Ideas for scenario where Norway defeated Scotland during their invasion in 1263...

I remember reading a bit about an obscure bit of the history of the British Isles, in particular an attempted invasion of Scotland by Norway. I'm wondering what could have happened toward the modern era had Scotland been conquered.

One scenario I postulate is that, assuming a development otherwise similar to OTL, that the British Empire rises as only the English Empire, but are opposed by a Scotland whose clans were united, if by force, and who speak Norwegian or a form of it, circa 1700s. By the time of the 1900s, I have the idea in that timeline that Scotland has become a prosperous nation with strong ties to Scandinavia, but that since the loss of Wales and Ireland, England has become a resentful nation and has fallen to a Marxist regime, becoming its world's equivalent to North Korea. Dunno how accurate such a thing would be but I like this kind of role-changing in alternate-history.

Can anyone make up some flags of the alternate Scotland and alternate England in such a scenario? I just thought this'd be nice for a bit of a game.
 
Welcome to the board! :) What follows is rather critical of your scenario, but please don't take it badly: it's an imaginative idea about an area of history that's normally obscure (I only know about it because my family come from the Orkney islands), which is just the sort of thing we need more of. I don't mean to discourage you from contributing more, I@m just informing.

It wasn't a project to invade Scotland and seize control, but to intimidate us and so force us to acknowledge Norwegian rights in the western isles, which we'd been moaning about for some time: many of these islands were visible from Scotland, and it was no longer the viking age when the Norse held a monopoly on competent ocean-going. The isles of the Clyde and Hebrides were now simply much nearer Scotland, in real terms, than Norway.

Despite later Scottish mythmaking, the campaign didn't involve any decisive battle. There was an inconclusive scrap at Largs, but our strategy was to keep spraffing at them until they had to go to a winter anchorage, and it worked. Haakon died on Orkney that winter and his successor had no time for Scottish adventures, so the isles were signed over.

You also have to be wary of developments being "similar to OTL", because any big change rapidly starts to fan out. If you've drastically changed the history of Norway and Scotland, that means all of Scandinavia and Great Britain are going to start feeling the effects, and so on.

In this world, there wouldn't be Marxism: there'd almost certainly be an eventual industrial revolution, and its consequences would probably lead to some scientific-philosophical-political doctrine critical of its civilisation, but Marx himself and his particular ideas would never exist.

And Scotland being especially prosperous by comparison to England is hard: this is harsh country. Bits of it are agriculturally unusable: not just the rocky mountains, but also, until quite recently, the waterlogged river valleys. We lived and farmed on mid-level slopes and in glacial valleys (tellingly the Gaelic language has different words for glacial and riverine valleys: gleann and srath), and our soils were so acidic that we had to put ground-up limestone in them. We don't command a vital trading position either, at least until the discovery of America: we could only match a variety of commodities like cattle, coal, salt, woolens and so on to all the things we needed to import.

None of this is to say you couldn't get a more Norse-influenced Scotland, mind. You'd probably want a point of divergence much earlier on, before Scotland joined the feudal world.
 
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Why doesn't Marxism exist?

Because Marx doesn't exist. The German Idealist philosophers who inspired him don't exist. Germany as we know it doesn't exist.

As I said, it's quite likely that something broadly similar exists, although that could be a very broad kind of broad. But Marx was a product of his time and place, like everybody else.
 
I think IBC's comments are quite extensive enough that I don't need to add to them ;)

If you want a Scotland with more Norwegian connections then perhaps you could look at Eric II of Norway and his wife Margaret of Scotland, dr of Alexander III.
Since she died OTL in childbirth let's alter that so she successfully has several children including 2 boys.
The first Magnus becomes King of Norway, the second Haakon becomes King of Scotland (probably as Alexander IV). Then engineer a situation where Alex IV's son or grandson claims Norway...
 
Oh! I remember that invasion. According to the Brittania Campaign of kingdoms, Norway could have conquered the whole island.

Whoops, that was just me playing it. That was a fun one. ;)
 
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