No British Empire

I am looking for events which would lead to the British having no real Empire (except for Ireland).

The most obvious way of removing the Empire seems to be a reversal of fortune in the Seven Years War, with France coming out on top rather than UK.

Can you think of other, perhapse more subtle?

Thanks
 
Hm, a situation where there is no British Empire, but England is able to control Ireland (what about Scotland? Or Wales for that matter?)

I'm assuming some timeline where England collapses as a state is going too far.
 
England loses badly to the Dutch in the Anglo Dutch Wars and never gains naval supremacy over the French / Spanish / Dutch. Would be helped by a Stuart continuation and cosying up to France as junior partner in an alliance.
 
I think a good way might be a succesful Armada. Spain invades England, fights a war to conquer it, installs a puppet ruler, but because of the general unrest leaves an occupation force and remains involved in England for the next couple of decades. When things in England stabilises, it has missed its window of colonial oppertunity and it place has been taken over by the Dutch (who profitted from Spain being distracted in England), the French, the Portuguese and slightly less the Danish and Swedish.
 
That all depends on how you define "empire". ;)

If you mean "no crown colonies", then you could just as easily have everything controlled by corporations and so on.

Or you could do it the LTTW way, where there is no entity that is formally known as a "British Empire" - instead, it is the Hanoverian Dominions, which is predominately a bunch of states in personal-union with each other, with (currently) a bunch of colonies here and there. You could just end up either loosing them or intergrating them outright into the other "Dominions".
 

Thande

Donor
No Glorious Revolution and continued minor civil wars under a Stuart dynasty would get rid of most of it. Which is basically what happened in Tony Jones' Puritan World (barring the PC itself of course). There is what AE said but I get the impression that's not what the OP meant.
 
What if During the ARW, the British suffer a even stronger defeat then they did OTL. I.e. they lose all of their colonies in the America's and lose their foothold in India. You can't really call the British an Empire if they don't have ether of those.
 
What if During the ARW, the British suffer a even stronger defeat then they did OTL. I.e. they lose all of their colonies in the America's and lose their foothold in India. You can't really call the British an Empire if they don't have ether of those.

I think the British Empire suffering the loss of its entire Empire in one go is probably pushing it - by and large European diplomats knew when enough was enough in this period and didn't like to utterly destroy their enemies, probably mostly for fear that the same would happen to them in retribution. On top of this, I don't think that in 1776 and beyond the French are in any position to take Britain's Indian holdings away.

I'd have to agree that the only real way this is likely to happen is if England turns into a stagnant European second-rate power, for instance the idea proposed where James II keeps the throne. I'm not convinced by the Spanish Armada idea for two reasons on opposite ends of the practicality scale: to be ultra-realistic, the Spanish Armada isn't far from being a 16th century Sea Mammal. It was simply never going to work. Case in point, Parma (who was due to march 24,000 men to Flanders to be the invasion army) simply refused to follow orders as he was so convinced it could never succeed, and marched off to fight the Dutch instead. On the other end, if we assume a POD where somehow the Armada succeeds, the result would not be an England under Spanish occupation in the long term (in the short term maybe but not long enough to ruin colonial plans) and the history of the Americas suggests that Hapsburg England would have to be in a diabolical mess to miss its window for colonising the Americas, since 100 years later the Dutch, Swedish and English were still trading control of relatively small parts of what would become New Jersey. 100 years plus is an awful long time for Spain to unintentionally keep England under a military occupation which prevents it from colonising - especially as the more likely alternative is that a Hapsburg King of England would after a generation or two after the Armada start to become very jealous of his Spanish brethren's Empire...Also you could argue that a Hapsburg England might imperil the very existence of the Dutch state, and at least could do an efficient job of cutting off its route to the Americas, meaning that you could potentially lose the most enterprising alternative coloniser of North America. You are essentially the left with France, who was never what you'd call lively at planting colonists.
 
Top