Plimoth Colony Retains its original borders

[VT45]

So I'm not sure how plausible it is or what would need to happen, but what would the world look like if the Plimoth Colony retained the claimed borders that the original charter prescribed, which are everything on the North American continent between the 40th and 48th parallels north? I'll post a map later tonight to give you a visualisation of what it'd look like.

 

[VT45]

Here's the map, with OTL borders:

 

[Umbric Man]

I mean.... New Plymouth was the starting point for the OTL Northern half of the USA and that's where OTL New Englanders and Mid-Atlantic-men and their westward descendants settled, if keeling down to take in Nebraska and most of the 37th parallel westward. You want to see what it's like, look at the OTL North in culture.

More seriously, that's the Plymouth/New England Council that had that claim, not Plymouth Colony in and of itself. The same NE-Council freely gave land to the Saybrook/Connecticut Company and Massachusetts Bay Company (before they got a royal charter for legality insurance), and proprietary-wise gave New Hampshire to John Mason, and Maine to Ferdinando Gorges.

 

[VT45]

Well I wouldn't expect a region this big to be a unitary authority.

Would it be possibly for the New England Council to give those land grants with the stipulation that they be subservient to Plymouth or the New England Council? Kind of like the formation of counties?

 

[Umbric Man]

Well I wouldn't expect a region this big to be a unitary authority.

Would it be possibly for the New England Council to give those land grants with the stipulation that they be subservient to Plymouth or the New England Council? Kind of like the formation of counties?

Certainly England probably would've liked that, but it never specified doing so, and the New Englander settlers felt kinship to one another and wouldn't be opposed in principle.. they started the NE Confederation, after all.

But there were just enough different quirks and goals that the separate colonies were ultimately set up for a reason, and seeing the Antimonian Controversy in Massachusetts kind of exemplifies why this was a good idea. Rhode Island was the weirdo tolerant one and exiler haven, New Plymothians were particularly inward-looking and commercial-minded, Massachusetts was the 800-ilb gorilla and quite Puritan, New Haven was full of rich and especially-commercialized zealots who could make MA colonists blink at their strictness, and Connecticut was the middle of the road when it came to all of this - to say nothing of New Hampshire and Maine nominally starting out as royalist-proprietary colonies (if swamped with Baymen and completely Puritanized in culture and government by the time Massachusetts annexed them anyway).

 

[VT45]

Ah! So maybe a stipulation for the granting of a charter is that all other colonies established in this region must send representatives to the New England Council in Plymouth? Thereby turning the entire northeast into a loose confederation under English rule via Plymouth?

And when I say loose confederation, I’m thinking like EU levels of integration, with maybe a common military as well.

 

[Umbric Man]

You can just have the New England Confederation survive in that case, although it'll obviously be kept in Boston as in OTL. Certainly you can make it a NE-Council stipulation in New Plymouth, but if you're butterfly-conservative just having the Confederation survive and both MA play nice while the other colonies accept the reality MA is the 800-ilb gorilla will do wonders for keeping New England more unified politically. Even Rhode Island will join a surviving New England Confederation in time, and very probably a once-more independent New Hampshire as well as the 17th century drags on.

 

[VT45]

And if the Canadian colonies are absorbed into the New England Confederation following a war with France as in OTL, all of a sudden we've got an absolute behemoth of a colony. No need to appeal to the Southern Colonies for help if they wanna have a revolution!

 

[Umbric Man]

And if the Canadian colonies are absorbed into the New England Confederation following a war with France as in OTL, all of a sudden we've got an absolute behemoth of a colony. No need to appeal to the Southern Colonies for help if they wanna have a revolution!

Nova Scotia and PEI yes, certainly, since they were part of MA's official claims and the first Anglos settled in the colony were the New England Planters. If these two colonies explicitly join a surviving Confederation, they'll probably tilt into the ARW in whatever form it takes, since the other colonies will officially back them and TRY to actually do so even if the distance and near-island/new colony status both have will make them an easy target for Britain, a northern version of Georgia as happened to that colony in OTL.

Newfoundland and Quebec were obviously different cultures as well as colonies, a la the Mid-Atlantic, Chesapeake, (Deep) Southern, etc.

 

[VT45]

True, but if the New England colonies were able to sway the Mid-Atlantic, ITTL New England could probably swing Newfoundland and Quebec.

Whether they'd win or not is another question.

 

[Carl Schwamberger]

Has potential to cut off New York from the Hudson river basin. It might be a expedition from this NE Confederation sizes Dutch New Amsterdam & it become part of the NEC ?