English Canada/French Carolina: A Timeline
- Thread starter Gabingston
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Part 100: Let's See How Far We've Come
Part 100: Let’s See How Far We’ve Come
Alas, after nearly a quarter decade of brainstorming, writing and posting, we have finally arrived at Part 100 of this timeline! I started this timeline after I lost interest in my previous French Australia and French Canada timelines, and I was looking to start a new timeline. I wanted a point of divergence that would lead to a very different North America, and found the Anglo-French War of 1627-29, and more specifically the seizure of Quebec by privateer David Kirke to be a good launching point. By having the seizure take place a year earlier before the war in Europe ended (blatant handwaving, I know), the English (and Scottish) could acquire French Canada and Acadia in the peace deal. After that, France colonizes the Deep South (which remained uncolonized by the British until later on in the 18th Century), thus kicking off the timeline in full.From it’s beginning in 1628, we’ve progressed over 300 years up to the 1930s. During this time, there have been major divergences between this timeline and our own. The American, French and Latin American revolutions never happen, leading to many more monarchies in the western world surviving. In contrast to the long post-Napoleonic peace in Europe of OTL during the 19th Century, the continent is rocked by a continent-wide war occuring from the Mid 1860s to the Early 1870s. With the weakening of Europe in the war and the absence of a certain hand-mutilating king going “hippity hoppity the Congo is my property”, the Scramble For Africa is much more limited, largely concentrated in the southern third of the continent and along the coast. Asia is also less colonized, as mainland Southeast Asia is mostly independent. In China, the Ming Dynasty has risen from the grave, and Japan has gone from isolationism to great power within a lifefime. Australia is split between the British in NSW, Victoria, Southern Queensland and Tasmania, France in South Australia, The Netherlands in Western Australia and Portugal in Northern Queensland and the Northern Territory. Across the Tasman Sea, New Zealand is colonized by the Danish on the North Island and the Swedes on the South Island (EDIT: Retconned to be a Prussian colony). In the New World, The Commonwealth of America is the giant of North America. The former French colony of La Floride and the former Spanish colony of Mexico are both recently independent republics formed out of the chaos of the Second Global War (1911-1916), while Central America is largely under the new Guatemalan Republic and the Caribbean is a mix of European colonies and recently independent states. In South America, the main player is the behemoth that is the Empire of Brazil. The rest of the continent is made up of the Spanish dominions of New Granada, Peru and La Plata, the Dutch colony of Suriname and the British dominion of Patagonia. Back in Europe, the twin German states of Prussia and Austria-Bavaria dominate the continent after their victory in the Second Global War, while the losers lick their wounds and think of how to get back on top. Meanwhile, Russia has thrown off the czar and is now a radical-controlled Republic, although whether that is to last remains to be seen. All the while, Britannia continues to rule the waves, in no small part because their branch-off of the Commonwealth of America is now the hegemon of the Western Hemisphere.
The world in this timeline is familiar in some ways and yet quite different in others, and I look to provide more interesting content in the years to come (if I keep up this pace, I’m thinking this TL will reach the present sometime in 2022, after which I will start a Maps & Graphics series). It has been a thrill to write this over the past two and a half years, and I’m going to keep this world alive for at least the near future (assuming I don’t get the ban hammer by then). I’ll be putting up some maps within the next few days, and will start thinking of what to do for #101. Thanks to all of you for sticking around for 100 parts, and here’s to many more to come!
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Good summary! I've enjoyed this timeline a lot, looking forward to where it goes from here.
Middle East Map as of Part 100
Middle East Map as of Part 100 (I'd never posted one before, and I figured it was about damn time).
Maybe. I'm sure South Africa would count if it weren't for TTL's equivalent to Apartheid (which is almost certainly going to be a thing, unfortunately). Other than that, there could be some equivalent to a Middle Eastern oil state like Qatar or the UAE. I've actually thought about doing a poll on whether Africa will be better off ITTL in the absence of European colonization of the interior.
I could see the possibility of Europeans industrializing native African states in exchange for resources.
Part 101: The Victors
Part 101: The Victors
For the first update after Part 100, I’m going to look at the fate of the victorious countries from the Second Global War of 1911-16. While Russia had fallen into Civil War and France was barely hanging on, the victorious states were experiencing a post-victory high. Sure, many men had died and many more were injured or shell shocked, but there was a price to pay for victory (freedom does cost a buck o’ five, after all). In particular, I will be talking about the European victors of the war, namely The German States and Britain.First, The German States of the North German Confederation (dominated by Prussia, which is what I’ve been calling it) and the Austro-Bavarian Union (or Austro-Bavaria) had established the new economic and defense union of Mitteleuropa (which would’ve been established if the Central Powers won World War 1 IOTL). This union, which I already talked about in Part 84, basically tied much of Central and Eastern Europe’s economy around that of the German States, as well as providing the Germans’ military protection against any French or (especially) Russian threats. The rich natural resources of Eastern Europe were now at Prussia and Austro-Bavaria’s disposal.Massive amounts of grain was shipped from Ukrainian fields to German cities, and coal from the Carpathians fueled industry. In return, German-produced goods would be sold to Eastern Europeans for reduced prices, so there were benefits for both parties here, although the lion’s share of the gains went to the Germans. While the new Eastern European partners (or more accurately subjects) weren’t thrilled with rule from Berlin and Salzburg (the capital of Austro-Bavaria, a compromise between Vienna and Munich), it was preferable to rule from Moscow, as at least they had their own governments (even if they were effectively puppets).
Now, to the other major victor of the war, Britain. Britain, being an island with the world’s top navy was mainly unscathed. However, they had lost around a million men fighting in the fields of the Rhineland and Northern France, and were generally exhausted by that. Meanwhile, nationalism in British India, which was already significant, began to surge in the period after the war, and debates over whether to peacefully depart from The Subcontinent became more frequent.
With that said, the most notable trend in post-SGW Britain was the shift in opinions towards the Germans. With France on its knees and Russia in chaos, the Germans had completely taken over Continental Europe. Thus, the British became increasingly concerned over the German hegemony over the mainland, with Anglo-German relations souring over the 1920s. If there’s one thing Britain doesn’t like, it’s one power dominating the continent, and thus, the unthinkable came…
A rapprochement with France.
France and Britain had been age-old rivals, fighting numerous wars over centuries. Frenchmen and Brits may as well have been natural enemies by this point (insert Groundskeeper Willie reference here), and it was going to take exceptional circumstances for the frogs and limeys to reconcile. Well, those exceptional circumstances may have come to fruition, just a decade and a half after the Brits waltzed into Paris, France and Britain were rapidly reconciling, as Britain too came to see the Germans as their main threat. The French and British negotiated a new pact of nonaggression, with the monarchs of each nation shaking hands and burying the metaphorical hatchet, thus putting a stop to the Anglo-French rivalry that had been a thing since the 14th Century at least. Heading into the Mid 20th Century, the geopolitics of Europe (and indeed the world at large) was rapidly shifting, and we’ll continue to cover this story in the future.
The maps will be coming in the near future, but I didn't want to wait too long to write some new material.
Okay, my next update is gonna be on the migrations and settlement patterns of the various ethnic groups that made up the Commonwealth of America up to this point. I've already got some of it done, but I'd like to hear your suggestions before I put it out.
Part 102: Demographics and Migration in the Commonwealth of America
Part 102: Demographics and Migration in the Commonwealth of America
This update is going to be a bit of a special one, as I get to talk about a particular interest of mine: Demographics! More specifically, this is going to be about the various ethnic and cultural groups that formed the Commonwealth of America up to this point in the timeline, and where they ended up. I’ll also talked about some of the different cities and provinces in the country later on, but that’ll be after the settlement part. The East Coast of OTL’s U.S. from Virginia on north is much the same. New England is still settled by Calvinists, Pennsylvania by Quakers, Virginia by Cavaliers and Appalachia by the Scotch-Irish. However, further north is where things begin to change.In New Scotland, it should be pretty obvious who settled there. Being a colony of Scotland before the Act of Union in 1707, New Scotland was overwhelmingly settled by Scots (shocking, I know). This gave the colony a very Scottish character, with the accent being noticeably more Gaelic than the rest of the country. Up in Laurentia, the colony was more of a mixed bag. Being quite cold, the colony basically took whoever was willing to come. As I mentioned way early on in Part 4 of this timeline (posted in September of 2018, man does time fly), Laurentia was settled by a mixture of different groups, from Englishmen to Scotch-Irish to Germans and even some Scandinavians.
That covers the early, foundational migrations of the colonial era, but now it’s time to talk about what transpired after the independence of the Commonwealth in 1776 (blatant parallelism to OTL). In the century following independence, the five major regional groups of the U.S. (Chesapeake, Appalachian, Mid-Atlantic, New English, New Scottish and Laurentian expanded westward. The Chesapeake planter class was rather limited, only being able to expand to some areas along major rivers south of the Ohio before slavery’s death knell rang (this is also largely where TTL’s African-Americans were concentrated before the equivalent to the Great Migration happens). Appalachian settlers cut across the mountains into the land the slaveholders didn’t take, as well as much of the land along the Ohio and in the Lower Midwest (as well as into the land acquired from La Floride after the First Global War). Mid-Atlantic migrants went straight west into the fertile central part of the country. New Englanders settled in the Great Lakes and Upper Midwest. Laurentians and New Scotsmen settled in much the same regions as the New Englanders, with the three groups coalescing to form the basis for the culture of the Great Lakes region.
The Central part of the country (what we’d call the Midwest IOTL) was also heavily settled by German immigrants, many of whom came to farm the fertile fields of the region, while others settled in growing urban centers like Chicago, Millocky, Cleaveland, Losantiville and New Hanover. Some of the central provinces of the Commonwealth ended up with populations that were over 25% ethnically German, and the German language would maintain a large presence in said provinces for decades. Back out east, Irish immigration surged, as half a million Irishmen fleeing the famine ended up in the Commonwealth. The wave of Irish immigration wouldn’t stop there, as Ireland would be one of the largest suppliers of settlers to the Commonwealth for the remainder of the 19th Century. While the Irish settled pretty much everywhere in the Commonwealth, the largest number stayed in the East Coast cities in which they landed (in large part because they had no means of moving further inland), giving cities like Boston and Saint John a very Irish flavor.
Anyway, a bit more on the largest cities and stuff (which I already talked about a bit in Part 87). Obviously, the largest city was New York, as it is IOTL. The population in the greater New York area had recently crossed the 10 Million threshold, becoming possibly the first city in the world to reach that momentous milestone. However, I’ll dedicate a whole paragraph or two to the province of Laurentia.
To start, Mount Royal was the second largest metro area in the nation with nearly seven million people (I greatly overshot it when I said it had nearly 10 Million). Pretty much the entire Island of Mount Royal had filled up by this point (the island itself had a population of 4.5 Million, or over 23,000 people per square mile), so the city was rapidly spreading both across the Saint Lawrence onto Caroline Island (named for Charles I of England in the 1630s) and across the river, greatly growing the preexisting city of New Lambeth (named for Lambeth, one of the areas of South London that is immediately across the Thames from the center of the city).
Downstream in Kirkeston, the population had grown to 3.5 Million. A massive new bridge had been constructed across the river (think something as huge and iconic as the Golden Gate or Brooklyn bridges), allowing the city to spill over, greatly expanding the city of Southwark (once again named for an area in South London). Three Rivers had long surpassed the one million mark, while other cities were home to hundreds of thousands of residents, including Falton, Hull, Williamstown and Sherbrooke. With such a concentration of large cities in a relatively small area, the population density in the Saint Lawrence river valley and lowland Laurentia was now similar to that of Western Europe, and there was only so much room to expand, so Laurentians, along with other Easterners, began to pack up and move west…
The West Coast provinces of New Albion, Oregon and Columbia began to boom during the Early-Mid 20th Century. With cheap land, a mild, pleasant climate and abundant resources, the West Coast became a very appealing destination for Easterners. The San Francisco Bay Area became the largest urban area on the West Coast of North America, with the cities of San Francisco, Newhampton and Oakland swelling with emigres from out east. Other cities in New Albion like Tuleburg, Sacramento and Reading also saw their populations grow. Further north in Oregon and Columbia, the cities of Chiffing, Chimikitty, Oregon City, Vancouver, Port Gardner, Bellingham and New Westminster were also growing, also in large part because of migration from the East Coast. The same held true in the interior west, where cities like Spokane, Eagle Rock, Salt Lake and Blackrock were also attracting easterners (you can tell that I really like listing locations).
Broadly speaking, the Commonwealth of America was seeing both internal and external migration drastically reshaping much of the country during the Late 19th and Early 20th Century, which would go on to form the characteristics of each region of the country. Wherever the rest of the 20th Century takes the Commonwealth, I’ll be looking forward to writing about it. Take care folks, I’ll get those maps out in the near future, and have a great day!
Part 100 Maps
Alright, here are those maps I've been promising.
Europe
Asia
Africa
Middle East
Australasia
North America
South America
Europe
Asia
Africa
Middle East
Australasia
North America
South America
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So, which wars do you think could happen in the near future of this TL, and thus serve as material for updates?
