Irrelevant Britain

Very doable; just have Harald Hardrada land after Hastings, and have England partitioned between Scandinavians (Danes and/or Norse) and Normans, with the Scots and Welsh remaining independent. As long as England is divided into competing realms it will remain weak and relatively insignificant.

Four or five English kingdoms, subject to constant harassment from both Scotland, Wales, Ireland, France and Scandinava as well as constant warfare, dynastic struggles and such, weakened further by the Plague, perhaps being subjugated by the Welsh who establish some kind of "High Kingship" with constant warfare over who is High King, bring England into the 17th century as backwater and unimportant as historical Ireland.
 
There were plenty of Norsemen and Gaels at large in the years after 1066, helping out the Last of the English for their own ends; but Norman power prevailed. After all, England had been divided and attacked by foreigners before, and if its unification in a functioning administrative unit (William, and before him Sweyn and Canute, could install themselves on the throne with this actually meaning something, which wasn't an option available to the earlier Norse) had been some fluke it wouldn't have stuck.

Economically and politically, the British isles turned on the southeast of England. The 'imperial crown of England', to use the contemporary name, which later constitutionally re-organised itself into Great Britain, represented that expanding area that a ruler in London felt he needed to give a toss about for the sake of his security.
 
If the spending and sanity were reversed, then the UK could end up in a very nasty position.

It's a dubious equivalence, though. Britain and France didn't have the same kind of financial system. Britain had excellent credit, of course; but besides that we still payed most of the cost of fighting our wars out of taxation throughout the 18th C. The British elite didn't just pay the Land Tax: they collected it, since they were the country's local government. The French, who had to devise the office of Intendant to bully their landed elites, still couldn't get that kind of ready money. Later Britain got more and more money from the Excise, but what it signifies is the same thing: Britain's ruling classes saw themselves as beneficiaries of a commercial imperialism and were prepared to pay the membership dues.

So even though France was the state whose combination of huge resources and modernity made her Britain's great rival in the spheres of commerce, manufactures, and imperialism, she was undermined by being in the end a land-power whose elite still conceived of themselves as a privileged military caste.

That's not to say that Britain won't have a revolution; it just won't be the result of bankruptcy. Britain proved able to pay for the Great French War, which was a much bigger show than anything in America.
 
There were plenty of Norsemen and Gaels at large in the years after 1066, helping out the Last of the English for their own ends; but Norman power prevailed. After all, England had been divided and attacked by foreigners before, and if its unification in a functioning administrative unit (William, and before him Sweyn and Canute, could install themselves on the throne with this actually meaning something, which wasn't an option available to the earlier Norse) had been some fluke it wouldn't have stuck.

Economically and politically, the British isles turned on the southeast of England. The 'imperial crown of England', to use the contemporary name, which later constitutionally re-organised itself into Great Britain, represented that expanding area that a ruler in London felt he needed to give a toss about for the sake of his security.

What if London was sacked and utterly ransacked in the aftermath of 1066, leaving York or wherever as it's equal or even superior city?
 

amphibulous

Banned
It's a dubious equivalence, though. Britain and France didn't have the same kind of financial system.

It's almost certainly impossible to achieve - the English state apparatus was a fraction of the size of the French one; I can't think of a way that it could have managed to tax enough. The other scenario I outlined seems much more likely to me.
 
So how about a successful Jacobite restoration in 1715, which is never really accepted by the people. The new King has a decade of feuding with parliament, during which time the armed forces are neglected, and then low level resistance breaks out, eventually erupting into full blown civil war in the 1730s. This is long and messy, and not only destroys a lot of the capital needed for the coming industrial revolution, it also smashes British overseas trade, further weakening future conditions.

New England, paranoid of Catholic takeover, then declares independence, and successfully becomes its own country. Skirmishes break out in the rest of the colonies between different groups of supporters. Back home, the Jacobite King eventually falls and some prominent Whig magnate (Newcastle?) seizes the reigns of power. He raises taxes to a very high level to fund regaining control of Scotland, Ireland and the American colonies, and ends up drawn into long bloody wars. Resentment of this sees a Tory backed military coup, which restarts the civil war. Eventually, England emerges as an military state, hostile to the Whig merchants, and has to cede its American colonies and recognise independent regimes in Scotland and Ireland.

Meanwhile France takes advantage of British problems to knock them out of India and also builds trade with New England. The extra funds from this and weakness from Britain means it is able to grab the Austrian Netherlands during wars with the Habsburgs. A combination of extra trade and more raw materials in the new Eastern provinces cause greater economic growth and a bit more of a middle class than our timeline. However, the absolute monarchy is holding back these merchants, and when a financial crisis hits in the later part of the century, they push heavily for the end of feudalism during the calling of the Estates-Generale. Eventually, they manage to grab control of the revolution and place Philippe Egalite on the throne, who avoids aggressive wars but defends France's borders and brings in various capitalist reforms. Soon the industrial revolution spreads to Prussia, who is an emerging power at Austria's expense.

Come 1820, France and Prussia are the two leading powers in Europe. Britain is a screwed backwater.
 
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