A very nice narrative update, and nice flags, too. Unlike some others, I didn't think a narrative update was absolutely necessary here. I don't see why Britain couldn't go for some half-baked fascism, this is a depression after all. But it was splendid all the same. One similarity I haven't seen brought up yet: The Imperials actually sound very familiar to the new Jim Crow politicians that emerged around 1900, after the chaotic and economically disruptive 1890s. There was an editorial from the Charleston News & Courier in 1898 ridiculing the notion of segregation, because it would end up to such nonsense as different restrooms, different drinking fountains, and different Bibles. All of which happened. The Jim Crow advocates didn't have any international damage to do, but a similar mentality is there.
Malê Rising
- Thread starter Jonathan Edelstein
- Start date
Very good update, the period certainly sucked for unskilled workers: have you ever read Germinal by Zola? Because the tone reminds me of it. I am quite surprised that things went bad so quickly for the Imperials : in times of crisis, populist policies and public employment seem to wield positive results see the administration during the great depression or hell even Nazi Germany. When the Imperials fall, I have an hard time seeing Tories or Liberals make a comeback without being much more populist (think the unionist in Fight and be right) and opposed to socialists.
Speaking of Zola what is his fate in this world; did he live to see the red France?
The next update should be interesting, Canada and the Quebec problem, Australasia and the German/Indian/Russian scare and South Africa.
When you speak about "post-Westphalianism" don't forget that it won't be the solution used each time : repression and genocide can go a long way (even now : look at Syria, the CAR, etc).
Really cool flags, there may be more diversity in the flags of Africa ITTL.
Speaking of Zola what is his fate in this world; did he live to see the red France?
The next update should be interesting, Canada and the Quebec problem, Australasia and the German/Indian/Russian scare and South Africa.
When you speak about "post-Westphalianism" don't forget that it won't be the solution used each time : repression and genocide can go a long way (even now : look at Syria, the CAR, etc).
Really cool flags, there may be more diversity in the flags of Africa ITTL.
I'm not sure I get liberalism out of them, but the Sokoto flag (which is my favorite of the two) suggests industry somehow.
BTW, if you're interested, these are the Fulani and Yoruba patterns on which I based the designs. The latter represents the movement of a drum when it is struck.
I'd guess that their designs will be influential in the Niger Valley, and possibly beyond, but the Toucouleur and Bornu empires will also have influence, as might Adamawa. I'd expect the countries to the north and west to have more traditional Islamic green in their flags.
Yup. English-language fantasy will be a very different genre in TTL, with high fantasy quite a bit more Victorian.
All I'll say now is that you'll see soon.
What Falecius said. The war was a very near thing for Italy in existential terms, and after such a narrow escape, few Italians have an appetite for more military adventures. The conquest of Rome, and the cession of Trentino and a couple of Dalmatian coastal towns, are enough of a triumph for now, especially since (as Falecius also notes) any irredentist war will bring Italy into conflict with powerful opponents. This isn't to say that some Italian nationalists don't dream of more, but the consensus is that such things are impractical.
Malta was certainly looking for more independence around this time: in OTL, it got responsible government in the early 1920s, but the Imperials might be less willing to deal. They might see the Maltese as different from other colonial peoples, especially with Malta as strategically important as it is, but they also might not. If Britain messes things up badly enough, Italy might be able to step in.
Speaking of Malta, BTW, I'll have to figure out what happened to Cyprus in TTL. In OTL, it became a de facto British colony in 1878, but in TTL, with the Ottomans beating Russia, that won't happen. I'd guess that it's still Ottoman territory, with some concessions to local autonomy such as were given in the Aegean islands, but that much of the population still wants enosis. Maybe conflict will break out there in the 1920s or 30s.
They're not as obsessed with racial pollution - they have no particular need to live apart from Indians or Africans, as long as the latter know their place - but there are certainly similarities in their overall attitude and in their use of the colonies as a foil to win poor Englishmen to their side.
I haven't, but will now have to do so.
They certainly weren't implementing populist policies in India, which is where things went bad for them. Their position in the UK in 1917 is somewhat more secure, and they've received some credit for improving working-class life despite their repressiveness. The war will soon change that, though.
The Tories and Liberals that come out the other side of the Imperial interregnum certainly won't be the same parties as before the war, and will have learned the lessons of their complacency.
The blocked chimney was butterflied, so he lived to 1914 and was an independent minister in a couple of the postwar governments.
Unfortunately so: in fact, in many cases, post-Westphalianism will only be tried where repression, war and ethnic cleansing have failed. For every people like the Mapuche who are well enough armed and inhabit difficult enough terrain to force their opponents to the table, there will be others who are successfully kept down or expelled. Over time, international norms will shift strongly against repressive measures and institutions will try to prevent them, but as in OTL, such norms and institutions won't succeed in all cases.
The dominion update will probably happen around midweek; in the meantime, there's a literary interlude (well, sort of) immediately below.
Literary interlude: From a (slightly) more innocent age
W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, Mutesa, or The Baron of Mugungi (1908)
[Mutesa]
It was a year ago today
I awakened with the sun and went to get my evening meal
‘Mid the rattle of the teapot and the cattle in the fields
But what an apparition did the morning light reveal
On that extraordinary day.
It was a demon gone astray
In a pith hat and a rosette, and he pushed in through the door
Knocking Gulu, Buddha, Jesus to keep comp’ny on the floor
And without a by-your-leave, he laid a paper down before
Me, on that extraordinary day.
Then he bowed in the English way,
Said “Rise, Sir Wog, and be a faithful servant to the Crown,
Rule well and guide us wisely, add to Edward Rex’ renown,”
And handed me a ticket, second-class, to London town,
On that extraordinary day!
[Featherstonehaugh-Cholmondeley]
It was a month ago today:
I was sitting in the club, cigar and sherry in my hand
A hard day’s debate behind me, and a hard night’s drinking planned,
When my peace was interrupted by a most uncanny man,
On that extraordinary day.
He’d been in the House that day,
Holding forth upon the Woolsack on his people’s use as feed,
And suggesting, much like Swift, that it would fill our people’s need,
And the wonder of it all was that the Tories all agreed,
On that extraordinary day.
Before the waiter had his say,
He’d built himself a bonfire just as pretty as you please
And he set a kid to roasting while he munched a Stilton cheese,
And asked where the House of Ladies was, so he could take his ease,
On that extraordinary day!
[Mutesa]
It was a week ago today,
That I’d planned a pleasant dinner with the member from West Fife,
Bought a stick of suya for him in the Garden, on my life,
But still he wouldn’t eat it, as I gave him the wrong knife,
On that extraordinary day.
I’d hoped he’d help me win the day
On my bill to merge the churches and end all religious fights,
But I broke his native taboo and he huffed out of my sight:
I could never guide these natives ‘less I learned their ways aright,
On that extraordinary day!
[Featherstonehaugh-Cholmondeley]
It happened just the other day:
I saw someone in the well, who I was fairly sure was you,
Wearing yellow tie with tails, and that would never ever do
And I knew that my new calling was to make you lot anew,
On that extraordinary day.
[Together]
And it is now the very day
When we mean to square the circle and press onward without fear,
[F-C] To turn the savage multitude to proper English peers,
[Mutesa] To help the brown man bear his heavy burden with good cheer,
[F-C] On this
[Mutesa] Extraordinary
[Together] Day!
_______
[1] I imagined a score as I was writing, but feel free to imagine a different one.
W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, Mutesa, or The Baron of Mugungi (1908)
… By the 1890s, Gilbert and Sullivan’s partnership seemed on its last legs. Their famously stormy working relationship was strained to the breaking point, the two men quarreled frequently with each other and with their producer, and their final prewar collaboration, The Sultan’s Solicitor (1892) was not a critical success. The outbreak of the Great War early the following year made London society lose its appetite for light opera, and the creative partnership was suspended for the duration. Gilbert would spend the war years writing propaganda songs, most of them uninspired; Sullivan toured the German and Italian fronts with a military orchestra, receiving an experimental medical treatment in Berlin that he credited with partly restoring his health.
The postwar era would give their collaboration a new lease on life. The British middle class was ready to laugh at itself again, and the Age of Asquith, marked as it was by earnest reformism, the collapse of long-held social verities and the movement of workers and colonial peoples into public life, was tailor-made for Gilbert’s absurdist sense of humor. The acclaimed Downton Abbey (1901), with a bourgeois vicar as its comic hero, is widely seen as the beginning of Gilbert and Sullivan’s second golden age, which would end only with the latter’s sudden death of heart failure in early 1909…
… Mutesa is the penultimate Gilbert and Sullivan operetta (their final collaboration, Fortune’s Favor, opened shortly after Sullivan’s death), and lampoons Asquith’s Imperial Lords scheme of 1907. The premise is that, in order to make the House of Lords truly a parliament of the world, Asquith ennobles a thousand men at random from all corners of the earth, regardless of their prior station or even whether their homelands are part of the British Empire. Before long, the upper house is teeming with Chinese peasants, New Guinea cannibals, and worse yet, Americans.
Lord Featherstonehaugh-Cholmondeley, a viscount of ancient lineage whose family has fallen on hard times, decides to turn the situation to advantage by opening the Finishing School for the Newly Noble, which will teach the new peers to be properly British and lordly. He takes several other impecunious lords and a pair of maharajahs onto the faculty – the latter because “they’re better snobs than we could ever hope to be” – and opens for business.
Among the pupils is Mutesa, a recently-promoted baron from “Mugungi, a land in the darkest corner of Africa.” Mugungi is fictional, but the descriptions of it in the dialogue, as well as Mutesa’s name and his claim to profess all religions at once, strongly suggest the Great Lakes, which in contrast to the more familiar Niger Valley or Swahili coast, was still a place of legend to most Englishmen of the time. The Maharajah of Gangapur, who has put up much of the money to open the finishing school, bets Lord Featherstonehaugh-Cholmondeley a thousand pounds that he cannot make Mutesa presentable in time for the summer garden party at Buckingham Palace.
The rest of the operetta chronicles Mutesa’s bewilderment at the uncivilized customs of the English natives (as he calls them) and an increasingly frustrated Lord Featherstonehaugh-Cholmondeley’s attempts to mold him into a proper representative of the upper class. At last, Mutesa attends the garden party, and while his deportment is not remotely English, he charms the other guests, including Princess Eliza (described as being 109th in the line of succession to the throne, “right behind the palace grocer”). Both Featherstonehaugh-Cholmondeley and the maharajah claim to have won the bet, and when Eliza is called upon to arbitrate, she pronounces Mutesa “eminently presentable” and walks off on his arm.
“An Extraordinary Day,” one of the operetta’s better-known patter songs, is Mutesa’s debut in the libretto, and is sung as a duet between him and Featherstonehaugh-Cholmondeley when he arrives to enroll at the finishing school [1]…
The postwar era would give their collaboration a new lease on life. The British middle class was ready to laugh at itself again, and the Age of Asquith, marked as it was by earnest reformism, the collapse of long-held social verities and the movement of workers and colonial peoples into public life, was tailor-made for Gilbert’s absurdist sense of humor. The acclaimed Downton Abbey (1901), with a bourgeois vicar as its comic hero, is widely seen as the beginning of Gilbert and Sullivan’s second golden age, which would end only with the latter’s sudden death of heart failure in early 1909…
… Mutesa is the penultimate Gilbert and Sullivan operetta (their final collaboration, Fortune’s Favor, opened shortly after Sullivan’s death), and lampoons Asquith’s Imperial Lords scheme of 1907. The premise is that, in order to make the House of Lords truly a parliament of the world, Asquith ennobles a thousand men at random from all corners of the earth, regardless of their prior station or even whether their homelands are part of the British Empire. Before long, the upper house is teeming with Chinese peasants, New Guinea cannibals, and worse yet, Americans.
Lord Featherstonehaugh-Cholmondeley, a viscount of ancient lineage whose family has fallen on hard times, decides to turn the situation to advantage by opening the Finishing School for the Newly Noble, which will teach the new peers to be properly British and lordly. He takes several other impecunious lords and a pair of maharajahs onto the faculty – the latter because “they’re better snobs than we could ever hope to be” – and opens for business.
Among the pupils is Mutesa, a recently-promoted baron from “Mugungi, a land in the darkest corner of Africa.” Mugungi is fictional, but the descriptions of it in the dialogue, as well as Mutesa’s name and his claim to profess all religions at once, strongly suggest the Great Lakes, which in contrast to the more familiar Niger Valley or Swahili coast, was still a place of legend to most Englishmen of the time. The Maharajah of Gangapur, who has put up much of the money to open the finishing school, bets Lord Featherstonehaugh-Cholmondeley a thousand pounds that he cannot make Mutesa presentable in time for the summer garden party at Buckingham Palace.
The rest of the operetta chronicles Mutesa’s bewilderment at the uncivilized customs of the English natives (as he calls them) and an increasingly frustrated Lord Featherstonehaugh-Cholmondeley’s attempts to mold him into a proper representative of the upper class. At last, Mutesa attends the garden party, and while his deportment is not remotely English, he charms the other guests, including Princess Eliza (described as being 109th in the line of succession to the throne, “right behind the palace grocer”). Both Featherstonehaugh-Cholmondeley and the maharajah claim to have won the bet, and when Eliza is called upon to arbitrate, she pronounces Mutesa “eminently presentable” and walks off on his arm.
“An Extraordinary Day,” one of the operetta’s better-known patter songs, is Mutesa’s debut in the libretto, and is sung as a duet between him and Featherstonehaugh-Cholmondeley when he arrives to enroll at the finishing school [1]…
*******
[Mutesa]
It was a year ago today
I awakened with the sun and went to get my evening meal
‘Mid the rattle of the teapot and the cattle in the fields
But what an apparition did the morning light reveal
On that extraordinary day.
It was a demon gone astray
In a pith hat and a rosette, and he pushed in through the door
Knocking Gulu, Buddha, Jesus to keep comp’ny on the floor
And without a by-your-leave, he laid a paper down before
Me, on that extraordinary day.
Then he bowed in the English way,
Said “Rise, Sir Wog, and be a faithful servant to the Crown,
Rule well and guide us wisely, add to Edward Rex’ renown,”
And handed me a ticket, second-class, to London town,
On that extraordinary day!
[Featherstonehaugh-Cholmondeley]
It was a month ago today:
I was sitting in the club, cigar and sherry in my hand
A hard day’s debate behind me, and a hard night’s drinking planned,
When my peace was interrupted by a most uncanny man,
On that extraordinary day.
He’d been in the House that day,
Holding forth upon the Woolsack on his people’s use as feed,
And suggesting, much like Swift, that it would fill our people’s need,
And the wonder of it all was that the Tories all agreed,
On that extraordinary day.
Before the waiter had his say,
He’d built himself a bonfire just as pretty as you please
And he set a kid to roasting while he munched a Stilton cheese,
And asked where the House of Ladies was, so he could take his ease,
On that extraordinary day!
[Mutesa]
It was a week ago today,
That I’d planned a pleasant dinner with the member from West Fife,
Bought a stick of suya for him in the Garden, on my life,
But still he wouldn’t eat it, as I gave him the wrong knife,
On that extraordinary day.
I’d hoped he’d help me win the day
On my bill to merge the churches and end all religious fights,
But I broke his native taboo and he huffed out of my sight:
I could never guide these natives ‘less I learned their ways aright,
On that extraordinary day!
[Featherstonehaugh-Cholmondeley]
It happened just the other day:
I saw someone in the well, who I was fairly sure was you,
Wearing yellow tie with tails, and that would never ever do
And I knew that my new calling was to make you lot anew,
On that extraordinary day.
[Together]
And it is now the very day
When we mean to square the circle and press onward without fear,
[F-C] To turn the savage multitude to proper English peers,
[Mutesa] To help the brown man bear his heavy burden with good cheer,
[F-C] On this
[Mutesa] Extraordinary
[Together] Day!
_______
[1] I imagined a score as I was writing, but feel free to imagine a different one.
Faeelin
Banned
Canada is going to be talking to the US, sorry everyone. It's the major Canadian trading partner; and even in OTL's Depression, when Britain wasn't a mustache twirling evil regime, the Canadians turned to the US instead of Britain.
Just a few short comments.
1. With Britain doing so bad, it seems a lot of British workers would be looking to emigrate. Of course the recession is global, which somewhat limits options, but if Britain is doing worse than anywhere else, presumably nearly anywhere else would be better as well. There's nothing like a British diaspora IOTL, so it seems like this would have interesting butterflies indeed.
2. I wonder what the effect of the Legion and its more progressive offshoots is having within the U.S.? I could see a delayed acceptance of Catholicism by several decades, since anti-papists would kind of have some evidence to show in this world that Catholics really do hold the Pope above the state.
1. With Britain doing so bad, it seems a lot of British workers would be looking to emigrate. Of course the recession is global, which somewhat limits options, but if Britain is doing worse than anywhere else, presumably nearly anywhere else would be better as well. There's nothing like a British diaspora IOTL, so it seems like this would have interesting butterflies indeed.
2. I wonder what the effect of the Legion and its more progressive offshoots is having within the U.S.? I could see a delayed acceptance of Catholicism by several decades, since anti-papists would kind of have some evidence to show in this world that Catholics really do hold the Pope above the state.
Bravo!
Oh, other question- I'm sure this has been covered, but I've forgotten how Victoria and Albert's life was changed in this timeline. I'm asking just because if there's a "King Albert" then she mustn't have put her famous prohibition in place of that name ever being used for a monarch.
Oh, other question- I'm sure this has been covered, but I've forgotten how Victoria and Albert's life was changed in this timeline. I'm asking just because if there's a "King Albert" then she mustn't have put her famous prohibition in place of that name ever being used for a monarch.
A wonderful and entertaining update. I needed that, thank you.
Thanks! The literary ones are always fun to write. And if the plot seems like a cross between Iolanthe and Shaw's Pygmalion, remember that the first British Pygmalion play was Gilbert's.
On second thought, though, I think the first line of each verse needs to be repeated.
They'll certainly talk to the US - they'll talk to everyone they can. They still won't want to be an American appendage, though, so they'll keep all options open.
I'd guess that a lot of the emigration would be to the dominions, which may or may not count as a British diaspora in OTL. Aside from that, the most likely destination would be the United States, which speaks English and has a reasonably accessible culture; here, there probably would be an identifiable British diaspora that's distinct from the established Anglo-Saxon elite. Maybe the elite would view the British immigrants the same way that middle-class German Jews in the United States of OTL viewed their poor cousins from eastern Europe.
There's also the possibility of British workers braving the language barrier to find jobs in the oil fields of Venezuela or even the Ottoman Empire, both of which will be going concerns by the end of the 1910s. I'm not sure how many would do this, but it would be interesting to have a distinct British working-class community in Mosul or Caracas. There's also Brazil and Patagonia, which still have frontiers, but again I'm not sure how many would go to a non-English-speaking country, and urban workers wouldn't have frontier skills.
Definitely. This won't make a difference in states where Catholics are the majority, and the national parties won't be able to ignore them, so plenty of Catholic governors and congressmen, but it might sink any Catholic presidential candidate for the time being. On the other hand, with so many emerging Catholic political movements, the Catholic vote wouldn't be monolithic and various parties will see sections of the Catholic population as important allies.
Albert's life wasn't much changed at all: he still died in 1861. Victoria went to an earlier grave due to the stresses of the Great War, and maybe the war changed her sense of historical memory to the point where she rescinded the prohibition. Or maybe Albert (all the male grandchildren had Albert in their names somewhere, didn't they?) decided that he would honor his grandfather's memory in his own way, and his grandmother's wishes be damned.
That's possibly my favourite rationale behind a flag design ever - right there with Botswana's blue-grey colour to represent rain.
It's worth pointing out, even in OTL, that Victoria herself wanted her son to ascend the throne as Albert Edward, and George VI was styled 'His Highness Prince Albert of York' in his youth. The prohibition on the name seems to be more the choice of the various Alberts themselves than any decree by Victoria.
To be fair, I haven't seen anything that says she didn't make such a moratorium - it's certainly a prevalent pop-historical belief either way. It's entirely possible OTL's Albert Victor would've styled himself 'King Albert' had he ascended the throne.
On which note, how closely related is TTL's King Albert to OTL's Albert Victor? I can't recall if Edward VII took the same spouse as OTL...
The reason you can't recall is that I never said. King Albert would be Albert Victor's brother if Edward married Alexandra, and half-brother if he married a princess from Germany or one of the Low Countries (or maybe Russia?) instead. Heads Alexandra, tails not... all right, it's Alexandra, and there's no particular reason for it not to be, so brother Albert is.
If there were a black actor readily available, they might have used him; otherwise, the times being what they were, Mutesa probably looked about as African as the original Mikado cast looked Japanese.
I was wondering if anyone would notice that.
I'm now picturing an Alt-Topsy-Turvy set against a backdrop of rising tension, with hints of the Imperials slowly rising.... Cabaret with the Major-General.
It occurs to me that Harry Flashman is now far too old to be involved in this violence, doubtless much to his happiness- he was born in 1822, I believe- but I do hope there's some roguish soldier of fortune to pick up his baton.
Actually, for some reason I'm picturing this timeline's version of D'annunzio as the Italian charge d'affaires in Calcutta when everything goes to hell....
Oh, and do you think Joseph Conrad has a great novel left about the Imperial's Britain and their Empire before he goes?
It occurs to me that Harry Flashman is now far too old to be involved in this violence, doubtless much to his happiness- he was born in 1822, I believe- but I do hope there's some roguish soldier of fortune to pick up his baton.
Actually, for some reason I'm picturing this timeline's version of D'annunzio as the Italian charge d'affaires in Calcutta when everything goes to hell....
Oh, and do you think Joseph Conrad has a great novel left about the Imperial's Britain and their Empire before he goes?
Yes. He looked down on the entire world, but he looked down on most of his countrymen too. And he had no time for policies that made the empire more likely to try and kill him.
I expect that if they try to drag him out of retirement at the age of ninety plus he stages a bout of senility...
I expect that if they try to drag him out of retirement at the age of ninety plus he stages a bout of senility...
Also he knows enough about India to know that the Imperials would be the absolute worst choice to run the place.