederich Hecker’s Benthamist reign were chaotic and marked by an influx of Bavarian soldiers, both to assist a fellow Benthamist republic and to cross over into France for combat on the Occitan Theater. From the beginning, monarchist resistance was commonplace in Hecker’s Swabia, although this was at first little more than disorganized cells loyal to Louis XVIII. Following the Wurzburg Putsch, however, Swabian reactionaries came into contact with the Commonwealth of Franconia and were provided with resources to stage an effective rebellion. Under the leadership of the monarchist MT Friedrich von Blittersdorf as its regent, the Provisional Government of the Kingdom of Swabia (PRKS) was declared in the city of Adelsheim on March 11th, 1857, with much of northern Swabia subsequently falling under the control of the PRKS. Within a matter of hours, Franconian military forces had entered into PRKS-held territory to combat Hecker’s republic while Bavaria pledged to intervene against Franconia’s counterrevolution, thus beginning the German Theater of the Bourbon War.

Posing a significant threat to the success of the Comintern in not just Germany but in the entirety of the Bourbon War due to its proximity to France, the German Theater required reinforcements from the Plebeians’ Republic and her socius republics, thus temporarily detracting from British presence in the Occitan Theater. Wittelsbach’s counterrevolution had to be contained, or else the fall of France to the Royalists would be more likely than ever. The PRKS would push southwards towards Stuttgart, which was eventually defended by a series of trenches, but this did not stop Royalist terrorist cells from rising up throughout the Swabian Republic much in the same way that Royalist terrorism plagued the French Popular Republic. In many ways, the fight for Swabia was a guerrilla war as military officers and civilians alike pledged their loyalties to both regimes fighting for control of their nation. The war against Franconia, which was primarily spearheaded by Bavaria, was much more clearly-cut. The formation of a government-in-exile for the Republic of Franconia did mean that Republican partisans were a common nuisance for Karl Theoador Wittelsbach, however, for the most part this element of the German Theater was a straightforward clash between two states.

By primarily focusing on ensuring the victory of the PRKS in Swabia, the Commonwealth of Franconia more or less waged a solely defensive war against Bavaria. The construction of trenches along the Franconian-Bavarian border was one of Wittelsbach’s first actions upon seizing power in the aftermath of the Wurzburg Putsch, which did ultimately prevent initial advances by the Bavarian Plebeians’ Army (BPA). As the war in Swabia remained a chaotic feud between partisan forces throughout the spring of 1857, the war in Franconia became a slow and vicious war of attrition. Trench warfare was a defining feature of this frontline, and as Bavaria’s fellow socius republics primarily focused on the theaters to the west of Germany, the BPA was left with few reinforcements to turn the tides of the German Theater. Months would pass without the BPA making it past Scheinfeld, and the people of southern Franconia would become accustomed to the constant firing of organ guns only mere miles away from their homes. The Battle of Markt Bibart would finally bring change to the war between Franconia and Bavaria when the latter emerged victorious on June 15th, 1857 and punched through enemy defenses, thus causing the Franconian army to fall back.

The Bavarian Plebeians’ Army fighting at the Battle of Markt Bibart.

The fallback of Franconian soldiers following their defeat at Markt Bibart allowed Bavaria to go on a rapid offensive under the command of General Joseph Martin Reichard towards Wurzburg. The Bavarians rapidly pushed towards Wurzburg via the Kitzingen Offensive while taking relatively few casualties, and by the time the Franconians had reconsolidated their defenses in mid-July 1857 the BPA had reached the southern shore of the Main River. By this point, Wuzrburg was only a few miles away and Bavarian airships had begun conducting short-range bombing campaigns upon Franconia’s capital. In order to prevent the apparent collapse of his regime, Wittelsbach would recall a number of Franconian regiments from the war in Swabia to reinforce defenses around Wurzburg, which in turn caused the Swabian Republic to gain the upper hand over the PRKS. Adelsheim, the de facto capital of the PRKS and the residence of Regent Friedrich von Blittersdorf, fell to the Swabian Republic on August 4th, 1857, with much of the PRKS administration (including Blittersdorf) being captured in the process. While the PRKS continued to hold on and waged guerrilla warfare throughout northern Swabia, it was merely a shadow of its former self and had been almost completely eliminated from southern Swabia. All it would take were some sieges throughout August 1857 to decisively defeat the PRKS paramilitary organization.

With the PRKS defeated and Wurzburg merely across a river, the defeat of the Commonwealth of Franconia was seemingly imminent. A month of attrition along the banks of the Main finally came to an end when the BPA emerged victorious at the Battle of Kitzingen on August 23rd, 1857, thus allowing General Reichard to make the final push for Wurzburg. With that being said, however, Karl Theodor Wittelsbach’s redeployment of Franconian soldiers from Swabia to defend the capital, while arguably contributing to the defeat of the PRKS, did ensure that the push for Wurzburg would be far from easy. The Main Offensive (named of the river that surrounded this final fight in the German Theater), despite encompassing far less territory, was substantially bloodier than the Kitzingen Offensive of the preceding July and also proved to be much slower. Despite this, the defeat of the Commonwealth of Franconia was seemingly inevitable. As the gunfire of the Bourbon War could be heard on a daily basis in the distance, many of the disgruntled masses of Wurzburg would take to the streets in protest against Wittelsbach, advocating for an end to his counterrevolution and the recreation of the short-lived Republic of Franconia. Of course, the aristocratic Karl Theodor Wittelsbach paid little attention to the demands of his people, and instead dispersed republican protests, with force if necessary. On September 1st, 1857, this culminated into the Wurzburg Massacre, in which Franconian soldiers fired into a crowd of protestors and therefore sparked a riot. After hours of violence in what was, for all intents and purposes, an armed conflict between the people and the armed forces of Franconia, the protest-turned-rebellion had been violently crushed, with hundreds of Franconian civilians being killed in the process.

The Wurzburg Massacre was the beginning of the very end for the reign of Karl Theodor Wittelsbach, as the war weariness that had been building up for months blew over into full-out nationwide riots. On the frontlines of the Main Offensive, entire battalions would stage mutinies in rebellion against the Wittelsbach regime and disintegrated Franconian defenses against the BPA. On September 7th, 1857, a little less than a week after the Wurzburg Massacre, Bavarian soldiers entered the southeastern reaches of the city following their victory at the Battle of Frauenland earlier that day. While the chaos following the massacre had weakened the city’s defenses, Wurzburg remained well-armed by numerous regiments, which meant that the Battle of Wurzburg spanned many days. A street by street battle would span three days before the banks of the Main River were reached yet again on September 10th by the Bavarian Plebeians’ Army upon pushing to the easternmost side of Wurzburg. Following the Bavarian victory in the Battle of Wurzburg, Karl Theodor Wittelsbach, seeing that Franconian defeat was inevitable at this point and that if the war continued the people of Franconia may very well come for his head, surrendered to the Bavarian Republic under the condition that he would be able to live in exile in the Kingdom of Saxony.

Following the Comintern’s acceptance of Wittelsbach’s surrender, the government-in-exile of the briefly established Republic of Franconia was reinstalled by Bavaria. However, while the Republic of Franconia was initially an Ochist-esque republic upon its formation many months prior, the government established in the aftermath of Karl Theodor Wittelsbach’s regime was explicitly Benthamist due to the installation of Benthamist officials in the government-in-exile by the Bavarian Republic. Furthermore, as a socius republic of the Plebeians’ Republic, Bavaria would also insist on a similar status for Franconia, thus meaning that two British socius republics would exist in southern Germany, a region once ruled by roturierist states. Ironically enough, by staging his infamous counterrevolution, Karl Theodor Wittelsbach had not brought upon a new age of absolute monarchism in Germany like he had hoped but through defeat had instead led to the ascendance of vehemently anti-monarchist republicanism over the region instead. And with the counterrevolution suppressed, the once-neutral Swabia and Franconia could turn their guns on the war that King Louis XVIII continued to wage in the western Mediterranean Sea.

By the end of the German Theater, the other frontlines of the Bourbon War had taken a turn in favor of the Royalists due to the redeployment of British and Bavarian soldiers out east to fight the German counterrevolution. From Lyon, the French Royal Army pushed into the very center of France itself, capturing the city of Bourges on August 3rd, 1857. In the Iberian Theater, things were far worse for the Republicans due to the Spanish capital of Madrid falling to Charles V’s restored kingdom following a grueling siege that lasted throughout much of August 1857 before a Royalist victory was narrowly secured on September 5th, 1857. The Bourbon War, which was once believed to surely be a certain victory for the Comintern establishment, now appeared to be going in favor of the Royalists. Even the other great powers of Europe, who had remained neutral throughout the conflict to recover from the Decade of Despair, had begun to more outspokenly endorse the monarchies installed by King Louis XVIII, therefore causing both London and Paris to fear intervention by the Triple Alliance on behalf of the Royalists.

But as all of southern Germany descended upon Occitania with a burning vengeance against Louis XVIII’s counterrevolutionary terror, it became clear that these grand victories by the Royalists were to be short-lived. Under the leadership of the famed Bavarian General Joseph Martin Reichard, a coalition of German forces would launch an offensive from Bensacon starting in late September 1857. The Rhone-Alps Offensive would prove to be a great success for the Republican War effort, as General Reichard rapidly pushed southwards at a rapid rate and managed to get as far as Valence by the beginning of November 1857. Due to it forcing a reconcentration of military forces out east to hold back Reichard, the rapid fallback of the Royalists in the Rhone-Alps Offensive would turn the tides of the Bourbon War in favor of the Republicans all throughout the Occitan Theater. The fall of 1857 was a period of quick victories for Comintern forces, which in turn boosted domestic morale in the French Popular Republic. Hamilton Bonaparte, despite still remaining controversial amongst much of the French population, was increasingly viewed as the apparent savior of not just France, but just about all of western Europe, from counterrevolutionary terror.

This boost in popularity of Bonaparte’s republic was not, however, shared in Occitania, which still predominantly remained under the control of Louis XVIII’s Kingdom of Occitania. Over the past year, the fledgling constitutional monarchy had managed to cultivate a national identity that the Roturier Kingdom of France had spent much of its history attempting to repress. For the first time in decades, the Occitan language was freely spoken in public by the majority of people in Toulouse while a red flag bearing the Occitan cross was flown throughout the fledgling state. For the people of Occitania, the Bourbon War was less of a war of aristocratic restoration than it was a war for independence. Of course, not all Occitanians were supportive of the newly formed fledgling state. Many living in this region considered themselves Frenchmen rather than Occitans and therefore did not support independence from Paris. Even amongst Occitanian nationalists, the Kingdom of Occitania was controversial due to a number of said nationalists opposing monarchism, thus causing groups like the PRO to side with the French Popular Republic in the hopes that their efforts would attract Hamilton Bonaparte to guaranteeing autonomy for Occitania under a republican government.

Regardless of local divisions over who to align with in the Bourbon War, Occitanian nationalists would prove to make the FPA’s occupation of northern Occitanian cities a relatively difficult task. Resistance to Republican military occupation by nationalists often caused locals to resort to terrorism akin to what Royalists often waged in northern France. Considering that many northern Occitanian cities continued to remain active war zones even after Republican occupation, nationalist partisan groups and terrorist attacks often proved to be detrimental to the war effort of the FPA. As many locals, regardless of their allegiances, continued to practice the local Occitan culture in the face of the French Popular Republic’s military presence, the stratocracy back in Paris realized that Occitanian nationalism had become not merely a threat to the Republican war effort, but a serious issue that the FPR would have to constantly tackle should its forces emerge victorious in the Bourbon War. As General Marie Alphonse Bedeau put it in a letter to Hamilton Bonaparte, “should the Occitan people not be appeased, we shall have far more problems to worry about than the war effort. For the prosperity of the Popular Republic in both the short and long term, I advise the Supreme Consul to contemplate conceding some degree of autonomy to the region of Occitania.”

Seeing that the Occitanian nationalist movement could not be defeated alongside the Second Kingdom of France, Supreme Consul Hamilton Bonaparte would go along with the advice of much of the French armed forces, Plebeians’ Tribune, and Century Assembly and seek to negotiate with Occitanian republicans in January 1858 to form an Occitan autonomous region within the French Popular Republic. Among these republican leaders was MT Frederic Mistral, the leader of the Occitan Republican Party, who initially agitated for the total independence of Occitania as a French socius republic but would ultimately have to moderate due to pressure from the Jacobin elite. In the end, however, the Occitanian nationalist movement secured a far greater victory than anything they could have possibly anticipated even two years ago. Ratified by Supreme Consul Bonaparte on January 20th, 1858, the Tetrarchy Act established the Occitan Autonomous Popular Republic (OAPR) as a region within the wider FPR that officially was only answerable to Paris’ policy on economic, militaristic, foreign, and judicial affairs.

While on paper France had secured a great degree of Occitania through the Tetrarchy Act, the de facto situation was a lot more dubious. National political parties continued to exist in the OAPR, and by extending national judicial authority over Occitanian territory, the supreme consul held onto the ability to purge and therefore control the Occitanian apparatus of state via the installation of local cronies. Furthermore, the constitution of the French Popular Republic continued to remain completely committed to the ideals of utilitarianism, which meant that the national government could agree to suspend the autonomous status of the OAPR at any given time should Paris determine that said status prevented the maximization of well-being within the French Popular Republic. Bonaparte did not, at least for the time being, plan to ever undertake such an action and the OAPR would consistently hold greater autonomy than the rest of France throughout its history, however, this autonomy always existed at the mercy of the supreme consul. The PRO would nonetheless tout the Tetrarchy Act as a great victory for Occitanian republicanism and Frederic Mistral, who was appointed as the acting Consul of the OAPR by the national government of France, would quickly go about depicting his administration as the legitimate Occitan nation, versus the “puppet” Kingdom of Occitania.

Consul Frederic Mistral of the Occitan Autonomous Popular Republic.

Surely enough, the formation of the OAPR shifted substantial support from Occitanian nationalists away from the Royalists, who were clearly beginning to lose the Bourbon War, and towards the Republicans. Throughout February 1858, numerous militias, local governments, and political organizations that had previously sided with the Kingdom of Occitania declared their loyalty to the OAPR, either due to having stronger ideological sympathies for republicanism or due to seeing the writing on the wall for the Royalists. During this period, the mass defections of Occitanian nationalists to the Republicans allowed for a coalition of Comintern forces to launch a grand offensive into what remained of the Kingdom of Occitania. Named after its commanding officer, General Alphonse Bedeau, the Bedeau Offensive would quickly overrun large swaths of Royalist-held territory in Occitania, territory that had taken two years for the Royalists to completely conquer. All the while, more and more forces previously loyal to the Kingdom of Occitania would defect to the OAPR, contributing to a collapse in manpower, resources, and morale for the Royalists in the Occitan Theater. On February 27th, 1858, Toulouse, the capital of the Kingdom of Occitania, fell into the hands of the Republicans and was declared the capital of the Occitan Autonomous Popular Republic. With the government of Joseph Roumenille on the run, the Kingdom of Occitania was little more than a clique of monarchist Occitanians at this point, doomed to be defeated by the forces of Benthamism at any point.

As the Kingdom of Occitania collapsed, so too did the tides turn for the Royalists in other theaters. In Iberia, where the restored Kingdom of Spain had managed to conquer Madrid back in September 1857, victories in the Occitan Theater relieved British forces to be redistributed to fight on behalf of the Spanish Communist Republic, which was on the brink of capitulation by the time the Bedeau Offensive was in full swing. The famed General Harold Codrington of the Revolutionary Plebeians’ Army was relocated from France to Spain circa mid-February 1858 as the commander of the British Expeditionary Force in Iberia, a role that he would utilize to coordinate the annihilation of Charles V’s reactionary clique. Ordering the deployment of chemical weapons by the Plebeians’ Republic in Iberia, General Codrington would emerge victorious at the Battle of Valladolid on February 17th, 1858, where the RPA unleashed cyanide artillery shells upon enemy forces, a sight not unlike the horrors of Mike Faraday’s weapons being used in the Italian Revolutionary War. On top of the blood agents used a decade prior in Italy, the RPA would fire chlorine gas upon Royalist forces at the Battle of Valladolid, which proved to be far more deadly than the older cyanide weapons. The Royalists were devastated by the chemical warfare at Valladolid, and were forced to not only end their offensive towards Leon (the provisional capital of the Spanish Communist Republic), but were forced to retreat against the toxic onslaught of the British.

The Spring of Poison had begun.

A soldier of the Revolutionary Plebeians’ Army wearing a gas mask during the Spring of Poison, circa March 1858.

While the Royalists were unable to get their hands on many chemical weapons during the Spring of Poison, this didn’t change the fact that both sides of the Iberian Theater felt the effects of Harold Codrington’s devastating campaign. Both Royalist and Republican soldiers alike had to wear gas masks, a device whose modern iteration had only been invented a few years prior, to survive the constant flow of toxins across battlefields. Entire towns had to be abandoned as the air was poisoned by warfare and numerous settlements, once filled with thousands of people before the Bourbon War, became barren ghost towns, only roamed by men wearing masks. While the Spring of Poison was a living nightmare for just about everyone involved, the tactics of General Harold Codrington were ultimately successful. The Royalists were forced into a constant westward retreat while the British Expeditionary Force took very few casualties despite their rapid progress towards the Mediterranean Sea. Madrid, which took a month to conquer, fell back into the hands of the Spanish Communist Republic within just the span of a few hours on March 22nd, 1858. As British and Spanish soldiers of Benthamism alike waged war, they left behind them a ruined nation ruled by the authoritarian Consul-General Leopoldo O’Donnell, who utilized the BSI to violently purge reconquered cities of any monarchist sympathizers. In many ways, the BSI served as the occupying army for the SCR and actively quelled any opposition that had survived the defeat of Royalist forces. Thousands of suspected Royalists were confined to dungeons during the Spring of Poison, and public executions in the middle of cities still rebuilding from the Bourbon War became commonplace.

While Leopoldo O’Donnell reinforced his reputation as a brutal dictator, there was little anyone could do to combat his reign of terror. O’Donnell’s regime, despite being even more controversial during the Bourbon War, was sustained by foreign investment, particularly from the Plebeians’ Republic, which went as far as to actively fund the BSI with military-grade equipment. In other words, the Spanish Communist Republic survived not with strong domestic support but through the circulation of equipment from Great Britain and her socius republics, which in turn gave the SCR the ability to effectively and efficiently purge dissent. And even if Royalists and many of those who fell victim to the brutality of the Iberian Theater of the Bourbon War despised Leopoldo O’Donnell, his previous supporters only became more dedicated to the reign of the consul-general and his popularity in northwestern Spain was boosted substantially following the Republican victory at the Battle of Valladolid. After the fall of Madrid, Consul-General O’Donnell had pledged to never capitulate to the Kingdom of Spain, and to those whose homes never became the battlefields of the Spring of Poison, Leopoldo O’Donnell’s pledge became a saving grace for northwestern Spain from warfare and reactionary terror in the region.

Of course, to those who lived in whatever little territory remained under the control of Charles V, the reputation of Leopoldo O’Donnell was far more negative, for it was here that the consul-general was regarded as a brutally effective tyrant. This reputation was in no small part thanks to the rapid successes of Republican forces, who managed to reach the western Mediterranean Sea by mid-April via emerging victorious at the Battle of Alicante on April 18th, 1858, throughout the Spring of Poison. The British would obviously celebrate the triumphs of General Harold Codrington, however, Spain’s very own Field Marshal Joaquin Espartero, whose rank in the armed forces of the Revolutionary Spanish Army (RSA) was second only to that of the consul-generalship, was equally pivotal to the Comintern’s victories in the Iberian Theater. It was, after all, Field Marshal Espartero, who had conquered Alicante. Born into humble origins three years prior to the Great London Coup, Joaquin Espartero had climbed up the social ladder in the aftermath of the establishment of the Spanish Communist Republic, becoming a figure who was as charismatic as he was deadly. By cultivating a reputation as a populist military leader, Espartero kept much of the Spanish population on his side even as he personally quelled riots against the ruling Communist Party and directed the executions of numerous dissidents.

Just as vicious military capabilities of Field Marshal Espartero were pivotal to the survival of the SCR throughout its retreat against the Kingdom of Spain, as Espartero held on in a brutal defensive war even after the fall of Madrid, these capabilities were pivotal to the victory of the RSA throughout the Spring of Poison. Supplied with British chemical weapons, Joaquin Espartero rapidly overran southeastern Spain in the name of the Spanish Communist Republic, leaving ruined cities in his wake. Field Marshal Espartero would, alongside General Codrington, reduce the Kingdom of Spain, once on the brink of restoring the rule of the House of Bourbon to all the Spanish state, to little more than an enclave hugging the Mediterranean coastline over the span of two months. With Espartero’s forces invading from the south and Codrington’s forces invading from the west, the Republican coalition would begin a siege of the de facto Royalist capital of Valencia on April 29th, 1858. Two days later, fearsome chemical warfare ultimately defeated Royalist defenses and the last holdout of Charles V’s Kingdom of Spain surrendered to the Revolutionary Spanish Army as a defeated Karl Louis von Bourbon abandoned his throne and returned to Vienna before he was killed alongside his failed counterrevolution.

As all guns fell silent in the Iberian Theater, flags of crimson were raised throughout Spain, for the Spanish Communist Republic had crushed the wrath of domestic reaction yet again and had survived the Bourbon War.

The occupation of Valencia following the capitulation of the Kingdom of Spain, circa May 1858.

With the defeat of the Spanish Royalists, the destruction of King Louis XVIII’s short-lived empire was in sight. As the Spring of Poison began in Iberia, the Occitan Theater continued to go in favor of the French Popular Republic. The fall of Toulouse, the capital of the Kingdom of Occitania, meant that the fall of Roumenille’s regime was in sight, however, Louis XVIII made was intent on holding onto territory on the European mainland for as long as possible, thus meaning that the expulsion of the French Royal Army would be more difficult than simply forcing the capitulation of the Kingdom of Occitania. By utilizing trench warfare and concentrating a large number of Royalist soldiers on pivotal frontlines, forces still loyal to the House of Bourbon managed to slow down the Republican onslaught throughout most of March 1858, but by this point defeat for the Occitan constitutional monarchy was inevitable. This seemingly inevitable defeat would be inflicted on March 29th, 1858 via a decisive Republican victory at the Battle of Carcassonne, which ended in not only massive casualties for the Royalists, but also the surrender of a number of Royalist battalions.

With the bulk of remaining Royalist defensive regiments in Occitania in ruin following the Battle of Carcassonne and defections to the French Popular Republic throughout the ranks of the Kingdom of Occitania continuing all the while, Prime Minister Joseph Roumenille saw no other choice than to go against the interests of King Louis XVIII and unconditionally surrender to Paris on April 2nd, 1858. The Treaty of Montauban would subsequently absorb what little remained of the territory of the Kingdom of Occitania into the Occitan Autonomous Popular Republic whereas the officials of the kingdom were put under house arrest in central France throughout the remainder of the Bourbon War. As for the remaining regiments of the French Royal Army stationed in Occitania, Viceroy Lucien de Montignac of Algeria, who King Louis XVIII had appointed as the commanding officer of the French Royal Army, personally ordered these forces to reconsolidate in Marseille as a sort of final holdout on the European mainland. This last stand, while certainly one of the bloodiest affairs of the entire Bourbon War, would of course ultimately end in defeat for the Royalists. After holding out nine gruesome days, the Siege of Marseille ended on April 11th, 1858 as whatever FRA men had survived the onslaught retreated to ships. After two gruesome years of combat, the Occitan Theater had come to a close.

With the Royalists ousted from both Spain and Occitania, the Republicans launched an offensive into the Kingdom of Catalonia once more pressing matters on other frontlines were resolved. The French Popular Army began to push towards Barcelona following the Battle of Carcassonne, and by the time the British and Spaniards got involved, much of northern Catalonia had already been conquered, with the French getting as far as Hostalric by the time of the Second Battle of Valencia despite the Pyrenees Mountains bogging down initial advances. Once a coalition of British, Spanish, and Portuguese soldiers began their offensive into southern Catalonia, the fall of the last of King Louis XVIII’s puppet regimes would come quickly. The Catalan capital of Barcelona was captured by French forces on May 6th, 1858, and with that the Bourbon War on the European mainland had more or less come to an end. A handful of Royalist guerrilla pockets continued to persist throughout much of southern Europe, but these were nothing that domestic standing armies couldn’t handle. For all intents and purposes, the Bourbon War had been relegated to northern Africa and a handful of islands throughout the western Mediterranean Sea, thus meaning that all guns had turned upon the Second Kingdom of France.

This final stage of the Bourbon War was a brutal death for Louis XVIII’s counterrevolution. Once within reach of recreating the pre-revolutionary France that had been eliminated over sixty years prior, the Second Kingdom of France now faced invasions from all sides by some of the most powerful empires of the 19th Century. The nations that had conquered western Europe, made ancient empires fall, and had expanded their influence to all corners of the globe were now coming for the head of Louis XVIII and his cronies with a lust for revenge. With the Mediterranean presence French Popular Navy (FPN) in ruins following the conquests of the Royalists in the region over the past two years, the responsibility of occupying Royalist-held territory within the Mediterranean Sea was therefore the responsibility of the Revolutionary Navy. The commanding naval officer of British forces in the Mediterranean Theater of the Bourbon War was none other than Admiral Thomas Cochrane, a man whose service on behalf of the Revolutionary Navy went back as far as its establishment.

Prior to the Bourbon War, Admiral Cochrane had presided over British naval forces during the Italian Revolutionary War and was a strong advocate within the military high command of the Plebeians’ Republic for the utilization of Mike Faraday’s chemical weapons in said conflict. This interest in chemical warfare had not left Cochrane by the time of the Bourbon War, and Cochrane happily coordinated the distribution of chemical weapons to the Iberian Theater throughout the entirety of the Spring of Poison. It was a man with decades of experience, a man whose reputation preceded him, and a man who had encouraged the proliferation of chemical weapons throughout the ranks of the British armed forces who was tasked with unleashing total war upon the last holdouts of the Second Kingdom of France. The conquest of the Balearic Islands was the first campaign that Thomas Cochrane focused on, and the handful of days in early May 1858 that it took to occupy the archipelago proved to the Republicans that the Royalists had more or less given up on on holding onto the numerous islands they had occupied throughout the Mediterranean Sea, therefore meaning that these territories were poorly defended. Corsica, the last significant island holding of the Royalists, was vanquished on May 17th, 1858 when the British emerged victorious at the Battle of Aleria.

As Republican forces converged upon the center of Royalist authority in Algiers from both the north and west, soldiers of the Revolutionary Plebeians’ Army had already begun to advance towards the last holdout of the Second Kingdom of France via Tripolitania. The North African Theater had originally been a point of consistent success for the Royalists due to a large concentration of force loyal to the French Royal Army in this region, with much of western Tripolitania falling under the white banner of Louis XVIII’s kingdom during the early stages of the Bourbon War and the FRA pushing as far as Sirte. These days of victory, however, were far in the past by 1858. The defeat of Royalist forces on other frontlines throughout late 1857 and early 1858 diverted both manpower and resources from the North African Front, which in turn gave the opportunity for the Plebeians’ Republic to increase its buildup in Tripolitania to eventually outnumber the army of General Aimable Pelissier. By May 1858, much of the grand advances made by General Pelissier over the last two years were undone by the RPA, which recaptured the city of Tripoli on May 29th, 1858.

Among the RPA officers who had bested Pelissier was General Hong Xiuquan, the commanding officer of the Cheng Dynasty’s Red Flag Army who had been placed in charge of the Union of Sinae’s expeditionary force to the North African Front. A man with decades of military experience under his belt, Hong arrived in Tripolitania circa the summer of 1856 and had been a constant thorn in the side of Aimable Pelissier ever since. General Hong was experienced in scaling along coastlines from his days fighting in the Liangguang War, and it was this experience that made Hong and his Sinic Expeditionary Force (SEF) an integral part of the Tripoli Offensive that would ultimately oust the Second Kingdom of France from the British protectorate. As a matter of fact, General Hong Xiuquan was ultimately the officer who expelled Aimable Pelissier from all of Tripolitania when he led the SEF in pursuit of remaining FRA forces, which had concentrated their efforts around Tiji. As the other regiments of the RPA focused on consolidating their control over northern Tripolitanian cities that bordered Tunis, Hong Xiuquan would crush Aimable Pelissier’s last stand in Tripolitania at the Battle of Tiji on June 6th, 1858, thus forcing General Pelissier to order the total withdraw of Royalist forces from the Eyalet of Tripolitania following his defeat.

Once the flag of the Plebeians’ Republic was hoisted atop Tiji, the Second Kingdom of France lost its last conquered territory and entered a period of purely defensive warfare. This final stage of the Bourbon War was ultimately a short, albeit very bloody, fiasco. Republican naval forces bombarded the Algerian coastline from the north, Republican ground forces invaded Tunis from the east, and Republican aerial forces bombed all frontlines from the sky. For those who resided within Republican states, the closing weeks of the Bourbon War was simply a matter of sitting back and awaiting for the news of the enemy’s capitulation, but for those who resided within the Second Kingdom of France, the death of King Louis XVIII’s counterrevolution was a brutal period. Entire coastal settlements were reduced to rubble by naval gunfire and aerial bombardment campaigns brought the destruction inland.

Despite witnessing the annihilation of Algiers firsthand, King Louis XVIII refused to surrender to the Republican forces and instead committed to pursuing a valiant last stand against the forces of Benthamism. Of course, all such an endeavor would do was prolong the inevitable. The French Royal Navy could defend the area surrounding Algiers from being invaded by sea, however, the same could not be said for territories that laid further away. The city of Tunis, for example, did not fall via an invasion by British ground forces from the south but instead was occupied by a coalition of Republican forces on June 17th, 1858 upon the securing of a beachhead in the ancient and once-grand city Carthage a day prior. With its capital controlled by Republican forces, the Beylik of Tunis subsequently capitulated to the Comintern on June 19th and was put under the control of Paris yet again, this time as a protectorate of the French Popular Republic.

Only a few days after the Battle of Tunis, the Republicans would gain yet another foothold in northern Africa when the Revolutionary Navy pierced through defenses surrounding Oran and deployed forces to conquer the city on June 21st, 1858. The Republicans now occupied territory within the Viceroyalty of Algeria itself, therefore causing an influx of Republican regiments into Oran and the surrounding territory with the intent to conquer Algiers. Led by the infamous General Harold Codrington, the Algiers Offensive would bring upon the ultimate defeat of the Second Kingdom of France. Sticking by his declaration to never surrender, regardless of the brutal cost of human life that the Bourbon War inflicted, King Louis XVIII sat by as thousands of men scrambled to fight the forces of the poisonous General Codrington. But in the end, the forces redistributed out west did little to stop the advance of the Republicans. In many ways, the Algiers Offensive was barely even a direct confrontation of armed forces. Bombardments of enemy forces from sky and sea reduced defensive FRA regiments into scattered ruins of an army, and on multiple occasions towns were simply abandoned to the Republicans without much of a fight. And, of course, Harold Codrington unleashed chemical weapons upon his enemies, just as he had done in Spain, to literally choke the Royalist forces.

General Codrington finally reached the gates of Algiers on July 11th, 1858. As the last fortress of the Second Kingdom of France, Louis XVIII ensured that the city was defended by whatever remained of the Royalist armed forces, although over two months of bombing meant that there was not much of a city left to defend. Their goal, therefore, was to defend the throne of just one man, a power-hungry reactionary who had waged over two years of war against the great European powers of the 19th Century in a futile attempt to restore what his ancestors had once reigned over a century ago. Intent on making sure that Louis XVIII would not escape, Harold Codrington directed his men to first encircle Algiers while the Revolutionary Navy already blockaded the city from the north. The campaign to totally encircle Algiers took two days, and in the end the city became a prison for the remains of the government of the Second Kingdom of France. Sooner or later, Algiers would have to fall, be it through conquest, through starvation, or through obliteration.

It would ultimately not take long for General Codrington to emerge victorious at the Battle of Algiers. Months of warfare had left the city exhausted and demoralized, something that was only reinforced by the blockade. Over the span of two grueling days, Republican soldiers from all across Europe fought through the streets of Algiers, streets that were often already filled with rubble from bombardments at the hands of airships. All the while, Republican warships pushed towards the Bay of Algiers as, one by one, the last ships bearing the flag of the Second Kingdom of France were either sunk or surrendered to avoid taking a trip to Davy Jones’ Locker. By the time the sun set upon the battlefield of Algiers on July 14th, all of the city east of the Wadi El Harrach was occupied by Republican forces, thus leaving only the heart of Algiers under the control of King Louis XVIII. It was on the fateful day of July 15th, 1858 that the de facto capital of the Second Kingdom of France would ultimately fall. To the southwest of the city’s center, General Harold Codrington continued to move through Algiers road by road, capturing military and government officials alike as prisoners of war in the process. Finally, after hours of combat, the most prized prisoner King Louis XVIII, who was frantically attempting to make a last-ditch escape from the warzone, was apprehended by a battalion of British soldiers. With their king in handcuffs, the last of the French Royal Army unconditionally surrendered to the Republican coalition, therefore bringing an end to both the Battle of Algiers and the Second Kingdom of France as a whole.

The Republican forces had won the Bourbon War.

The PRS Molesworth ironclad warship of the Revolutionary Navy docked in the Bay of Algiers, circa August 1858.

In the aftermath of the end of the Bourbon War, representatives of the belligerent forces would congregate in Porto to ratify an official end to hostilities. The Treaty of Porto was straightforward enough, as much of the theaters of the Bourbon War had already been brought to a close by separate peace treaties. Aside from all parties officially recognizing the aforementioned treaties, the Treaty of Porto primarily focused on the fate of the Second Kingdom of France. Geographically, the territorial integrity of France was effectively kept intact, with direct rule from Paris being restored to Catalonia, the Balearic Islands, and Corsica whereas the Beylik of Tunis became a protectorate of the FPR and the Viceroyalty of Algeria was replaced with the republican Dependency of Algeria. War reparations were levied upon the two colonies due to them being integral territory to the Second Kingdom of France, however, paying reparations was agreed to be the responsibility of all signatories of the Treaty of Porto.

On top of determining the geopolitical consequences of the Bourbon War, the Treaty of Porto would outline the punishments for the political and military leadership of the Royalist forces, with it being agreed upon that these figures were to be convicted in their nation of origin on account of treason. Should they be found guilty, the exact punishment of these counter-revolutionaries was not outlined in the Treaty of Porto, but it was expected that the vast majority would face capital punishment. Some figures, usually low-ranking officials, did actually get away with only a few years in prison, and by recognizing the Treaty of Montauban all government officials of the former Kingdom of Occitania remained under house arrest. But the higher ups of the Royalist forces, particularly the leadership of the Second Kingdom of France, were not so lucky. Aimable Pelissier, Lucien de Montagnac, and, of course, Louis XVIII were all found guilty of treason against the French Popular Republic and were sentenced to death by falling axe. The execution of Louis XVIII and his cronies on August 2nd, 1858 was not a public display, however, among those present to the event were Hamilton Bonaparte and William Molesworth. Killed in a secluded sect of Paris, Louis XVIII would be executed in the city he once ruled from, by the nation he had once ruled, in front of the revolutionary who had succeeded him.

As France, now reunified under the banner of a Benthamist republic, began to rebuild itself, the chess game of geopolitics continued to be played. At the fifty-ninth annual convention of the governments of the Communist Internationale, held in the city of Leon circa March 1859, Consul-President Frederich Hecker of Swabia put forth a resolution that, if ratified, would cause the alliance to adopt the promotion of the ideology of Benthamism both domestically and abroad as a part of its foreign and internal policy. In an impassioned speech to the Comintern, Hecker argued that King Louis XVIII’s counterrevolution had proven monarchism had not only become an obsolete institution, but a dangerous one, and that only a centralized Benthamist vanguard state could effectively combat reactionary powers. Hecker’s resolution was clearly controversial, as it threatened to divide the Comintern between Benthamists, Ochists, and roturierists, however, Supreme Consul Hamilton Bonaparte would eventually announce his support for the resolution, as would the governments of Bavaria and Franconia.

With the Ochist and roturierist states clearly in opposition to the so-called Hecker Resolution, it would be up to the Plebeians’ Republic of Great Britain and her socius republics to determine the fate of the Comintern alliance. William Molesworth was a hardline follower of the ideals of Jeremy Bentham, but as a pragmatist would ultimately vote for whatever benefited British geostrategic interests. Given that the Plebeians’ Republic held a large degree of influence around the world by itself and, regardless of whether or not the Comintern remained intact, London would likely maintain strong economic ties with its former members, not much would be lost in the eyes of Molesworth should Gallia Novum and the Ochist republics leave the alliance. On the other hand, an exclusively Benthamist alliance would be more reliant on and therefore influenced Great Britain, more in line with the ideology of Great Britain, and would be more capable of enforcing the interests of Great Britain abroad. Therefore, the Plebeians’ Republic of Great Britain would announce its official support for the Hecker Resolution, and by a vote of nine to five, with one abstention from the Republic of Mecklenburg, the resolution passed and the Comintern officially became a Benthamist alliance on March 31st, 1859.

As was to be expected, non-Benthamist member states were infuriated by the passage of this resolution, and a day after it was passed Gallia Novum, Helvetica, Genoa, and Italy announced their intent to leave the Comintern. Following the conclusion of the fifty-ninth annual convention of the Comintern, Consul Giuseppe Garibaldi of the United Italian Republic invited former Comintern states to Rome to form their own separate alliance under the guise that the Hecker Resolution was a revision of the values of communist solidarity that the Comintern had been founded upon. This splinter alliance, named the Popularis International (Popintern), was founded on April 14th, 1859 on the basis of intersectional communist solidarity, thus providing an alternative to the strictly Benthamist Comintern for moderate and anti-authoritarian communist nations. While the Popintern did not exclude Benthamist republics from membership, it was clearly intended to be a fraternity of communist liberal democracies committed to the Enlightenment ideals of protecting that which was determined, at least by liberal philosophy, to be natural rights.

Over the span of three years, the West was completely altered by King Louis XVIII’s counterrevolution. His war was not successful, but it had dramatic consequences for much of the world. Roturierism as an ideology lost its last footholds in Europe, the dominance of Benthamism upon western reaches of the continent was reinforced through bloodshed, and an alliance that had stood since the dawn of the 19th Century had begun to show its first cracks. Due to the devastation inflicted upon the French Popular Republic, the Plebeians’ Republic was the driving force for the reconstruction of Europe and the policing of the Comintern, therefore turning Great Britain into the sole great communist power as a war-ravaged France became a shadow of its former self. With an era of total British supremacy over western Europe emerging and France in the hands of an aggressive stratocratic republic, the stage was beginning to be set for the Industrial War. By the beginning of the 1860s, most of Europe had more or less recovered from the Decade of Despair and the great powers were mobilizing to exert their influence yet again. But the world was not in peace in the aftermath of the Bourbon War.

In 1859, one election in the United Dominion of Riebeeckia would turn the world upside down.​

 

[ETGalaxy]

Chapter Thirty-One: Empires of Africa

As the Decade of Despair came to a close, the clock was ticking down to a war that would shape the fate of the entire world. Unbeknownst to those who lived in this time period, lines in the sand were already inadvertently being drawn and a new global power was about to be born. This oncoming war was to be fought across the Indian Ocean, including in Africa, where new empires had been emerging over the last half-century. Once regarded as yet another prey for colonialist powers, it had become very clear that the African continent had averted the fate of succumbing to conquest by said powers, a fate that had befallen many other regions, such as East Asia, Australasia, and the Middle East. This wasn’t to say that the greedy claws of imperialism had failed to grab any of Africa, for European banners soared above the northernmost lands of the continent and a number of significant colonies had been established over time, however, the revolutions of the Age of Enlightenment toppled a number of colonial empires, and post-Benthamian powers in the West simply did not have either the capacity or interest to amass vast collections of colonies.

Rather than be partitioned by competing foreign adversaries, the coastal states of Africa became vital trading partners for Western powers, particularly newly-formed nations in the Americas. As a consequence, Western technology made its way to the aforementioned coastal states, and the Industrial Revolution had consumed much of the Afircan exterior by the start of the 1850s. It was these nations, which had become global commerce in the aftermath of the 18th Century world order’s downfall, which would come to dominate their home continent. It was these nations within which the African Renaissance of the 1830s would flourish. It was these nations that would be on a path to not just be a force to be reckoned within local geopolitics, but a force to be reckoned with on the global stage as well. By the halfway point of the 19th Century, it was apparent that the global distribution of international authority would not be consolidated on one or two conflicts but was instead to be decentralized throughout the world as new industrialized empires emerged in Asia, South America, and, of course, Africa.

The Sultanate of Tuggurt was not one of these coastal states lucky enough to have industrialization take off within its borders. An Amazigh kingdom located just to the south of the Atlas Mountains, one would not expect Tuggurt to ever become anything more than just another minor nation trying to make its way within the Sahara Desert. When the 19th Century began, the Sultanate of Tuggurt had been a vassal of Algiers since 1552, which was in turn a vassal of the Ottoman Empire. But the new century brought with it a streak of good luck for the Tuggurtians when the French invaded the Regency of Algiers and turned both it and the neighboring Tunis into colonies, thus ending over two centuries of tributary status for the Sultanate. While the French certainly had the military capacity to invade the Sahara, there was little incentive to do so due to the region holding little strategic value while rebellions in the Viceroyalty of Algeria demanded the attention of colonial forces first and foremost, thus meaning that Paris had no interest in expanding beyond the Atlas Mountains for the time being.

This meant that not only was the Sultanate of Tuggurt freed from Algerian control, but that it would not have to bow down to a new master in the form of France anytime soon. Tuggurt and its fellow Amazigh states of the Sahara had managed to evade the fate of its northern neighbors, and as one of the larger Amazigh kingdoms, Tuggurt was well-poised to become a prominent regional power. During this time period, the Sultanate was under the de facto reign of Lalla Aicha, who came to power after poisoning Sultan Ali IV and assuming the regency of her eight year-old son Abd er-Rahman. Aicha proved to be an incredibly efficient ruler despite the amount of internal violence that plagued the Tuggurtian royal family, however, her intent was to ultimately hand over the affairs of state to Abd once he was old enough to rule. This all changed when the young sultan perished in a horse-riding accident in 1839, thus leaving the throne of the Sultanate of Tuggurt vacant. Lalla Aicha quickly laid claim to the throne of her deceased son, as did a handful of other nobles, but by holding a grip on the Tuggurtian apparatus of state, Aicha easily crushed all opposition to her rule by the end of the year, thus becoming Sultana Aicha of Tuggurt.

It was a few years after this power struggle that Abd al-Qadir ibn Muhieddine made his way to the capital of the Sultanate (which also just so happened to be named Tuggurt) and requested an audience with Sultana Aicha. The son of an influential and highly religious Islamic family from Oran, Abd al-Qadir had participated in the defense of Algiers from the French back in 1821 when he was less than fifteen years of age. A few years later, the young Abd al-Qadir, who was determined to one day repel the French from his homeland, would partake in the Hajj to Mecca and returned disillusioned in the Ottoman Empire’s commitment to defense of the Islamic world from foreign invaders, going as far as to prophetically write in 1830 that “if the capitulation of Algiers into the hands of a foreign conqueror is reflective of future Ottoman apathy to enemy incursions, the Sultan might as well start counting the days to the fall of Constantinople.” As the French Royal Army pacified revolts in their newly-seized North African colonies, Abd al-Qadir made his way to Morocco in an attempt to persuade its monarch to wage a jihad in the name of the liberation of Algiers from French imperialism. This, of course, failed, but Abd al-Qadir did manage to secure a position within the Moroccan army, and by the end of the 1830s Abd al-Qadir had risen through the ranks to become one of the most renowned generals in Morocco.

Abd al-Qadir never lost his determination to halt European incursions into the Islamic world, although he eventually conceded that a war to retake colonial possessions was a far-fetched ambition. Rather than forge a sword to sever the head of imperialism, Abd al-Qadir decided that his time would be better spent constructing a shield to fend off further imperialism. It was for this reason that General Abd al-Qadir oversaw the modernization of the armed forces of the Kingdom of Morocco, with European rifles and tactics being adopted in the 1830s. With that being said, rather than adhere to Abd al-Qadir’s ambitions of defending northern Africa from Europe, the Moroccan sultan sought to instead pursue friendly relations with the West, with Morocco negotiating a non-aggression pact with the Comintern in 1836 that would last for fifty years in return for the Moroccans opening up their kingdom to foreign trade. This would lead Abd al-Qadir to see that his shield could not be built by Morocco, thus causing him to abandon his post in late 1841 and head eastward into the world of the Amazigh kingdoms.

Abd al-Qadir would therefore make his way to the Sultanate of Tuggurt, where he used his status as a prominent and influential general to meet Sultana Aicha. It was during this meeting in 1842 that Abd al-Qadir introduced a proposal to the Sultana that would make the both of them two of the most influential figures in modern African history. Former General Abd al-Qadir urged Lalla Aicha to pursue a series of military campaigns led by himself with the intent of uniting the entirety of the Amazigh people under the banner of a single empire ruled from the city of Tuggurt. This empire, Abd al-Qadir argued, would not only turn Tamazgha, the Amazigh homeland, into a powerful society under the control of Lalla Aicha but would finally prevent Western colonialist powers from digging deeper into the Sahara Desert. In other words, Abd al-Qadir would finally have his shield. Unlike the nobles of Morocco, Sultana Aicha was impressed by Abd al-Qadir’s ambitious plan and agreed that a unified state was in both her best interest and in the overall interest of the people of the Sahara. She would, therefore, entertain Abd al-Qadir’s vision for now and allowed him to lead a series of Tuggurtian incursions into neighboring Amazigh states.

General Abd al-Qadir’s first campaign in what became known as the Wars of Amazigh Unification began in October 1842 when he led an invasion into the Mzab region in order to construct his envisioned empire by first building a wall directly south of the Viceroyalty of Algeria. With a large army, skillful tactics, and even Western guns on his side, Abd al-Qadir would easily lead the Tuggurtians to victory and overrun all of Mzab by the end of November 1842. From here, the Western Campaign would push towards the city of Laghouat, which, like the war for Mzab before it, was an easy conquest for the Tuggurtians. The Battle of Laghouat would begin on December 21st, 1842 and proved to be a slightly more difficult endeavor due to the walls surrounding the city, but Tuggurtian artillery brought down said walls after three days of said combat and Abd al-Qadir therefore emerged victorious in the Battle of Laghouat on December 24th, 1842. This in turn brought an end to the Western Campaign, and General Abd al-Qadir made his way back to Tuggurt as the constructor of an empire. Upon Abd al-Qadir’s return to the city, Lalla Aicha prepared to be crowned the first Sultana of All Amazighs. This would ultimately occur on January 12th, 1843 alongside the reorganization of the Sultanate of Tuggurt and the territories occupied during the Western Campaign into the Tamazight Sultanate.

Flag of the Tamazight Sultanate, which was adopted circa 1850.

With no external powers having either the capacity or interest to go on Saharan campaigns, Tamazgha was the dominant power within the Sahara Desert upon its formation and was more or less free to continue the Amazigh Wars of Unification unimpeded. Throughout much of 1843, Tamazgha would consolidate power in the northern Sahara by invading a number of minor towns and tribes surrounding its current borders that had been spared by the Western Campaign. All the while, General Abd al-Qadir began the Southern Campaign towards the Ahaggar Mountains in March 1843. Said campaign would encompass a far larger territory than the previous Western Campaign, however, the Tamazight Sultanate was now entering the sparsely populated heart of the Sahara Desert, which meant that little resistance was faced. With that being said, Abd al-Qadir would be gone for far longer on his southward trek, for he intended to bring the confederacy of Kel Ahaggar to its knees by occupying its capital city of Abalessa. Doing so would mean that the dominant power in the Ahaggar Mountains would be absorbed into the Tamazight Sultanate, thus expanding the empire’s reach into the center of the largest desert on Earth.

Surely enough, the Southern Campaign would be yet another victory for Abd al-Qadir, but it was far more grueling than the prior year’s westward push. The Tamazight army was several miles away from their Sultanate’s center, therefore meaning that few reinforcements arrived and Abd al-Qadir had to be much more cautious and slow in this conflict. The Tamazights reached the northern reaches of the Ahaggar Mountains in early August 1843, at which point the organized forces of Kel Ahaggar engaged with an army determined to conquer the Sahara and slowed down the Southern Campaign even more. The clash for control of the Ahaggar Mountains would be prolonged over many months, however, Tamazgha would ultimately defeat Kel Ahaggar upon winning the Battle of Abalessa on January 3rd, 1844. The territory of Kel Ahaggar became yet another province of the ever-expanding Tamazight Sultanate, therefore bringing the Southern Campaign of the Wars of Amazigh Unification to an end as General Abd al-Qadir finally made his way back to Tuggurt.

The next two years were a period of consolidation for the Tamazight Sultanate. Aside from a handful of expeditions to conquer small neighboring tribes, the Wars of Amazigh Unification were temporarily put on hold as Sultana Aicha diverted attention to developing her empire’s domestic infrastructure, with one of the most impressive projects started during this time being the construction of the Ahaggar Road, a pathway spanning through the Sahara Desert by connecting Tuggurt to Abalessa. The development of such lengthy roadways was viewed as essential to the long-term success of Tamazgha as a cohesive state, given that said roadways served as a means to connect cities otherwise isolated in the vast wasteland that is the Sahara and therefore develop a unified Tamazight society. All the while, more Western technology was imported to Tamazgha, including (under the guidance of Abd al-Qadir) a handful of airships. The mass proliferation of such devices throughout Tamazgha was still a few decades off due to the Sultanate not yet having the infrastructure in place to domestically construct many airships, but even in the mid-1840s, officials Tamazight could see the benefits of investing in a mode of transportation that could simply soar above the vast desert that encompassed much of their empire’s territory.

Sultana Aicha would not live to see the completion of many infrastructure projects started under her reign, for the first ruler of the Tamazight Sultanate passed away in early 1846. Her only child had died many years prior, and with no clear heir to the throne in place, Lalla Aicha spent the waning days of her life ensuring that Abd al-Qadir would succeed her. Despite not being of Amazigh ethnicity, the accomplished general already held a considerable degree of influence within the Tamazight government, was popular amongst the Sultanate’s population and elite alike, and was young enough to reign for a long time. It was, therefore, a relatively easy process to ensure that the man who had first envisioned the formation of what eventually became the Tamazight Sultanate all those years ago would get to rule the empire he had forged. Therefore, Sultan Abd al-Qadir I was crowned in Tuggurt, eager to continue the Wars of Amazigh Unification. Often nicknamed the “Genghis Khan of Africa” due both men pursuing similarly impressive campaigns of empire-building, Adb al-Qadir finally had an empire to rule and was ready to expand it once more.

Sultan Abd al-Qadir I of the Tamazight Sultanate.

As the Ottoman Empire was partitioned by the European powers, Tamazgha began the Oceanic Campaign of the Wars of Amazigh Unification. Starting said campaign in June 1846 with the hope of ending the Tamazight Sultanate’s landlocked status, the Genghis Khan of Africa went on a campaign of empire-building yet again with the intent of pushing towards the Arab settlement of Dakhla and therefore gaining access to the Atlantic Ocean. Many Berber settlements stood in between Tamazgha and the Atlantic, with Timimoun being the largest of these settlements, which made the Oceanic Campaign a long endeavor in which Sultan Abd al-Qadir I confronted many enemy forces to conquer. Despite slowing down Tamazight expansion, none of these forces were any match to the unified and increasingly modernized army of Tamazgha, which slowly but surely made its way west. The Battle of Dakhla would occur on September 15th, 1847 and was a relatively simple victory for the Tamazights due to the coastal settlement being both sparsely populated and not very developed. By the end of the day, Abd al-Qadir had declared victory in the Oceanic Campaign and the Tamazight Sultanate had access to the Atlantic Ocean.

The next few years were an era of peace and prosperity for Tamazgha. The Wars of Amazigh Unification were not yet over, for Sultan Abd al-Qadir I was not yet Sultan of All Amazighs, but the Sultan recognized that any future campaigns would bring Tamazgha to war with neighboring empires rather than any of the tribes scattered throughout the Sahara Desert. Therefore, as the rest of the world approached the Decade of Despair, the Tamazight Sultanate continued its infrastructure started many years prior under the reign of Sultana Aicha, with the vast roadways spanning the Sahara Desert that connected the largest cities of the Sultanate being expanded to reach Dakhla. Speaking of Dakhla, Abd al-Qadir I invested heavily into the settlement throughout the 1850s with the intent of transforming it into a flourishing port city that would serve as Tamazgha’s gateway to the international economy. By the end of the 1850s, the economy of the Tamazight Sultanate was booming due to the nation opening itself up to globalized commerce for the first time, with the mining of ores proving to be an especially profitable industry for the modernizing Tamazight economy.

The early 1850s also saw the development of new diplomatic ties by the previously isolated Tamazight Sultanate. Following the Oceanic Campaign, the Kingdom of Cayor became an early and close ally of Tamazgha due to the former’s policy of armed isolationism with regards to most Western states. By barely trading with the West, Cayor had few allies as its neighbors were either gobbled up by Western imperialism or were conquered in the Fulani jihads. This made an alliance with the emerging regional power that was the Tamazight Sultanate particularly appealing to Cayoran King Dece Fu Njogu II, especially after Tamazgha opened itself up to global commerce. By trading with the Tamazights, Cayor was able to maintain its protectionist foreign policy of “armed isolationism” towards the West while still purchasing Western technology through Tamazgha in a unique relationship that had fruitful economic benefits for both the Cayorans and Tamazights. As a former general of the Moroccan armed forces, Sultan Abd al-Qadir I was also able to establish close ties with the Kingdom of Morocco. This relationship went as far as the formation of a mutual defense pact between the two states in 1853 via the Treaty of Laghouat, which ensured that the last two great Islamic powers of northern Africa would stand in solidarity against any foreign encroachments upon their soil.

This age of peace could not, however, last forever. The Genghis Khan of Africa still desired the complete unification of the Amazigh people, or at least the Amazigh people whose lands were not occupied by technologically advanced European empires. This meant that Sultan Abd al-Qadir I’s attention landed upon the lands to his south, including the vital commercial hub of Timbuktu. This region was the domain of the Massina Empire, an Islamic theocracy established in 1818 during the Fulani jihads of the early 19th Century, an in which a number of theocratic states were established by the Fulani people of western Africa, oftentimes by bringing down historical regional powers. With the notable exception of the Sokoto Caliphate, none of these jihad states had yet to industrialize circa the 1850s, but they had engaged in trade with the coastal empires of West Africa, which meant that the Fulani armed forces, including the Massina military, had completely integrated Western technology into their arsenals.

A war against Massina would be the greatest challenge Sultan Abd al-Qadir had yet to confront, but in his eyes the city of Timbuktu was the last piece needed to complete the shield he had begun the construction of all those years ago. Therefore, after nearly a decade of internal consolidation, the Tamazight Sultanate prepared for war yet again when an ultimatum was delivered to the Massina Empire circa February 1856 demanding that Timbuktu and all land to its north be recognized as Tamazight territory within the span of a week. This was, of course, not something that Alamani Amadu III of Massina was willing to do, opting instead to not respond to the ultimatum as both Tamazgha and Messina prepared for war. The Tamazight-Massina War would, therefore begin on February 15th, 1856 and the Genghis Khan of Africa marched his forces off to combat yet again in the last of the Wars of Amazigh Unification,

Armed with Western rifles and even a handful of organ guns, the Massina Empire was far from an easy foe to defeat. The Battle of Arawan, which started on March 1st, 1856, would be the first major confrontation between the Tamazight and Massina and quickly bogged down into a brutal war of attrition. Seeing that his forces didn’t have a technological advantage, Abd al-Qadir ordered his men to take a defensive stance and dig trenches in the sand of the Sahara after a day of combat. The harsh desert made such prolonged warfare a cruel experience for both belligerent forces, and many died from the lack of water alone. Nonetheless, after weeks of combat, the Tamazights gradually pushed through the settlement and ultimately declared victory in the Battle of Arawan on March 16th, 1856. The brutality of the Tamazight-Massina War was, however, far from over and the Massina army continued to utilize trench warfare to hold back Abd al-Qadir’s army. This would clearly not be a quick campaign to victory like the other conflicts of the Wars of Amazigh Unification.

The slow push towards Timbuktu would last for two years as lines were literally drawn in the sand time and time again, with the barren landscape of the Sahara Desert becoming the warzone where hundreds would die for their respective empires. With that being said, it gradually became clear that the Tamazight-Massina War was going in favor of Tamazgha. The march of Abd al-Qadir’s was ultimately towards Timbuktu rather than in retreat back to Arawan. Caravans of camels from the great cities of the Tamazight Sultanate would serve as the supply lines providing their Sultan with a consistent influx of resources and manpower that ensured that the Tamazight Army was an efficient war machine. The Battle of Timbuktu would finally begin on June 4th, 1858 as the outskirts of the city were besieged by Tamazight forces. It would be many weeks until the city fell, but fall it did. The experienced tactics of Sultan Abd al-Qadir I mixed with crumbling morale amongst Massina forces ensured that the Tamazight flag would soon fly over Timbuktu, and the last Massina forces within the city capitulated on July 2nd, 1858. Seeing that the Tamazight-Massina War was lost, Alamani Amadu III called for a ceasefire two days later and would subsequently surrender Timbuktu and all territory to its north to the Tamazight Sultanate.

After over a decade of warfare, the Amazigh people, with few notable exceptions, were finally united under the banner of one empire. One of these exceptions was, of course, the Amazigh who lived within French colonial holdings in northern Africa. Abd al-Qadir believed he would’ve been able to conquer Algeria during the Bourbon War, but this conflict happened to occur roughly simultaneously with the Tamazight-Massina War, which meant that the Tamazight Army was fighting on the other side of its empire when Louis XVIII was staging his counterrevolution. A two front war against two enemy armies, both of which were well-armed with Western technology, would’ve drawn Tamazight forces thin, which in turn likely would have resulted in defeat for Tamazgha. Despite building a vast empire within two decades, Sultan Abd al-Qadir I would never have the opportunity to liberate his homeland of Algeria, something that he regretted for the rest of his life.

While the Industrial Revolution had yet to take hold in the Tamazight Sultanate, the industrialization of the West African states to the south of Timbuktu flourished during the 1850s. The Ashanti Empire remained the industrial juggernaut of the region, but soon enough factories were popping up throughout surrounding states as well. The Bamana Empire, which lost the bulk of its territory to the Massina Empire back in the 1810s, was quick to embrace the African Renaissance during the 1840s while importing Ashanti machinery and weapons in a desperate attempt to save the crumbling state amidst continuous Massina incursions (Timbuktu was seized by the Massina from Bamana just as the modernization of the latter was beginning to take off). Starting in 1846, foreign investors would be paid by the Bamana monarchy to oversee the construction of factories in order to develop the nation’s domestic industrial capacities, with the first of these factories being completed a few years later in the capital city of Segou.

Bamana’s industrial revolution was far from impressive, but it did rejuvenate the declining empire’s economy and strengthened its armed forces to ensure that another jihad into its territory would not succeed. It would be years until Bamana was fully industrialized, thus meaning that for the time being there would be few factories and the ones that did exist were primarily concentrated in Segou, but the nation was clearly on its way towards forging an industrial society. More importantly in the context of the history of the wider region of West Africa, the industrialization of Bamana encouraged the nation’s neighbors to adopt similar policies to make sure that the victories of the Fulani jihads wouldn’t be undone by rising industrial powers. The Massina Empire was the next state of the Sahel region to undergo the process of industrialization, with said process starting in the early 1850s (it should be noted that Massina’s industrial revolution was one of the factors that led to Abd al-Qadir’s declaration of war in 1856 due to the Sultan seeking to conquer desired territory from the Massina Empire before it had completed the process of industrialization). While Bamana initiated its modernization through interactions with the Ashanti, Massina imported equipment, investment, and oversight from the Sokoto Caliphate, a fellow Fulani jihad state whose technological capacities were rising to rival that of Ashanti.

The industrialization of the Sahel was in many ways an arms race between the region’s powers, all of which feared that the potential modernization of each other would lead to one West African empire eventually conquering its neighbors with its mechanized army. The Kingdom of Kaarta, a state to Bamana’s west, was the next nation in the region to industrialize as its government pursued the purchase of machinery from both Ashanti and Virginia’s colonies in western Africa. After Kaarta, both Futa Tooro and Khasso to its west would hop on the regional trend of industrialization through the importation of machinery. By the end of the 1850s, all nations in West Africa had either begun the process of industrialization or had invaded their smaller neighbors that had failed to realize the necessity of modernization programs. A decade later, Bamana and Massina had both more or less become completely industrialized states, although with that being said pre-industrial agricultural production continued to be a prominent sector of their economies well into and beyond the 1860s.

Bamana factory workers in Segou, circa 1872.

The rapid industrialization of the western Sahel was certainly impressive and revolutionized the geopolitical, economic, and social situation of the region (for example, Bamana would abolish slavery in 1870 as the institution simultaneously became increasingly impractical within an industrial economy and increasingly despised by the international community that the Bamana Empire had been integrated into via commerce with its coastal neighbors), however, it did not really produce any empires in the same way that industrialization to the Sahel’s south produced Ashanti dominance. Instead, the regional powers continued to exist and the economic sphere of influence of the Ashanti Empire, whose trade with its northern neighbors was one of the driving forces in the industrial revolution of the Sahel, extended northwards.

One West African empire that did flourish due to industrialization was the Sokoto Caliphate. Having already become a major regional power by the 1830s due to a number of conquests over the preceding decades, the Sokoto had initiated their industrialization through trade with both the Ashanti Empire and Western states following the expansion of the Sokoto Caliphate to the Gulf of Guinea. Sokoto also found itself in a conveniently secure position upon industrializing due to the Ashanti (the only regional power that could realistically defeat the Sokoto Caliphate) pursuing the formation of a non-aggression pact with their eastern neighbor, thus meaning that the Sokoto did not have to worry much about defending their western border. This allowed for military attention to be concentrated on the expansion of the Sokoto borders, with the declining Bornu Empire being conquered by the Sokoto Caliphate via a jihad that lasted from 1849 to 1850. The eastward campaigns would not stop with the fall of Bornu, and by the mid-1850s, Lake Chad was completely enclosed by Sokoto-held territory.

By 1855, the Sokoto Caliphate was physically larger than even the Ashanti Empire, spanning from Lake Chad to the Gulf of Guinea. This brought upon newfound wealth, power, and influence to Sokoto, but it also meant that there was more territory for the Sokoto sultan to exert control over. The tasks of rapidly expanding, industrializing, and internally consolidating the Sokoto Caliphate were all the responsibility of Sultan Ali Babba bin Bello, who reigned from 1842 to 1859. A number of emirates, the internal administrative divisions of Sokoto, would rebel during this time period, including Kebbi, Dendi, Zamfara, and Hadejia. None of these rebellions lasted long and were easily crushed by the modernizing Sokoto armed forces, however, they did clearly indicate that the emirates had become too independent from the authority of the Sultan to be effectively controlled by the central Sokoto administration. This was an especially pressing issue during a time when Sokoto held large chunks of newly-conquered territory that had also yet to be converted to Islam, most notably the ethnically Yoruba lands of what had once been the Oyo Empire, which had completely fallen in 1852 after a series of defeats.

Ali Babba was therefore incentivized to rethink the management and autonomy of the emirates in order to ensure that the prosperity of the growing Sokoto Caliphate would not be hampered. In 1856, the Sultan would enact what are colloquially referred to as the “Acts of Cohesion,” which were seen as reforms to keep Sokoto centralized, unified, and stable. In accordance with these reforms, the emirs were no longer lifetime appointments by the Sultan and could be replaced at any time, the emirates themselves could be dissolved and have their borders redesigned at the whim of the Sultan, and taxes would be paid directly to the central government rather than be delivered annually by the emirs. On top of the introduction of reforms to the powers the Sultan held over the emirates, the Acts of Cohesion also declared all natural resources within Sokoto territory to be waqf, which in practice effectively nationalized said resources, and formed a Sokoto legislative assembly called the Council of Ministers.

The Council of Ministers did not hold any real authority upon its formation due to the Sultan being able to enact laws without its discretion and wielding a veto that could not be overturned, which made the assembly little more than a collection of advisors. Structurally, the Council of Ministers was reminiscent of the parliament of the long-gone Kingdom of Great Britain, with the upper house (Brotherhood of Experts) consisting of nobles and members of wealthy members whose seats within the Brotherhood were to be hereditary and the lower house (Brotherhood of Representatives) consisting of democratically-elected ministers elected to serve five-year terms. For the time being, the powerless status of the Council of Ministers ensured that the Sokoto Caliphate remained a de facto absolute monarchy (something that Ali Babba bin Bello intended to preserve when he went about implementing the Acts of Cohesion), but it was supported by the aristocracy by giving them a means to introduce legislation to the Sultan, not to mention that the Brotherhood of Representatives was the first instance of democracy being implemented within Sokoto.

Two ministers of the Brotherhood of Experts, circa 1857.

Besides structural reforms and the initiation of industrialization, the reign of Sultan Ali Babba was also notable for expanding the Sokoto sphere of influence. The Caliphate had been a regional power well before industrialization, but the African Renaissance transformed Sokoto into a great continental power whose authority was rivaled by few. The Massina Empire was one such state that fell into orbit around the Sokoto during this time period of prosperity, as were the Sultanate of Wadai, an Islamic monarchy that bordered the Sokoto Caliphate to the east of Lake Chad, and the Sultanate of Darfur, which was situated between Wadai and the British colony of Aegypt. Both Wadai and Darfur in particular were wealthy nations with a long history of prosperous trade with northeastern Africa, however, the conquest of much of the region, both by European imperialists and the Tamazight Sultanate, had considerably disrupted Trans-Saharan trade while putting Darfur in particular at risk of being the next target of colonial expeditions.

Both Wadai and Darfur, historically rivals of each other during the 18th Century, therefore shifted their trade relations westward to western Africa, and all commerce from the region to Central Africa had to pass through Sokoto. The Sokoto Caliphate itself became the dominant trading partner of both Wadai and Darfur by the end of the 1850s. This was reinforced when the two sultanates became tributaries of Sokoto, with the Sultanate of Darfur accepting military protection (particularly against Great Britain) from the Sokoto Caliphate and sending resources to its protector as payment by ratifying the Treaty of Al-Fashir in February 1857. A few months later, the Sultanate of Wadai, which was now surrounded by Sokoto military presence, gave into pressure from Sokoto diplomats and signed the Treaty of Ouara in August 1857, which turned the nation into a tributary akin to Darfur. As Sokoto soldiers entered both Wadai and Darfur, the two states continued to import West African weapons and machinery while Sokoto entrepreneurs made agreements with local leadership, who sought to reduce dependency on Sokoto, to develop domestic industrialization.

As the industrial revolution of Africa spread eastward, the Sokoto grip on regional power stayed firm. Sultan Ahmadu Atiku ascended to the throne of Sokoto in 1859 and, with strong support from the Council of Ministers, initiated the construction of the Trans-Sudanian Railway, which was to span from the Sokoto capital (which also just so happened to be named Sokoto) to the Darfur capital of Al-Fashir, as one his first acts as Sultan. Forged through the industry of Sokoto and funded through the tribute of Wadai and Darfur, the Trans-Sudanian Railway took six years to build and, upon its completion, became the lifeline of commerce in Central Africa, especially as smaller railways were connected to the larger line. By constructing and managing the Trans-Sudanian Railway, the Sokoto Caliphate situated itself at the center of Africa’s industrialized economy of the late 19th Century, hence why Sokoto became the preferred African trading partner of the Comintern and established profitable trading relations with a number of other Western states, during the 1860s.

The Sokoto Caliphate was far from the only African empire to expand its sphere of influence during the 1850s. The Ashanti Empire, for example, established strong economic ties with Bamana and the kingdoms to its west by sparking the fires of industrialization in this region. Ashanti was not a threat to Sokoto due to the non-aggression pact and strengthening trade relations between the two empires, however, one empire that was a potential threat was the Kingdom of Kongo. A coastal absolute monarchy in Central Africa that had been in contact with Europe since the late 1400s and subsequently converted to Catholicism, Kongo was in a perfect position to industrialize due to its centuries-old ties with the West that ensured the flow of technology born from the Industrial Revolution. The Benthamian War and the subsequent collapse of the ancient European empires that had traditionally maintained the Atlantic slave trade generated the first sparks of socioeconomic modernization in Kongo as the demand for slaves sharply declined, with only Brazil and New Granada keeping the abhorrent market alive. By the start of the Amazon War, economic pressure from abolitionist states and fears of a potential large-scale slave revolt had caused both nations to abolish the slave trade in 1830s, thus killing off the legality of the Atlantic slave trade once and for all.

In its place, Kongolese commoners would make their way to the Kingdom’s coastal ports to trade goods with international markets. Starting in the years immediately after the conclusion of the Benthamian War, this gave rise to a market liberal economy within Kongo, a sector that had long since outpaced the Atlantic slave trade by the time of its total abolition in the 1830s. A number of Western businesses would trade extensively with the Kingdom of Kongo, with Brazil, Riebeeckia, and Germania becoming some of its largest commercial partners. This economic situation meant that Kongo was one of the most well-poised nations in Africa to undergo an industrial revolution, with an entrepreneurial class with the incentive to industrialize, dense population centers that could fill up factories, and foreign businesses willing to export machinery and expertise to Kongo all existing by the 1840s. Around the same time as the beginning of the Ashanti industrialization process, opportunistic entrepreneurs in western Kongo started to build the nation’s first factories with the hope of building highly successful corporations that could satisfy the national demand for Western industrial products much more efficiently and at a much cheaper price than imports ever could.

On top of a domestic demand for manufactured goods, the foreign demand for Kongolese resources drove businessmen to find ways to more efficiently develop products and transport resources to the western ports on the coast. This led to the construction of railways (primarily by the makanda, trading association clans whose members were of common lineage) into the interior of Kongo throughout the 1840s, which allowed for the industrial cities of the west to be rapidly supplied with resources from the agrarian east. Kongo’s particular circumstances meant that its industrial revolution occurred far more rapidly than it did in most other states. By the mid-1850s, a decade after the beginning of Kongolese industrialization, the Kingdom’s capital of Mbanza-Kongo was amongst the most industrialized cities in Africa, even rivaling the capacities of cities in the United Dominion of Riebeeckia, some of which had possessed factories before the first shots were fired in the Cape Revolutionary War.

Skyline of Mbanza-Kongo, circa 1858.

One resource that fueled the fast industrialization of the Kingdom of Kongo was natural rubber, a material that the nation was rich in. A natural resource that had been valued by international merchants trading with Kongo for decades, rubber was the single largest export of the Kingdom of Kongo by the start of the 1840s. Approximately a decade prior, a process referred to as sulphur hephaestization (named after Hephaestus, the ancient Greek god of fire and metalworking), the heating of natural rubbers with sulphur to make them harder, more elastic, and durable, was discovered by the Massachusettsan chemist Nathaniel Hayward. As soon as the Kongolese industrial revolution began, so too did the introduction of hephaestization to Kongo. A number of local and foreign entrepreneurs alike would jump on the opportunity of profiting from developing hephaestized natural rubber, which therefore resulted in the rapid emergence of a number of factories in western Kongo constructed with the intent of entering the Kongolese rubber hephaestization market early on.

The Kingdom of Kongo had long been a great regional power with its own sphere of influence, and Kongolese industrialization only strengthened the authority of Kongo. With the southward expansion of the Kongolese sphere of influence off the table due to the region being controlled by Brazil and Riebeeckia, the Kongolese looked northwards. The stren. In the early 1850s, Mbanza-Kongo imposed direct rule over its vassal states to consolidate control over their resources and pressured nations primarily to the north of Kongo to adopt a tributary status via the formation of alliances that forced states under Kongolese military protection to both pay tribute and permit Kongolese military occupation. While these treaties were far from popular amongst the governments of the new tributary states, the threat of invasion by the Kingdom of Kongo meant that they had little of a choice, not to mention maintaining some degree of sovereignty while entering into a tributary status with the culturally similar Kongo was preferable to potentially being invaded by either Sokoto or Western empires.

These initial tributary states whose relationships with the Kingdom of Kongo were formed via treaties in the early 1850s created what was colloquially referred to as the Kikongo League (named after the lingua franca of Kongo and most of its tributaries), which would become more economically and politically interconnected over the coming decades, with Kongolese investors building factories in the League’s member states, joint military practices between member states being conducted, and the Treaty of Mbanza-Loango (signed in 1867) turning the Kikongo League into an official political entity by forming a customs union utilizing the name that managed tariffs and economic policies between its member states. But the Kikongo League was not a large enough sphere of influence for the Kingdom of Kongo, which desired to forge a large sphere of influence encompassing all of Central Africa, which would in turn give Kongo control over the entire region’s natural resources.

It was this pursuit of regional authority that led Kongo to negotiate a number of free trade agreements with nations on the periphery of the Kikongo League, such as Bakuba, Lunda, and Luba, being negotiated in the mid-1850s to reduce trade barriers between Kongo and its neighbors, as well as outlining infrastructure projects to construct railways to efficiently connect the nations of the region. While these free trade treaties were peaceful endeavors by the Kingdom of Kongo, efforts to expand influence became much more hostile as Kongo looked further north, where the Sokoto Caliphate reigned supreme. Fearing that its backyard would become a playground for the Kongolese, Sokoto sought to ensure that its southern neighbors were within its sphere of influence during the late 1850s by negotiating free trade and mutual defense pacts with said neighbors, including the Aro Confederacy and the Kingdom of Bamum.

While nations bordering Sokoto and Kongo both fell into their respective spheres of influence without much quarrel, it was the territory between the two empires that was contested. Both the Sokoto and Kongolese would utilize proxy forces to exert their authority in this area, with the former aiding Aro campaigns into the Mbini region and the latter supporting the Kingdom of Loango’s campaigns northwards along the African coast. This game of influence-building played between the Sokoto Caliphate and the Kingdom of Kongo was nicknamed the Komo Struggle, after the Komo River situated between the two great powers. A number of groups were wrapped up into the Komo Struggle, particularly the Beti-Pahuin peoples, whose internal groups served as proxies between Sokoto and Kongo throughout the 1860s.

In the case of the Sokoto, the Ewondo and Eton became their primary proxy forces, although the latter also often found themselves ceding territory to Bamum. As for the Kongolese, the Fang people became their predominant pawn in proxy conflicts. The wars between the Ewondo, Eton, and Fang for territory in Central Africa would first break out in early 1861, when the Kingdom of Kongo armed the Fang to make a northwards campaign into Ewondo land, who were in turn supplied with Sokoto weapons. The First Beti-Fang War would last for a little over a year and is generally regarded as a victory for the Fang, who gained control over some territory, but it was far from the decisive victory that the Kingdom of Kongo had hoped for. Over the next few years, a number of subsequent Beti-Fang Wars, which were often little more than brief proxy skirmishes for territory and resources, made up the bulk of the Komo Struggle. These conflicts also arguably kept the slave trade conducted by the Sokoto Caliphate and its allies alive well into the 19th Century due to Fang prisoners of war (both soldiers captured on the battlefield and civilians kidnapped in raids) being sold into slavery.

For the Kongolese, whose slave trade had primarily relied on purchases from Western markets to be profitable, slavery fortunately continued to decline in prominence as a domestic institution, which in turn meant that the Sokoto slave raids during the Komo Struggle were an easy way to antagonize their rival empire, which in turn solidified the support of Kongo from the groups being utilized as their proxies. In their eyes, Kongo became a defender of their freedom from Sokoto slave raids and the Beti-Fang Wars became necessary conflicts to vanquish slaver oppression. The arrival of Catholic missionaries from the Kingdom of Kongo in Fang territory also served as a means to win over the local population by converting them to the Kongolese faith, a tactic that was also copied by the Sokoto Caliphate, which sent Sunni Islamic missionaries to Ewondo and Eton territory.

Over time, groups being used as proxies in the Beti-Fang Wars would develop their own states. The Fang people, who had historically lived in villages independent of each other, would consolidate under a larger authority throughout the 1860s in order to manage the war effort against the Ewondo and Eton, which ultimately culminated in the formation of the Fang Confederation in 1870 as an entity that managed the armed forces and foreign affairs of its constituent Fang villages, with an elected monarch and assembly of village representatives making up the central government. In the coming decades, the Ewondo and Eton would form sovereign nations for reasons similar to that of the Fang, with the Ewondo Sultanate being founded in 1872 and the Beti Empire (led by the Eton people) being founded in 1873.

In the meantime, the Beti-Fang Wars raged on throughout the 1860s and well into the 1870s as the Komo Struggle dominated regional geopolitics for the foreseeable future. As the 19th Century entered its second half, it was blatant that Central Africa had done what Asia could not and averted the imperialistic ambitions of European and American powers, but freedom for the West was traded for domination by local rival powers in the form of the Sokoto Caliphate and the Kingdom of Kongo. One African region that did not evade the scourge of European imperialism was the island of Madagasikara, which was victim to the establishment of a French colony in its southeast in 1813, which overtime grew from a collection of coastal outposts to the Viceroyalty of Madagascar, the last major French outpost in the Indian Ocean after the bulk of its colonies in the area had either been annexed by rival colonial powers or were seized by the exiled French Empire.

Madagasikara in its entirety was, however, far from being a colony of France. To the north of the Viceroyalty, the native Kingdom of Imerina remained the dominant power on the island and waged numerous wars of expansion against neighboring tribes. Under the reign of King Radama I, who ascended to the Merina throne in 1810, the nation would not only come to encompass the bulk of the island of Madagasikara but would also establish closer relations with Western powers. Radama would oversee the establishment of extensive trading relations with the Roturier Kingdom of France, Great Britain, the Netherlands (and later Germania), Mutapa, Columbia, and even New Occitania, gaining a reputation as a sort of neutral power when it came to Western geopolitics. In the eyes of Radama I, his priority in foreign affairs was simply the expansion of the Kingdom of Imerina and the establishment of beneficial relations with the great powers of the West.

Flag of the Kingdom of Imerina.

A man who was determined to modernize his kingdom, Radama welcomed the arrival of Western industrialists to Imerina, which resulted in the emergence of carpentry, leather, tin plating, and cotton as industries in the nation throughout the 1820s. This was often conducted via Christian missionaries, something that was cause for alarm amongst many conservative Merinas who feared that their traditional cultural was being abandoned by King Radama I, but the prevalence of a number of Western powers in the Indian Ocean combined with an inability for imperialist powers to conquer Madagasikara in its entirety meant that numerous foreign investors competed for access to the markets of Imerina, something that prevented any one state from exerting total influence over the Merina, incentivized rapid and widespread development of Merina industry amongst foreign entrepreneurs, and gave Imerina more leverage in foreign diplomacy.

By the late 1820s, the Kingdom of Imerina had its first factories, therefore making it one of the first African nations to undergo an industrial revolution. Upon falling ill during a meeting with Dutch diplomats in 1826 due to alcohol abuse, King Radama I realized the toll his intoxication was taking on his health and thus committed to combat his abuse, thus meaning that the young king would make sure that he would not fall prey to a premature death and would instead continue to pursue a policy of industrialization and expansion for Imerina. An admirer of the tactics of the Benthamian War, Radama ensured that the rapid modernization of his kingdom during the 1820s and 1830s proliferated to the Merina armed forces, something that was pivotal to the expansion of Imerina’s borders to encompass the bulk of Madagasikara within the 1820s alone.

King Radama I of the Kingdom of Imerina.

While Radama took a break from his military campaigns during the early 1830s due to said campaigns contributing to his declining health in the preceding decade, February 1834 would mark the beginning of the Northwestern Campaign, which sought to conquer what remained of the Malagasy north that was not yet Merina territory. After over a year of combat, Radama would declare victory in the Northwestern Campaign upon reaching the Mozambique Channel in June 1835 and subsequently returned to the Merina capital of Antananarivo to pursue the settlement and development of the recently-conquered Malagasy northwest. Expansion to the south was the next step in King Radama I’s empire-building ambitions, however, the presence of the Roturier Kingdom of France in this region in the form of the Viceroyalty of Madagascar meant that the total conquest of Madagasikara was out of the question for the time being.

Rather than go to war with the French, who had become one of Imerina’s closest trading partners in recent decades, King Radama I proposed the partition of southern Madagasikara to France in 1836, an offer that was accepted by the government of the recently elected Consul Joseph Bonaparte. Negotiated and ratified within the capital city of the Viceroyalty of Madagascar, the Treaty of Fort Bailly would recognize all Malagasy land to the south of the Onilahy River as French territory while all land to its north was recognized as a part of the Kingdom of Imerina. Furthermore, in order to strengthen economic ties between what were now the sole two forces inhabiting the Madagasikara, the Treaty of Fort Bailly outlined the construction of a railway connected Fort Bailly to Antananarivo, thus meaning that the two largest cities on the island would be directly tied to each other. The construction of Islandic Railway was to be jointly funded and managed by Imerina and Madagascar, which further reinforced economic ties between the two governments.

The 1840s were a mostly peaceful decade for the Kingdom of Imerina, with the expansion of the nation’s territory more or less concluding for the time being with the ratification of the Treaty of Fort Bailly on July 3rd, 1836. The conclusion of the construction of the Islandic Railway in 1839 brought with it a booming economy for both Imerina and Madagascar while industrialization continued to sweep later additions to Merina territory. While agriculture continued to be the dominant segment of the Merina economy despite industrialization sweeping the kingdom, textiles and mining were also prominent industries during this time period, with the discovery of ilmenite in the southernmost lands of Imerina during the 1840s especially encouraging investment into mining. Precious metals were far from unique to Imerina, but the nation’s friendly economic ties with communist and absolutist states alike made it a highly accessible source of such resources, and by the start of the 1850s, the Kingdom of Imerina briefly had the single largest economy in all of Africa before being overtaken by Kongo a few years later in 1854.

Politically, the 1840s saw a number of notable changes in Imerina. Since 1828, the Merina government had possessed a prime minister, who was appointed by the reigning monarch, and in 1840 King Radama I presided over the writing and ratification of the constitution of Imerina, which based the governmental structure heavily off of that of the Germanic Empire. While members of the executive branch were nominated by the monarchy, the General Assembly, a bicameral legislative branch consisting of the democratically-elected House of Hova as the lower house and the hereditary aristocratic House of Adriana as the upper house, had to approve of all nominations and was responsible for both proposing (although the monarchy could also do this) and voting in favor of or in opposition to all bills. The first Merina general election was held on August 29th, 1840 and saw two political parties attempt to seize control of the General Assembly, with traditionalists and isolationists who were opposed to the reforms pursued by Radama forming the Conservative Party while a broad coalition of supporters of Radama, including progressives, industrialists, and the nation’s growing Christian minority, formed the National Liberal Party (NLP). The People’s Democratic Party (PDP), a third party whose support primarily came from territories conquered by Imerina and advocated for the kingdom’s decentralization, the protection of minority cultures, demilitarization, and the abolition of slavery, also emerged, however, was unable to win control of the General Assembly due to the party not appealing to outside of specific Merina lands.

While the Conservatives narrowly achieved a majority of members within the House of Adriana, the National Liberals managed to secure a majority of seats within the House of Hova. Given that the NLP was the most supportive of Radama’s policies, the bulk of the king’s cabinet appointments, including the prime minister, came from the National Liberals and were approved by both houses of the General Assembly (the Conservatives managed to get a handful of prominent party members into the executive branch by using their majority in the House of Adriana for bargaining power). Once the legislative and executive branches officially began their tenures on September 15th and September 25th respectively, the Kingdom of Imerina had its first government under the 1840 constitution. Field Marshal Rainiharo, who had already been serving as the Merina prime minister since 1833, continued his service as Imerina’s head of government upon being approved by the General Assembly and made it clear that he was committed to the continued modernization of the Kingdom of Imerina.

Under pressure from both the National Liberal Party and King Radama I, one of the first priorities of the Rainiharo ministry was the reduction of slavery within Imerina. The Merina had already stopped the export of slaves in the late 1810s, therefore removing itself from the slave trade, however, the institution continued to exist by the time of the first Merina general election in 1840 despite going sharply into decline over the last two decades. It was for this reason that, outside of a handful of opponents within the Conservative Party, the Emancipation Act of October 1841 faced little legislative opposition. This bill, which was signed into effect immediately after being passed by both General Assembly houses, stated that no one could become a slave in Merina, no slaves could be imported from other nations, and all children of current slaves were to be freed from bondage. Simply put, slavery as an institution within Imerina would expire once all adult slaves who were alive when the Emancipation Act was passed were dead.

Going into the 1850s, the Rainiharo ministry continued to reign over the civilian government of the Kingdom of Imerina, and the Merina general election of 1845 and 1850 had both expanded the National Liberal majority in the House of Hova, while the NLP had gained control of the House of Adriana in 1847 following a collection of defections from the Conservative Party. This allowed for the National Liberals to pass a number of major bills with little obstruction, such as the Education Act of 1848, which guaranteed twelve years public education as a right for all Merina children, and the Fair Labor Act of 1849, which banned child labor, strengthened industrial safety regulations, and established a minimum wage. The National Liberal dominance of the Merina government was, however, short lived. Due to its strong connections with the global economy, the Kingdom of Imerina was hit hard by the Great Crisis of 1852, and within a few months, the Merina economy had sunk into a depression as unemployment rose. A vote for a snap election was therefore passed in late December 1852 and said election was scheduled to be held a month later.

The NLP remained popular despite the recession due to its social reform programs, however, the Conservatives were able to narrowly secure a majority in the House of Hova by highlighting their isolationist foreign policy in contrast to the National Liberal support for extensive integration into global markets. The Popular Democratic Party, which had been slowly rising in prominence over the past two election cycles, also saw an uptick in seats within the House of Hova in 1853 despite remaining as the smallest party represented in the General Assembly. With a majority of the House of Hova on their side and there being enough NLP members of the House of Adriana willing to reach across the aisle, the Conservatives motioned for a vote of no confidence in National Liberal Prime Minister Rainivoninahitriniony (Rainiharo had died in October 1852), and upon the victory of the vote of no confidence, the governing party made it clear that King Radama I had to appoint a prime minister sympathetic to the Conservative Party. Radama ultimately settled on nominating his wife, pro-isolationist Princess Ramavo, for the ministry, a selection that was approved by both houses of the General Assembly.

Prime Minister Ramavo of the Kingdom of Imerina.

While Conservative collaboration with Radama and the National Liberals was still necessary, the next few years would see the General Assembly as a whole push for a more protectionist approach to foreign trade and a redirection of economic relations away from European states and towards major powers in Africa, most notably the Mutapa Empire and the Kingdom of Kongo. The budgets for social expenditures, particularly public education, also decreased during this time period, something that, perhaps unsurprisingly, hurt public approval of both the Conservative Party and Prime Minister Ramavo. While the Merina economy started to stabilize going into the mid-1850s, unemployment remained high and the Conservatives opposed passing any sort of public relief legislation. On the other hand, the Merina armed forces greatly expanded during this time period, with the first mechanized infantry being introduced to the Merina military in the form of military automobiles and later elephas, both of which were based off of the models utilized by the New Granadan army in the Amazon War.

The much more substantial military buildup during this time period was the rise of the Merina Navy. Despite being a nation that was isolated to an island, the Kingdom of Imerina had very little in the way of a standing naval force and only had a handful of small warships at its disposal by the start of the Ramavo ministry. The Conservatives, who were eager to militarize both as a means of defense and as a way to assert regional authority, made expanding Imerina’s navy a priority, and such policies also managed to win support from moderate National Liberals. Within a handful of years, the annual budget of the Merina Navy had skyrocketed and a number of modern ships had been introduced to its ranks. By 1855, the Merina Navy even boasted a handful of ironclad warships, although it was still far from the largest naval force in eastern Africa, with both Mutapa and Riebeeckia having larger navies. Imerina did, nonetheless, now have a large and modernized navy to accompany its impressive army.

By the time of the outbreak of the Bourbon War in March 1856, Romava remained as the Merina prime minister while the Conservative Party continued to wield de facto control over both houses of the General Assembly. As France, which was once Imerina’s closest trading partner less than a decade ago, was fractured between Hamilton Bonaparte’s Popular Republic and Louis XVIII’s Second Kingdom, the Dependency (previously Viceroyalty) of Madagascar remained loyal to Paris, but far from a colony that either the Republicans or the Royalists were paying much attention to. This meant that Imerina was poised to assert its authority over the last corner of Madagasikara to not bow to Antananarivo, a gambit that became especially possible as the Bourbon War proved to be a conflict that would not end anytime soon. As Occitania began to fall under Royalist occupation, Conservative members of the General Assembly schemed to put such ambitions of conquest into fruition and introduced the Unification Act to the floor of the House of Hova in mid-June 1856, which, if passed, would cause the Merina government to recognize the Dependency of Madagascar as its rightful territory.

The Unification Act passed through both houses of the General Assembly shortly after being introduced, and soon enough the gears of the Merina foreign ministry subsequently started rapidly turning. On June 19th, 1856, an ultimatum was sent to Fort Bailly demanding that the colonial government of the Dependency of Madagascar submit to the Kingdom of Imerina with seventy-two hours or else face invasion by the Merina Army. Seeing that the French Popular Republic couldn’t afford to deploy forces in the defense of Madagascar, Governor Louis Faidherbe of the colony scrambled to enter into negotiations with Imerina in order to evade the total dissolution of France’s presence on the island of Madagasikara. Prime Minister Ramavo, who was facing pressure from her husband to not invade Madagascar, agreed to Faidherbe’s offer for negotiations, thus resulting in the Treaty of Toamasina being ratified in July 1856 once Supreme Consul Hamilton Bonaparte begrudgingly gave the go-ahead for the FPR to negotiate the cession of the Dependency of Madagascar.

According to the Treaty of Toamasina, the vast majority of Madagascar was surrendered over to the Kingdom of Imerina, as was total management of Islandic Railway, however, the French Popular Republic was permitted to maintain control over the port cities of Fort Bailly, Manambovo, and Androko as the remnants of a rump Dependency of Madagascar. The treaty was signed on July 20th, 1856, thus bringing the vast majority of Madagasikara under the control of Imerina. The influx of resources from the annexed territory gave way to a large boom for the Merina, however, this prosperity was to be short-lived. The victory of Republican forces in the Bourbon War brought with it a much more hardline and aggressive Comintern, with the Plebeians’ Republic of Great Britain undeniably at the helm, and the purging of perceived opposition to Benthamist rule from the list of foreign allies of Comintern member states became an immediate priority. This policy, of course, led to the formation of the Popintern following the expulsion of Ochists and roturierists from the ranks of the organization, but it also meant that the Kingdom of Imerina would be punished for the annexation of the bulk of the Dependency of Madagascar, with Great Britain levying an embargo on the Merina in May 1859 while the French Popular Republic and its fellow Comintern member states followed suit by copying London’s example.

While the Ramavo ministry had focused on diverting economic relations away from European states and towards regional markets, the Comintern, particularly Great Britain and France, continued to be amongst the closest trading partners of Imerina and the nation’s economy started to spiral into a recession as a consequence. The Recession of 1859, coupled with over half a decade of gutting fledgling Merina welfare programs in favor of militarism, was the straw that broke the camel’s back with regards to public support for ruling Conservative civilian government, and a vote of no confidence resulted in a snap election being scheduled for June 29th, 1859. Given the nosedive in popularity for the Conservatives, it was no surprise that the party lost control of the House of Hova, but what was unprecedented was who took their place. The National Liberal Party gained a plurality of seats rather than a majority, which meant that they did not have enough power to achieve control of the House of Hova by themselves. The People’s Democratic Party, on the other hand, continued to grow and now had enough seats to rival the numbers of both the National Liberals and Conservatives.

More importantly in the context of forming a government, the PDP was effectively in a kingmaker position given that the National Liberals were dependent on collaboration with the PDP if it was to ever form a government. Therefore, the NLP proposed the formation of a coalition government to the leadership of the People’s Democrats, a proposal that was of course accepted, and the PDP was therefore poised to participate in the governance of the Merina civilian government for the first time ever. Interestingly enough, given that the House of Adriana remained under the control of the Conservative Party, the General Assembly fell under tripartisan rule upon the inauguration of the House of Hova on July 16th, 1856. The first impacts of the influence of the PDP on its governing coalition with the larger NLP emerged almost immediately when the time came for a new executive branch to be appointed. Rather than nominate his preferred choice, former Prime Minister Rainivoninahitriniony, King Radama I would nominate the thirty-one year-old Rainilaiarivony, who was the younger brother of Rainivoninahitriniony and a National Liberal sympathetic to the ideals of federalism, continued democratization, and multiculturalism, all of which were pivotal elements of the PDP’s platform.

Prime Minister Rainilaiarivony of the Kingdom of Imerina.

Upon assuming the prime ministry on July 26th, Rainilaiarivony set out to recover Imerina from Recession of 1856 via revitalizing trade with Mutapa, the Hanoverian Realms, and New Occitania while promising the implementation of a number of relief programs to aid the general public as a means to begin the reconstruction of the Merina welfare state, which had been gutted for years by the Conservatives. King Radama I would not, however, live to see the recovery of the Kingdom of Imerina, for the monarch who had led his state into an age of industrialized prosperity passed away on August 5th, 1856 at the age of sixty-six. Radama I was succeeded by Rakotobe, the eldest son of his eldest sister, who would assume the title of King Radama II upon undergoing a coronation ceremony in front of a crowd consisting of General Assembly members and foreign heads of state alike.

Given that the island of Madagasikara had been unified with the exception of a handful of French ports, Radama II anticipated a reign far more peaceful than that of his predecessor. But the machinations of history do not stop for any individual, and chaos emerging from the 1859 Riebeeckian election of the chancellery would soon captivate the attention of Imerina, as well as much of the Indian Ocean for that matter. For now, however, it is worth shedding some attention on the Mutapa Empire, one of the most important actors in the aftermath of the aforementioned chaos. Reborn by the Rozvi Empire amidst the Zulu War of the early 19th Century, the Mutapa Empire had reigned as a great regional power for decades thanks to a combination of pursuing industrialization relatively early via agreements with the Netherlands and rapid expansion in the aftermath of the Mutapa victory over Shaka Zulu’s empire. By the 1850s, Mutapa remained an undisputed great power of Africa whose economic and militaristic might exceded that of its most powerful neighbor; the United Dominion of Riebeeckia.

The Mutapa Empire was founded as a decentralized feudal state, with many going as far as to nickname it the “Holy Roman Empire of Africa.” All political power within the Empire centered around the Changamire Dynasty, which was also the ruling family of Rozvi, due to the Changamires controlling the armed forces and foreign affairs of Mutapa. In practice, however, the Mwene (monarch) of the Mutapa Empire wielded considerably more power due to the position possessing the entitlement to demand the payment of tribute of any form from Mutapa’s constituent states, be it natural resources, industrial goods, or men to conscript into the Mutapa military. While internal affairs of the Mutapa kingdoms remained more or less ignored by the Mwene throughout much of the Empire’s history, the unconditional tributary system gave the Changamires borderline control over the entire Mutapa economy by being used as a means for the Mwene to allocate wealth to territories directly under their rule, such as Rozvi, which in turn gave the Mwene the jurisdiction to do whatever they wanted with said wealth.

Overall, the Changamire Dynasty’s dominance within the Mutapa Empire was apparent, and was only reinforced going forward as northward expansion resulted in a number of valuable territories falling under the direct rule of the Mwene. Most notable of these annexations was that of the Swahili Coast in the 1830s, which put the Changamire Dynasty in control of what was historically one of Africa’s most vital trading centers, as well as the heart of what remained of the regional slave trade. Indeed, as the Mutapa Empire consolidated its rule over much of eastern Africa, the Changamire Dynasty was poised to profit off of one of the most sinister institutions in human history. While many slaves were kept by their Changamire captors, thousands of others were sold to the Mutapa tributary kingdoms and sovereign states scattered throughout the Indian Ocean that had yet to abolish slavery. The international community, which was becoming more and more opposed to the continued existence of slavery while the Mutapa slave-trading empire was simultaneously expanding, often pressured the Changamire Dynasty to move towards abolition (Great Britain and France went as far as the application of heavy sanctions in 1834), but the combination of industrialization, access to a large quantity of resources, and its pivotal geographic position in trade meant that foreign economic pressure could never really deter the Mutapa Empire.

Going into the 1840s, the Mutapa Empire continued to grow, often by integrating neighboring kingdoms into its tributary system. One such example was Unyanyembe, a Nyamwezi kingdom situated along a trading route in the interior of eastern Africa. By promising to aid Unyanyembe in the conquest of the neighboring Nyamwezi states, Mwene Changamire Tohwechipi managed to get the nation to agree to joining the Mutapa Empire in 1840. The Wars of Nyamwezi Unification would thus only last a little more than a year, ending in early 1842 with a decisive victory for Unyanyembe thanks to assistance from the Mutapa Army. As the slave trade expanded to the west of Unyanyembe, so too did the Mutapa Empire, which conducted a series of military campaigns towards the Lualaba, the easternmost section of the Congo River (although the connection of the Lualaba and wider Congo was unknown at the time), with Changamire Tohwechipi hoping to construct an empire spanning all major trade routes in East Africa.

Starting in 1844, the Lualaba War was an almost inevitable Mutapa victory from the start. The territory being fought over was relatively remote from the population centers of the Mutapa Empire, however, no there was no organized force to defend the Lualaba River from the Mutapa Army, one of the largest and most industrialized military forces on the African continent. The gradual occupation of Lualaba region was made particularly easy due to the Mutapa Aeronavy, which had been splintered off from the Army approximately a decade prior, bombing enemy positions from above and shipping in new supplies and manpower to the frontlines of the Lualaba War. Following three years of combat, the Mutapa had finally reached the banks of the Lualaba River, thus consolidating their control over the region to its east and emerging victorious in the Lualaba War. Changamire Tohwechipi would subsequently place the recently-conquered territory under his direct control by forming the Kingdom of Lualaba as an administrative division of the Rozvi Empire on May 3rd, 1847.

The rainforests of and lack of development within Lualaba made the newly-formed kingdom a difficult region for the Changamire Dynasty to administer, but Tohwechipi made sure to direct resources towards the construction of infrastructure throughout the region that turned it into one of the largest sources of profit for the Mutapa Empire within the next decade. Trade routes were turned into railways and military outposts were turned into cities. The discovery of precious minerals in Lualaba circa 1849 certainly helped accelerate the region’s colonization, with thousands of Mutapans (and even a number of foreigners) racing out west with the hope of getting rich thanks to the 1849 Ore Rush. As Lualaba was integrated into Mutapa, however, the region earned a reputation as one of the most brutal corners of all of Africa, with natives being enslaved by merchants from the east while workers (both within and without bondage) were being imported to work on the construction of Lualaba’s infrastructure, waste away in the numerous mines sprouting up throughout the kingdom, and deliver resources to local outposts. As the wealth of Luabala strengthened the prosperity of the Changamires, the truly desperate endured great horrors in the region while the extremely unfortunate were forced out of their homeland in chains.

A miner in Lualaba during the Ore Rush, circa 1852.

The last major conquest conducted by Changamire Tohwechipi would be to the north of his reign by attacking the Sultanate of the Geledi. A regional power that had first emerged in the late 17th Century, the Sultanate had made strides towards filling the power vacuum left open by the decline of the Omani Empire in the aftermath of the Zulu War and had certainly carved out its own regional sphere of influence, but the Geledi sphere failed to expand far beyond the Horn of Africa as the Mutapa seized control of pivotal ex-Omani colonies in the south, most notably the island of Zanzibar. The Sultanate of Geledi was, nonetheless, a force to be reckoned with. The African Renaissance had mostly avoided the Horn of Africa, as had industrialization, but the Geledi nonetheless possessed Western weapons, therefore making it a far more difficult enemy to subdue than the natives of Lualaba.

Despite this, Tohwechipi, who was keen on constructing an empire spanning the commercial centers of East Africa, saw the coastline of the Horn of Africa as the next component to add to the Mutapa Empire and thus declared war on the Geledi on January 22nd, 1850. Just as was anticipated, the Geledi proved to be a more difficult opponent for the Mutapa relative to past enemies, however, the titanic Mutapa armed forces would gradually bring the Sultanate to its knees. Geledi naval and land defenses alike were outgunned by their Mutapa counterparts, and whatever forces couldn’t be defeated by land or sea were obliterated from the sky. The Battle of Kismayo proved to be an early blow to the Geledi, and as the Mutapa Army pushed up the coastline of the Horn of Africa, the Mutapa victory at the Battle of Baardheere on February 10th, 1850 gave the Mutapa access to the Geledi interior. After over a year of combat, the Battle of Afgooye, the capital of the Sultanate of the Geledi, would bring about an end to the Geledi War after the three-day clash for the city ended with a decisive victory for the Mutapa Army on June 2nd, 1851.

The Treaty of Barawe would see the Rozvi Empire directly annex all Geledi land to the south of the Juba River while what remained of the Sultanate would become a constituent kingdom of the Mutapa Empire. Sultan Ahmed Yusuf Mahamud was mandated to abdicate in accordance with the Treaty of Barawe, with his brother Abobokur Yusuf succeeding him and subsequently pledging loyalty to Mwene Changamire Tohwechipi following the ratification of the treaty. Upon returning to the Mutapa capital of Danangombe, Tohwechipi began contemplating future expansion into the Horn of Africa, however, the ambitious ruler would never live to see such conquests. Whilst touring a recently-opened factory in Danangombe on July 8th, 1851, a disgruntled worker present at the event pulled out a pistol and didn’t hesitate to assassinate the Mwene of the Mutapa Empire. Changamire Tohwechipi died before he could receive any medical attention, therefore meaning that his nineteen year-old son, Changamire Chatunga, would ascend to the Mutapa throne.

Mwene Changamire Chatunga of the Mutapa Empire.

Having not anticipated his ascendancy to the Mutapa throne to come for at least a few more decades, Changamire Chatunga would prove to be one of the most pivotal individuals in 19th Century history, due to both circumstance and ambition. One of the most important elements of Chatunga was his religiosity. While the Rozvi Empire (and the Kingdom of Mutapa before it) had historically worshipped the traditional Shona god named Mwari, Christianity rapidly proliferated throughout the Mutapa Empire during the African Renaissance, with many nobles and commoners alike seeing conversion over to Christianity as a necessary element of modernization. Among these nobles was Changamire Tohwechipi, who converted over to Calvinism shortly after ascending to the Mutapa throne in 1831. Alongside campaigns of empire-building, Tohwechipi would spend much of his early reign establishing the Mutapa Reformed Church as the dominant Christian denomination in East Africa.

Tohwechipi managed to convert over a good chunk of the Mutapan population (in no small part thanks to the Mutapa Reformed Church synthesizing many elements of the Shona religion with Christianity, including referring to the Christian God as Mwari) to Calvinism, including the vast majority of members of the House of Changamire, however, the continued prominence of Shona religious leaders within the Rozvi apparatus of state meant that the Mwene could not pursue a systemic mass conversion. This, combined with the historical prominence of Islam in East Africa and the continued survival of local religions, meant that the Mutapa Empire was actually very religiously diverse, and by the time of the demise of Changamire Tohwechipi, only a plurality of the Empire’s population was practicing Calvinism. One individual that was a devout member of the Mutapa Reformed Church was Changamire Chatunga, who was determined to dramatically increase the systemic authority of Christianity throughout the Mutapa Empire to a degree that not even the Shona religion had ever boasted. In other words, Mwene Changamire Chatunga would be the first theocratic ruler produced by the House of Changamire.

Of course, to enforce the reign of the Mutapa Reformed Church, Chatunga would have to abolish any remaining political authority held by Shona religious leaders. This, therefore, meant that the Rozvi advisory council, the only check on the power of the Rozvi, and by extension Mutapa, monarch, would have to be eliminated due to religious officials sitting upon the council. This action was undertaken almost immediately after Chatunga seized the throne and transformed the young emperor into the most autocratic ruler in Mutapa history. In the subsequent months, Changamire Chatunga would eliminate non-Calvinists from the ranks of his government, including Mutapa military officers and foreign diplomats. The purge of those who refused to convert to the doctrines of the Mutapa Reformed Church was a sign of more drastic things to come, but for the time being Chatunga’s religious revolution would have to be put on hold thanks to a sudden shift in foreign affairs.

The inauguration of Maartin Van Buren as the chancellor of Riebeeckia in September 1851 brought upon a shift in the United Dominion’s approach to foreign relations with the Mutapa Empire. Mutapa’s continued maintenance of the slave trade was something that fell to consistent criticism from previous Riebeeckian administrations, particularly those hailing from the socially progressive Federalist Party, however, the Van Buren administration would take things a step further by levying sanctions against the Mutapa Empire with the intent of pressuring the historically close trading partner of Riebeeckia into abolitionism. An outspoken opponent to the continued existence of slavery in many nations (most notably Mutapa), Maartin Van Buren had promised to push for the international abolition of slavery throughout Africa on the 1851 chancellorial campaign trail, and the narrow passage of the Sanction Act, which applied the aforementioned economic punishments to Mutapa, through Congress in October 1851 was seen as the first step towards achieving this foreign policy goal.

Rather than give into the demands of Austropolis, however, Changamire Chatunga saw the Sanction Act as a betrayal of the political and economic ties between Mutapa and Riebeeckia that even preceded the formation of the United Dominion. A trade war would therefore begin between the two nations, with Chatunga propping up retaliatory embargoes against the UDR. The economic and physical expansion would not, in the words of Chatunga during a speech to the people of Danangombe, “be deterred by a government with no comprehension of the divine right bestowed upon the Mutapa to rule over this once fragmented and uncivilized land.” As the Riebeeckian-Mutapa Trade War continued with no sign of either side backing down, the Mutapa Empire shifted into a state of relative economic isolationism, something that was unprecedented for an empire with a history of building extensive economic ties with the global community. Nonetheless, the size of the Mutapa Empire meant that it could economically do just fine under isolationism, and these policies also helped lighten the blow inflicted by the Great Crisis of 1852.

Trade wars were far, however, from the priority of Chatunga during the beginning of his reign. Far more pressing in his eyes was the continued transformation of the Mutapa Empire into a Calvinist theocracy, something that would require him to consolidate domestic political authority. The purges of 1851 helped position the Mwene for this consolidation by securing the total loyalty of the armed forces to himself. On May 20th, 1852 (the day of the Feast of Ascension for that year), Changamire Chatunga issued the Edict of Danangombe, which declared that all ruling monarchs of the constituent states of the Mutapa Empire were required to convert over to Calvinism. Implementing this sort of theocratic policy was not actually something the Mwene had the legal authority to do, however, with the armed forces on his side and the Edict of Danangombe threatening a “cleansing of heresy” against those who did not convert, Chatunga was able to get the vast majority of his tributary nobles to join the Mutapa Reformed Church within a matter of weeks.

One noble who resisted the Edict of Danangombe was Sultan Abobokur Yusuf of the Geledi, who refused to abandon the teachings of Islam and insisted that the edict violated the conditions of the Treaty of Barawe, therefore resulting in the secession of the Sultanate of the Geledi from the Mutapa Empire on June 1st, 1852. Such resistance to the theocratic rule of Changamire Chatunga would not, however, be tolerated and the Mwene made quick on his promise of a cleanse. No less than a day after Abobokur Yusuf’s declaration of independence, Mutapa naval forces positioned off the coastline of the Horn of Africa received orders from Danangombe to traverse up the Shabelle River and lay siege to Afgooye with the intent of occupying the city and capturing its rogue sultan. Surely enough, by the end of the day, the Mutapa flag was flying over a burning Afgooye and Sultan Abobokur Yusuf was executed for insurrection against the Mutapa Empire. The Sultanate of the Geledi was subsequently integrated into the Rozvi Empire as the Kingdom of Tunni.

While the death of Abobokur Yusuf brought an end to internal opposition to Changamire Chatunga’s theocracy, millions of Mutapans still did not practice Calvinism. This led to the formation of the Office of the Reformed Inquisition, otherwise more colloquially referred to as the Mutapa Inquisition, as an institution dedicated to enforcing the practices of Calvinism upon the general Mutapan population and identifying and persecuting those accused of heresy. With Chatunga justifying the existence of the Mutapa Inquisition by establishing it as a branch of the armed forces, the organization effectively served as a theocratic military-police directly answerable to the Mwene that patrolled the many cities of the Mutapa Empire, purging officials and commoners alike who were accused of contradicting the teachings of Calvinism.

Unlike the Catholic inquisitions of early modernism, the Mutapa Inquisition was an integral component of how Changamire Chatunga enforced his theocratic rule upon his empire. It was through the Inquisition that Chatunga was able to purge any opposition to his rule, be it local bureaucrats or more progressive clerics within the Mutapa Reformed Church, which gave the Mwene an unprecedented degree of de facto control over the historically decentralized Mutapa Empire. As inquisitors spied on supposed heretics in the shadows of the Mutapa Empire, what had once been little more than a feudal league of Rozvi tributaries during the reigns of Chatanuga’s predecessors evolved into a reactionary totalitarian police state. Even the Mutapa Reformed Church fell under the jackboot of Changamire Chatunga, who utilized purges of religious officials he disagreed with to install loyal clergy that upheld his interests.

The efficient consolidation of domestic power was the obvious priority of Mwene Changamire Chatunga, however, the rapid external expansion that the Mutapa Empire was feared for did not disappear during the 1850s. The most notable conquest of this time period was that of the land of the Garanganze people to the south of the Kingdom of Lualaba, a region situated in the middle of trading routes between eastern and western Africa. Starting in June 1854, the Mutapa Army of the Garanganze War was led by General Msiri, a Nyamwezi merchant who had risen through the ranks of the armed forces during the Geledi War despite his young age. In a matter of months, Msiri had made quick work of the Garanganze through strategically forming alliances with local tribal leaders alongside utilizing the brute mechanized force that the Mutapa Empire had become infamous for by this point. General Msiri was particularly cruel, and became infamous during the Garanganze War for his horrific punishments of his enemies, including mutilation, being trapped in a hut to be eaten alive by a pack of dogs, and execution, after which heads would be placed on poles as a means of intimidation.

General Msiri of the Mutapa Empire.

Regardless of his brutality, Msiri emerged victorious over the Garanganze by February 1855 and the region was subsequently annexed into the Rozvi Empire as the Kingdom of Yeke. Msiri’s career in serving the Mutapa Empire was far from over as he returned from Yeke as one of the highest-ranking military officers within all of Mutapa, a young man whose success had caught the attention of Mwene Changamire Chatunga. Little did either of them know, war was on the horizon for not just East Africa, but much of the Indian Ocean itself. Beneath the surface of decades of growing prosperity and power for the region, the stage was being set for a war that would engulf India, Mutapa, and Riebeeckia, altering the outcome of human history in the process.

In 1859, the Equatorial Revolutionary War would begin.​

 

[ETGalaxy]

Given that I introduced a number of border changes in the previous chapter, I thought it would be a good idea to put together a map of Africa as of 1859, both as a relatively simple graphic to make for this TL and to serve as a visual reference for what's going on.

Map of Africa circa 1859​

 

[generalurist]

Riebeeckia is getting thicc.

An independent trans-saharan power is quite interesting, though I'm curious how long Tamazight will be able to keep up given how sparse their population is.

 

[ETGalaxy]

 

[ETGalaxy]

Chapter Thirty-Two: A House Divided

When the Great Crisis of 1852 crashed the global economy, Maartin Van Buren had just assumed the chancellorship of the United Dominion of Riebeeckia, determined to carry on the progressive legacy of his predecessor, Theodosia Burr Vanderlyn. Fate would, of course, have other plans for the young Van Buren administration, for the collapse of the Amsterdam stock exchange had a vicious ripple effect throughout all of the Hanoverian Realms. Riebeeckia’s strong ties to European markets and Germania in particular put it in a particularly vulnerable economic position, with hundreds of thousands of Riebeeckians losing their jobs. By the summer of 1853, it was estimated that national unemployment rates had exceeded twenty-five percent, something that was unheard of in the United Dominion’s brief history.

Given Riebeeckia’s history of economic reforms unprecedented for the time period and Chancellor Martin Van Buren having campaigned on a populist platform, the Van Buren administration opted to respond to the beginning of the Decade of Despair by pushing for a relief program intended to alleviate the economic woes faced by the unemployed. This program eventually manifested into the Recovery Act, a bill that would provide unemployed Riebeeckian adults with stimulus checks and regulate the prices of housing and rent. Despite being popular amongst the Federalist Party and the Riebeeckian populous as a whole, however, the Recovery Act faced significant backlash from Unionists in Congress, who lambasted the legislation as a needlessly extreme solution to the economic crisis that unfairly violated the property rights of landowners. Therefore, the Recovery Act ultimately narrowly failed to pass due to the Unionist Party holding a narrow majority of seats in Congress at the time, thus dashing Federalist hopes of a quick response to the unemployment crisis.

With the Unionists not budging on the Recovery Act, the relief bill that ultimately passed through Congress was the Stimulation Act, the product of extensive compromise between moderate Unionist and Federalist congressmen. Effectively a watered down version of the Recovery Act, the Stimulation Act cut out all mentions of economic regulation and restricted the provision of stimulus checks to unemployed Christians in order to appeal to the Unionist Party’s long held view that the Riebeeckian government should encourage conversion over to Christianity. The Stimulation Act was far from popular amongst the more left-leaning wing of the Federalist Party and any stimulus checks at all were regarded as a step too far by some more fiscally conservative Unionists, but more moderate Federalists decided that the Stimulation Act was better than nothing and begrudgingly reached across the aisle to vote with the vast majority of Unionists in favor of the bill. In the end, Chancellor Maartin Van Buren signed the Stimulation Act into effect on July 26th, 1853, knowing that Congress wasn’t going to get him anything better in its current state.

For many, the passage of a relief program far smaller than what was promised was infuriating. The simple fact of the matter was that the Stimulation Act was not going to save the Riebeeckian people from economic ruin, not to mention that the lack of the institutional changes initially within the Recovery Act meant that housing remained expensive for the hundreds of thousands of unemployed Riebeeckians. National congressional elections, which were held every three years, would not come around until summer 1854, thus meaning that Maartin Van Buren was stuck with a Unionist-led legislature at the worst possible time and unable to heed the demands of the Federalist Party. Many decried the current situation in Congress as the consequence of the UDR’s legislature ceding each province only three representatives at most, thus ceding disproportionate power to a conservative party that was primarily popular in sparsely-populated rural provinces. On August 10th, 1853, former Zomerland Governor-turned Congressman William Seward proposed an amendment to the Riebeeckian constitution that would allocate congressional representation proportional to provincial population, however, the bill was predictably unanimously struck down by the Unionist majority, well aware that such a constitutional change would cost their party its chances at attaining legislative power, and even faced opposition from a handful of moderate Federalists. Nonetheless, the so-called Fair Representation Amendment sparked national calls for significant reform to the legislature, with many seeing such changes as both ethical and the only means of getting significant relief during the Decade of Despair passed.

In the meantime, Chancellor Maartin Van Buren turned to the powers of the executive branch as the sole tool for confronting the economic crisis left at his disposal. The Ministry of the Treasury and Finance directed the Bank of the United Dominion to pump money into the economy with the hope of staving off deflation, however, this was a difficult game to play, and by the fall of 1853, the worst effects of the Great Crisis had already been felt. Stabilizing the Riebeeckian guilder would not bring back the thousands of jobs lost, nor would it undo the bankruptcy faced by several businesses. It was projected that unemployment rates would exceed 30% by the end of 1853, and Maartin Van Buren was effectively a sitting duck whose powers had been relegated to pulling on the levers of the UDR’s central banking system. Furthermore, the private banking system remained effectively unregulated, meaning that even the powers of the Bank of the United Dominion were limited.

Desperate to pass some degree of economic reform, Chancellor Van Buren decided that the time had come to negotiate a deal with the Unionist Party. In September 1853, Federalist and Unionist leadership met at the Austropolis Palace, the official residency of the chancellor, to come to an agreement on banking regulations. After lengthy debate and argument, Maartin Van Buren ultimately got Congressional Majority Leader Jacobus Groenendaal to agree to the bipartisan passage of the Banking Reform Act, which placed ceilings on the amount of interest that could be payed, limited the price of interest, prohibited the participation of banks in speculation, and transferred all government funds from private banks to a government vault, the latter of which was a longtime proposal championed by Van Buren himself. Alongside the Banking Reform Act, the Unionists agreed to pass the National Infrastructure Act, which established a public works program overseen by the Ministry of Transportation that intended to build new transnational railways through the employment of those who had lost their jobs to the Decade of Despair, however, Unionist support for both of these bills came at a heavy price.

In return for getting his party to vote the Banking Reform Act and National Infrastructure Act into effect, Majority Leader Groenendaal got the chancellor and sizable chunk of the Federalist caucus within Congress to agree to the passage of a constitutional amendment, which required two-thirds Congressional support to be ratified. Subsequently nicknamed the Provincial Sovereignty Amendment due to its contents, the Sixth Amendment to the Riebeeckian constitution barred the national government of the United Dominion from passing any law regarding voting rights, thus handing power over determining who could and could not vote over to provincial governments, and giving provinces the constitutional right to promote the practice of Christianity amongst their citizenry. Both features of the Sixth Amendment were clearly intended to benefit the Unionist agenda of preventing voting rights from extending to Native Africans and pushing for religious conservatism, however, the Federalist Party was in a position where it was desperate enough to give into Groenendaal’s hefty demand if it meant the passage of relief programs. The Federalists could deal with the repercussions of passing the Sixth Amendment later, but for now their priority was resolving the Decade of Despair. Therefore, In late September 1853, the Banking Reform Act, National Infrastructure Act, and Sixth Amendment were all passed by Congress and signed into effect by Chancellor Van Buren.

While the Federalist bills both passed with unanimous approval by Congress, the Sixth Amendment still faced opposition from a handful of progressive Federalists, who refused to vote a law they disagreed with so strongly into effect. For many like-minded progressives, the so-called Compromise of 1853 was viewed as the Federalist Party establishment needlessly betraying its principles on pivotal issues. From the growing outrage amongst progressive Federalists emerged murmurs of breaking off from the party of Aaron Burr to form a new political organization. These murmurs soon grew into serious backroom discussions amongst congressmen, and these discussions eventually led to the arrangement of a convention in the city of Zomerstadt to formally create a new major Riebeeckian political party. Amongst those present at the Zomerstadt Convention were progressive activists, politicians, and labor leaders alike, including congressmen William Seward and Hannibal Tuinstra, son of Theodosia Burr Vanderlyn and incumbent governor of Liberia Aaron Burr Vanderlyn, now-elderly founder of Moses City Jack Pritchard, and socialist chairman of the Riebeeckian General Workingmen’s Association Wilhelm Lovett.

Photograph of attendees of the Zomerstadt Convention, including then-Congressman Hannibal Tuinstra (center-left).

The ideologies represented at the Zomerstadt Convention varied dramatically, with some members being socially left-leaning classical liberals to cooperative socialists who were versed in the works of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, however, the various men and women gathered nonetheless gradually constructed a platform for their new party. Ultimately named the Revolutionary Burrite Party (RBP) to portray the organization as an heir to the ideals of Aaron Burr and the Cape Revolutionary War, this new progressive political party broadly advocated for the calling of a new constitutional convention to enact sweeping reforms that would sweep away the perceived flaws of the Riebeeckian government structure. This included, among other things, a Congress whose members would be allocated proportionally to the national population, the implementation of a referendum system, the guarantee of voting rights to all Riebeeckian adults of at least twenty-one years of age, regardless of race, national origin, or religion, secularization of the apparatus of state at all nations, the constitutional guarantee of a strong welfare state, and collective bargaining rights for labor organizations.

One point of contention at the Zomerstadt Convention was the Revolutionary Burrite policy regarding the Native African protectorates. These constituent kingdoms of Austropolis had effectively become highly autonomous provinces with monarchist systems of governance, with only the Xhosa Federation even possessing a democratically elected legislature, one that held more or less no de facto political authority. Many Riebeeckians, including those who lived within the protectorates, had long questioned these autonomous regions’ status, often due to ideological qualms with the existence of absolute monarchies as administrative divisions within an otherwise relatively democratic constitutional monarchy. Political activists from the protectorates present at the Zomerstadt Convention generally advocated for the abolition of their absolute monarchism, however, others simply called for the adoption of reforms similar to those of Xhosa. The issue of how integrated into the United Dominion the protectorates should be was even more divisive, with opinions ranging from independence to annexation as provinces. In the end, the Zomerstadt Convention came to a general consensus that the Revolutionary Burrite Party would support the “implementation of democratic governance” within the protectorates and leave it at that.

Once a final decision was reached on BRP policy towards the Native African protectorates, however, the new party more or less had a finished platform to run on. Therefore, on November 5th, 1853, the Revolutionary Burrite Party was officially formed, and quickly found itself with a number of representatives with the Riebeeckian apparatus of state from the get-go. Half of all Federalist congressmen opted to leave their party for the Revolutionary Burrites, including the entire delegation from Bloemfontein, thus dividing the Congress of South Africa between eleven Revolutionary Burrites, eleven Federalists, and twenty-three Unionists. On the provincial level, even more elected officials swapped party allegiances, including three governors. The birth of Riebeeckia’s new three-party system sent shockwaves throughout the United Dominion, however, the first past the post electoral system that the nation adhered to meant that this triumvirate could not last forever.

The 1854 congressional election put the BRP to the test, with this being the first nationwide electoral contest the party would face. The Revolutionary Burrites mostly focused their efforts on holding onto their eleven congressmen while also replacing incumbent Federalists within progressive stronghold provinces. Meanwhile, the Unionist Party sought to take advantage of the opposition’s division and expand its slim congressional majority whereas the Federalists simply tried their best to undo the damage inflicted upon their party by the Zomerstadt Convention. As was to be expected by the United Dominion’s combination of utilizing first past the post and having disproportionate representation for rural pro-Unionist provinces in Congress, the legislative election of July 1854 was a decisive victory for the Unionist Party, even if the results of the national popular vote was roughly equal between all three parties. The final result of the 1854 election indicated a gain of four seats for the Unionists (all of which came at the expense of the Federalists) and the loss of zero, thus bringing the party’s congressional majority up to twenty-seven seats.

As for the Revolutionary Burrites, the new party not only managed to hold its own against the historical Riebeeckian establishment but surpassed the Federalists as the second largest party in Congress, snatching seats in Austropolis, Liberia, and New Ireland at the expense of the Federalist Party, thus bringing BRP numbers up to fourteen seats. The Federalist Party, which still remained in control of the executive branch due to the chancellorship not being up for reelection until 1855, was clearly the decisive loser of the 1854 congressional election, losing a total of seven seats to the Revolutionary Burrites and Unionists, thus bringing the once-dominant party in Riebeeckia down to an effectively powerless four seats in Congress. The fact that the popular vote for the Federalist Party was similar to that for the RBP and Unionists was the only bright side of the devastating loss for the Party of Aaron Burr, however, any chance for the Federalists to rebuild their numbers was now three years away and Chancellor Maartin Van Buren had a reelection bid to worry about for the time being.

This brings us to the 1855 Riebeeckian chancellorship election. While there was some discussion amongst the Federalist Party elite to replace Van Buren, who many blamed for the crushing defeat of the Federalists in 1854, the chancellor and deputy chancellor were both renominated for a second term. Despite being a young party with little in the way of established leadership, the Revolutionary Burrite Party’s 1854 chancellorship primary nonetheless quickly coalesced around Governor Aaron Burr Vanderlyn of Liberia as their nominee, hoping that the statesman would attract voters as the heir to the Burr-Vanderlyn political dynasty. The selection for who would be Vanderlyn’s running mate was a bit more contentious, but in the end Indiana Senator Salmon Ralston Chase was ultimately selected in order to geographically balance the Revolutionary Burrite ticket. Governor Vanderlyn sought to run on a center-left populist platform of repealing the Sixth Amendment, expanding the right to vote to all adult Riebeeckians, and dramatically expanding the national welfare state in order to more sufficiently provide health services and pensions for the elderly.

Governor Aaron Burr Vanderlyn of Liberia.

Out of all party primaries in 1854, it was that of the Unionist Party that proved to be the most divisive. Unlike the congressional election, the victor of the chancellorship was based off of the national popular vote, meaning that the Unionists had to at least secure a plurality of support. Given the partition of the former Federalist base, this was far easier than in previous elections, but the Unionist Party nonetheless wanted to ensure that it would not forfeit on the opportunity to simultaneously govern the executive and legislative branch, thus leading the party to search for a ticket with broad enough appeal to siphon off voters from moderate Federalists and Revolutionary Burrites. This was, at least, the approach taken by the Unionist establishment, who ultimately coalesced around Congressman Robert Peel of Edwardland, an experienced center-right statesman who had been involved in national politics since the independence of Riebeeckia itself. A long time proponent of free trade and market liberalism, Peel took a more moderate approach to the question of religious freedom when compared to the bulk of his party, supporting institutional religious discrimination against non-Protestants but arguing that such policies should be pursued more pragmatically so as to not cause widespread backlash.

Despite being widely supported by the Unionist establishment and the center-right wing of the party, Robert Peel nonetheless faced a major opponent in the 1854 Unionist chancellorship primary in the form of Congressman Samuel Cabell Breckinridge of Interland. A far younger man than Peel, Breckinridge was born on a Liberian farm in 1821. The father of Breckinridge was Joseph Cabell Breckinridge, a descendant of the colonial Virginian Cabell political family who had moved out to the western reaches of Liberia in order to reclaim the agrarian lifestyle of his Columbian-Riebeeckian family while the coastline of the colony founded by Thomas Jaager gradually urbanized around this time. Joseph Cabell would go on to be elected as a senator within the Liberian legislature and served as a right-wing politician who became notorious for his advocacy in favor of the militant inland expansion of the Cape Colony and the utilization of the Liberian government as a means to enforce Protestant teachings upon its population.

When the Cape Revolutionary War broke out in 1830, Joseph Cabell Breckinridge sided with the vast majority of Liberians in support of the declaration of the United Dominion of Riebeeckia and vacated his seat in the Liberian senate to fight under the command of General Wilfried Harrison. Present at numerous major battles, including Zomerstadt and Cape Town, Joseph Cabell Breckinridge returned from the Cape Revolutionary War as a hero of the conflict, however, he nonetheless soon found his political career in Liberia halted due to his right-wing views preventing him from having any provincial appeal. Therefore, due to both failure to secure any provincial office and the westward expansion of urbanization in Liberia, Joseph Cabell Breckinridge and his family moved to the newly-formed rural province of Interland in 1834, which Breckinridge was elected to represent in Congress on behalf of the Unionist Party in 1837.

It was here in Interland where Joseph Cabell’s son Samuel launched his own political career, thus continuing the legacy of the Transatlantic Cabell-Breckinridge political dynasty. Samuel Breckinridge first ascended to public office upon being elected to the House of Representatives of Interland in 1846 at the young age of twenty-five. While Joseph Cabell was notorious for his right-wing views on the national stage, Samuel took the reactionism espoused by his father and the Unionist Party as a whole to another level, firmly believing that Native Africans and non-Christians were uncivilized and should be harshly discriminated against by the Riebeeckian government, with Representative Breckinridge introducing a bill to the Interland legislature in 1847 that intended to prohibit Native Africans from owning property within the province. While Breckinridge’s more extreme proposals never managed to gain much traction, even within a Unionist-dominated provincial administration, he did nonetheless push forth some successfully passed legislation, including an 1848 amendment to the Interland constitution that prohibited laws giving the right to vote to Native Africans from being passed.

A drawing of Samuel Breckinridge during his tenure as a representative in the legislature of Interland, circa 1848.

In 1849, a vacancy opened up in one of Interland’s three seats in the Congress of South Africa, and the controversial Samuel Breckenridge saw an opportunity to follow in his father’s footsteps and make his way onto the national stage. Breckenridge’s campaign would emphasize his more theocratic leanings, arguing that the Unionist Party must relentlessly push for “the restoration of Christian morality” in Riebeeckia amidst the passage of numerous socially progressive programs by the Theodosia Burr Vanderlyn chancellery. Given the heavily pro-Unionist political leaning of Interland, Samuel Breckinridge was elected to Congress in 1849 with ease, meaning that he was to serve in tandem with his father. While many expected Samuel to simply be a copy of his father ideologically, the young congressman was notably further to the right. Perhaps it was due to Samuel having started his political career in the highly conservative Interland, or perhaps it was due to the fact that he felt as though his family of former Virginian slaveholders had lost a lifestyle they were entitled to by migrating to Africa and that it was his duty to restore it, but Samuel Breckinridge quickly made a name for himself as a notorious far-right candidate, advocating for blurring the line between church and state and imposing a rigid racial hierarchy throughout the United Dominion.

Breckinridge’s fringe ideology seemed to be built around a genuine desire to rebuild the slavocracy of the southern Columbian Colonies (although Congressman Breckinridge never went as far as to advocate for the introduction of slavery as institution to Liberia, instead supporting an exaggeration of the Separation Acts) and a sense of political pragmatism, with his constant appeal to religion seeming to be designed as a means to win over Columbian-Riebeeckians, Anglo-Riebeeckians, Dutch-Riebeeckians, and German-Riebeeckians alike by forging a Protestant nationalist ideology that voters from all of these groups could rally behind. This ideology seemed to work, and by the time the 1855 Riebeeckian chancellorship election rolled around, Samuel Breckinridge was a rising star within the Unionist Party, albeit an individual who was extremely controversial and managed to fall to the right of the party establishment.

This brings us back to the 1854 Unionist primary, where Breckinridge tossed his hat into the ring and managed to win substantial support from a handful of party bosses who were attracted to his socially reactionary platform of transforming the United Dominion into a theocratic state. Nonetheless, a majority of Unionist officials, including Congressional Majority Leader Jacobus Groenendaal, rallied behind the safer choice of Robert Peel as their candidate to run against Maartin Van Buren and Aaron Burr Vanderlyn in 1855. Samuel Breckinridge subsequently pushed for being nominated as Peel’s running mate, however, the Unionist establishment yet again went for a more moderate choice in the form of their 1851 chancellery candidate and former Minister of Justice Archibald Dixon as their option for deputy chancellor. Infuriated by what he saw as an ostracization from the Unionist Party elite, Samuel Breckinridge would announce an independent bid for the chancellorship on December 9th, 1854, with Unionist Congressman Robert Garnett Hunter of New Hanover agreeing to be Breckinridge’s running mate.

Thus, the Federalist-Unionist duopoly that had dominated Riebeeckia for its entire history was shattered as the nation braced for the first chancellorship election where more than two candidates would have a viable shot at winning. The partition of both major parties by splinter groups meant that Vanderlyn, Van Buren, Peel, and Breckinridge all had a decent chance at winning the chancellery, thus guaranteeing a close election as unpredictable as it was unprecedented. The unusual nature of the 1855 chancellorship election caused an emergence in opinion polling, with nationwide pollsters emerging for the first time after historically being conducted on the local level. The Austropolis Times released a poll in April reporting that incumbent Chancellor Maartin Van Buren was on a path to reelection while Robert Peel trailed behind him in second whereas the Georgeburgh-based Dominion Inquirer of Edwardland shocked the United Dominion when it predicted that Congressman Samuel Breckinridge was to narrowly beat his three opponents. National polling was obviously in its infancy during this time period, so no poll was very accurate (regional bias in straw-polling was often commonplace, with the southern Austropolis Times interviewing more pro-Federalist crowds while the northern Dominion Inquirer encountered more Unionists), however, national polls nonetheless played an important role in the narrative of the 1855 chancellorship election, with the Dominion Inquirer’s May poll giving Breckinridge’s fringe campaign a sense of legitimacy.

The Dominion Inquirer poll helped Samuel Breckinridge receive a number of endorsements from his fellow Unionists, including a handful of congressmen (up until this point, Breckinridge’s father had been the only national congressman to endorse his candidacy), governors, and former prominent Unionist officials. All of a sudden, it appeared as though the United Dominion of Riebeeckia was headed towards electing a theocrat to the chancellery, something that would certainly lead to the undoing of much of the Federalist Party’s legacy. Aaron Burr Vanderlyn sought to mimic this boost in support for Breckinridge by spending campaign money on running a poll of his own, which ultimately found the Vanderlyn/Chase ticket to be leading. Given the biased nature of this poll, the Revolutionary Burrite Party’s nominee didn’t see as much of a rise in support from its publication as Breckinridge did after the publication of the Dominion Inquirer’s, however, the poll was generally regarded as a benefit for the Vanderlyn campaign.

This strategy of paying for polls skewed in favor of certain candidates was soon copied by both Van Buren and Peel, and while the trick lost more of its success the more it was used, each candidate managed to secure a period of time where Riebeeckian voters regarded them as the frontrunner. By the beginning of the summer of 1855, each ticket had amassed comparable followings. Despite the failings of his chancellery, Maartin Van Buren continued to win sizable support from remaining Federalists and was especially popular in Liberia and New Ireland. Aaron Burr Vanderlyn grew into a favorite for poorer Riebeeckians, people of color (at least where they could vote), and the inhabitants of some of the United Dominion’s largest cities by running on a left-wing populist platform and a healthy dose of name recognition as the heir to two popular former chancellors. Robert Peel held onto a number of Unionists, particularly more moderate members of the party, and even managed to win support from conservative-leaning Federalists as an electable alternative to the more radical Vanderlyn and Breckinridge that they could stomach. All the while, Samuel Breckinridge clung to his base of farmers and socially conservative figures who were attracted to his Christian nationalist ideology.

Congressman Samuel Breckinridge speaking to a crowd of supporters outside of the Indiana Provincial Capitol in New Rotterdam.

Soon enough, however, an unexpected incident would shake up the election when, on June 5th, 1855, Joseph Cabell Breckinridge passed away at the age of sixty-four. Grief-stricken by the loss of his father, Samuel Breckinridge rarely campaigned in the final haul to July 10th, leaving his less popular running mate, Robert Garnett Hunter, to run around winning votes. Support for the right-wing Unionist Breckinridge/Hunter ticket took a clear hit throughout the end of June and going into early July, and the vast majority of former Breckinridge supporters were scooped up by Robert Peel, giving the congressman an edge in what was otherwise a very narrow race with Vanderlyn and Van Buren. When the fateful election day of July 10th, 1855 ultimately rolled around, it remained to be seen who would emerge victorious as Riebeeckians anxiously awaited reports on the outcome. After lengthy counting of votes that finally spanned a week, a winner was finally announced, and news soon spread that a Unionist was returning to the executive mansion for the first time in eight years.

Robert Peel had won the chancellorship.

Chancellor Robert Peel of the United Dominion of Riebeeckia.

Aaron Burr Vanderlyn managed to achieve second place in the 1855 election whereas the incumbent Chancellor Maartin Van Buren slid into third, therefore solidifying the replacement of the Federalist Party with the Revolutionary Burrites in the eyes of many. Meanwhile, independent Unionist candidate Samuel Breckinridge came in a distant fourth, just barely exceeding ten percent of the popular vote. Many anticipated that Breckinridge’s poor performance marked the end to the young congressman’s aspirations for the chancellery, and upon assuming control of the Riebeeckian executive branch on September 12th, Chancellor Robert Peel, who was confident that the Breckinridge’s weak campaign meant that his reactionary ideological faction no longer posed a serious threat to the Unionist establishment, decided to take action against the rogue pro-Breckinridge wing of his party. As the de facto leader of the Unionist Party, Peel pushed the party apparatus to adopt a resolution officially ousting Samuel Breckinridge, thus turning the congressman into an independent pariah within the national legislature. While Peel anticipated that this action would prevent Breckinridge from ever gaining influence again, it seemed to have the opposite effect. Infuriated by his removal, Breckinridge called on his political allies to leave the Unionists in protest.

A total of six congressmen would ultimately leave the Unionist Party, thus breaking the Unionist majority in Congress by bringing the party’s number of seats down to a plurality of twenty-one. As was to be expected, this league of far-right Breckinridge supporters opted to forge their own political party. This clique of far-right congressmen would therefore assemble in the Interlander capital of Williamsburg alongside a handful of pro-Breckinridge Unionist officials from provincial and local governments to do what the progressive Federalists had done two years prior and break away from one of the two great historical parties of the United Dominion of Riebeeckia. From the ruins of the Ribeeckian duopoly emerged the National Cross Party (NCP), an organization that committed itself to turning the United Dominion into a “Christian state” and overturning laws perceived as heretical to Protestant theology upon its founding at the Williamsburg Convention on October 3rd, 1855.

More importantly than any ideological doctrine, however, the NCP was dedicated to following and carrying out the political interests of Samuel Breckinridge, who was almost immediately appointed party leader in Congress. Given that its commitment to Breckinridge was the core platform of the National Crosses, the new party was often accused as being little more than the vessel of a cult of personality for a failed chancellorship candidate, however, Breckinridge himself would publish a manifesto outlining the NCP ideology circa January 1856 titled “The Crusade of the National Cross Party,” which advocated for, among other things, the establishment of a third branch of the legislature consisting exclusively of Protestant clergymen appointed by the chancellor, the elimination of citizenship and property rights for non-Christians, the prohibition of women from voting, the state-sponsored funding of religious institutions, wide-scale privatization of public utilities (primarily schools), racial segregation similar to the Separation Acts, and the prohibition of government seizure of Christian-owned property. “The Crusade” also outlined praxis for the NCP, most notably nullifying national policies opposed by the party by having provincial governments refuse to enforce said policies.

As was to be expected, the National Cross Party quickly approved of adopting “The Crusade” as its official party platform. The provincial governments of Interland and Binnenland, the only two provinces to be led by National Cross governors at the time, subsequently set out implementing much of Breckinridge’s policies to the best of their abilities, with both provincial governments implementing widespread privatization programs, evicting many Native Africans and non-Christians from their homes with the intent of segregating communities, and providing substantial funding to churches and religious schools. Many of these actions were widely criticized, even by Unionists, and Chancellor Peel condemned segregation policies on the grounds that he believed such extreme programs would result in violence and instability (it should, however, be noted that Unionist provincial governments had supported more subtle segregation programs, such as raising prices on or withholding aid to certain communities, for decades). Nonetheless, the fact that the Unionist Party only held a plurality of seats in Congress meant that the Peel administration was often dependent on NCP congressmen to pass the more right-wing elements of his platform.

This awkward de facto alliance between the Unionists and National Crosses was undeniably delicate (NCP congressmen were far from enthusiastic to collaborate with public officials that had expelled them from the Unionist Party, to say the very least), however, a handful of notable bipartisan bills were passed by the Peel administration. One of the most notable of these bills was the National Policing Act, which made its way through Congress circa April 1856 and created the Ministry of Policing, a national institution that was responsible for establishing, managing, and funding local police departments. Metropolitan police forces had been emerging throughout Riebeeckian municipalities since the country’s inception, but with the formation of the Ministry of Policing, a national body dedicated to establishing professional law enforcement as the norm throughout the United Dominion was formed, alongside (at the behest of a number of NCP congressmen) provincial ministries of policing that received additional funding and were answerable to the nation Ministry.

Officers of the Austropolis Police Service, circa February 1857.

Alongside the National Policing Act, a handful of other prominent bills were passed by the informal Unionist-National Cross coalition, including the repeal of both the Progressive and Equitable Taxation Act of 1848 and the Housing Act of 1849, significantly lowering taxes for the wealthy and landowners in general via the Taxpayers’ Relief Act of September 1856, restricting non-Christians from holding positions in the executive branch of high-ranking military offices via the Corporation Act of January 1857, and criminalizing homosexuality on a national level via the Social Act of June 1857. Even when combined with all National Cross congressmen, the Unionist forces in Congress lacked the numbers to pass constitutional amendments, which prevented the undoing of some of the most important lasting policies of progressive Federalist administrations, however, for all intents and purposes Robert Peel was effective at passing his agenda regardless.

The popularity of the Peel administration would be gauged by the 1857 congressional election, not to mention that Riebeeckia would now undergo a chaotic four-way election for control of the legislature. By this point, the Revolutionary Burrite Party had long since surpassed the Federalists in terms of support whereas it was now the conservative bloc of Riebeeckian politics that faced a significant split between the Unionists and National Crosses. By winning a plurality of votes in many provinces thanks to the lack of a strong Federalist Party and the partition of the right-wing between two relatively even parties, the Revolutionary Burrites won a substantial number of seats, taking all four Federalist seats and a number of vulnerable Unionist seats won in the 1854 landslide, thus bringing RBP numbers up to a respectable plurality of twenty-two seats. Meanwhile, despite winning less votes than the Unionist Party, the NCP won more seats due to its heavy concentration of support in northern agrarian provinces, thus winning the National Crosses a total of thirteen seats while the Unionists slid into third place with ten seats as a consequence of spreading their votes out too thin across the country.

And just like that, the Federalist Party succumbed to irrelevancy on the national stage while the more left-wing Revolutionary Burrite Party rose to take its place. All the while, the combined might of the Unionist Party and NCP still generated a slim majority, however, it was now Samuel Breckinridge’s Christian nationalists who would be calling the shots in the legislature, therefore throwing the once-powerful Chancellor Robert Peel into a situation very similar to that of his predecessor. Going into the fall of 1857, Congressman Samuel Breckinridge, who was narrowly elected Speaker of the Congress of South Africa after the Unionists had backed down from pushing for their own candidate due to fears of a Revolutionary Burrite speaker looming over the two parties, was already starting to make moves on a severely weakened Robert Peel, forcing the Marriage Act through Congress in October 1857, which prohibited interracial and interreligious marriages. A month later, Samuel Breckinridge would announce his intentions to run for the chancellery yet again in the upcoming 1859 election to the delight of a National Cross crowd in Williamsburg.

Going into 1858, the National Crosses continued their bid for power by forming the Crusaders of Riebeeckia in February as the party’s official paramilitary, the first of such organizations to ever be promoted by a major Ribeeckian political party. The Crusaders were initially formed out of the unification of a number of local far-right militias, all of which were technically unaffiliated with the NCP, at the behest of Congressman Breckinridge and placed under the command of War of Malacca veteran Edward Jonathan Jackson of Noordelijk. With the endorsement and financial support of the National Cross Party, the Crusaders of Riebeeckia grew into an organization boasting thousands of members, and soon enough armed militias were parading through the streets of many Riebeeckian communities. At first, the Crusaders rarely did much beyond guarding NCP rallies and many of its chapters were effectively militant fraternal clubs for the far-right of Riebeeckia, however, the organization nonetheless had a history of vigilantism, including patrolling diverse communities, intimidating local opposition, and harassing those whose activities were viewed as blasphemous by the National Cross Party.

As the Crusaders of Riebeeckia grew in strength, so too did local pro-RBP militias (although the Revolutionary Burrites never endorsed any paramilitary), oftentimes as means of defense against the vigilante actions of the Crusaders. For the first time in Riebeeckian history, militancy had been injected into the nation’s political divisions and the ideology of provincial sovereignty began to mutate into a genuine threat of civil war as National Cross-controlled local administrations threatened nullification and had the armed force in the form of the Crusaders of Ribeeckia to back up said threats. As the United Dominion seemingly spiraled towards an unprecedented crisis, Chancellor Peel mostly remained quiet on the subject of the rise of domestic paramilitaries, although he did make it clear that any clashes between militia forces would be responded with force by local police services under the guidance of the national Ministry of Policing.

All the while, the Decade of Despair raged on throughout the United Dominion. The Banking Reform Act and National Infrastructure Act had both helped in reducing the extreme thirty percent unemployment experienced during the middle of the Van Buren administration, however, seventeen percent of Riebeeckian adults remained unemployed even as the economy stabilized, and tax reform implemented by the Peel chancellery seemingly resulted in growing economic inequality. This situation had helped contribute to the rapid rise in support for the RBP and NCP, both of which were seen as alternatives to the failed platforms of the Federalists and Unionists by increasingly desperate Riebeeckians, and as the election of 1859 approached, the craving for radical change became stronger and stronger. Membership within the Riebeeckian General Workingmen’s Association surged throughout the entirety of the Decade of Despair, and socialist thought, while still relatively niche, was becoming more popular throughout the United Dominion, as exemplified by the election of cooperative socialist and RGWA founder Wilhelm Lovett to Congress as a member of the Revolutionary Burrite Party in 1857.

Despite growing support for more extreme ideologies at the expense of the Federalists and Unionists, Robert Peel remained relatively popular in the sense that he managed to evade significant controversy, regardless of his flaws. The chancellor undeniably faced strong opposition, however, he maintained an apparent plurality of support as 1859 approached due to simply being the least divisive national figure. But Chancellor Robert Peel would never run for reelection. On the cool night of May 3rd, 1858, Robert Peel was strolling down an Austropolis street on his way back from work to his home, opting to go for a walk that night as opposed to his usual transport via road locomotive. The chancellor would never arrive at his home, for as Peel walked past the late night traffic of locomotives buzzing through the City of the South, a man by the name of Daniel M’Naghten crept out of the shadows and approached Peel from behind. After following the chancellor for a while, without warning, M’Naghten pulled out a pistol from his pocket and fired two bullets into the back of Robert Peel. As nearby police servicemen rushed to apprehend M’Naghten, who was later found to be not guilty on the ground of insanity, an ambulance locomotive rushed the chancellor to the nearby Queen Victoria Hospital.

Only a few minutes before the midnight of May 3rd, Chancellor Robert Peel passed away from his gun wounds.

In accordance with the constitution of the United Dominion of Riebeeckia, Deputy Chancellor Archibald Dixon was sworn in as Peel’s successor in a private ceremony on the morning of May 4th, 1858. A member of the Unionist establishment whose service in the national executive branch dated back to the Potgieger administration, Dixon was ideologically quite similar to his predecessor, however, Dixon’s chancellery would not be a mere continuation of Peel’s, mostly for reasons outside of Dixon’s control. The new chancellor did not possess the same degree of relative popularity as his predecessor, and the National Cross Party took this to their advantage as a means to get their way with a less stable national government. Samuel Breckinridge had been a longtime advocate for nullification of laws opposed by the NCP through provincial refusal to enforce said laws, and with the new chancellor still settling in, a golden opportunity to put nullification into effect was finally presented to the National Cross governments of numerous northern provinces.

Chancellor Archibald Dixon of the United Dominion of Riebeeckia.

Interland was, perhaps predictably at this point, the first province to pursue nullification. Starting on May 8th, 1858, the Fourth Amendment to the Riebeeckian constitution, a product of the Vanderlyn administration that prohibited corporate donations to political officials, was no longer enforced by the Interland executive branch under the guidance of Governor Joshua Lane, thus effectively nullifying the amendment within Interland. Chancellor Dixon obviously protested these actions, however, Lane’s grip on his province’s Ministry of Policing and the strength of the Crusaders of Riebeeckia within Interland meant that there was little the national government could do without invading Interland with armed force, something that Dixon was, like his successor, keen on avoiding. The incompetence of the Dixon chancellery to enforce the very constitution it was bound to, however, caused the NCP-led provinces of Binnenland, South Holland, Noordelijk, and Kalahari to follow suit in the coming days.

The Dixon administration’s inability to enforce the Fourth Amendment opened the door for National Cross-controlled provinces to more or less nullify whatever they wanted, with nullification ranging from something as minor as federal corporate regulations to something as important as violating the Second Amendment by preventing women from voting in local elections. This crisis not only threatened to tear apart the United Dominion itself as the national government’s effectiveness at preserving rule over its territory was thrown into doubt but resulted in widespread violence as the Crusaders of Riebeeckia clashed with rival paramilitary forces. The so-called Nullification Troubles resulted in countless riots throughout the United Dominion and national forces rarely intervened to keep the peace, only really ever doing so when spouts of violence had subsided and the Riebeeckian Army came in to pick up the rubble. Within the span of less than a decade, the United Dominion of Riebeeckia had gone from being a great power and a bastion of classical liberalism to standing on the brink of civil war.

A fight between the Crusaders of Riebeeckia (right) and striking RGWA workers (left) South Holland during the Nullification Troubles, circa August 1858.

The 1859 chancellorship election stood on the horizon of the Nullification Troubles as a potential solution to the crisis at hand in the eyes of many optimists, however, more practical onlookers saw that building tensions were reaching a fever pitch that simply could not be resolved by a mere change in executive leadership. Nonetheless, high enthusiasm for the coming election soon emerged amongst both Revolutionary Burrites and National Crosses alike. Governor Aaron Burr Vanderlyn announced that he would not seek the RBP nomination in October 1858, thus leaving the party’s nomination wide open. This opening would ultimately be filled by none other than Bloemfontein Congressman Hannibal Tuinstra.

Born in February 1817 to a former slave from the Republic of Virginia who had escaped captivity by fleeing across the Potomac River to Columbia before immigrating to what was then the Cape Colony, Tuinstra had been a passionate advocate for civil rights for nearly the entirety of his adult life. Upon graduating from Aaron Burr Memorial University in 1839, Tuinstra would become a plaintiff who took up cases against defendants he believed had partaken in a systemic injustice against his clients. This brought Tuinstra into fights across the United Dominion against wealthy plutocrats, landlords, and corrupt government officials alike, and the young lawyer gained a national reputation as a skilled champion of Riebeeckia’s repressed. In his spare time, Hannibal Tuinstra toured the country giving speeches at various rallies and conventions and writing a number of pamphlets and booklets in favor of the civil rights of women and marginalized groups, becoming renowned as an excellent orator and writer.

By the time Theodosia Burr Vanderlyn was elected to the chancellorship in 1847, Now-Bloemfontein resident Hannibal Tuinstra, who remained unaffiliated with any political party, had become an influential figure within progressive circles and even met with Chancellor Vanderlyn in 1848 to discuss the civil rights of Native Africans amidst continued suppression of their liberties by Unionist provincial governments. Once the Decade of Despair brought ruin to the Riebeeckian political status quo, however, Tuinstra was quick to criticize the Van Buren administration for compromising with the Unionist Party and the famous social reformer was amongst those present at the Zomerstadt Convention, being one of the primary advocates for a second constitutional convention as a solution to many of the systemic flaws that plagued the United Dominion. Given the heightened focus on economic issues during the Decade of Despair, much of Tuinstra’s early activism on behalf of the Revolutionary Burrite Party also took on a greater socioeconomic focus, advocating for the nationalization of health services, wealth redistribution programs, and guaranteed income.

It was this platform of economic progressivism, equal voting rights for all, and a new Riebeeckian constitution that Hannibal Tuinstra would run on in his 1854 bid for a seat in Congress representing the province of Bloemfontein. As a relatively popular figure amongst Revolutionary Burrites and Federalists alike, Tuinstra was elected to the national legislature by a decent margin, and notably became the first person of color to be elected to represent a province (representatives of Native African protectorates had been serving in Congress since the ratification of the Treaty of Morija) within the Congress of the United Dominion. Throughout the remainder of the Van Buren chancellery and the subsequent Peel administration, Congressman Tuinstra was one of the most prominent legislators of the newly-formed RBP, particularly denouncing the various policies of the informal Unionist-National Cross coalition.

By the time the 1858 Revolutionary Burrite chancellorship primary rolled around, Hannibal Tuinstra was amongst his party’s most well-known members. While some Revolutionary Burrites were reluctant about nominating a person of color for the executive leadership of a state with many provinces that prohibited people of color from even voting, Tuinstra proved to be deeply popular amongst his party’s base and therefore faced no major opposition in the primary process. Tuinstra was well aware, however, that a four-way chancellorship election would inevitably be a gambit much like 1855, and therefore simultaneously tossed his hat into the ring of the 1858 Federalist Party chancellorship primary, where he faced opposition in the form of former Fort Jaager Congressman Edward Bates, who ran on a centrist platform of keeping the peace amidst the Nullification Troubles, and Indiana Governor Oliver Everett II, who ran on a center-left platform of increased funding for public education, temperance, providing stimulus to the unemployed during the continued havoc of the Decade of Despair, and encouraging the expansion of voting rights at the local level while being cautious with regards to inflaming the Nullification Troubles.

Both Bates and Everett noticeably contrasted with the more radical Tuinstra, who made his case to the Federalist Party that the time for compromise was over and that a resolution to the past decade of instability was only possible via a dramatic transformation of national institutions. Amongst what remained of the Federalist electorate, which was more or less relegated to left-leaning moderates and centrists disillusioned by the more extreme elements of the Unionist Party, such a platform was generally viewed as too radical, however, many were nonetheless attracted to his economic populism as a solution to the continuously high levels of unemployment that Riebeeckia had endured since the ripple effect of the Great Crisis of 1852. What was ultimately credited towards pushing Hannibal Tuinstra towards an otherwise unlikely victory in the Federalist primary was his endorsement by ex-Chancellor Maartin Van Buren, an advocate for equal voting rights who believed that Tuinstra, a man widely respected in elite Federalist circles, was the best bet at significant nationwide change with regards to voting rights. After privately meeting with Hannibal Tuinstra in early December 1858, the elderly retired statesman issued official endorsement shortly thereafter, and Tuinstra subsequently coasted to victory in the Federalist primary on December 23rd, 1858 over Edward Bates and Oliver Everett II, thus forging a unified coalition between the Revolutionary Burrite Party and Federalist Party going into the general chancellorship election of the upcoming year.

Congressman Hannibal Tuinstra of Bloemfontein, circa January 1859.

As for Tuinstra’s running mate, the congressman would select fellow legislator George Stevens of Zomerland, a consistent advocate of universal suffrage and land redistribution to marginalized groups. With Tuinstra and Stevens, two advocates for policies viewed as incomprehensibly unpalatable by the NCP and even many Unionists, leading a coalition going into 1859, the right-wing of Riebeeckian politics scrambled to retaliate. Samuel Breckinridge had been running since 1857 and refused to step down in favor of endorsing incumbent Chancellor Archibald Dixon, which meant that any deal struck between the National Crosses and Unionists would have to keep the Breckinridge candidacy in the picture. In January 1859, Archibald Dixon, who had been nominated by his party’s convention for reelection in November 1858, privately met with Samuel Breckinridge alongside a number of National Cross and Unionist elites to organize a united conservative front in order to snub Tuinstra of the chancellorship, a scenario that shook both of the other contenders for the chancellery to their core.

After many days of lengthy negotiation, Archibald Dixon reached a deal with the devil and agreed to withdraw from the 1859 chancellorship convention with the consent of the Unionist establishment, understanding that the unpopularity of the Dixon administration meant that a second term for the incumbent chancellor was unlikely anway. Archibald Dixon would thus publicly endorse Samuel Breckinridge for the chancellorship, however, in return Jorgan E Badger, the Secretary of the Navy during all three Unionist executive administrations, was to be Breckinridge’s running mate on this newly-formed unity ticket as opposed to Edward Jonathan Jackson, the original NCP nominee for the deputy chancellorship, and the National Cross Party was to agree to not running any candidates against incumbent Unionist congressmen in 1860. The National Cross-Unionist coalition was undoubtedly awkward, with many Unionists balking at the endorsement of an extremist over their party’s incumbent chancellor and many National Crosses condemning an alliance with the very party that their leadership had been ousted from, but it the agreement reached was ultimately the only any right-wing candidate had a shot at defeating the rival Revolutionary Burrite-Federalist alliance.

Throughout the campaign season of 1859, Hannibal Tuinstra and Samuel Breckinridge consolidated their coalitions while violence raged throughout a state rocking on the brink of collapse. In the eyes of many, the 1859 chancellorship election was the last chance the United Dominion of Riebeeckia had to pull itself back from implosion, while for others it was already too late and the fuse of civil war had already been lit. Tuinstra found the bulk of his support in urban and typically southern communities whereas Breckinridge maintained his grip over the traditionally conservative and agrarian north, thus giving the upcoming election a strong geographic divide alongside its ideological rift. All the while, the sitting duck Chancellor Dixon struggled to maintain the peace as the continued Nullification Troubles turned provincial governors into more effective authorities than the national administration. Months of relentless campaigning between the two fierce rivals, who polls indicated were roughly neck and neck in terms of support, would culminate on July 10th, 1859 as millions of Riebeeckians cast their ballots in what would ultimately turn out to be amongst the most pivotal elections not just in the history of the United Dominion, but in the modern history of the world.

Just as polling had predicted, the 1859 chancellorship election was remarkably close as both candidates had unleashed uniquely dedicated bases to voting booths. As such, it took longer than usual for a winner to be declared, however, after four days of counting and reviewing ballots, a victor was finally declared. On the morning of July 13th, 1859, the headlines of just about every newspaper in Riebeeckia announced the chancellor-elect to the nation. After amassing a base of support over the past five years, ultimately eclipsing the once-dominant Federalists in the process, the Revolutionary Burrite Party had finally elected their very own candidate to the chancellorship. Congressman Hannibal Tuinstra would make history by becoming the first person of color to be elected chancellor of the United Dominion of Riebeeckia, a remarkable victory for the nation’s civil rights movement when millions of people of color did not even possess the right to vote.

Unfortunately, this victory would not last long.

Shortly after the declaration of Tuinstra’s victory, Samuel Breckinridge disputed the results of the 1859 election, baselessly claiming that voter fraud had handed Tuinstra his narrow win, whilst the Crusaders of Riebeeckia staged militant parades throughout a number of cities denouncing the election of Tuinstra. The two months between the election and inauguration of Hannibal Tuinstra became dangerously tense as many seemingly accepted the inevitability of civil war. Breckinridge’s challenges to the legitimacy of the 1859 election soon dissipated once it became clear that they wouldn’t go anywhere, however, the congressman refused to drop his opposition to the impending chancellorship of Tuinstra. On August 17th, 1859, under the guidance of Samuel Breckinridge, the governments of Binnenland, South Holland, Noordelijk, Kalahari, and Edwardsland ratified the Williamsburg Compact, a treaty between the five provinces under which the signatory parties agreed to fund their respective provincial wings of the Crusaders of Riebeeckia and to not enforce any legislation passed by the Tuinstra administration that lacked support in Congress from either the NCP or Unionist Party.

Chancellor-Elect Hannibal Tuinstra almost immediately condemned the Williamsburg Compact and pledged that he would ensure that the policies of the national government would be enforced throughout all of Riebeeckia during his administration, including with force if necessary, thus bringing the provinces of the United Dominion ever closer to the brink of an armed confrontation. All the while, Archibald Dixon stood back and watched a crisis that he couldn’t possibly solve within the span of less than a month and looked forward to his retirement from the chaotic mess that had engulfed Ribeeckian politics. The appointment of a new cabinet by Tuinstra consisting of those perceived as “radical” by much of the NCP and Unionist Party further fueled building domestic tension. Finally, after two months of anxious anticipation, Hannibal Tuinstra was inaugurated as the eighth chancellor of the United Dominion of Riebeeckia on September 12th, 1859 in front of a crowd of enthusiastic supporters in Austropolis while thousands National Cross members took to the streets in protest throughout the nation.

In his inaugural address, Chancellor Tuinstra made it clear that the resistance of northern provinces to the policies of the national government was treasonous and that the perpetuation of the Nullification Troubles would be met with force if necessary. Otto Bismarck, the famed hero of the War of Malacca, was appointed has Hannibal Tuinstra’s Minister of War and stood by the chancellor’s commitment to ending the Nullification Troubles, thus ensuring the loyalty of the leadership of the Riebeeckian armed forces going into what was increasingly becoming a seemingly unavoidable confrontation. On Chancellor Hannibal Tuinstra’s second day in office, his administration would order the Riebeeckian Army to deploy itself along all railways within Williamsburg Compact signatory provinces, thus ensuring that transportation infrastructure within potentially rebellious territories was under the direct control of Austropolis. Unsurprisingly, provincial regimes that had grown accustomed to resisting the rules of the national governments over the past few years were outraged by the chancellor’s executive order and mobilized local police services and the Crusaders of Riebeeckia in preparation for an armed conflict.

Samuel Breckinridge publicly decried Chancellor Tuinstra’s occupation of railways as an act of war on northern provinces, a sentiment that was clearly shared by the Williamsburg Compact. On September 15th, 1859, as the Riebeeckian Army began to patrol the various railways of the northern provinces, Samuel Breckinridge met with the leadership of the Crusaders of Riebeeckia and ordered the alliance that his cult of personality held informal sway over to conduct a march on Austropolis and overthrow the Tuinstra chancellorship with the intent to install Breckinridge himself as the new ruler of the United Dominion. With approval from Edward Jonathan Jackson, Breckinridge appointed himself as the leader of his planned putsch, and three days later, after congregating in Indiana, the Crusaders of Riebeeckia, whose numbers were in thousands, paraded from down to the national capital as legions of road locomotives served as a means to accelerate the March on Austropolis and evade preemptively gaining the attention of the Army. By the time Hannibal Tuinstra was made aware of an armed putsch towards Austropolis, the Crusaders were less than ten miles away from the outskirts of the capital. With a battle seemingly inevitable, Tuinstra ordered a state of siege and subsequently evacuated to Victoria City alongside his cabinet as the first gunshots rang through the streets of Austropolis.

Eastern Austropolis, circa September 1859.

On the evening of September 18th, 1859, blood would run through the streets of the City of the Southern Wind. Hastily-produced barricades did little more than slow down Samuel Breckinridge’s onslaught. Having received significant financing over the years from sympathetic military officials, corporations, and local governments, the Crusaders of Riebeeckia boasted the equipment and training of a conventional army, deploying organ guns against the sparse regiments garrisoned in Austropolis at the time of the city’s siege. Fighting from street to street, the Crusaders gradually pushed their way towards the Austropolis Palace in the center of the city as Samuel Breckinridge served as an armchair general, unaware that the Tuinstra chancellery had already been evacuated. Within the span of two hours, the largest city in all of Riebeeckia had been brought under the control of the Crusaders and the Tuinstra chancellery had fallen. While Breckinridge had not captured the Tuinstra administration, thus almost certainly guaranteeing the formation of a rival government by provinces opposed to his coup, he nonetheless went forth with declaring himself the chancellor of the United Dominion of Riebeeckia to a terrified nation following the total consolidation of his reign over Austropolis, a claim to power that was quickly recognized by the Williamsburg Compact.

At long last, Samuel Breckinridge had become chancellor, but through bloodshed rather than the ballot box.

Hannibal Tuinstra would not, however, concede to the tyranny of Breckinridge and decried the blatant coup that was the Austropolis Putsch. The provincial government of Liberia would officially recognize Tuinstra as the legitimate chancellor of the United Dominion on August 19th, followed by similar declarations by Zomerland, New Ireland, Zululand, Bloemfontein, and Indiana in the following days. As Riebeeckia tore itself apart between a pro-Breckinridge administration in the north and a pro-Tuinstra administration in the south, the storm clouds of civil war began to thunder. Antarctica officially joined Breckinridge’s clique on September 26th, 1859, thus meaning that all provinces of the United Dominion had finally chosen a side in the coming conflict. The Native African protectorates, on the other hand, declared neutrality in the conflict, which subsequently led to de facto independence for these kingdoms, at least for the time being. This nightmarish standoff between the two Ribeeckias would not last long. On the afternoon of September 28th, 1859, Chancellor Samuel Breckinridge ordered Edward J Jackson, now his government’s Minister of War, to direct the Crusaders of Riebeeckia and the regiments of the Riebeeckian Army loyal to his reign to march towards New Richmond, the de facto capital of Tuinstra’s government.

Less than an hour after Breckinridge’s executive order was issued, General Paul Kruger, a leader of the Crusaders of Riebeeckia who had participated in the March on Austropolis, left the capital of a fallen democracy only to engage with pro-Tuinstra forces at the Battle of Melkbosstrand. The clash for the small city was brief due to the relatively small amount of forces loyal to New Richmond present at the battle, however, it was nonetheless significant due to the fact that it was the very first military engagement of what was doomed to escalate into one of the most gruesome wars in modern history. After little more than an hour of combat, General Kruger had emerged victorious at the Battle of Melkbosstrand and continued to scale along the coastline towards New Richmond. All the while, pro-Tuinstra forces mobilized to converge upon Austropolis, pro-Breckinridge paramilitaries from the northern provinces simultaneously surged into Indiana with the intent of linking up with the encircled capital and marched into Liberia in order to make Kruger’s job far easier, politicians on both sides of the war began to seize the opportunity to forge the system of governance they had desired for years but had been unable to implement thanks to the efforts of an opposition they were now going to war against, and the world looked on as one of the most powerful nations on the African continent and a subject of the House of Hanover that had grown to rival the likes of Germania itself.

Soon enough, Riebeeckia’s civil war would embroil the great powers of the Indian Ocean into a conflict that would define the coming century. Mwene Changamire Chatunga of the Mutapa Empire watched with intense curiosity as Samuel Breckinridge set out to follow his example and forge a centralized Calvinist theocratic regime while the Kingdom of India carefully monitored the collapse of its fellow Hanoverian state, knowing that neutrality could only be preserved for so long. After reigning over the southernmost reaches of Africa for the past three decades, the United Dominion of Riebeeckia had finally collapsed, however, out of this destruction a new superpower was to emerge. The Riebeeckian dream of liberty may have perished on the fateful day of September 18th, 1859, but perhaps a new dream could blossom from the fires of war.

Welcome to the Equatorial Revolutionary War.

Crusaders of Riebeeckia following the Battle of Melkbosstrand.​