Chapter 13
The Separate-verse was a world on the brink in the early years of the 20th century.
The old alliances of the Last Crusade- still shaped by the French Revolutionary Wars and reactionary fears of enlightenment transformation- had largely broken down and realigned themselves in accordance to the principles of self-interest instead of religion or ideology. With the Russian colossus sitting astride Asia and threatening British India, British had broken its ties with Moscow. London was joined by Berlin and Athens, both of whom were terrified of Russian dominance over Eastern Europe, on top of which the (now-federalized) German Confederation was also quite happy with Britain for letting it acquire Hannover through referendum, and Rhomania had revanchist claims over Russian Constantinople. Forced to pick between Italy and Austria in the ongoing territorial dispute over Venice France picked Italy, driving Austria and Bavaria into British arms as well as they sought protection from Russia and France. Portugal remained allied to Britain as it always had been, and Spain under the absolutist regime of Ferdinand IX committed itself to brotherhood with the coalition that would in time dub itself the Central Powers.
Standing opposite the Central Powers was the Entente, an alliance centered around a deal with the devil.
Increasingly surrounded by enemies, France and Italy had been forced to look for whatever friends they could find. America was always a reliable ally (it was the Franco-American Entente that lent its name to the alliance), but it was questionable what help the United States could actually give France in a European conflict- they hadn’t been any real help in the Last Crusade after all- and so Paris was forced to cast its gaze further afield. There was only one other major power that Britain feared, and neither France nor Italy shared a border with it. But the brutal and totalitarian government of Czarist Russia was deeply unpopular in Republican France and the Italians loathed Russia for its victory in the Last Crusade. Even worse American and Russian influence was colliding in East Asia where America’s ally Japan was fomenting resistance and Pan-Asianism in Korea and Russian-ruled Manchuria, putting France’s most powerful friend at odds with Britain’s most dangerous enemy. Realpolitik came first however, and despite their mutual hatred Paris and Moscow engaged in secret negotiations over a hidden alliance against a common foe.
Scandinavia sat in an uncomfortably neutral position, sharing a long land border with Russia and a mutual hostility with Britain’s ally Germany.
Flag of the United Kingdoms of Scandinavia
Tensions between the different power blocs remained high. There was an ongoing naval race as France and the United States sank increasing portions of their national budgets into trying to build fleets capable of taking on the Royal Navy, and Britain invested more and more resources into trying to maintain its advantage.
Dreadnaughts had first begun appearing in the 1880s, and by the 20th century huge
Super-Dreadnaughts were central to most naval strategies. All of the major powers had vast dirigible air fleets inspired by the example of the fire-bombing of Berlin, intended to devastate enemy cities from the air with incendiary bombs. The effectiveness of gas in winning the Last Crusade for Britain motivated an international obsession with chemical weapons- TTL’s version of the Geneva Convention (signed in Stockholm) laid out rules for treating captured soldiers, rights for POWs, and protections for civilians, but there were no internationally agreed upon regulations to what sort of weapons a country could use in battle. It was clear to most observers that the great powers all expected another major war and were preparing to fight it- their preparations inevitably increasing the likelihood of such a conflict.
Short victorious wars by the great powers against smaller countries only increased the sense in their nations that war could be made easy and victorious. These included the American
conquest and annexation of Honduras and
Nicaragua (even if protracted guerilla resistance continued in both countries), the Franco-Dutch War of 1901 when the Netherlands tried to reassert its independence from France, the Second Russo-Persian War, the First Sino-Japanese War, the South Atlantic War between Britain and La Plata, and the Police Action by Britain against its own Dominion of Jamaica. France wanted to redeem the disgrace of its defeat in the Last Crusade and remembered how it had been winning up until the point when it started losing, the new generation among the military leadership of Britain, Germany and Russia wanted to win the glory that their predecessors had. America wanted to complete Manifest Destiny with the unification of North America and was already engaged in the undeclared “Klondike War” after the
discovery of gold in isolated parts of Russian Alaska where the Russian government had little to no control spurred a mass influx of American prospectors.
American prospectors heading into the Klondike region. The Americans in the area would form the "Provisional Government of Alaska", treated as a domestic insurrection by the Russian Empire and the recipient of private aid from American citizens.
In Paris military analysts planned out contingencies and were optimistic. If they could keep America and Russia away from each other’s throats then they could bring three of the world’s great powers together against Britain and a Germany considered to be the least of the great powers. Still, they worried that it wouldn’t be enough. The British Empire was unquestionably the strongest country in the world, with dominions on every continent save Antarctica and near total control of two continents. It had over 507 million inhabitants- counting British dominions and protectorates- or 29% of the world’s population. Many British dominions were industrialized, capable of contributing large armies to any war effort that they could keep armed, fed, and supplied. By comparison there were only about 40 million Frenchmen and 105 million Americans (counting around 9 million Hispanophones who spoke no English and probably didn’t consider themselves Americans, but not the 8 million inhabitants of America’s Filipino protectorate), making Russia an essential ally if they were to have a chance at winning.
What wasn’t immediately obvious to the planners in Paris was that the British Empire was deeply sick.
Britain had cultivated an assemblage of autonomous dominions to administer different parts of the Empire in its name. This allowed most of the expenses of imperialism to be shuffled off onto the dominion governments, while the profits- in the form of cheap raw materials and markets within which to sell British goods- remained in British hands. This ensured that there was a large positive flow of wealth from the Empire back to the British Isles, making many Britons very rich and supporting one of the world’s largest economies.
Is it any wonder that so many Britons were willing to overlook colonial abuses in Drakia or India or the East Indies for so long?
Bondsmen who had attempted to escape doing penal labor.
But the problem was that the dominions themselves did not benefit from this system. They bore most of the costs of the Empire but reaped few of the rewards. Industry that had been permitted to exist for purely military purposes had flowered into general production of goods that put colonial economies in direct competition with British producers. The elected governments of the dominions began pushing for economic policies that would better serve their own constituents and resented it when the Parliament in London vetoed such policies in the interests of maintaining British profits. Initially most of the discontent was limited to the majority-ruled dominions- Newfoundland, Australia, New Zealand, the Bahamas, and a few other places- which weren’t as afraid of ‘vengeful native hordes rising against their white superiors’ as dominions such as Drakia and India who were more loyal. But democratic reforms in the United Kingdom in the 1860s alienated many in the minority-ruled dominions (particularly Drakia) and growing calls from within the British reform movement for changes to colonial policy left many in those dominions deeply concerned. There were elements within the British Liberals who sympathized with American Fascism- a fact that white minorities found terrifying- and the willingness by Drakia and other such dominions to tolerate British economic dominance waned.
By the 20th century Britain was embroiled in political and economic controversy with its dominions- whether majority or minority-ruled- going so far as to intervene in Jamaica militarily when the government there began enforcing laws that it had passed but London had vetoed. The conflict with Jamaica would pale however, next to the controversy over Drakia.
The Firstborn Dominion had always been unusually autonomous for a dominion, and while it had a history of London needing to step in to make it fall in line- banning slavery being one of the more obvious examples- it generally got away with acting independently. Therefore, it was with considerable shock that Drakia greeted a set of mandatory reforms to the Bonded Labor System imposed by London in 1900. The changes were minor- an attempt to limit the interest rates on labor bonds to make it easier for Bondsmen to earn their freedom- and not terribly difficult to circumvent. But it sparked considerable outrage purely for the principle of the thing- rationalization of the Bonded Labor System had driven many Drakians to regard it as central to their national culture (not unlike many Southerners and slavery in the United States before the Civil War) and many considered an attack on it as an attack on themselves. The vociferous response from Drakia briefly quieted things down as the British government- which had not expected to face such opposition- stepped down pressure on the dominion.
But that only lasted until
Black Lamb’s Blood.
Premier William Nisbet of Drakia rallying in opposition to Britain's demands that the dominion reform its system of labor.
Black Lamb’s Blood was a book written as an expose of the Bonded Labor System. Its author- Adam Schonland- was himself a white Drakian with aristocratic family ties and a veteran of the Drakian Army who had managed Bondsmen after the end of his military service and received an inside look at how the system worked. Disgusted with Bonded labor and with himself for aiding and abetting the system, Schonland composed his book in order to lend strength to calls for change. Initially he tried to publish it in Britain, but pressure not to rock the boat prompted the author to bring
Black Lamb’s Blood to Copenhagen where it was picked up by a Scandinavian publishing house. The book offered an unflinching description of physical and sexual abuse within the system and the use of actively illegal bookkeeping to keep families in debt for generations. It stressed how many of the Bonded were Christians of one kind or another, and of how rights that they had been legally granted were violated casually and often. The result was an unprecedented international outcry. There had already been overseas organizations calling for an end to Bonded Labor in Drakia, now their numbers and membership swelled massively. Heads of state around the world spoke out against Bonded Labor, the Pope condemned it in an encyclical, boycotts of Drakian products were implemented, and Parliament launched an investigation.
Among the many Drakian letters, articles, books, and opinion pieces written in defense of Bonded Labor were a series of essays by a previously unknown young woman named Elvira Naldorssen that would be published in book form the following year. Under the title
I Grant You Dominion Over Them she drew on arguments from classical philosophy, the Christian Bible, and modern Eugenic theories to argue that the natural state of human society was a hierarchical one in which moral, cultural, and physical superiors ruled over inferiors for their own good. Most of what was presented as Christian Morality in the modern day, Naldorssen asserted, had in fact been invented by the weak and the immoral as part of an ideology of “handicapping” to allow them to control the moral and the strong.
Dominion claimed that god really wanted was superior humans assuming a “custodial” role over their inferiors, not superiors “elevating” their inferiors (an oxymoron according her) to a destructive role in governance. As tempting as it is to say that her version of divinely mandated morality was radically new, the truth is that much of it consisted of the same justifications traditionally used to justify the rule of conquerors over the conquered, repackaged for a modern audience.
Greater attention towards the abuses of the BLS led to revelations over the nature of Drakia’s Euthanasia Program. “Mercy killing” the disabled had a surprising number of defenders even in countries like France and America, but the sheer size of the program and the number of victims who were children horrified the overwhelming majority of people. Even many Drakians expressed misgivings over the magnitude of the program, although their criticism focused on the treatment of disabled white children as opposed to those of the Natives. It became politically impossible for His Majesty’s Government to do anything other than order Drakia to abandon its Euthanasia Program and dissolve the Bonded Labor System, while for the government of Premier William Nisbet any concessions beyond minor changes to the Euthanasia Program were unacceptable to the clear majority of Drakian voters. As it was only the outbreak of the World War temporarily saved British Imperial unity.
White children subjected to Euthanasia as part of Drakian Eugenic policies.
August 1, 1907 was a hot day in Jerusalem. The holy city was unusually restive- even for the era of conflicted and ineffective governance that had begun with the creation of the Tripartite Commission of the Holy Land. Crime was on the rise and public order plagued by minor outbreaks of violence between the Muslim and Christian communities and between different types of Christians. Both groups targeted the Jews. Despite its increasingly inability to govern (the Russians vetoed anything the British and the Germans introduced, the British and the Germans vetoed anything the Russians proposed) the Commission had maintained policies designed to push Muslims into converting to Christianity while continuing a project to establish a non-denominational Christian Cathedral in
Solomon’s Stables. Meanwhile Russia had adopted a practice of bringing in large numbers of Russian Orthodox settlers to strengthen its claim on Holy Land, leading to a similar German settlement project in retaliation. The influx of new Christian immigrants (and to a lesser extent Jewish Zionists) plus the aforementioned policies, had badly incensed the region’s Muslim majority, while putting the Christians themselves at each other’s throats. Everyone knew that violence was imminent, the only question was what would trigger it.
Last time it was a ladder, this time things started with a chair.
Nekrestyanov Petr Petrovich, a Russian Orthodox monk making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, was praying in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher when he decided to move his chair a few feet out of the summer sun and into the shade. In doing so he inadvertently moved into a formerly Catholic part of the church that had been transferred over to the control of the Anglican Church in 1855. Interpreting this as a hostile act designed to expand Orthodox control over the CHS in violation of the restored Status Quo, a group of Anglican clergy marched down and forcibly removed Petrovich, precipitating a general riot between Protestant and Orthodox faithful. When word of the riot reached Lord Addison Monaghan (the British High Commissioner for the Holy Land and all-around religious firebrand), Monaghan dispatched soldiers from the British garrison to protect the Anglicans and arrest Petrovich for starting the fight. What they found were soldiers from the Russian garrison sent by Count Tsyrinsky Lavr Fyodorovich (the Russian High Commissioner for the Holy Land) to protect the Orthodox and arrest the Anglican clergy who had tried to expel Petrovich for starting the riot. One thing led to another and soon you had Russian and British troops shooting at each other in the middle of Jerusalem- the crisis compounded when an attempt by a squad of British soldiers to fire down on the Russians from inside the
Mosque of Omar proved the spark for a general Muslim revolt.
For the British government this could not have come at a better time- and “better” isn’t a typo. War offered a valid excuse to put off dealing with the question of Drakian reform and the presence of external enemies was an excellent means to enforce unity among the Empire’s dominions. Besides London was legitimately concerned about the size and power of the Russian Empire that had absorbed most of Asia and threatened Britain’s own Asian colonies. Thus the diplomatic crisis was permitted to spiral into unacceptable ultimatums and the world once more stepped off the edge into madness.
I'm thinking that we'll just have every global conflict in this timeline start with someone doing something with an article of furniture in Jerusalem.
