German America

then the arw has prussia on the British side, if you're still running with that idea, which would surely affect the way things finish. also, would Germans used to autocratic rule side with the rebels if they were from a German colony? maybe if they were labourers in a British colony but would a colony of Germans run from Berlin really care about taxation without representation? of course, good luck getting parliament to hand over land to prussia anyway. they weren't exactly happy to cooperate with Hanover OTL, except when napoleon was the common enemy...


I wasn't contemplating the cession of British colonies to Prussia - merely that a far higher percentage of their inhabitants would be of German origin.

Of course there might be a German settlement in OTL Georgia, since the PoD would be well before its foundation in the 1730s.
 
then the arw has prussia on the British side, if you're still running with that idea, which would surely affect the way things finish. also, would Germans used to autocratic rule side with the rebels if they were from a German colony? maybe if they were labourers in a British colony but would a colony of Germans run from Berlin really care about taxation without representation? of course, good luck getting parliament to hand over land to prussia anyway. they weren't exactly happy to cooperate with Hanover OTL, except when napoleon was the common enemy...

No, I don't think he meant Prussian colonies, he meant British colonies with lots of German laborers and indentured servants. The biggest demand for these people would likely be in the American South. IOTL, much of the Deep South was majority African-American until the 1920's, so if you mostly replace African slaves with German serfs, you'll get a majority German south. I don't know if this is feasible, and it would greatly affect the political development of the South (Germans will be seen in a MUCH more sympathetic light then Africans, so it will be much more difficult for them to be repressed to the same degree).

IMHO, someone needs to do a TL on this-I don't know if it would result in parts of America becoming German, but a British-Prussian personal union would have a lot of effects nonethless...
 
There was a timeline on one of the other AH sites where Prussia is completely destoyed in 7YW and there is a mass exodus of Prussians to America, with America eventually becoming German speaking despite its loyalty to the British King. Can't find a link, though.
 
One possibility is if the Hohenzollerns, rather than Hanoverians, inherit Britain. The two families were closely interrelated, and it would have needed only two, or at most three, deaths at the right moments for Frederick William I of Prussia to become also King of Britain.

Maybe he does, and then argues "Why mess about with importing all these Africans? If you want forced labour, ve haff lots of perfectly good serfs in Silesia and Pomerania". He wins his point, and many thousands of them are transported across the Atlantic, to the point where several BNritish colonies become majority-German.

Incidentally, something very like this happened OTL in Scotland, where a large number of Highlanders were, in effect, sold into slavery by their Clan chiefs.

Wait, didn't Prussia only snatch Silesia from Austria in Frederick the Great's rule?
 
Well slavery mostly prospered once people figured out that indentured servants were no good, had a limited time of use, and were bound to rebel.
 
Well slavery mostly prospered once people figured out that indentured servants were no good, had a limited time of use, and were bound to rebel.

And the slave trade was lucrative too; transporting indentured servants did not make appreciable income.
 
The Prussian-British personal union is a very interesting idea!

In such a union, I think the Hohenzollern will have a by far larger interest in their continental belongings. Prussia might get important enough to counter Britain and hence the parliament - what we could get is a British monarch with substantial means to follow his own policies thanks to his absolutistic rule in Prussia. It's not that far-fetched to assume that this monarch tries to gain non-British/non-parliamental influence in the Americas as well.

A very nice idea I once read in a TL: some sort of feudalism in the Americas attracting German settlers. The Prussian king could give out small fiefs to some East-elbian Junkers under the restriction of settling these fiefs. The landlords attract mainly German settlers and thus establish a semi-feudal agrarian society in the Americas which is predominantly German-speaking.
 
A very nice idea I once read in a TL: some sort of feudalism in the Americas attracting German settlers. The Prussian king could give out small fiefs to some East-elbian Junkers under the restriction of settling these fiefs. The landlords attract mainly German settlers and thus establish a semi-feudal agrarian society in the Americas which is predominantly German-speaking.


I'm a bit hazy as to the details, but have a feeling that parts of the Hudson Valley were a bit like that - only with Dutch landowners rather than German.
 
Just curious-can anyone find year-by-year statistics for German immigration to the US? Google has proved surprisingly unproductive for me.

In another thread on this topic I started a few months back, it was suggested that if there had been no Napoleonic Wars, there would have been a lot more German immigration to the US in the 1810's and 1820's, and they could have filled up the upper Midwest before it became dominated by Anglophones.
 
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