One Man- One Vote is not the opposite or opposed to IRV.
Mayhap you were meaning First Past The Post will become seen as dangerous and unrepresentative?
Malê Rising
- Thread starter Jonathan Edelstein
- Start date
One Man- One Vote is not the opposite or opposed to IRV.
Mayhap you were meaning First Past The Post will become seen as dangerous and unrepresentative?
Though it led to Hitler IOTL and is still used by the Anglophone world... but maybe.
In terms of Australasia, I expect that at this point you see them playing the card Alfred Deakin did around 1908 when the Great White Fleet arrived at the same time Britain was question Australia's stance on the Yellow Peril- point out that even if Australasia needs a patron, there's an alternative in the English speaking world.
My gut instinct is that Australasia would at best provide minimal support. For all the racism and xenophobia, this is happening post Great War, when the Dominions no longer felt obliged to leap into any British conflict (in the main, Menzies notwithstanding,) economic links between the two nations are strained and the security of Australasia simply isn't under threat the way it was OTL.
I'm with those who think Canada is a more likely ally, and even that's dubious.
My gut instinct is that Australasia would at best provide minimal support. For all the racism and xenophobia, this is happening post Great War, when the Dominions no longer felt obliged to leap into any British conflict (in the main, Menzies notwithstanding,) economic links between the two nations are strained and the security of Australasia simply isn't under threat the way it was OTL.
I'm with those who think Canada is a more likely ally, and even that's dubious.
I'm just amazed by the stupidity of the Imperial Party leadership: did they cancel the Partnership Raj in _expectation_ of a rebellion, in the belief that a "whiff of gunpowder" would be enough to cow the natives? Because it's hard to imagine them being dumb enough to think there wouldn't be a nasty reaction. We're talking dregs of the Tea Party levels of obliviousness here...
Bruce
Bruce
This reminds me, how the heck will Indochina react to this? The upper-class Catholics would probably rebel if their post-War French connections are tampered with.
Well, we're not dealing with the sharpest knives in the drawer, and they only got into power because of the manifest failures of everyone (minus the Socialists) within the British political system. I mean, in current terms, would you expect if Golden Dawn managed to form a majority government in Greece you'd end up with a state which objectively understood its geopolitical capacity?
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Yes he is, and Kapur Singh was the lieutenant that Ibrahim sent away with the married men to get help for Saragarhi.
I doubt any of the great powers will enter an outright alliance with India, at least not at first. Nobody wants another Great War, it's still a bit beyond the pale to join forces with someone else's rebellious colony, and the Royal Navy would make any alliance difficult to carry out. On the other hand, nations like France might give India diplomatic or financial support - for instance, recognizing the Republic as India's legitimate government, which would give it a safe base to conduct foreign relations.
The Congress will issue a declaration of independence and interim constitution - among other things, doing so will reaffirm its status as the government and pre-empt other would-be leaders.
Hmmm, so the consensus seems to be converging on no open break with the empire but also little or nothing in the way of military participation. Maybe lip service and logistical support but not much else.
How controversial would this be domestically - would there be a political party or faction in Australasia that would want to join the war? What about Canada - are there obvious pro-war constituencies (there clearly are obvious antiwar ones)?
Fair point; the border would run to the east of those cities, with the Mapuche controlling the lake region and the mountains. (Route 5 does seem to be too far west.)
As eliphas8 said, that train has largely left the station. Indian nationalism is cohesive enough to hold most of the ethnic groups together, and while Britain might take advantage of existing conflicts, it won't be able to drive a wedge between groups that aren't already at odds. Of course, that doesn't mean they won't try.
Or better yet, that zombies won't become part of popular culture at all in TTL, although with Haiti as part of the Afro-Atlantic network, there's probably little chance of that.
And don't worry, the Imperials won't last.
Oh, they figured that there would be a nasty reaction. They just thought that (1) the Indians wouldn't dare to actually rebel, having learned their lesson at bayonet-point in 1857; (2) if a rebellion did occur, enough Indian troops would stay loyal to crush it quickly, and (3) hey, these are wogs, they'll fall apart without white officers and a whiff of grapeshot will scatter them. Basically, underestimation of the vehemence of the Indian reaction combined with drastic overestimation of British military superiority.
Most of Indochina consists of princely states rather than colonies, so they aren't feeling the boot as much as the Indians are, and there's no love lost between their rulers and the Indian administrative-merchant class. It should be possible for London to keep them in line through a combination of manipulation and bullying. Cochin-China will be more of a problem, and could become a flashpoint in the way you suggest.
IIRC the first to use Molotov Cocktails to stop tanks ITTL were Filipino Revolutionaries against the Spanish forces.
I've been wondering for some time now what are the Malayan and East Indies Chinese up to at this point. With international politics being complicated already (and a failed uprising movement in Java during the Great War), will there be an earlier formation of Chinese political parties than in OTL?
Also, I think I can see what's gonna happen to Sarawak, but I want to ask just to be sure: Will the Brooke's support the new Imperial policies?
Also, I think I can see what's gonna happen to Sarawak, but I want to ask just to be sure: Will the Brooke's support the new Imperial policies?
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I'm now a couple pages behind--haven't yet read the update on the Indian reaction for instance--but skimming through the comments I find few addressing two aspects of the Imperial Party takeover that are of immediate interest.
One is the whole antifeminist platform of the Imperialists. Not that they are calling it that, I suppose! They'd be the first to deny they are "against" women, and will doubtless say, as antifeminist regimes generally do, that they are for restoring the proper respect for the proper role of women and thus respect for proper women.
Thinking it over, the elements of an antifeminist backlash of the type I am all too familiar with in US history are certainly there. During the late War, no doubt British industry and the labor market in general hired lots of women to make up for men enlisted in the armed forces. During brief postwar prosperity (I forget if there was such a period worthy of the name) some of them doubtless quit in relief and went back to a more domestic life, but most probably intended to keep their jobs, because they were used to it by now and because most of these women would not have been well off and would have few attractive alternatives. But then when the economy collapsed, the competition for jobs would have been greatly worsened, and the wages and working conditions of what jobs there were would deteriorate. Then holding the jobs would not seem so attractive--except that the alternatives for these women would have also suddenly gotten a lot worse, so the women would have grimly tried to hang on. Meanwhile of course millions of returning veteran men from the Army and Navy would also have been looking for work upon discharge--possibly there was no "good time" for the working classes at all and they all plunged straight into this maelstrom immediately, while it was their social "betters" who rode the roller coaster of a rickety prosperity and a precipitous fall.
I haven't factored in the Asquith social insurance very well of course, in part because it isn't clear to me how it worked or what it did exactly--on the most conservative guess it amounts to Social Security, which is to say the maintenance of elderly people mostly, with a possible aspect of disability aid--in terms of the workforce, this enables the very old to retire and removes the disabled from the most desperate fringes of competition. Perhaps it went farther and deeper, interacting significantly with working-age people--if it included unemployment benefits and if this were a first for Britain, it would have run afoul of the collapsing economy immediately.
The grant of the vote to a limited class of women might not be missed as such by the vast majority; most women still could not vote and there might be a political campaign to capitalize on their resentment by crowing against the protests of the privileged few who did.
As I've mentioned, the history of feminist progress (in the USA anyway, where I know more about its workings than in other countries) is as Jonathan says not a linear one. Women take many steps forward and then are driven back again; sometimes it isn't even clear they wind up farther ahead on the whole. But on the other hand the backlashes I am most familiar with--the "Feminine Mystique" one of the later 1940s through the early 60s, and the still-ongoing one from the 1980s--didn't happen through new legislation or a sweeping and open plan. Rather they happened by gradual cultural sniping as it were. Indeed the 40s-60s period was, quite in contrast to this sudden-seeming British situation, in the context of a generally strong and rising American economy, and so it was rather seductively softened--the hardscrabble struggle to simply survive by getting a paycheck in some hectic urban situation for the dubious privilege of a tiny, run-down apartment (the USA had a severe housing shortage in the Depression, war and postwar years--indeed for poor people that never really ended) was contrasted with a relatively palatial, quiet, supposedly secure new suburban home, with a husband who could be presumed to make enough money to maintain himself, her, and any children they had in a much more comfortable style. All she had to do was give up her agency and accept her "proper place." Oh, and of course land that man...
The situation in Britain in the ITTL 1910s seems more like that of Weimar Germany than Betty Friedan's nightmare though! It is interesting to note that despite the rabidly anti-feminist ideology of the Nazis, with their "Kinder-Kirke-Küche" teachings on women's roles, the fact is, women did not quit their jobs after the Nazi takeover. Get married they did, and even have children--but they could not afford to quit, because the Nazis were not interested in raising hourly wages (nor perhaps would they have been able to). German working people (those not singled out for persecution or execution of course!) did take home more wages and consume somewhat more food and other goods under the pre-war Reich--but only because now they were working longer hours, with average work weeks swinging from under 40 to over 50; this extra work accounted for the whole of what improvement they enjoyed. So the women went right on working.
Here though the premise seems to be that they really should not, which raises the question, of how can the Imperialist party government actually raise the hourly wages of the (male) workers without sending their capitalist employers even deeper into a recessionary spiral?
Stick it to the wogs, of course! But that's not going to work... more about that in a bit.
Just to continue with the sexual situation a bit more, we know that thanks to "Congo Fever" sexual liberation is inhibited ITTL. But what that means in practice, unless there are other factors at work we haven't seen illustrated, is a continuation of rampant Victorian hypocrisy, which will leave women largely the victims of male privilege and thus will defeat the purpose, if the purpose is actually restraining the spread of STDs (and the greater security of women who might wind up with embarrassing pregnancies). The stark lines Victorian morality imposed on women, dividing them into "virtuous" and "fallen" camps, will remain unless there is some effective repression of male sexuality as well. If that has somehow been happening I can see one source of restlessness that can be channelled in a quasi-fascist direction. But keeping that situation harsh but "fair" is very difficult--more likely the "fallen" women will be all the more brutally exploited as an outlet--and "Congo Fever" and other diseases will spread apace.
Jonathan is very good at showing us how grassroots improvements spread and ramify, giving his world a very pleasant glow. I suspect that maybe things have been happening in Britain, and Europe generally perhaps, that have been less pleasant and then Jonathan is not so inclined to write about it up close and personal, which is why this British situation seems to come like a bolt from the blue--or from the lower depths perhaps more aptly! We've seen the macro factors at work but we don't see examples of how they hammer away at the common people, that could help us understand how these rather cranky Imperials have suddenly taken over.
Now speaking of "wogs," I am of course interested in the Indian situation too, which is clearly of paramount importance to the Empire's fate. But what about West Africa? The Imperial program is going to be just as unwelcome there, and its imposition will doubtless also lead quickly to nasty incidents.
The antifeminism of the Imperials is going to rankle there too, with the long tradition of women having such an important role in West African Islam and society in general. Women and men--the West Africans are not going to take it.
And we should remember, there are a lot of West Africans settled in Britain itself. So that's my second, largely if not entirely neglected, subject--wouldn't the West African events be as immediate and as explosive as the Indian ones?
There can be no question of recruiting West African troops to try to put down the Indian rising, any more than the Raj can plausibly use Indians to keep order in West Africa!
One is the whole antifeminist platform of the Imperialists. Not that they are calling it that, I suppose! They'd be the first to deny they are "against" women, and will doubtless say, as antifeminist regimes generally do, that they are for restoring the proper respect for the proper role of women and thus respect for proper women.
Thinking it over, the elements of an antifeminist backlash of the type I am all too familiar with in US history are certainly there. During the late War, no doubt British industry and the labor market in general hired lots of women to make up for men enlisted in the armed forces. During brief postwar prosperity (I forget if there was such a period worthy of the name) some of them doubtless quit in relief and went back to a more domestic life, but most probably intended to keep their jobs, because they were used to it by now and because most of these women would not have been well off and would have few attractive alternatives. But then when the economy collapsed, the competition for jobs would have been greatly worsened, and the wages and working conditions of what jobs there were would deteriorate. Then holding the jobs would not seem so attractive--except that the alternatives for these women would have also suddenly gotten a lot worse, so the women would have grimly tried to hang on. Meanwhile of course millions of returning veteran men from the Army and Navy would also have been looking for work upon discharge--possibly there was no "good time" for the working classes at all and they all plunged straight into this maelstrom immediately, while it was their social "betters" who rode the roller coaster of a rickety prosperity and a precipitous fall.
I haven't factored in the Asquith social insurance very well of course, in part because it isn't clear to me how it worked or what it did exactly--on the most conservative guess it amounts to Social Security, which is to say the maintenance of elderly people mostly, with a possible aspect of disability aid--in terms of the workforce, this enables the very old to retire and removes the disabled from the most desperate fringes of competition. Perhaps it went farther and deeper, interacting significantly with working-age people--if it included unemployment benefits and if this were a first for Britain, it would have run afoul of the collapsing economy immediately.
The grant of the vote to a limited class of women might not be missed as such by the vast majority; most women still could not vote and there might be a political campaign to capitalize on their resentment by crowing against the protests of the privileged few who did.
As I've mentioned, the history of feminist progress (in the USA anyway, where I know more about its workings than in other countries) is as Jonathan says not a linear one. Women take many steps forward and then are driven back again; sometimes it isn't even clear they wind up farther ahead on the whole. But on the other hand the backlashes I am most familiar with--the "Feminine Mystique" one of the later 1940s through the early 60s, and the still-ongoing one from the 1980s--didn't happen through new legislation or a sweeping and open plan. Rather they happened by gradual cultural sniping as it were. Indeed the 40s-60s period was, quite in contrast to this sudden-seeming British situation, in the context of a generally strong and rising American economy, and so it was rather seductively softened--the hardscrabble struggle to simply survive by getting a paycheck in some hectic urban situation for the dubious privilege of a tiny, run-down apartment (the USA had a severe housing shortage in the Depression, war and postwar years--indeed for poor people that never really ended
) was contrasted with a relatively palatial, quiet, supposedly secure new suburban home, with a husband who could be presumed to make enough money to maintain himself, her, and any children they had in a much more comfortable style. All she had to do was give up her agency and accept her "proper place." Oh, and of course land that man...The situation in Britain in the ITTL 1910s seems more like that of Weimar Germany than Betty Friedan's nightmare though! It is interesting to note that despite the rabidly anti-feminist ideology of the Nazis, with their "Kinder-Kirke-Küche" teachings on women's roles, the fact is, women did not quit their jobs after the Nazi takeover. Get married they did, and even have children--but they could not afford to quit, because the Nazis were not interested in raising hourly wages (nor perhaps would they have been able to). German working people (those not singled out for persecution or execution of course!) did take home more wages and consume somewhat more food and other goods under the pre-war Reich--but only because now they were working longer hours, with average work weeks swinging from under 40 to over 50; this extra work accounted for the whole of what improvement they enjoyed. So the women went right on working.
Here though the premise seems to be that they really should not, which raises the question, of how can the Imperialist party government actually raise the hourly wages of the (male) workers without sending their capitalist employers even deeper into a recessionary spiral?
Stick it to the wogs, of course! But that's not going to work... more about that in a bit.
Just to continue with the sexual situation a bit more, we know that thanks to "Congo Fever" sexual liberation is inhibited ITTL. But what that means in practice, unless there are other factors at work we haven't seen illustrated, is a continuation of rampant Victorian hypocrisy, which will leave women largely the victims of male privilege and thus will defeat the purpose, if the purpose is actually restraining the spread of STDs (and the greater security of women who might wind up with embarrassing pregnancies). The stark lines Victorian morality imposed on women, dividing them into "virtuous" and "fallen" camps, will remain unless there is some effective repression of male sexuality as well. If that has somehow been happening I can see one source of restlessness that can be channelled in a quasi-fascist direction. But keeping that situation harsh but "fair" is very difficult--more likely the "fallen" women will be all the more brutally exploited as an outlet--and "Congo Fever" and other diseases will spread apace.
Jonathan is very good at showing us how grassroots improvements spread and ramify, giving his world a very pleasant glow. I suspect that maybe things have been happening in Britain, and Europe generally perhaps, that have been less pleasant and then Jonathan is not so inclined to write about it up close and personal, which is why this British situation seems to come like a bolt from the blue--or from the lower depths perhaps more aptly! We've seen the macro factors at work but we don't see examples of how they hammer away at the common people, that could help us understand how these rather cranky Imperials have suddenly taken over.
Now speaking of "wogs," I am of course interested in the Indian situation too, which is clearly of paramount importance to the Empire's fate. But what about West Africa? The Imperial program is going to be just as unwelcome there, and its imposition will doubtless also lead quickly to nasty incidents.
The antifeminism of the Imperials is going to rankle there too, with the long tradition of women having such an important role in West African Islam and society in general. Women and men--the West Africans are not going to take it.
And we should remember, there are a lot of West Africans settled in Britain itself. So that's my second, largely if not entirely neglected, subject--wouldn't the West African events be as immediate and as explosive as the Indian ones?
There can be no question of recruiting West African troops to try to put down the Indian rising, any more than the Raj can plausibly use Indians to keep order in West Africa!
One rather unpleasant thought that's just occurred to me:
The Imperial Party have already taken away the meagre rights granted to women, because it offends their worldview.
They've ignited an insurrection in India, because they couldn't even bring themselves to pretend Indians, even the wealthy, aristocratic ones, might be their equals.
There's an entire swathe of West Africa where the natives claim to be subjects of the British crown, yet have their own rulers, a democratic tradition and a history of treating women as people.
How long is it going to be before some arsehat in Imperial Britain decides it's time to abandon this fanciful notion of 'Imperial Domains' and just turn the lands of the Niger Valley into good old-fashioned colonies?
It won't come off - the Imperials won't have the strategic capability, not while India is aflame - but Whitehall could make things very bad for the Male in the next few years.
The Imperial Party have already taken away the meagre rights granted to women, because it offends their worldview.
They've ignited an insurrection in India, because they couldn't even bring themselves to pretend Indians, even the wealthy, aristocratic ones, might be their equals.
There's an entire swathe of West Africa where the natives claim to be subjects of the British crown, yet have their own rulers, a democratic tradition and a history of treating women as people.
How long is it going to be before some arsehat in Imperial Britain decides it's time to abandon this fanciful notion of 'Imperial Domains' and just turn the lands of the Niger Valley into good old-fashioned colonies?
It won't come off - the Imperials won't have the strategic capability, not while India is aflame - but Whitehall could make things very bad for the Male in the next few years.
And so Usman's dream dies a death not long after him. Seriously, reading the Imperialist platform was like reading a suicide note for the British Empire ITTL.
In regards to the Dominions, I think I agree with the general consensus: logistical support and no public break with policy at best(Australasia I'd say is most likely), and a very public disapproval and much more reduced role(TTL Africa with its large number of British "influence" like the Boers, the Omanis, and the Yoruba will make it very difficult to appeal to White Englishman connections). If anything though, I'd expect that most of the dominions won't say no to volunteers going to the British Army, which could have interesting effects down the line as the most pro-British are actually off fighting the war and not dictating policy at home. In particular, if Ireland starts seeing a lot of Unionists going abroad to fight a damn stupid war for the Empire and dying...
On the other hand, the court has already declared the "Indian Empire" as somehow separate and distinct from the British Empire based on the partnership Raj and its separate participation in the Olympics among other things. If the Court rules against the British, it's going to be severely tested, but it would provide a fig-leaf with which other nations can condemn the Empire, including the Dominions, and begin the process of becoming a truly independent international body rather than the British-dominated institution it seems to have been up til now.
In regards to the Dominions, I think I agree with the general consensus: logistical support and no public break with policy at best(Australasia I'd say is most likely), and a very public disapproval and much more reduced role(TTL Africa with its large number of British "influence" like the Boers, the Omanis, and the Yoruba will make it very difficult to appeal to White Englishman connections). If anything though, I'd expect that most of the dominions won't say no to volunteers going to the British Army, which could have interesting effects down the line as the most pro-British are actually off fighting the war and not dictating policy at home. In particular, if Ireland starts seeing a lot of Unionists going abroad to fight a damn stupid war for the Empire and dying...
I agree, but this actually brings up something very important for the future: the power of the International Court. We know that it has ruled that gas and other WMD's are not permitted in wars between nations, and only narrowly ruled that it could not regulate colonial conflicts. The Imperialist party will certainly try to frame this war as the latter to justify harsh tactics. It's flimsy, but it's the best option among shitty ones.
On the other hand, the court has already declared the "Indian Empire" as somehow separate and distinct from the British Empire based on the partnership Raj and its separate participation in the Olympics among other things. If the Court rules against the British, it's going to be severely tested, but it would provide a fig-leaf with which other nations can condemn the Empire, including the Dominions, and begin the process of becoming a truly independent international body rather than the British-dominated institution it seems to have been up til now.
I'm not sure the Swiss would push around so easily - an established French client like Brazil might be more likely. But if France wants to recognize India, it would probably just recognize India. There isn't much risk under the circumstances - Britain is already fighting the biggest part of its empire, and even the Imperials won't start a shooting war with France on top of that over a purely diplomatic move.
What Iori said. "Toast" refers both to raising the bottle and to what happens to the tank that gets hit.
I've been wondering for some time now what are the Malayan and East Indies Chinese up to at this point. With international politics being complicated already (and a failed uprising movement in Java during the Great War), will there be an earlier formation of Chinese political parties than in OTL?
Also, I think I can see what's gonna happen to Sarawak, but I want to ask just to be sure: Will the Brooke's support the new Imperial policies?
The overseas Chinese and the East Indies nationalists have alternately been on the same side and in conflict, so the Chinese probably have formed their own political organizations by this time. They'll need allies to get anywhere, so they'll be close to one or another of the nationalist parties, but they'll also want their own voice. We'll see more of them a couple of updates from now when Malaya's development during the 1910s is sketched out, and also in the 1920s.
And the Brookes are old-fashioned paternalists, so their reaction to the Imperial Party platform will be somewhere between horror and disgust. Not that they don't have their own issues, but they certainly won't see eye to eye with the Imperials.
They're actually a bit more open than that. They do say that they're all for the idealized "proper woman," but their pitch to working-class men also includes restoration of control over the family. Amid the "angel in the house" rhetoric is an explicitly supremacist ideology, and many of the party's thinkers and orators don't bother to mask it.
The party's attitude toward women mirrors its attitude toward colonial peoples - sure, everyone exploits their colonies, but the Imperials shed the white man's burden/mission civilisatrice rhetoric and portray imperial supremacy and colonial exploitation as ends in themselves.
It was mainly old age and disability pensions, but there was also limited unemployment insurance, which wasn't very generous but was enough to blow hell out of the budget once the recession started to bite. Part of the Imperials' financial program is to privatize these losses somewhat by forbidding or penalizing layoffs, which is good for people who have jobs already but terrible for anyone trying to get a first-time job or break back into the market after having lost their previous one.
No, of course it isn't. But it superficially sounds like it should, and in an environment where the economy has gone to hell and the traditional parties have failed to solve the problem, it's the kind of quick fix that some voters will find appealing. Especially since the Imperials have been busily blaming the empire for the economy going to hell in the first place.
(You mentioned below that the takeover seems to have happened like a bolt out of the blue. Things do happen that fast sometimes in a crisis environment - in 1928, the Nazis were a joke, but by 1934 they held absolute power. But maybe I should backtrack to 1913-14 and show a narrative scene on the ground in the UK, either before or after the dominion update. Or... well, you'll see when I decide.)
That will be a fairly central part of the "colonies and protectorates to 1917" update, which will follow the dominions.
Changing their status like that would be a bit complicated, both because it would involve abrogation of a treaty and because Whitehall would have to establish colonial administrations from scratch. This doesn't necessarily mean they won't try, though, and there are plenty of things short of annexation that can be done to nominally sovereign countries - see, e.g., apartheid South Africa's relationship with Lesotho.
The situation in the Niger Valley between 1915 and the early 20s won't be a happy one - I'll hold my peace for now as to exactly how.
Certainly, the suicide note for it as an empire, although nations and empires die slowly.
You're very nearly reading my mind. Britain's position will be subtly different, though - it will argue that of course the Empire of India is a distinct and internationally recognized entity, but that the rabble who call themselves the Republic of India are rebels and traitors who may be treated as such. The legitimate Indian government could bring a case before the court, but the Republic isn't that government.
That's going to be a harder argument for the court to overcome. It will have to consider the basic question of what a state is, what status a government has if some countries recognize it but others don't, and whether the court itself can give de facto recognition to a government by declaring the conflict to be international. You'll see what happens a few updates from now.
I'm quite ill and don't have much time to add anything other than my two cents on the dominions issue. I can very much see both Australasia and, reluctantly, Canada joining the War. I think Australasia will join no matter what, but Canada depends on if a Liberal or Tory is PM. Arthur Meighen in particular strikes me as a good figure who can blunder into a disastrous war. I also foresee Canada leaving the war early due to the fierce opposition it would cause in Quebec. Hopefully things don't get too heated, or those expansionistic Americans down south could get some ideas. But I would be very surprised if both don't initially enter the War.
Ireland I see staying on the sidelines, happy to see the Unionists go off and volunteer on their own.
Ireland I see staying on the sidelines, happy to see the Unionists go off and volunteer on their own.
Oh, for the love of Benji...As Fascists go they are pretty half-baked then. Any decent repressive regime knows how to get a lot of women onside, even when they are among the designated targets. But that takes time.
What seemed like a "bolt from the blue" to me was not so much that the British might go for a binge of righteous repression and global rampage, but the whole sexist thing. Especially now that you tell us how raw it is. There had to be a buildup to this kind of thing. Well, you've shown us the positives that a backlash could build against, and that's had some long years to fester even before the war started. Then the war must have mobilized hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of women into all sorts of positions they hadn't been seen much in before, then the postwar years, the years of fumbling attempts to deal with the crash...It's just that I'm left to my imagination for now just how this much high-test misogyny could brew up; what British society might have been like just before the crash.
A more subtle reaction would still be bitter but might go down a bit smoother. As things are, millions of British women--wives, mothers, girlfriends, sisters, daughters--know men who voted in a government whose platform is they can no more be trusted than a bunch of heathen savages, and have the same value. That's got to be a poisonous memory for generations to come.
Also--the IP is indeed half-baked. They haven't got enough women onside to start with. They surely have some; there's always subservient women, and "Ladies Against Women"--but these movements get a lot of their reach and punch from mobilizing more women than that...It's sort of the reverse of what impressed me so much about West African Islam in general, and the radicalized Abacarist version in particular, going viral by spreading via the women, as teachers and as mothers.
Clearly they can't be "blamed" for being unfinished; they are shooting from the hip. But they haven't got their act together; they have made unkeepable promises and haven't really shored up their infrastructure against the backlash of disillusionment. That will only come after years of trial and spectacular error.
For the sake of my general Anglophilia I like to think there are a lot of people who thought this was wrong from the get-go and said so right away and vigorously. After all, even though the IP did win an actual majority, that was of a somewhat limited franchise--only a few women allowed to vote against them, and it could be the men of the British working classes weren't entirely enfranchised yet.
{in answer to my saying "win by extorting it from the colonized" wouldn't work...}
Oh, I never doubted that it would make sense and can even fill in some blanks myself, though I daresay your version would be the more satisfying! The misogyny angle, and the sheer concentrated venom of stupidity in general, was the surprising part--rather than seeing the mainstream parties fumble themselves into the ground until the pressure built up like this, I rather thought (since you warned us bad times were ahead, or I'd have hoped for better) that the ruling classes would muddle along without the spectacular depths of failure, running themselves into the ground but at a more majestic pace, with these sorts of developments happening all right but gradually, in an escalation.
That would be less shocking day to day, but perhaps over time and cumulatively, worse. This way these Imperialists will make spectacular asses of themselves in very short order--doing a lot of damage as they do so, but not leaving behind much of a legacy latter-day bigots would want to rally to.
If a Red Britain is the outcome, it too might be rather sadly dystopian and doctrinaire; to an extent bitter reaction against the slanders and injuries of the Imperialists, and to an extent a reconstruction of some of their own--ideas, and people, because no matter how much I want to amplify the opposition at the end of the day a lot of British men did vote for this. Having burned all their bridges to a friendly and comfortable menage with colonized West Africa, India, and God knows which other small colonies (if only by example) and having proven that mobilizing all the bigots in Britain does not make for an adequate conquest army against desperate and offended peoples who outnumber them by large proportions, particularly when half of one's own metropolitan population has just been kicked in the teeth but not properly tied down first, Britain will wind up terribly isolated, even if the Dominions do remain more or less affiliated. And I doubt very much South Africa can! And Canada and Australasia, even if they won't let Britain be quite alone in the world and more or less support the motherland's flailings, still will have to become de facto independent, just to manage their own affairs responsibly and sensibly.
I can be more optimistic about a Socialist Britain remaking herself and charming her way back into reasonable relations with the former colonies and in this sort of world I don't have to dismiss the hopes as groundless. But it could easily become a bitter, impoverished communism of shared scarcity--if not so much a North Korea, perhaps anyway an East Germany.
For one thing it might be whiter than it has been up to this point--before they go down the Imperials might make life very hard for the African and Indian origined folks who settled; some might die, others might run. They could go to France; they could return to Africa (to fight for its liberation or afterward) or even emigrate. Even the USA might take in a lot of them--having just acquired still more formerly British colonial islands in the Atlantic.
Black London is older than anyone typically remembers it; substantial numbers of African people were already in England in Queen Elizabeth Ist day. The Africans tend to blend in to the lower classes--meaning that even OTL as here--more British people have African blood in them.
So, despite the fact that the presence of people of color in Britain always seems so odd and so modern, driving them out will be a drastic diversion from the actual steady state, aside from the human drama of it all.
But don't forget, the timing overlaps the period where the Americans who think a bit like the Imperial Party have indeed gotten greedy--and are busy with the Mexican Misadventure!
That doesn't guarantee that no yahoo suggests doubling down, north and south, but such people will draw the looks they deserve.
With the Imperial Party going as it is, I can see future generations of Britons remarking the 1910's as the time when everyone went crazy and lost the Empire, and see the era as an embarrassing moment that "could've been avoided".
I wonder how will the aftermath(s) shall effect the UK in the long term, especially in culture. I can see there being a lot of Alt-History fiction depicting an un-crazy British Empire being sold, as well as "what-could-have-been" TL's of Usman's Imperial Federation!
I wonder how will the aftermath(s) shall effect the UK in the long term, especially in culture. I can see there being a lot of Alt-History fiction depicting an un-crazy British Empire being sold, as well as "what-could-have-been" TL's of Usman's Imperial Federation!
They do soon to be cartoonish supervillains. You'd expect em to build ties with the princes, maybe some of the capitalists in India...