Map (and Book) Challenge

I was jotting down some notes for a long-term project of mine, and thought it would be fun to see if anyone could guess anywhere near the TL's actual content.

First off: A map of Britannia and her dependencies, circa 1985. Borders are absent for cartographic reasons, not due to world-states. Do not be alarmed by the absence of Lake Baikal - it wasn't on the original, and placing it correctly in Siberia.... No.

British_Overseas_Smallest.png
 
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More to the point:

The table of contents of the popular history Perpetual Distraction: Policy in Early Modern Britain, by Domitille de Buttet. Published in 1983 by the University of London Press, Cardiff, it was derided by professional historians as largely oversimplistic and derivative, but was commercially successful both in Britain and world wide.

Inscribed just inside the cover is a single sentence.

"All politics is local."



Table of Contents
Foreword
Chapter 1: Perpetual Distraction: Policy in Early Modern Britain.
Chapter 2: After Agincourt.
Chapter 3: 1763-1773 The Lonely Island: England Astride the World.
Chapter 4: 1773-1781 The American Problem.
Chapter 5: 1783-1794 Reframing of Empire.
Chapter 6: 1794-1805 Revolution and Reaction.
Chapter 7: 1806-1823 The Cultist Wars.
Chapter 8: 1823-1852 Shadow of the Hegemon.
Chapter 9: 1852-1868 The Great Game.
Chapter 10: 1868-1879 Pax Britannia.
Chapter 11: 1879-1889 Conqueror and Captive: The Third Scramble.
Chapter 12: 1890-1906 A Third Alliance.
Chapter 13: 1908-1915 La Belle Époque.
Chapter 14: 1915-1920 Entente.
Chapter 15: 1920-1940 Status Quo, Ante Bellum.
Chapter 16: 1941-1946 Total War.
Chapter 17: 1945-1963 Friends Like These.
Chapter 18: 1963-1969 Reconstruction and The Empty Handed War
Chapter 19: 1969-present New World Order.
Chapter 20: Conclusions.
Acknowledgements.
Appendix A
Appendix B
Appendix C
Index

Note: The 1985 edition combined chapters 9 and 10 into a single whole, titled "Pax Britannia and The Great Game."
 
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Going more by the dates in the chapter titles than anything else, I think the POD is in the late 18th century. Either

1) The French Revolution is delayed a few years, or
2) It sparks a revolution in Britain.

By the way, what happened to 1782?
 
I smell a lack of butterflies.

On the map or the book?

The map is a fair point - I decided there was only so much of my weekend I wanted to put in, and you can feel that in the Caribbean and some of the lakes.

I guess you could take the same from the little information given, but it's more a matter of superficial convergence. The butterflies are legion, if admittedly hidden. It's a goal-oriented, rather than POD-oriented TL, so that's unfortunately inevitable.

What you see is the most convergent parts of the whole, honestly: the dates. The closest thing this world has to WWI overlaps temporally with ours, for example. But that war takes place between a different set of nations with divergent cultures, economies, and demographics, starts for different reasons, and is fought differently due to alternate preceding wars and technological development.
 
Going more by the dates in the chapter titles than anything else, I think the POD is in the late 18th century. Either

1) The French Revolution is delayed a few years, or
2) It sparks a revolution in Britain.

[DELIBERATELYOBSCURE]At least one of those is mostly true.[/DELIBERATELYOBSCURE]

By the way, what happened to 1782?

It's a book about periods in which the British political classes, and later the British public, were distracted from the "big picture" by more immediate concerns. The author chose to divide it by those distractions, which don't always line up, and in reality overlapped substantially. See chapters 16 and 17, for example.
 
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