In The Name of the King: Mk 2

#79: Reconstruction

In North America, Britain had its work cut out. The rebellious shires, along with the Native Protectorates were all returned to colonial status, governed from London, with appointed governors to rule over them. The main difference between the current situation and other colonies was that this was regarded as first of all a temporary situation, and second of all a military operation. The new governors were generals, the law imposed was martial, and a radical agenda of changing the old slave-owning counties into functional parts of the Kingdom was enacted. There was a somewhat similar thing going on in Great Britain proper, where the more rebellious cities of the Great Crises remained under martial law, governed and regulated by the Myrmidon Corps. But there was no precedent of doing in Insular Britain what was about to occur in Continental Britain.

The first act was to alter the boundaries of the rebellious counties into larger military districts reducing the number from nearly twenty to six. All of the Caribbean shires were turned into one district, including British Honduras and the Miskito Coast. The Carolinas and Georgia became one district. The Floridas became another. The former Native Protectorates were merged into district. The counties beyond the Appalachian Mountains became one district, and the counties of Virginia and Maryland became one. Each district was to be governed by an officer not below the rank of lieutenant colonel. The duties of these governors were to protect all persons in their rights of person and property, to suppress insurrection, disorder, and violence, and to punish, or cause to be punished, all disturbers of the public peace and criminals. They also supervised elections and appointment of officials, the registration of voters, and the sheriffs and other officers of the law and state were placed under the command of these governors. The governor had the power to remove persons from civil office in their district and it was their responsibility to oversee and enforce oaths of allegiance to King and Country.

The black population was immediately emancipated and enfranchised, while those who had served the rebellious state in a civilian capacity or as an officer were disenfranchised until they proved their loyalty. While compensation was granted to slaveowners, many large plantation owners became desitute overnight from the costs of paying a large staff, as well as losing many as they moved away to make their own lives. These bankrupt plantations were bought up by the state and sold off in parcels to the former slaves as tenant farmers. Many freedmen were offered a deal to settle in the west (avoiding the areas agreed for the Lakota in the treaties which ensured their participation in the wars with the rebels and the New Spanish), receiving licences to claim a fixed area of land. Laws which discriminated on the basis of race were banned and punished severely. Those which tried to fix the system were quickly cut off.

Schools were built across the South, often by charities based in the North or Great Britain proper. Infrastructure investment came, and factories were built, railway lain. An alliance was swiftly forged of the military governors, newly enfranchised blacks, the white poor who had benefited little from slavery, and newcomers from outside the South. In the former Native Protectorates, a similar alliance was forged, with the chiefs responsible for rebellion kicked out and parliamentary structures of governance imposed.

Violence was frequent and brutal. Natives and whites alike balked at the enfranchisement and participation of blacks. The Red Banners, a group of radical white supremacists emerged and were brutally suppressed by the military government. Such groups became increasingly isolated as the years went on, and poor whites participated in the new structures, former rebels made oaths of allegiance to return to even the lowest of offices. Before long, the Red Banners was an organisation of common bandits and extreme reactionary former plantation owners.

The institutions of public education and the participation of an increasingly literate black population in politics saw the idea of state education become increasingly popular and mainstream. Reforms to tax policy in the South, long institutionally corrupt, saw revenues dramatically increase, particularly with the industrialisation of the region.

Some of the smaller plantation owners, who had been able to survive the emancipation of their smaller numbers of slaves, were able to build a system known as sharecropping which perpetuated systems of partially unfree labour. These were most common in the areas where slavery had been relatively newer, the Carolinas and Floridas. Elsewhere, the plantation owners had been larger and more institutionalised and so had suffered more from fines and emancipation, resulting in the collapse of their livelihoods. These counties would become the strongholds of Reaction when restored to the Kingdom proper.
 
I'm retconning a little but not too much just expanding on some points I've learnt.

In India, chaos reigned. As the European empire descended into the chaos of the Great Crises, so ripple effects spread into this wealthiest of subcontinents. Ancient kingdoms were destabilised, roving bands of rebel sepoys crossed borders on a whim, and the order and prosperity promised by Europe was not forthcoming as troops were used to keep order in their homelands and certain colonial centres. This was a time of trials, in which there were losers, and winners.

Two states in particular emerged as winners. One was Hyderabad, the other was the Sikh Empire. Hyderabad had acted as Britain's second-in-command in India for a long time. With the Mutiny and Britain suffering an empire-wide crisis, Hyderabad's crucial role in maintaining law and order became far more central. The Nizam saw an opportunity. As his well-armed, well-trained troops crushed sepoys, he gained the loyalty of princes under British rule. The sepoys mostly followed their own rules, and were more Jacobin than nationalist in many ways. The princes didn't want to be guillotined, and so pledged allegiance to Hyderabad. As Britain concentrated on crushing the rebellious shires in North America, on defeating the Chartists and bringing Australia to heel, as well as myriad other problems, India became a sideshow. As the sepoys built their own state in Bengal, curiously backed by North German arms coming from the small factory there, so any semblance of British rule withdrew to Mysore. Towards the end of the Great Crises era, Hyderabad used its military clout to force the princes under its influence to officially declare their submission to the Nizam. The New Mughal Empire of the Deccan was declared, the Nizam pointing out the Mughal legacy of his state, and how the old Mughal Empire had died.

That brings us round to the Sikhs. From their centre in the Punjab, the extremely professional Sikh Army or Khalsa had conquered a great stretch of land. In previous wars, they had brought the struggling remnants of the Mughal Empire under their protection. As the sepoy regiments marched on Delhi proclaiming their intention to remake an Indian Empire under the Mughals (albeit entirely different to the old Mughal Empire), the Sikhs panicked. While Hyderabad blocked Sepoy expansion southwards, the sepoy armies had secured Bengal, and were marching north along the Ganges. The Sikhs officially annexed the Mughal remnant, opening the door for the Hyderabadi to proclaim a new Mughal empire in the Deccan. An epic battle was fought in Delhi that prevented further expansion of the Sepoy Republic, and turned Gurjaratra into a de facto neutral state.

The result from the Great Crises was the permanent marginalisation of the European colonial empires. No longer could any one power aspire to dominance of all India. Portugal's experiment in expansion had been halted within her current boundaries, almost sixty years of neglect had seen Britain's once might Indian empire reduced to a southern pocket, and all other European outposts were city-states or factories. The foundation of the two powerful Indian empires, were a reaction to the emergent ideology of the Sepoys, and after they had failed to inspire continent wide Revolution or seize the Mughal Dynasty to proclaim a reborn Empire, they took their existent conquests in Bengal and the Ganges and built a Republic there. The neutralisation of Gurjarartra saw it stabilise into a vaguely Noble Republic form, a necessity since internal schisms could see it neighbours seek to take advantage which could lead to continent wide war.

The Great Crises in India spurred on the collapse of Afghanistan, further expanding the Sikh Empire and allowing Persia to strengthen her grip over Sindh. The Sikhs helped their Dogra vassals invade and conquer Tibet, carving a vassal out of weakened China, and extending a sphere of influence into isolated Nepal. The aim of the Sikhs now was to form a Himalayan Shield against the Sepoy Menace. The Sepoy example would also influence others around the world, particularly North Germany, who had the most contact with them.
 
#80: I'm A-Wanderin'

In the aftermath of the Great Crises, hundreds of thousands of people were displaced from their homes and had to find a new one. For many, this meant settling down in one of the growing industrial cities of their homeland. For many more, it meant leaving their country entirely. Over the course of the 1840s and 50s, thousands of migrants would flee Europe in particular but also areas of Asia and the Americas looking for a new home.

Most Europeans moved to the Americas, mostly the settled regions which suffered little from the Great Crises. The Continental North of West Britain became home to Poles, Germans, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Italians and any number of other people, looking for freedom. They didn't necessarily find it, there remaining some property qualifications to the vote and suffrage remained restricted to men. They soon found work in the growing cities, or building the railways that held this increasingly dominant part of the Kingdom together. The children of this wave of immigrants would come to change West Britain and all of Great Britain. Other immigrants fled to New Spain, particularly Mexico City which had escaped mostly unscathed from the war. But the country which enjoyed the most migration was Argentina. While the republic was a fairly brutal Jacobin dictatorship, all that many prospective immigrants heard was that the principles of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment lived on in Spectacular Isolation from the Reactionary Warlords of Europe. These immigrants fed into an industrial meatgrinder that was needed to hold down the newly conquered territories, with adult male immigrants only having citizenship granted to them and their families after serving in the army occupying parts of Peru.

The migrants who moved due to the conflagrations elsewhere moved to rather more proximate regions. In the Americas, most Iberic migrants moved to the stabler New Spain or to Brazil. For the New Spanish, immigrants rushed to the newly uncovered gold fields of California where they scrabbled for fortune and glory in the dust and filth. For the Brazilians, life was more parochial, and these immigrants became fodder for growing industries which grew out of Brazil's rule of the Congo Basin. In Asia, migrants mostly moved into neighbouring states, but the Japanese migrants settled in the British Pacific, notably New Caledonia, New Zealand and the Sandwich Islands. Migrants from India settled in the Osmanid and Persian colonial domains where life was easier, more lucrative and less oppressive.

Colonists of all sorts of stripes came to Australia, adding to an already cosmopolitan blend in both Nouvelle-Belgie and New South Wales.
 
#81: Idea-nalogy

In the aftermath of the Great Crises, the orthodox understanding of political cleavage emerged. Three principle cleavages produced eight key idea-forms. These cleavages are described as Economic, Cultural, and Governmental.

Economic

The right-left descriptor of politics emerged during the French Revolution, when those Deputies who sided with the King sat on his right, and those who opposed him sat on his left. At the time, the argument was far wider than economic, but ultimately the reason the King had called the Estates-General was because of economic reasons. It is also something of a falsehood. The King's desires for tax reform actually aligned far more with leftist notions of redistribution, but the opposition to him at the time came from hierarchical notions as he struggled over whether or not to acknowledge the National Assembly. Really, the division here was more a Cultural one.

In the broadest terms, the main division of the right and the left is over economic policy and specifically who benefits and how. The left broadly want economic equality for the widest possible population, and to have that delivered by redistributive mechanisms. Some say the left inherently want state operated utilities or corporations etc, but this is only true of certain sectors of the left. And there are those on the right who support state intervention in the economy, though for different reasons. By contrast, the right value economic freedom, delivered by minimal interference in the economy by the state. However, some rightists are opposed to mega-corporations and support state intervention to break up monopolies and invigorate competition. The nature of 'freedom' or 'equality' is often tempered by the over divisions.

Cultural

The division between the so-called Enlightenment and their opposition Romantics dates back to the 18th century. Referred to as Upper and Lower on the political spectrum, the best way to imagine the differing attitudes is where each side believes they are going, and what the best model for change is. For Uppers, the belief is that society is under threat of corruption by outside or internal elements and needs to purify itself by looking back to the past. For Lowers, society was corrupt already and needs to be purified by looking to the future. There are a whole range of other factors, but those can shift depending on the culture of a country, whereas these tend to be somewhat universal. Uppers tend to value individualism more, whereas Lowers value community or more properly, the state. Uppers and Lowers can also be divided into Left and Right groups. Left Uppers tend to see society as organic and that while social inequality is a fact, the more privileged sections of society must do their utmost to alleviate the situation of the poorest. Right Uppers value economic and individual liberty, but recognise inequality as a fact, and in fact encourage it as natural. Right Lowers see inequality as lamentable, but while not seeing it as natural or necessary, see it as not inherently bad and believe in liberty as the motivator for pulling oneself out of inequality. Left Lowers believe in strong government intervention to redistribute resources and to reshape society to deliver true equality. There are of course nuances, and depending on the state, what we define as a Left Upper may be defined as something entirely different.

Governmental

The nature of government is a perennial issue. And all of the aforementioned idea-forms can be divided on how they view the ideal government. It roughly comes down to democracy, yay or nay? Amongst Romantics, the issue is a big one. So-called High Romantics are essentially absolute monarchists trying to justify themselves and see all constitutional innovation since the 18th century as misguided. Low Romantics are more like groups like the Physiocrats, who wanted to return to a bucolic past but believed in individual liberty. Similarly, Enlightened thinkers are divided on how to build a good state. Some want a strong democracy, a republic of the people. Others simply wanted a strong authority from which all power flowed, and responsible government. Of course, there are always nuances and Enlightened governments have been as varied as Jacobin France to Hapsburg Austria to Black Adder Britain.

These three cleavages under orthodox understandings of politics are believed to cover all manner of political beliefs from Revolutionary to Reactionary, all concepts of the relationship between citizen and state, and the nature of all states. Obviously, this is hardly the case, and many states usually combine elements of many of these ideas. Few democracies are direct democracies and lack any authoritarian leanings after all.

itnokpoliticalspectrum.png
 
Last edited:
#82: The French Connection

An often forgotten part of the Great Crises was the war in the Helvetian Republic. A remnant of the Revolutionary Wars, Helvetia was the last remaining Jacobin republic in mainland Europe. By Jacobin, we refer to its symbology rather than its behaviour. Helvetia bore very little resemblance to Argentina. The outbreak of war across Europe saw Helvetia torn apart by various nationalists, by those who wanted to decentralise Helvetia and by Neo-Jacobins who didn't believe the Revolution was yet complete. The rise of the Ultras, constrained by pragmatists in France saw French patriotism rise and the annexation by France of the mostly Francophone portions of the Republic. This invasion saw the German and Italian portions rethink their options. The nationalism there died down, and the confederalists became more popular. A confederal republic was established, and the state was renamed the Swiss Confederacy, and most Jacobin imagery was abolished.

However, this did not last long, and the Ultras wanted at least one big propaganda coup from the war. The French army rolled over the exposed Swiss, and overthrew the weak confederal government, ending any hope of a return to the pre-Revolutionary era. One of the King's younger sons was put on the throne as ruler of a new Kingdom of Switzerland. This imposition declared to Europe that France was once more a power to be reckoned with, the overthrow of a Jacobin Republic by a Bourbon Kingdom deeply symbolic for a continent which until this point continued to look at France askance.
 
Last edited:
#83: Bella Italia

Until the Great Crises, the Hapsburg Kingdom of Italy was considered little more than an Austrian puppet. The beginning of the long decade of troubles across the world put paid to that story, as the old divisions between the city-states, principalities and republics dissolved in the face of struggle between the Carbonari, Cesaristas and the Hapsburg monarchy. Sicilian invasion didn't help. Few expected the rotten edifice of a Hapsburg puppet kingdom to last long. It would collapse, back into the mess of tiny states, Austria would expand, so would Sicily and maybe France.

This did not happen. The King was able to stave off Jacobin and Reactionary insurrection, until the Austrians had time to devote their larger army. Luis was able to make a deal with the Cesaristas, building a constitutional monarchy somewhat modelled after France. While Luis affirmed his bond of loyalty to the Emperor in Vienna, his Kingdom had survived. He had had to sacrifice territory to France, but he had taken land from Sicily, in a reversal of fortune no-one expected. All of a sudden, the King in Milan looked far more like a true King of All Italy than the King in Naples.

In the years following the Great Crises, Luis continued to assert his realm's independence from Vienna. He actively competed with the Austrians for a larger navy in the Adriatic. He visited Athens and the court Emmanuel II, the New Latin Emperor, a man who was persona non grata in Vienna. He moved the Kingdom's capitol from long Hapsburg Milan to the deeply symbolic Italian centre of Rome. His reconstruction of the city saw his stock in the south of Italy rise, where the Kingdom had been seen as a Northern Italian project. This move southwards was a direct challenge to Sicily.

For now, Italy remained rather weak in comparison with its neighbours, its alliance with Austria vital for its survival in another major war. But Luis, and his chief minister, Abraham Cesar were quietly sounding out figures in the New Latin Empire, in France, and in the Osmanid Caliphate. They had plans to expand Italian power in the world and claim a seat equal to that of Austria. In 1859, the Italians and the French joined in a venture to dig a Canal at Suez, to connect the Mediterranean and Red Seas. This action, entirely independent of Vienna, would put Italy on the map, as her merchants gained top billing in the fastest route to the Far East, bringing a whole new player into the game in the Indian Ocean.
 
Interlude: Interminable Terminology

Before the Great Crises, there was a great deal of confusing and contradictory jargon referring to the Kingdom of Great Britain and her relationship with her former colonies, now direct parts of the kingdom proper. Britain-in-America had been the most commonly used terms in official documentation but many people continued to refer to it as British America, British North America, or simply The Colonies. The phrasing established by the National Unity Government had been used by some figures prior to the Great Crises but only came to dominate the discourse after Grotius had established the Parliamentary Autocracy.

The Island of Great Britain proper became known as Insular Britain or sometimes, The Isles. Similarly, the Kingdom in the Americas became known as Continental Britain, or sometimes the Continent. When referring to geographic parts of the respective areas, they usually used the latter term ie the Northern Isles for Northern Britain, or the Southern Continent for southerly parts of the Kingdom in the Americas.

However, in the American parts of the Kingdom, a new term was popularised. Denizens of Continental Britain were increasingly aware of their growing population and impact they had on the affairs of the Empire. They had gone from a backwater to one of the hubs of the Empire. Back when Scotland and England were united into the Kingdom of Great Britain, some had started referring to Scotland as North Britain and England as South Britain. Now, many Americans began referring to themselves as West Britons and this notion became increasingly popular. A popular newspaper, albeit something of a mouthpiece for the Grotian Regime, was The West Briton, a pun on John Wilkes' satirical North Briton though he likely wouldn't have made much of the articles of his paper's self-proclaimed heir. Few referred to Insular Britons as East Britons.

The gulf of the Atlantic had seemed to shrink as technology had facilitated speedier travel between Isles and Continent, but after the Great Crises in which both parts of the Kingdom suffered alike and both came to the other's aid, the cultural divide had been fairly thoroughly closed. Whilst West Britons remained distinct from their Insular cousins, their increasing strength within the realm gave them confidence in the system.

Island of Great Britain: Insular Britain, The Isles
British territories in the Americas: Continental Britain, The Continent
Inhabitants of the Island of Great Britain: Insular Britons
Inhabitants of British territories in the Americas: Continental Britons, West Britons
 
#84: Into Darkness

The Great Crises saw the waning of many powers, and the rise of others. These newly arisen powers desired to make their mark in the world, and so from the 1850s onwards, the long neglected continent of Africa would become the focus of determined imperial expansion.

Different empires had different reasons for expansionism. The biggest distinction is that between the old and new empires. For the older empires of Britain, France, Portugal and Spain, expansion was about either continuing and deepening trade links with native kingdoms, about enriching their colonies elsewhere, or to get over a decline in prestige. The older empires varied in their success and so varied in their aims and goals. For the newer empires, their reasons were more uniform and less pragmatic. They simply wanted to expand themselves, to see their increased prestige translate into increased territory and wealth.

There is a third category. The Eastern empires of the Osmanid Caliphate and the Persian Empire. They too became colonial powers in Africa, albeit building upon bases that had been constructed centuries before. Zanzibar had been directly annexed to Persia, and would become a serious and large power in Africa. Similarly, the Osmanids had begun colonising Africa through penal colonies under the Buonapartes.

There was a certain amount of re-ordering of colonies after the war. Spain purchased France's colonies south of Morocco. Italy purchased Teutonia's station in Madagascar, as part of their 'East Indian Strategy' as well as the once Swedish colony on Borneo. Britain and France traded some stations in West Africa, which amounted to Britain gaining unchallenged access to the Gold Coast, while France concentrated herself along the Gambia River.

Teutonia, Austrasia and Italy all built stations at points on the African coastline, the Teutons pursuing a strategy focussed around their existing colonies in South Africa and the East Indies, while Austrasia and Italy attempted to build empires of their own.
 
Methinks a map will be useful at this time, old chap. ;)

Also, are you going to continue with your Peshawar Lancers-ish TL, or has that been put on indefinite hold?
 
Methinks a map will be useful at this time, old chap. ;)

Also, are you going to continue with your Peshawar Lancers-ish TL, or has that been put on indefinite hold?

There has been little change on the map, just some one pixel manoeuvrings. As for the Peshawar Lancers-ish TL that is probably on indefinite hold. I have changed my mind as to how things will go in this TL between when I wrote that, and now.

The thing about this TL is that I am really excited about writing about certain developments in the 20th century which I've had in my head for a while, but I have to write a lot of unrelated stuff to get there. I don't know whether to write an excerpt set in the 1950s just to show a glimpse of what may be coming.
 
Top