Largest possible British Empire?

How about Christopher Columbus sailing for King Henry first instead of Spain? The King's wooed by the alleged riches of India and funds him off two ships, Saint Mary and something else. Columbus bounces off the Canaries to go south for India, but instead lands of Hispaniola, or Queskeya, or something. Whilst there ain't riches, the fact that he made it to India baffles Henry and funds a second and third voyage. A combination of diseases and civil wars in the Incas would allow England to take OTL Latin America. Using those riches, the Tudors would then use it to either invest in the empire building, or beat France like hell and take, say, Aquitaine, Normandie, Breizh, etc.

The British Canary Islands. Interesting...
  • Nelson doesn't loose his arm or was it his eye in the attack on Tenerife if he exists in TTL.
  • British invisible earnings might be a lot better after the Islands become a tourist destination.
  • San Augustin becomes Saint Augustine and would Playa del Ingles be Beach of the Spanish ITTL?

It would not have happened anyway with that POD because the Castilian conquest of the Canary Islands had been in progress since 1402. It's probably so implausible to be ASB, but what if some of the English troop ships on their way to take part in the 3rd Crusade were blown way off course into the Atlantic, but fortuitously found the Azores, Madeira and the Canaries beginning 800 years of British settlement?

Even if that does happen, the Canaries would most likely become an independent state rather than an English colony, due to the slowness of communications if nothing else.

(Although I suppose it would be easier for England/Britain to conquer them later if they didn't have Spain protecting them.)
Fair enough.

AFAIK the Saxon Kings of England developed what for the time was a sophisticated navy to defend themselves against the Vikings and the Norman Conquest only succeeded because the fleet had to return to London because it had run out of food. Also AFAIK the Normans although they were the descendants of Vikings were land animals and did not maintain a navy of any size or incorporate the obligation to provide ships as well as soldiers into the feudal system.

Again AFAIK England in the Middle Ages wasn't a naval power, but there was a merchant marine of reasonable size operating as far as the Bay of Biscay for the Gascoigne wine trade.

What about a POD of 1066 where the Normans do include an obligation on their vassals to provide ships as well as soldiers and that Middle Age England develops a bigger and longer range merchant fleet operating as far as the Levant?

Then there is the possibility that some English ships would be visiting the Atlantic islands regularly by accident or design. From that what I want to happens is that they are colonised by the English after the Plantagenet Kings loose their French lands. The purpose would be to develop an alternative source for the agricultural produce England used to get from France like, wine.
 
An early POD opens up things a lot, because it's before other people even have empires so really most places are up for grabs. However, you need to be careful about it. England achieved the remarkable balance of having strong state centralization early, and then decentralized checks on that centre later. This meant that you broke feudalism, but didn't lapse into absolutism. Having the Tudors followed by the Stuarts really set the stage for the right political system for an industrial revolution, which is what you need to have Britain truly dominant.

For these reasons, you need to be careful with some "successes". Success in the Hundred Years War means long military lines, meaning a larger state to pay for it, diverting resources away from private business as well as naval dominance. Conquest of the Aztecs and Incas is great for a windfall of gold, but most of it will go to the centralized state, meaning they can crush any pushes for democracy. It also encourages rent-seeking in the economy over entrepreneurship, limiting development. Spain suffered from this in OTL, and so do places like Nigeria today.

So if I had to have a large as possible British Empire, I wouldn't give them success in the Hundreds Year War. They want to divert north and subjugate Scotland instead, integrating identity-wise into a single British state. Without the threat of a continental power invading via Scotland, Britain is then safe to fully commit to a conquest of Ireland. More colonisation there before the religious divides could allow it to become an English-speaking British-identity place (at least in the cities and rural elites) before national religious divides complicate everything. If the Irish and English don't see themselves as different, there will be less subjugation of Ireland later on, and hopefully that island too can benefit from the British agricultural revolution. A more developed Ireland means more trade between the Isles, and even more of a naval headstart than Britain had in our timeline. You could also try to have Lollardy less persecuted, meaning its tenets spread among the working class in grassroots fashion across the British Isles. This primes the entire archipelago for the reformation (which we won't butterfly) and induces a Protestant-like savings culture at an earlier point, providing capital for trade missions. It could also serve to undermine the legitimacy of the Church and King, incentivising earlier movements towards representative governance.

During this time, British sailors increasingly sail to Iceland and beyond, due to the enhanced naval technology, following fish stocks, before discovering America in the late 1400s. Settlements follow in the next century, spreading down the coast, and logging in the area provides for cheaper ships for the expanding merchant fleet. The more adventurous explorers reach the Aztecs, and trade takes off massively, enriching the British middle class on both sides of the Atlantic. Meanwhile other European powers, mainly the Dutch and Portuguese, start founding trade posts all over Asia, as in OTL. The French, Spanish and British shortly follow. France quickly becomes the most powerful continental power (given no Spanish gold revenues), and has a series of wars with the British. The Brits, fearful France will catch up with them, have a series of wars in Europe. British privateers gradually push the French out of Asia, taking their colonies during the wars. Before long, British companies establish a dominant position in India and south est Asia by the late 1600s. New corporate arrangements such as stock exchanges and central banks are developed.

Meanwhile, in America, the Brits realise that the colonists, streteching from Newfoundland to the Mississippi delta, and increasingly in the Caribbean, are so numerous, they can't force them to be subjugated an devise a system of autonomy and federation. With triennial councils held in London to develop imperial policy. At first this is dominated by the united British Isles, but power is dispersed over time. The Aztecs become increasingly a protectorate of the British empire. France focuses on dominating in Europe, and eventually manages to gain control of Spain in a Franco-Spanish Catholic union against the now Protestant Brits. The Brits maintain alliances with the Dutch and Portuguese against them, taking Spanish colonies that have started in South America. British traders push further east, up to the Phillippines, China and Japan. The Brits found colonies in South Africa and East Africa as refueling posts.

The French population continues to grow and becomes an ever larger threat as it begins to throw its weight around. Eventually a Napoleonic Wars-analogue happens in the late 1700s, and Franco-Spain invades and annexes Portugal and the Netherlands, expanding its border to the Rhine. The Brits absorb their colonies in Asia and Africa, to keep them out of French hands. The industrial revolution begins 50 years early, and Britain surges ahead in technology. They increasingly fund German nationalist movements to try to form a united Germany, which eventually happens in the mid-1800s. By this point, Britain has settled most of North America, controls India and many of the East Indies, has protectorates over the Aztec and Inca empires, colonies down the South American Atlantic coast, South Africa, East Africa. Franco-Spain focuses on West and North Africa instead. China is being pressured by Russia from the North, and the British back China against them in exchange for trade concessions in cities, which, in fits and starts turns into informal empire and other powers locked out. Japan forms a Russian alliance and tries to modernise.

Eventually there is a great war in the early 20th century, with the British Empire and Germany against Franco-Spain, Japan and Russia. It's horrific for everyone, but eventually the former prevails. Japan is occupied, Franco-Spain is split up and loses its colonies to Britain. Russia loses its warm water ports in Asia and has to leave Mongolia and China. British supremacy is entirely confirmed. As oil picks up in the Middle East, the British establish protectorates there with British administration of the oil for the "greater good" of the world (i.e. British interest).

Is that big enough for you?
 
Fair enough.

AFAIK the Saxon Kings of England developed what for the time was a sophisticated navy to defend themselves against the Vikings and the Norman Conquest only succeeded because the fleet had to return to London because it had run out of food. Also AFAIK the Normans although they were the descendants of Vikings were land animals and did not maintain a navy of any size or incorporate the obligation to provide ships as well as soldiers into the feudal system.

Again AFAIK England in the Middle Ages wasn't a naval power, but there was a merchant marine of reasonable size operating as far as the Bay of Biscay for the Gascoigne wine trade.

What about a POD of 1066 where the Normans do include an obligation on their vassals to provide ships as well as soldiers and that Middle Age England develops a bigger and longer range merchant fleet operating as far as the Levant?

Then there is the possibility that some English ships would be visiting the Atlantic islands regularly by accident or design. From that what I want to happens is that they are colonised by the English after the Plantagenet Kings loose their French lands. The purpose would be to develop an alternative source for the agricultural produce England used to get from France like, wine.


How about England resupplies and bounces off the Emirate of Morocco in 1490 ? Doesn't England have an adequate relation with Morocco at that time ?
 
It depends on what you think of as 'Britain'. I once envisioned a Britain which avoided the American Civil War, but up to the beginning of the 1800's immigration to the American realms grew and grew and America expanded westward. As the centre of power drifted towards America rather than Britain, and London (with many American diplomats in parliament) was forced to take an "America First" approach to a lot of things, discontent arose in the home country that eventually spilled over into revolution against the monarchy. The monarchy and parliament flees to America, and a Republic of Britain is set up on the home islands.

America/Britain-in-Exile takes over most if not all of Britain's western hemisphere territories while the Republic undergoes civil war after civil war. America eventually takes on a similar role to OTL USA, except more directly; they go to war with Spain over Latin American territories and seize the Philippines, they open Japan (but establish a protectorate), and so on. In my mind's eye, the East India Company would have set up shop in America long before, since that is where all the action was anyway, so America still has control of the Indian territories.

You basically get a North American goliath run by King and Parliament, with a spattering of colonies all over the world, while the British home islands are basically reduced to a backwater with successive tinpot dictatorships.
I've long wanted to do a timeline with this general premise, a fully retained British North America leading to a British Empire that's increasingly not centered on the British Isles.
 

It's

Banned
Well, actually I'd probably not like the world Magnum's skeleton TL and map imply. But I do like the internal logic and Machiavellian strategy it suggests. (un?)Fortunately the actual OTL British Empire was acquired "in a fit of absent-mindedness" and not planned by a dynasty of strategic geniuses.

:cool:
It was acquired to make money and not, to use Rome as an example, conquest for its own sake. Ironically, this is probably why it ended up the biggest.
 
It was acquired to make money and not, to use Rome as an example, conquest for its own sake. Ironically, this is probably why it ended up the biggest.
Or maybe it ended the biggest because cannons and machine gun are more efficient than catapults and ships from the modern era are faster than galleys?
 

longsword14

Banned
Or maybe it ended the biggest because cannons and machine gun are more efficient than catapults and ships from the modern era are faster than galleys?
And it was helpful that unlike the Romans, people in the future knew about large landmasses across the water.;) Go and place you flag 1000 km from the heartland and still it is your territory. This makes the amount of land captured a lot more than someone could hope for in a millennium previously.
 
No, no, you're thinking too small.

"To think of these stars that you see overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can never reach. I would annex the planets if I could; I often think of that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far." -- Cecil Rhodes

Love him or hate him (and I am not a fan), the man thought big.
 
Love him or hate him (and I am not a fan), the man thought big.

He also tried to set up a bona fide Illuminati-style secret society to promote British control over the world:

To and for the establishment, promotion and development of a Secret Society, the true aim and object whereof shall be for the extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom, and of colonisation by British subjects of all lands where the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labour and enterprise, and especially the occupation by British settlers of the entire Continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the Valley of the Euphrates, the Islands of Cyprus and Candia, the whole of South America, the Islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the whole of the Malay Archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan, the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire, the inauguration of a system of Colonial representation in the Imperial Parliament which may tend to weld together the disjointed members of the Empire and, finally, the foundation of so great a Power as to render wars impossible, and promote the best interests of humanity.

Somebody should go tell Dan Brown, I'm sure he'd have a field day. :biggrin:
 
Are we sure that Cecil Rhodes is dead? And that there was one of him? I feel like he's still alive, especially in this board.:p
 

It's

Banned
Or maybe it ended the biggest because cannons and machine gun are more efficient than catapults and ships from the modern era are faster than galleys?
...and only the British had cannons, machine guns and faster ships? When were machine guns invented, BTW?
 
...and only the British had cannons, machine guns and faster ships? When were machine guns invented, BTW?
Just as the scramble for Africa got really under way?

European naval artillery got better in the XVth century. Mobile artillery in the XVIIIth.

France had a massive empire, bigger than the English one at the time but got defeated in Europe. When they started again they conquered the other half of Africa.

On the other hand, England never had much success on its own against European forces. It was very good at paying for it, not much at the rest.

Also if you want to dispute the fact that artillery, rifles and modern logistics are not valid explanation to explain why the British empire was bigger than the Roman we'll have an interesting discussion
 
As I see it, machineguns, cannons, etc. were necessary for the British Empire to get so big, but not sufficient. So @It's and @Tanc49 are both right.
Sure, you needed an impetus. And leeway, a margin of error. The French for example always had to worry about land frontiers, limiting the resources available. German kingdoms were too busy with infighting.

Colonialism is driven by the navy. After the 1700's, the English didn't have to worry about land attacks and could focus entirely on the navy. After the union of the crowns, they became very good at colonialism. I'd wager it's no coincidence. Not the sole cause but very useful.
 
Sure, you needed an impetus. And leeway, a margin of error. The French for example always had to worry about land frontiers, limiting the resources available. German kingdoms were too busy with infighting.

Colonialism is driven by the navy. After the 1700's, the English didn't have to worry about land attacks and could focus entirely on the navy. After the union of the crowns, they became very good at colonialism. I'd wager it's no coincidence. Not the sole cause but very useful.

I think stable political institutions are important as well. It's hard to go off conquering if you're constantly fighting wars against yourself.
 
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