French India

Still, this greater degree dependence only took place after the stabilisation of the British rule as the sole European ruler of India. In a scenario where we have two European nations warring for India, the loyalty and submission of these Indian princes to one or another nation wouldn't be that certain in a long time frame.
If Britain could kick France (more or less) out of India, why wouldn't France be able to do the same with Britain?
 
Still, this greater degree dependence only took place after the stabilisation of the British rule as the sole European ruler of India. In a scenario where we have two European nations warring for India, the loyalty and submission of these Indian princes to one or another nation wouldn't be that certain in a long time frame.

When your pay, position (IE keeping the population from rise-up and put your head on a pike) and security (lets not forget the European powers had better and larger military tech by the mid-18th century) is dependant on one of them you're not going to rock the boat.
 
When your pay, position (IE keeping the population from rise-up and put your head on a pike) and security (lets not forget the European powers had better and larger military tech by the mid-18th century) is dependant on one of them you're not going to rock the boat.

Why the other one wouldn't try to pay better?

If Britain could kick France (more or less) out of India, why wouldn't France be able to do the same with Britain?

It surely could. What I think implausible is the idea of a British North India and a French South India coexist for a long time, even though, I agree, it sounds cool.
 
When your pay, position (IE keeping the population from rise-up and put your head on a pike) and security (lets not forget the European powers had better and larger military tech by the mid-18th century) is dependant on one of them you're not going to rock the boat.

Not exactly. Tech wise Indian armies tended to be able to field forces on par with European ones- more advanced sometimes in terms of the sophistication and weig of their artillery lines.

The advantage European armies had was the institutional know how to consistently produce drilled infantry who could advance into fire. If you look at a lot of European Indian battles you see that the pattern is that Indian infantry tended to be poorly drilled while the artillery was as good as anything in Europe. The problem was that that meant that European and European trained Indian troops could advance, weathering the losses from artillery fire, break the Indian infantry and then capture the cannon. Indian military science was adjusting to this in the late 18th C and a lot of Indianrulers had begun to raise drilled trained infantry corps. However, the loss pf the French to Britain meant that Indian rulers nolonger had the opportunity to play the two european powers against each other and soon had to bow to British hegemony. Given twenty more years of an Anglo French balance of power in India and I am of the opinion that Indian armies would have fully absorbed and institutionalised the lessons of drilled infantry and have fielded forces the equal of any in Europe.
 
Why the other one wouldn't try to pay better?

They can say they'll do so but it hardly means the Princes will just jump ship, afterall people don't just quit their jobs just because a rival firm makes vague promises of higher pay, especially when your actual life is potentially endangered by doing so.


It surely could. What I think implausible is the idea of a British North India and a French South India coexist for a long time, even though, I agree, it sounds cool.

Their really is no reason they could'nt, Britain and France had lots of colonies that bordered each other IOTL that lasted quite a bit of time, their's also the fact that it's very likely that their'd probably remain strong unaligned states in the North-West, so both fighting each other would be counterproductive.
 
Their really is no reason they could'nt, Britain and France had lots of colonies that bordered each other IOTL that lasted quite a bit of time, their's also the fact that it's very likely that their'd probably remain strong unaligned states in the North-West, so both fighting each other would be counterproductive.
You mean a sort of "Thailand" between southern French India and the Britiah Bay of Bengal. A neutral bufferstate that manages to remain independent. Could that possibly work? And if so, what would be a good candidate?
 
You mean a sort of "Thailand" between southern French India and the Britiah Bay of Bengal. A neutral bufferstate that manages to remain independent. Could that possibly work? And if so, what would be a good candidate?

I was thinking something more along the lines of a powerful state that would use any war to take territory from them and/or would severely hamper their fighting and rule of the region.

That said if you want a buffer state you could always go with an ATL version of the Maratha Confederacy.
 
If Dupleix keeps office - what are the consequences for British Empire in general? Or France? With Clive NOT winning Plassey, Dupleix who DOES, and the profits of East India Company flowing to Paris not London - could it, e. g. butterfly away French Revolution?
 
If Dupleix keeps office - what are the consequences for British Empire in general? Or France? With Clive NOT winning Plassey, Dupleix who DOES, and the profits of East India Company flowing to Paris not London - could it, e. g. butterfly away French Revolution?

The profits of the EIC flowed to private merchants, not the Government. I suppose the monarchy could try to squeeze more money out of them. On the other hand, the nabobs in England caused much social resentment and mockery, and it's more likely to just add another group of people with exuberant spending habits that piss off the ordinary people.
 
The profits of the EIC flowed to private merchants, not the Government. I suppose the monarchy could try to squeeze more money out of them. On the other hand, the nabobs in England caused much social resentment and mockery,

Does anyone have an idea of how much of these EIC profits wound up in the government budget via various direct and indirect taxes on the nabobs and the people who served and supplied them, and due to nabobs investing their money in Government debt?
 
By the 20th century the Princely States were for the most part no longer relevant and what London said went, regardless of how they felt. and even wehn they did matter they were in the end Imperial Protectorates that Britain could easily get to do what they wanted but just never bothered most of the time because they did'nt care so long as they did'nt interfere.

The Princely states system was ideal for the British. They got to control everything but barely had any rebellion or protest in such areas.
 
Does anyone have an idea of how much of these EIC profits wound up in the government budget via various direct and indirect taxes on the nabobs and the people who served and supplied them, and due to nabobs investing their money in Government debt?

Taxes were very low during this period, so the vast majority of the wealth would have stayed with the nabobs. I also can't imagine it made too much of a difference in the gilt market, as HMG never had to pay high interest rates at any time, so supply of capital was not in short supply, at least not until the Napoleonic Wars. On the other hand, the government had to bail out the EIC - to very large amounts - on a number of occasions. The whole thing was corporate exploitation of the taxpayer as bad as the US banking sector is today.

In France, however, a more authoritarian government could demand 'gifts' to the exchequer, I imagine.
 
Well, you could have two separate zones of influence in India, one for France and one for Britain. But that is not the question of this thread.

A french India after the french had ousted the british was very possible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_India

And I think that such a historical change would be quite similar to the "God is a frenchman" timeline.

If there is a clear victory of France at the end of the war of austrian succession and that for example the french retain control of Madras, then the british have lost their main indian base. You can simultaneously have Louis XV not make such a stupid mistake as to give back the austrian netherlands that Marshall of Saxe had conquered for France.

The french more or less shut the british out of the indian market. And if they are not stupid enough to fire Dupleix, the influx of indian riches is going to flow mainly to the profit of France instead of the profit of Britain.

The british are not going to be in a position to finance such a strong royal navy as they did in real history.

They are not going to trigger a new war in 1754/56 in order to conquer french colonies in India and America.
 
If Britain could kick France (more or less) out of India, why wouldn't France be able to do the same with Britain?
If the French wanted to make that stick then they'd need to improve their navy, which would probably mean either less funds for their army or higher taxes in France, which would mean... butterflies...


Why the other one wouldn't try to pay better?
During the period when the French still were [reasonably] serious rivals to the French in India they did out-bid Britain/tHEIC us for some princes' loyalty. Unsurprisingly however, Britain/tHEIC tended to regard princes breaking agreements in that way as legitimate grounds for annexing those princes' principalities when it won (as it usually did, overall), which discouraged other princes with whom they had treaties from selling their support to the French instead without a 100% certainty that it was the French who would win.


The Princely states system was ideal for the British. They got to control everything but barely had any rebellion or protest in such areas.
There was a province called Berar that nomnally belonged to Hyderabad (the large state of that name in the Deccan, not the smaller one up north near the Indus) but whose administration the HEIC had taken control of (under a treaty) on the grounds that they would use its revenues to pay for the troops whom they were now committed to supplying for Hyderabad's defense if necessary. When the British eventually suggested returning it to the Nizam of Hyderabad's own control, two or three generations later on, some of the locals rioted against that possibility.

They are not going to trigger a new war in 1754/56 in order to conquer french colonies in India and America.
Britain didn't trigger that war anyway, the bloody colonials did.... :mad:
And if that war did still happen ITTL then at least Britain would have entered it in possession of the important fort of Louisbourg (on what's now known as Cape Breton Island) near the mouth of the St Lawrence, instead of having to seize that place again before advancing by water against Quebec... because if France had held on to its gains from the previous war then obviously Britain would have done the same.
 
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If the French wanted to make that stick then they'd need to improve their navy, which would probably mean either less funds for their army or higher taxes in France, which would mean... butterflies...

This is entirely the case. The reality is that the British were successful in India not because they had better traders or armies than the Indians (although that did happen later), but because they could always add reinforcements from another part of the coast. For France to control India, they need to control the seas, which means funding a powerful navy and a powerful army, but with an economy that didn't go through an industrial revolution as soon as Britain.
 
This is entirely the case. The reality is that the British were successful in India not because they had better traders or armies than the Indians (although that did happen later), but because they could always add reinforcements from another part of the coast. For France to control India, they need to control the seas, which means funding a powerful navy and a powerful army, but with an economy that didn't go through an industrial revolution as soon as Britain.
Well part of my idea for France* was to add (most of) Wallonia and the southern part of the German Rhineland (Trier, Palatinate) to France, I assume that would help with French Industrialisation.



* basicly I am brainstorming for a timeline I will probably never write
 

Anaxagoras

Banned
If Britain could kick France (more or less) out of India, why wouldn't France be able to do the same with Britain?

It's not impossible, but it's much more difficult. Britain's great advantage over France throughout this period was its superior financial institutions. France could will beat the British on the battlefield, but Britain would always beat France in the bond market. And it is in the bond market that true power is to be found.
 
Whatever the superiority of the british bond market - on which role you are perfectly right - this bond market is going to krach if the british army and navy face important defeats.

In the war of austrian succession, if my memory is right, the french were very close to landing successfully an army in England.

If so, there would have been no escape. The defeat would have been most certainly decisive and unrepairable.

The royal navy would have been quickly asphyxiated since it would have lost its home harbours. The bonds woud then have been worth nothing since their value was based on the ability of the british military and commercial navies to ensure Britain the number one share in world trade.

The virtuous circle navy domination-trade domination-financial superiority-financing research and innovation would be broken.

And since Britain's per capita GDP would be smaller - more equal to other west european countries - there would be much more civil strife.
 
Well part of my idea for France* was to add (most of) Wallonia and the southern part of the German Rhineland (Trier, Palatinate) to France, I assume that would help with French Industrialisation.

* basicly I am brainstorming for a timeline I will probably never write

It would help sure, but an accommodating political regime is the real thing stopping industrialisation. Nobody wants to invest if the King will just take away all your money.
 
It would help sure, but an accommodating political regime is the real thing stopping industrialisation. Nobody wants to invest if the King will just take away all your money.
This depends on what you mean by accommodating. Monarchies, even strong monarchies, didn't prevent industrialization in 19th century Europe. If you are going to list the factors behind industrialization, government type isn't one I'd put high among them.
 
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