How likely is British hegemony with a prehistoric PoD (5000 BCE)?

How likely is British hegemony with a prehistoric PoD?

  • < 1%

    Votes: 49 45.8%
  • 1 to < 5%

    Votes: 18 16.8%
  • 5 to < 10%

    Votes: 7 6.5%
  • 10 to < 20%

    Votes: 10 9.3%
  • 20 to < 40%

    Votes: 9 8.4%
  • > 40%

    Votes: 14 13.1%

  • Total voters
    107
A remote tropical place like Indonesia is never going to become world hegemon. If you want to name an Asian place, Japan is your best bet.

Indonesia was a massive hub of trade that people traveled from all across the world to reach. Japan was generally the backwater neighbor of China for most of its history until relatively recently. You're just taking recent developments and projecting them back into the past.
 
There are certainly other non-British options like Iberia, France, and so forth. But all those other options are still firmly in Western Europe. A remote tropical place like Indonesia is never going to become world hegemon. If you want to name an Asian place, Japan is your best bet.

Yeah, just because Japan was the only major non-European country that’s had colonies and modernised doesn’t mean that it is the best Asian place to develop world hegemony.

Besides, we are only living in one timeline, out of say 1000 timelines identical to ours in AD 1000 and diverging with time, given the chance how do we know that Japan would modernise? What if it was actually the exception and places like India, China or the Indies would have modernised frequently?
 
Indonesia was a massive hub of trade that people traveled from all across the world to reach. Japan was generally the backwater neighbor of China for most of its history until relatively recently. You're just taking recent developments and projecting them back into the past.

I don't know; if you look at the history of art and crafts (industrial and economic history), there's a lot of complexity and quality in Japan really quite early, and fairly high literacy and things. It seems a bit inevitable that once you have an outside impulse introducing new ideas and technologies, there's a base to exploit that and fairly quickly move to the world technological frontier. That's not the case for Indonesia as far as I know. There's a deeper reason that places that have moved towards parity with modern world leaders in technology have been able to do so.

(Talking about "backwaters" in the sense of places that are remote on trade routes, or have a low population due to the constraints of cooler (or too hot) climate agriculture, or lack native plants that can serve as tradeable spices, it sort of disguises that a place that can produce a Seshu or a Murasaki Shikibu, just as illustrative examples, is no backwater by any sensible idea of it!)

Not that I believe this was determined in 5000 BCE.
 
What I really enjoy in those threads is how people bend reality backward to explain how, from 1780ish to 1930 the UK was slightly more powerful than other countries.
If UK hegemony was that blatant, I wouldn't posting that on a China made smartphone with a software developed in the US. Especially since I'm living in bloody London
 
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What I really enjoy in those threads is how people bend reality backward to explain how, from 1780ish to 1930 the UK was slightly more powerful than other countries.
If UK hegemony was that blatant, I wouldn't posting that on a China made smartphone with a software developed in the US. Especially since I'm living in bloody London

I'm confused by this post.
 

Kaze

Banned
It might in theory... I would start with Stonehenge following the Ancient Egyptian model.

There must be some sort of priest, king, god-king, priest-king, chief engineer, or something like that - there must have been some sort of leadership who is saying "put that rock here". That leader instead of building the massive constructions, uses the the construction as an excuse to create a nation-state. Then from a state, his descendants creates an empire that covers the whole of the British Isles. From the British Isles it would not long to look outwards - the lands of France is in desperate need of "culture" (I mean imperialism).
 

Kaze

Banned
He seems to be saying that, because the UK isn't dominant now, it was never a hegemonic power. It's a strange argument to make.

Sooo what about the British Empire - did it not have a hegemony whose imperialism that covered a good part of the globe? It was compared by some historians as a sea-born Roman Empire. But like all empires no matter the case - they decline, they age, and they fall into the the ash-heap of history.
 
Sooo what about the British Empire - did it not have a hegemony whose imperialism that covered a good part of the globe? It was compared by some historians as a sea-born Roman Empire. But like all empires no matter the case - they decline, they age, and they fall into the the ash-heap of history.
I assume he's specifically taking issue with the OP's wording, "world hegemon". Which would imply British hegemony over the whole world. Personally I'd point out that Britain had genuine rivals to contend with rather than talk about the manufacture of my phone, but that's just me.
 
He seems to be saying that, because the UK isn't dominant now, it was never a hegemonic power. It's a strange argument to make.

Sooo what about the British Empire - did it not have a hegemony whose imperialism that covered a good part of the globe? It was compared by some historians as a sea-born Roman Empire. But like all empires no matter the case - they decline, they age, and they fall into the the ash-heap of history.

The Roman Republic, and later Empire, had more-or-less total regional dominance from 70 BCE - 230 CE, whereas the British only really had that sort of overwhelming dominance during the time period between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the emergence of powers like the USA, Germany, and Japan (and Russia to an extent). Of course, that's a little bit of an arbitrary distinction to make, but I do agree that the underlying assumption of the OP is a bit dubious (as in, I don't think Britain was ever a world-hegemony in any meaningful longer-term sense)
 
The Roman Republic, and later Empire, had more-or-less total regional dominance from 70 BCE - 230 CE, whereas the British only really had that sort of overwhelming dominance during the time period between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the emergence of powers like the USA, Germany, and Japan (and Russia to an extent). Of course, that's a little bit of an arbitrary distinction to make, but I do agree that the underlying assumption of the OP is a bit dubious (as in, I don't think Britain was ever a world-hegemony in any meaningful longer-term sense)
On a purely pedantic tangent, as you said Rome had a regional rather than global dominance, to compare apples and apples I think a fairer comparison would be Britain's much firmer and long lived hegemony over the Indian subcontinent.
 
He seems to be saying that, because the UK isn't dominant now, it was never a hegemonic power. It's a strange argument to make.
I assume he's specifically taking issue with the OP's wording, "world hegemon". Which would imply British hegemony over the whole world. Personally I'd point out that Britain had genuine rivals to contend with rather than talk about the manufacture of my phone, but that's just me.
My point is that, according to geography, the Laws of History and all that's Holy, the UK was Destined to Rule the Waves, if we follow the OP.
If it was so magically predestined to rule over the world, I find it strange said hegemony lasted only for about a century and a half.
On the other hand a place like India has been a driver of world's affair at least as a goal to reach, for the better part of the last 3000 years, yet we do.not see any threads as to why that's the case

I find it strange that people need to take that teleological approach when it's fairly obvious those were exceptional circumstances that helped the UK in particular, and not some law of Heaven that would mean that, when it was barely an Island and was populated by hunter gathered, it was destined to rule the world.

Edit (cause this makes me particularly mad) : that type of thinking is particularly insane if we break it down.
With a Pod at - 5000BC...
How likely is it to have Europe as a separate polity from the Middle East

With a Pod at - 5000BC...
How likely is it to have a united state over the British Isles

With a Pod at - 5000BC...
How likely is it that a separate religion will develop, creating a strong trade divide in the Near East right after a bunch of steppe raiders somehow created the biggest empire the world has ever seen, creating a desire for spices that was fulfilled by Mediterranean city states

With a Pod at - 5000BC...
How likely is it that the Indian Mughal Empire will disintegrate at the time when England happens to start gaining an industrial advantage

And finally, because this one sums up the absurdity of it all:
With a Pod at - 5000BC...
How likely is it that the British Isles would control Tibet


Now, my dear friends who have voted that the UK had more than 40% chance of becoming hegemony, please tell me who the hegemon will be in 150 years, because I want to create a solid retirement fund for my grandchildren and I'd rather get started early.

For the sour cherry on top of the rant, this has been posted from London, apparently the inevitable capital of the World.
 
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Yeah, some 2.000.000 km2 Empire, without horses, is nothing to sneeze about
The Inca were certainly impressive. But so were the Babylonians/Sumerians/Akkadians/etc.

And the Inca were just entering the Bronze Age when the Spanish arrived with steel and gunpowder.

Being more or less technologically advanced doesn't make them better or worse people. But they clearly were less technologically advanced.

EDIT: None of which has much to do with the question of whether Britain specifically was destined to rule the World, as they notably did not even rule the Inca or the Aztecs.
 
On a purely pedantic tangent, as you said Rome had a regional rather than global dominance, to compare apples and apples I think a fairer comparison would be Britain's much firmer and long lived hegemony over the Indian subcontinent.

I tip my hat to you sir and I will counter with an equally pedantic tangent. I think that regional dominance is a much less impressive feat in an era with railroads, firearms, and deep water navigation. Furthermore Rome enjoyed more-or-less total naval and land power superiority for around four centuries without serious competitors, whereas Britain was constantly set back by France, the Dutch, Spain, and later Germany and the US. Of course, it’s apples to oranges and pretty much an arbitrary distinction. I’m just taking a slight issue with the OP because if British hegemony was inevitable, it would have lasted a little longer, imo
 
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Vuu

Banned
The further back you move the PoD, the weirder the consequences

Like, go back to 50k BC and make some man go near the wrong place and get killed. Cue butterflies and by now the world is dominated inexplicably by a Khoekhoe-speaking nation based in Somalia, with their biggest opponents being Negritos that migrated into South America, and similar shenanigans
 
Like, go back to 50k BC and make some man go near the wrong place and get killed. Cue butterflies and by now the world is dominated inexplicably by a Khoekhoe-speaking nation based in Somalia, with their biggest opponents being Negritos that migrated into South America, and similar shenanigans

In a sense that's actually more predicable because evolution would mean you'd probably have a world peopled by peoples with in many ways similar characteristics, because evolution and climate trends would lead to similar trends - people in northern hemispheres would have light skin, probably tend to straight hair, relatively large body size and relatively short limbs, narrow nasal cavities with high surface area - but on the other, vastly different, if you looked at them from the perspective of disease resistance, language, that are easy to butterfly, and tons of things more weakly selected on (eye and hair colour, more selectively neutral features of the face and skull that aren't as affected by climate) that would also vary.
 
If we're going by your own geographical determinism, then more East Asians should be a lot likelier to discover America over and over again, given how much closer it is across the Bering Strait than across the Atlantic and how nicely you can island-hop.

On the other hand, have you seen what the Bering/Okhotsk seas are actually like? I'd take the Great Gyre past the Canaries any day myself.
 
On the other hand, have you seen what the Bering/Okhotsk seas are actually like? I'd take the Great Gyre past the Canaries any day myself.
If you know both, yes. But the latter was unknown because of its large distance, while about the former, there was always indigenous knowledge of more people on the next Island, and the next one, and the next one...

But your point is of course valid. I shouldn't get trapped with geographical determinism myself...
 
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