The Dead Skunk
December 23, 1829
Part 2: The Eastern Hemisphere
Fifteen years ago today, Major General John Keane saw something in the Louisiana woods that caused him to make a different decision than he otherwise would have.
Let’s take a look at the general state of the world.
Europe
We begin with the march of science, technology and engineering over the past fifteen years. Scientists have isolated the elements beryllium, lithium, titanium and zirconium, confirmed del Río’s original discovery of eritronium[1] and discovered flavium[2], raphanium[3], silicon, aluminium, ruthenium, alguine[4] and thorium. The connection between electric currents and magnetic fields has been found, and a number of people are trying to think of a practical way to send messages via electrical wire. In the city of Bruxelles, professional tailors and dressmakers are delighted by M. Thimonnier’s new machine, which allows them to do their work a lot faster without sacrificing quality. (They’ll be less delighted when the machine gets cheap enough that every housewife can afford one, costing them much of their business[5].) Charles Babbage, with financial support from the Crown via Henry Brougham, is at work on his “difference engine,” which will revolutionize the calculation of polynomial functions if he can just get the damn thing built. And of course, the United States is not the only nation working on the railroad all the live-long day — Britain and France are getting in on the act too.
One of the youngest scientists — Augusta Ada Byron, who prefers to be known as Ada — is currently working on… recovering from the croup, actually.[6] The 14-year-old (legitimate) daughter of Lord Byron may have been spending a little too much time outside on cold mornings bird-watching.
A lot of future historians are going to notice the parallels between Ada and Eleanor Beecher in America — girls of genius-level intelligence and respectable family who show an early interest in birds but go on to do somewhat different things. The difference is that in the case of Ada, it’s not the birds themselves that interest her, but the thing they do best — fly. She’s noticed that the bigger a bird is, and the farther it has to fly, the more time it will spend gliding rather than flying. She’s also noticed that almost no flying birds weigh more than three stone, and most weigh much, much less.
As for her living arrangements, Ada is living with her maternal grandmother and occasionally getting letters from Dad. (As a rule, Romantic poets and freedom fighters don’t make good fathers.) Her mother puts a lot of effort into looking like she cares, and that’s about all that can be said. Ada also corresponds in Italian with her half-sister Allegra, who’s almost thirteen and in the care of a girls’ school in northern Italy.
Of course, the young British lady everybody really wants to hear about is Queen Charlotte. With her on the throne and Grey in charge of Parliament, the Liberals and Radicals feel like kids on Christmas Eve — they don’t know exactly what they’re about to get, but they have a lot of ideas and a lot of hopes. Votes for everyone! (Or every man. Or every Christian man… with a certain amount of money.) No more rotten boroughs! Down with the truck system! Bring municipal government into the nineteenth century! And, of course, the abolition of slavery throughout the Empire — and while they’re at it, the sorting out of this business of handing freed slaves over to Cuba and Brazil.
(Queen Charlotte is also dealing with personal matters, mostly involving her father’s estate. While doing this, she found the letters from his various mistresses and Maria Fitzherbert — thousands of these letters. Rather than go through them herself, she had them all locked in strongboxes, with instructions that they be kept safe for the rest of her life and given to a university on the occasion of her death. One day, a long time in the future, historians will be in for a real treat. Also, she’s keeping her own chef — but to make it up to her father’s chef Marie-Antoine Carême, she’s helping him set up a club on Regent Street where the richest people in London can, literally, eat like a king.)
Give Wellington credit — some reforms have already happened and are even now bearing fruit. Robert Peel’s police reforms, for instance, are resulting in a massive increase in the number of criminals caught and convicted even as the crime rate declines slightly. Lots of people are nervous at the thought of the government taking even bigger steps. America fifty years ago, and France forty years ago, show what happens if you don’t reform in time. But France and Portugal today show what happens if you do enact reforms and not everybody’s on board with them.
And not all the Conservatives are old men. On a farm in southern Scotland with the comical name of Craigenputtock, Thomas Carlyle is translating German poetry, squabbling with his wife and grappling with his faith and his stomach ulcers. Queen Charlotte is also on his mind. He’s impressed as hell with the queen herself, but he isn’t so sure about her politics. How could a woman with the wit to outmaneuver the complacent aristocracy and her feckless father during the Caroline Affair make such a fuss over the conditions of slaves and the opinions of the rabble? He doesn’t get it. But this is definitely inspiring him to put more thought into the proper ordering of society.
In some parts of the British Isles, even radical opinion is mixed — specifically Ireland. The message Queen Charlotte sent with her appointments is very clear. On the one hand, she cares about Ireland and the Irish people and means to learn more about their needs and wants and do the best she can for them within the context of British rule. On the other hand, there’s no sign of any give whatsoever on that context. Nobody ever sent the Duke of Wellington anywhere as a show of weakness. The people of Ireland are aware that things have gotten better and have a good chance of getting better still if they don’t blow it by doing something crazy like demanding independence, but it still irritates them that their biggest hope is an Englishwoman of German descent being nice to them.
So their next step will be not quite a show of force, but something more than a polite request. Having succeeded at emancipation, the Catholic Association has a new goal, more manageable than independence — the abolition of the tithe. Irish farmers and farm workers are required to fund the Church of Ireland (read: Church of England) which few of them are members of. They’re about done with the tithe, and they have a new tactic in mind to fight it — rather than take up arms against it, they’ll just not pay it and let the state take up arms trying to collect it.
Now let’s move on to France… starting not in Paris, but in Anvers, where George Washington Adams is in town for Christmas. He’s been assigned to replace the U.S. ambassador to France, James Monroe, who died earlier this year just a few days after his wife.[7] This might not have been the best choice. George is the son of a former president, but he’s also prone to what future generations will call scotopathy[8] and echthrophrenia, and the woman he was courting (their cousin Mary Catherine Hellen) had chosen his younger brother, John Adams II. People were a little worried that he might do something… drastic if he didn’t get a change of scenery and something useful to do.[9] And just then the ambassadorial position opened up. So here he is. It wouldn’t cheer him up to learn that his brother has also won glory in the Sauk War… to the extent that a logistics officer can win glory.
It’s too bad G.W. got to France so late in the year. He missed the celebrations of the fortieth anniversary of the Revolution and the Paris wedding of Prince Napoleon and Adelaide-Louise Davout. Still, reading Alexandre Dumas’ superb description of these events in the
Moniteur makes him feel like he was there. Reading between the lines, he gathers that yes, Adelaide-Louise is quite young (fourteen, to be precise) but the Bonapartes really feel like they need some heirs as soon as possible.
G.W. should have moved on to the capital by now, but he can’t help lingering in Anvers and learning more about this city. There’s a reason the British didn’t want the city of Antwerp to fall in French hands. That port, connected by river, road and canal to all the markets of France, has become a mighty economic engine and the financial capital of the nation. There’s even a member of the royal family living in town — Marie-Louise, the prince’s mother, with her second husband Adam Albert von Neipperg and an embarrassingly large brood of morganatic children.[10] For the first time in who knows how long, France has a real second city — a possible rival to Paris.
But while Paris is the beating heart of French culture, Anvers is only kinda-sorta French. As he goes about the streets of the city, George hears Dutch spoken more often than French — not just from Flemings, but immigrants from the Netherlands. Then there are the other immigrants — Germans, Danes, Poles, Hungarians, Jews and so on — who only speak French so they can talk to each other.
What G.W. doesn’t see, in Anvers, is the civil war. Conservatives are seldom seen this far north, and royalists are never seen at all. There are some people trying to make trouble. William I of the Netherlands, for example, is calling on the Dutch and Flemings to join the rebels in rising up against French rule. He thinks of this as payback for what Talleyrand tried to do to him eleven years ago. Frederick William III is doing the same thing with Germans living in what the French call
le pouce mayençais.
These guys are not very good at this sort of thing. Their main accomplishment so far has been to piss off Metternich, who’s trying to govern the Austrian Empire and feels about nationalist propaganda the way the Scarecrow feels about arson. The Dutch and Germans living in France do in fact have family and friends in the Netherlands and Prussia — especially western Prussia. They already know all about these two kings. They might be tempted to secede to the Netherlands and Prussia if the rebels took Paris and declared Catholicism the only official religion, but right now, no thank you. They might be citizens of France, but at least they’re citizens, not subjects.
So Anvers is maybe not the best place to learn about the uprising. To the people here, the rebels in the west and south are backwoods yokels who’ve decided to sabotage their own nation for no apparent reason other than spite. And to G.W. himself, it can’t be —
can’t — that people who are in no degree related to the Bourbons or Bonapartes actually care which family rules France. That just doesn’t make any sense to his American mind. And the French people can’t possibly believe that being governed by a monarch is terrible if the monarch calls himself a “king,” but it’s awesome if he calls himself an “emperor.” This fight must really be about something else.
Here again, for a guy who writes for the Liberal Party’s house organ Dumas is quite helpful. Reading his stories, G.W. gets the sense that what the rebels actually want is the right to feel at home in their own country, to feel that France is simply a larger version of their own communities. Which is not a right, per se, just something that some people have sometimes and can easily get used to. And if they are seemingly fighting the last war, it’s because they lost that war and want another go.
And there’s something else, something that maybe only a neurotic outsider like G.W. could have picked up on this early — the royalists aren’t the only ones fighting the last war. The Jacobin Party, as forward-looking as it claims to be, has defined itself in opposition to the
ancien régime, which gets a little more
ancien every day. And at this particular moment, it looks like the party was right to do so. But the lower classes, on whose behalf the Jacobins are supposedly acting, have new problems that no one seems to be addressing. Some of the richest people in town are committed Jacobins, but they are as indifferent and exploitative towards the people who work in their mines, foundries, canneries and so on as any old-style nobleman could possibly be. One day, his gloomy mind thinks, this is going to be a problem.
But for now, France has a different problem. As of late December, de L’Eure’s government has reestablished control over the Vendée and is moving down the coast. The rebels have spread into the hills in the south of France, but haven’t managed to take any more towns. Bordeaux, where the whole thing began, is also under the control of the government, and the trial of the Causserouge 22 is underway under heavy guard.
The reason the rebellion isn’t having more success is the same reason it hasn’t been crushed yet — it’s disorganized. It is currently being led by… absolutely no one. It’s basically a bunch of armed men running around the woods and hills, striking out at anything that looks like a good target. This makes it a lot harder to suppress than something more organized. Harder, but not impossible — the National Guard cut its teeth fighting brigands back when it was the
maréchaussée, and the only difference between brigandage and guerrilla warfare is that guerrilla warfare doesn’t have to turn a profit.
There are units of the National Guard that are basically
fédérés in new uniforms, only too happy to hunt down their political foes with the blessing of the state. One of these is an artillery unit commanded by Évariste Galois, a political radical and mathematical prodigy who tried to get into the École Polytechnique earlier this year, but failed the oral test because he’s much better at doing math than explaining it. When he heard about the rebellion, he dropped everything else, got some of his radical friends together and joined the Guard. There’s a limit to how much precision you can achieve with shrapnel shells, and Galois’ unit is right up against it.
The war isn’t over, but it seems clear enough how it will end. The Conservative Party was split by the rebellion, with Hervé Clérel Comte de Tocqueville and Jules Bonnin de la Bonninière Comte de Beaumont leading those who denounce the violence and accept the authority of Paris. The two Comtes are horrified at the schism, which they see as a disaster for conservatism, rural interests and France in general. They’re the ones who are going to have to rebuild the party after this mess is over.
Their respective sons Alexis and Gustave, both law students (and, embarrassingly for the old men, both Liberals) are equally unhappy and takes an even broader view of things. As they discuss the situation, it seems to them that nobody in France is into small-l liberalism for its own sake. Nobody seems to actually like the idea of sharing power with people of different background and outlook because the nation will be better represented and better governed that way. The Conservatives think they should be the only ones with a say because they are the True Soul of France. The Jacobins think they should be the only ones with a say because they are the Voice of the Future. And the Liberals think they should be the only ones with a say because Seriously, have you Looked at the Other Guys?
To the Liberals, political pluralism is a reluctant acknowledgement that in a nation with as many diverse viewpoints as France, you can’t make everybody happy. And when you’ve got a left-wing nut saying “kill the priests and rape the nuns” and a right-wing nut saying “drive the Jews into the sea” you don’t
want to make everybody happy. What you want is to start in the center and work your way outward, building up a circle of mutual toleration until it’s big enough and strong enough to stand against the attacks of those who would break it — or better yet, big and strong enough to intimidate them into not attacking in the first place. That has been the Liberal Party’s approach to governing, and it’s being tested like it hasn’t been tested since the smoke cleared at Nancy.
Still, it’s not like France is a hotbed of political repression. The best-selling novel in Paris is
Les Gendarmes, by an up-and-coming young writer named Honoré de Balzac, about a young police officer, a
fédéré and a secret police officer who all fall in love with the same woman and go to great lengths to win her heart. There’s a lot in this novel for a patriotic Frenchman to like — one of the comic-relief characters, for instance, is the bungling British spy Sir James Blond, who tries to function as a secret agent despite introducing himself by name to everyone he meets and is frequently ensnared in the schemes of the three suitors, to chaotic effect. Nonetheless, the novel pokes fun at the French government, institutions and society in a way that you wouldn’t get away with in the Netherlands, Prussia or Austria.
And France’s woes don’t look so bad from the point of view of Portugal. The Pedrists control the city of Porto and much of the north, but are having trouble expanding further south. As for the Miguelists, even though they started this whole thing by taking Lisbon, that’s also the one place they can’t hold. A big chunk of the capital has declared for Pedro, set up barricades in the streets and is up there waving flags and singing songs and generally providing good material for future epic novels and musicals. And they’ve got access to the sea, so Miguel can’t starve them out or cut off their supply of ammunition and gunpowder. The Miguelist navy tried to cordon off the harbor, and got ambushed and defeated by the Pedrist navy. Right now, the war could go either way.
And all Europe knows it. France and Italy are providing a little assistance to the Pedroists. Earl Grey is planning on providing them with a lot more assistance. As for Spain… do not mention this war in Spain anywhere unless you want to start a brawl. Especially not in the government itself, where the split between liberals and conservatives is mirrored by the Constitution and Tradition parties.
The second most controversial situation in Spain is… also a war. The war in Hispaniola is getting harder and harder to pay for, but conservatives don’t want to end it without a victory and liberals don’t want to get blamed for a defeat. And nobody can figure out why Morocco went down with one punch and the Haitians are still fighting. (The answer is (a) in Morocco they left the Sultan in charge, and (b) that Sultan was smart enough to realize that when six powerful nations that are supposed to be at cross-purposes with each other have united for the purpose of descending upon you in wrath, it’s no time to be a hero.)
There are other matters troubling the Spaniards. A couple of years ago there was an attempt at education reform involving uniform standards of literacy, mathematical aptitude, historical knowledge and so on. This might seem like a good idea, until you realize that uniform standards of literacy dodges the question of which language everybody is supposed to be literate in. Spain has more than one, and the people who speak the other languages — the Catalans and Basques — were already pretty sore over the loss of the
fueros. The Cortes scrapped this plan when they realized they were in danger of provoking an actual civil war, but it’s still left a lot of resentment towards the capital and the Constitutionalists.
In Italy, it is a time of unexpected change. King Joachim has died at the age of 62, and Prime Minister Buonarroti (who just turned 68) has announced his retirement, but his intended successor, Ugo Foscolo, died unexpectedly earlier this year[11]. (And while we’re on the subject, Ali I, Sultan of Albania, also died this year at the age of 89, leaving the throne to his son Muhtar.[12] 1829 is turning out to be a regular 2016.) So a new election was held, and, with the blessing of King Achille, Silvio Pellico is putting together a new governing coalition. The good news is that this election has given the voters of Sicily their first chance to participate in the Italian government.
The past decade has been good to Italy, and Terni in particular has been growing furiously. But Henry Hungerford, a rich young man living the gay life (in both senses) touring the capitals of Europe, finds the city to be a real letdown. The old part of the city has been half-gutted, and the rest of it looks like a cross between a factory town and a construction site. Surely a land as beautiful as Italy can do better than this? (He is, perhaps, being too harsh. Italy is full of picturesque old cities. Terni is new, and kind of ugly, but it works. And everyone knows what the ugly duckling grew up to be.)
Since the peace that gave Greece its independence left Macedonia, Thrace and Thessaly in Ottoman hands, you might be wondering if Greece is planning to take advantage of the situation in order to get some more of its own back. The answer is no, because Greece is only slightly more united at this point than the Ottomans are. The level of antigovernment violence that in France is considered a state of rebellion has been going on in Greece, to one degree or another, since independence and for a long time before the rebellion ever broke out. King Paul has a pleasant little court around him and is presiding over a revival of Greek art and literature, but, once you get outside Athens, not a great revival of law and order. Even Kapodistrias can’t do much about the situation, because parts of the army and navy that won Greece’s independence are more loyal to local lords, merchants and sheep-thieves than they are to the government.
Meanwhile, in Rome, Pope Pius IX has — you guessed it — died. A Papal Conclave has selected Emmanuele de Gregorio, who has chosen the name of Clement XV. (One side effect of Papal government being confined to the city itself is that the Jewish population of the city has migrated out — either just beyond the city borders, or to Terni. In Italy they are not legally required to go around in public wearing yellow hats or scarves.)
Austria has prospered over the past decade, seeing the growth of commerce and industry and the rise of the middle class in both numbers and wealth. The cities and towns of the Dalmatian coast are doing especially well, since they’re Austria’s only access to the sea with Venice gone. This has been Metternich’s goal, but succeeding at it makes him worry about the future. The history of France and the U.K. suggest that sooner or later a strong middle class is going to want a seat at the table, and will trash the room if not given one.
An unwelcome distraction at this point is King Carol of Wallachia (who is also King Carol of Moldavia, but that’s Russia’s problem, not Austria’s) keeps sending missives to the French people encouraging them to rise up against Prince Napoleon and the Regency Council, and asking Austria and Russia to intervene on behalf of the rebels. This might be tempting if the rebels were showing more sign of success. But here’s the thing — the Second Thirty Years’ War (which most people, right now, just think of “the war”) left France with a reputation for military badassery. It’s not that fighting them is hopeless, the way fighting the British at sea would be hopeless, but it’s a scary proposition. If you do it, you’d better have a good reason and you’d better bring
all your friends. And Tsar Alexander has already made it clear he has no intention of getting involved. And Austria wouldn’t even have very much to gain from a war against France, the way they might from, say, a war against Italy. That idea might tempt Metternich a little. As it is, all Carol is doing is irritating his own subjects, who find it unsatisfying to be good and loyal subjects of a king who’s still in love with the hot sexy foreign kingdom that won’t give him the time of day.
The man who is officially (and only officially) Metternich’s boss, Emperor Francis I, is also worried about the future. He has had the pleasure of outliving King Joachim, but that just reminds him that he’s in his sixties and his oldest son, Ferdinand, is just a mess. Ferdinand means well and tries very hard, but he had a grand total of four great-grandparents and seems to have inherited every single one of their bad genes and found some new ones all his own. In spite of his hydrocephaly, he doesn’t exactly seem to be developmentally disabled — he has hobbies that require some mental effort, including music, heraldry and botany. But he
cannot make his brain focus for any length of time on anything that might actually help him rule. (With Metternich at the wheel, he’s never really had any encouragement to do so.) Also, Ferdinand has no children of his own, and isn’t likely to because every time the poor guy has an erection, he also has a seizure. So Austria’s future is uncertain.
The big news in the north of Europe is, of course, the changes in the Kingdom of Hanover and the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg. With the death of George IV and the accession of Charlotte, William went from being viceroy to king. He has already granted a constitution for a parliament modeled roughly on Britain’s, with each
Amt (or “bailiwick”) sending an elected representative. There is freedom of speech and the press, and (for Christians at least) freedom of religion. This makes Hanover an island of liberty in the middle of the Prussian-dominated
Nordzollverein. This is leading to a strange situation in which German unificationists, considered dangerous subversives in the Prussian and Austrian spheres of influence, are migrating to Hanover — the one German power that is doing absolutely nothing to unite Germany around itself.
And then there’s Oldenburg. Grand Duke Peter died this year (yes,
another one) and his son, August, has decided not to join the
Nordzollverein. There would be some economic advantages, but it’s more advantageous to pursue closer ties with Hanover, which surrounds most of the Grand Duchy. Also, being almost-equal partners with Hanover is more satisfying than being part of what amounts to a Prussian empire. And Hanover has those lovely trade relations with British commerce…
[1] OTL vanadium
[2] OTL cadmium. Here named for the bright yellow of its oxide.
[3] OTL selenium. Here named for the radish-like smell of its burning.
[4] OTL bromine. Here named for the fact that it was extracted from seaweed. Pronounced “al-ghine” in British English and “al-gwin” in American English.
[5] IOTL Thimonnier tried to use his sewing machines to become a big wheel in the clothing business. ITTL, following the advice of some Dutch business partners, he’s sticking to selling the machines themselves.
[6] IOTL the poor girl got measles this year.
[7] IOTL Elizabeth Monroe died in 1830, and James died in 1831.
[8] Depression
[9] IOTL he did, in fact, commit suicide this year.
[10] ITTL Napoleon died earlier, so they’ve been married longer. (Also, IOTL von Neipperg died this year.)
[11] He died in 1827 IOTL.
[12] IOTL Muhtar was executed along with his father.
Russia and Whose Empire Is It Anyway?
Big changes are coming to Russia in the next decade. Tsar Alexander has looked on the effects of constitutional government in Poland and Finland, and has found them good. Now it’s time to take things to the next level with a constitution for the motherland itself.
There will be some continuity with the present. The Governing Senate will be confirmed in its role as Russia’s highest court. There will be a Duma, but it will be a unicameral legislature with the State Council as its leaders.
This is not exactly a triumph of democracy. The Tsar decides who goes on the State Council. Legislation can come from any legislator, but if the Tsar and the Council submit a decree, it may be debated and modified, but not disapproved — and modifications will have to be cleared through the Senate to make sure they’re in keeping with the original decree. Voting for the Duma is restricted to nobles and those with a lot of land or money — and the monetary requirement is higher than the land value requirement.
Oh, and the task of selecting candidates for the Duma, which would normally go to a political party, is going to… the Ministry of Spiritual Reform and Popular Enlightenment. Yes, rather than try to prevent a rise in political demands or hope it doesn’t happen, the Tsar is going to try to co-opt it into the system before it ever begins. This is part of the “Slavophilic” school of thought that the Tsar increasingly favors — the idea that when it comes to progress and social development, Russia should be willing to go its own way and not always look to the west to see what the cool kids are doing.
The good news is that serfdom is finally coming to an end… eventually. The Tsar is going the gradual route. All children born in 1831 will be free. In the meantime, no new mortgages will be granted on serfs, and landless nobles are forbidden to sell serfs separate from the land. (Wait a minute. A serf who can be sold separately from the land… isn’t there another word for that? Anyway, that’s gonna stop.)
In terms of relations with the rest of the world, Alexander is pursuing closer relations with Greece seeing opportunities for expansion in the chaos to the south. Speaking of which, for the Ottoman Empire the news just keeps getting worse and worse and worse. The Sultan’s armies are finally making some headway against the Janissary rebellion, but he has a lot of allies he doesn’t trust (especially in the Balkans), and Russia and Persia have invaded, respectively, Armenia and Kurdistan — calling it “peacekeeping.”
And these are no longer even the biggest problems. The biggest problem is that Muhammad Ali, though he hasn’t bothered to formally secede, is openly acting as an independent power. No one in Europe is quite sure what to call this new empire — right now they’re split between “Cairene” and “Egyptian.”
Whatever you call it, Muhammad Ali is quite pleased with it just as it is — Syria and Iraq are now kingdoms within it ruled by his sons Tusan and Ibrahim, respectively, and the Rashidis, the Saudis and the emirs of Kuwait are his vassals. The North African Arabs and Berbers that haven’t already been swallowed up by the Partition are begging to be his subjects — and then there’s Ethiopia, which has gone into warlord mode and could really use a guiding hand. But of course, there’s always room for one more vassal kingdom if the House of Osman isn’t prepared to see reason. (Speaking of people not seeing reason, Mahmud tried to get the Janissaries to stand down by offering to let them integrate themselves into his new army and pointing out that at this rate there wasn’t going to be an Ottoman Empire for them to serve. Their response was, essentially, “Great! This means you’ll do whatever we tell you, right?” Again, a perceived need for unity in the face of a terrifying enemy isn’t a magic cure-all for real conflict.)
Africa
It’s time to stick our fingers into the open wound that is the Barbary Partition. The colonial overlords of North Africa are not exactly thrilled with their conquests. A colony should be either a captive market, a source of raw materials or both. So far the Barbary States aren’t really either one — the only economic benefit the Powers are getting out of this is an absence of piracy. For the most part, this is the place money goes to die.
There are a few universals in how the states are being treated. Slavery has been abolished, partly because it’s bad but mostly because it empowers local elites who might become a threat. Other that that, the colonies are going in wildly different directions.
- Tangeria (Portuguese): The coastal strip along the Atlantic is the most extreme example of colonization. Portuguese settlers — some of them former landowners in Brazil who left after independence — are claiming places and, with a great deal of help from the Army, chasing off the locals. You might think, with a civil war going on, the Army has better things to do, but there are many units of the Army that don’t want to declare for one side or the other. This gives them something to do that benefits Portugal while keeping them out of the fight.
- Morocco (Spanish): Abd al-Rahman is still the sultan… of a puppet kingdom with a smaller army, no navy and no west coast. He’s also dealing with an influx of refugees from Portuguese Tangeria while using that smaller army to fight rebels who can’t believe he just gave in to the combined might of all Europe like that. This has had one interesting side effect. As much as the Spaniards might enjoy forcing all Morocco to convert to Catholicism, they’re not that crazy — or, it might be better to say, not that ambitious. And you may be certain that Abd al-Rahman has no interest in enforcing Spanish rules against Protestants or Jews. The result of all this is that there is now a place within the Spanish Empire where freedom of religion is absolute. (Well, okay, if you’re an open atheist the neighbors will probably have something to say, but the government will stay out of it.)
- Orania (British): What Britain wanted out of Orania, besides the thrill of having the Union Jack flapping over yet another new part of the world, was a friendly port from which to keep an eye on the French and Italians. They’d be willing to send settlers, but if you’re a British colonist you’ve got a long list of potential places to move to and North Africa is right at the bottom. They’ve appointed Joseph Dupuis, a man who used to negotiate the ransom of pirate captives, as governor of this colony. Things are actually going fairly smoothly… for the moment. Just for the moment. A precocious young scholar with the complicated (to Europeans) name of Abd al-Qadir ibn Muhyi ad-Din was out of Algeria on the hajj when the British and French came and divvied up his country between themselves. Now he’s back…
- Algeria (French): At the beginning of the year, Hussein ben Hassan had even less power than the sultan of Morocco. He felt like he’d been internally exiled to his own capital, with his advisers replaced with a group of French “advisers.” But with the rebellion going on in France, he’s decided to make his move. His old divan and some of his advisers have raised armies, and now he’s slipped out of the palace to lead them. The last time he got word from his spies in Marseille (who happened to have royalist sympathies) they assured him that soon all France would be aflame with civil war. That’s good enough for him. (This is not the first time the time delay in information from distant lands has screwed people over. The telegraph can’t come to this world soon enough.)
- Tunisia (Italian): This is the only one of the Barbary States to come out of the Partition as an intact unit. Mostly intact, anyway. Italy annexed the offshore islands like the Galites and Djerba, abolished slavery and extracted a small indemnity. (It had to be small — Tunisia isn’t a wealthy country.) Other than that, they’re mostly leaving mainland Tunisia to its own devices. Just so long as no Arab or Berber puts to sea in anything bigger than a rowboat or holding anything more dangerous than a fishhook.
- Tripolitania (Austrian): Austria joined the Partition more out of a desire to maintain its importance than out of a desire for Libyan lebensraum. Still, now they’ve got Tripoli, so what are they going to do with it? Metternich has what he thinks is a good idea — a penal colony. After all, the British have gotten good results from their penal settlements in Australia, another place that seems to be more desert than anything else. Transportation lets you crack down on crime and dissent without going completely kill-crazy. So the city now has a small and mostly male but growing population of Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs, Croats and various others working at the geologic pace of forced labor to improve the port and build a naval base, while the Berbers watch them and think “Wow, you Austrians really abolished the shit out of slavery in these parts.”
To the south, the big news (near the coast, anyway) is what’s happening in Pays-Crou. The Crou Assembly, which started out as a way for the Crou chiefs not to undercut each other in trade, is turning into a real governing body — a way for communities and leaders to adjudicate disputes without conflict. They’ve already established as a general law that Crou are not to kill or enslave other Crou.
As positive a development as this is, there are some unfortunate effects to the Crou-French sugar and palm oil trade. The rich — big landowners who can afford to devote a larger percentage of their land to sugarcane and palms instead of food for themselves — are getting richer, which lets them bid up the price of goods and makes it harder for smaller farmers to stay in business. Some Crou are selling their land to the big guys and getting jobs on board French ships, but more are striking out for the frontier. And by “the frontier” I of course mean “other people’s land.” The edges of Crou lands are a war zone, and so far the Crou are winning. As for the losers… well, all those sugar plantations need workers. The Crou don’t actually have a problem with slavery as long as it’s happening to other people.
This doesn’t bother the Compagnie de Commerce Africaine so much as the Crou use of monopoly pricing. And the thought has occurred to them — hey, we’ve got ships, and there’s a lot of other Africans out there who’d be happy to do business with us even if we aren’t taking slaves. So they’ve opened relations with the kingdom of Oyeau (Oyo), near the Niger, which just made peace with Danhome (Dahomey), is now being attacked by the Fulani in the north and needs all the weapons it can get. The Alaafin of Oyeau is happy to do business, but it took a lot of talking to get across the idea that the French don’t want slaves, won’t take them and have nowhere to put them. The CCA did not go into business to try to explain to a West African king that black lives matter, but here they are.
What the French see as an awkward and complicated situation, the rest of Europe sees as an unqualified success. Other European nations are building relationships with West African kingdoms and peoples — the British with Asanteman[1] and the Ibo, the Portuguese with Danhome and the Dutch with Benin. None of them can duplicate the French success with sugar, because all of them have sugarcane plantations of their own that they’re trying to keep in business. But palm oil and ivory are still worth trading, and with the Fulani on the warpath inland, all these kingdoms and peoples need guns and ammo.
Down at the southern end of Africa, Cape Town has by a strange coincidence become home to two exiled princes at once. The Zulu prince Umhlangana son of Senzangakhona showed up in the brand-new British port of Napier[2] and hopped a ship to Cape Town, looking for a place to hide. He and his half-brother Dingane were caught plotting against another one of their half-brothers… Shaka, the most feared king the Zulus have ever had. Now Dingane is dead and Umlhangana is on the run. Meanwhile, on Bourbon Island[3], Prince Rakotobe has shown up trying to escape from his aunt Ramavo, now Queen Ranavalona, who seized the throne after the death of his father early this year (I promise this is the last dead royal this year). Ranavolana has the backing of a lot of the top military leaders, but she also one tiny little problem — no heir.[4]
When you take in exiled princes, all sorts of possibilities open themselves up… good and bad. One of them, of course, being war with the countries that exiled them. And there’s one more issue to complicate the situation. If you’ve ever read Shakespeare’s
Coriolanus, that’s basically Shaka — a confirmed badass, dangerous as both a warrior and a general, arrogant as all hell and with mommy issues beyond the dreams of analysts. And his mother, Nandi, is dying.[5]
[1] Asanteman has official trading relationships with the U.K., the Netherlands, Denmark and now Hanover, but guess which one is the most important.
[2] OTL Durban, here named after Thomas Napier, currently governor of Cape Colony.
[3] One of the effects of the continued war in 1815 is that Britain never formally returned Réunion (or, as it was known then, Île Bourbon) to the French.
[4] IOTL Ramana died in 1828, and Ranavolana seized the throne and had Rakotobe killed. Also, IOTL Ranavalona had a son at this point… who was born fourteen months after the king died, but everybody pretended they couldn’t do math.
[5] IOTL, by this time Nandi had died, Shaka basically lost it, he was ambushed and killed by Dingane and Umlhangana, and then Dingane killed Umlhangana.
Asia
The big news from China is still the war in the west, against Jahangir Khoja in Kashgar. Let’s start by looking at the war as seen by the rebels. It looks very bad. After a couple of good years, the tide of the war is starting to turn against them. They have numbers, know the ground and have a lot of local support, but the Chinese forces are more disciplined, more organized, and they
never stop. Destroy one army, and here comes another one. And the Chinese (who have a
lot of institutional memory of fighting wars in East Turkestan) also know the ground, and have local supporters of their own — the Black Mountain Khojas, rivals of Jahangir’s White Mountain faction. Jahangir is becoming more and more dependent on the assistance of Kokand.
In China, this war doesn’t look much better. China may be starting to regain the ground it lost, but what they aren’t regaining is money. This war is expensive. Sending armies that far west and keeping them paid and supplied is a drain on the treasury, and of course they aren’t getting any taxes out of the far west while all this is going on. But if you don’t happen to be living in the west, it’s still basically an economic problem more than anything else.
Speaking of economic problems, down in the south of China a not-quite-16-year-old scholar named Hong Huoxiu has had to interrupt his studies this year because his parents couldn’t afford to keep him in school. He tutors children to pay the bills while pursuing his own studies on his own time. Right at the moment, he seems like a very…
normal young man.
In Southeast Asia, the big war between Burma and Siam is over, and the winner is… the British Empire. Well, and Siam. The loser is definitely Burma. Assam, Manipur and Arakan are now British vassals, while Tenasserim and the Shan States are now vassals of Siam. As a warning to these vassals, what’s left of Laos — which is not much — has been annexed to Siam. The city of Vientiane is now a ruin being swallowed by the jungle, at least half the Lao people are being forcibly resettled in other parts of Siam and the vassal states, and Chao Anouvong has been put to death in a manner too gruesome and complicated to describe, except to say that the guards did
everything to him at once while Rama’s court formed a betting pool on what would kill him.
This has radically changed the balance of power in the region. Vietnam narrowly avoided being drawn into the war when Anouvong tried to flee there. Emperor Minh Mang’s whole court is telling that he needs to start making overtures towards the French — preferably right now, while he’s still more or less in a position of strength. If war happens, Vietnam won’t be able to stand alone against a British-armed Siam and he’s going to end up begging for help and taking whatever deal he can get. Minh Mang… doesn’t want to hear it. Not right now.
And then there’s Burma itself, which is beaten, broke and surrounded by Britain and its vassals and allies. They’re having to pay a one-million-pound indemnity to Britain, which would be a lot easier if Siam hadn’t sacked their capital and looted their treasury. King Bagyidaw would love to be in the position Minh Mang is trying to refuse, of being able to make alliances and play the balance-of-power game. As it is, he’s had to throw open his kingdom to traders from all countries, offering not-too-high tariffs and hoping enough wealth will accumulate to enable him to pay off London and maybe even rebuild his kingdom one day.
The biggest news in Persia is that experimental expansion into Kurdistan, which seems like the best way to gain from Ottoman weakness without confronting Muhammad Ali or his sons directly or getting into another war with Russia. Speaking of Russia, the second biggest news is an influx of immigrants from the Caucasus. Most of these are Muslims — Azeris, Avars, Chechens, Georgian Muslims and others. Alexander’s government is friendly to religion in general, but not so friendly to Islam in particular. Some of them are Jews, leaving for pretty much the same reason.
And in India, Ranjit Singh is doing everything he can to modernize the Sikh Empire, especially its weapons and weapons-making, in order to turn it into a hard target for the British when they come as they surely will. And he has a royal guest — Shuja Durrani, former emir of Afghanistan. Shuja Durrani would like his kingdom back from Dost Mohammed Khan, and Ranjit Singh would like to be able to concentrate on his southern border. Maybe they can help each other get what they want…
Oceania
Australia is a growing colony — not so much because of good government as because the increasing effectiveness of British law enforcement has led to a massive increase in the number of transportees. I’ve mentioned before the tug of war between London and the local authorities over whether the purpose of Australia’s convict system is to rehabilitate criminals and provide cheap labor for the colony, or to deter crime in Britain through its sheer frightfulness.
That’s about to change. Lord John Russell is now Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, and is taking the time to review the System (as it’s called) and prepare a report for Her Majesty. Since it isn’t practical for him to go there himself, he’s doing so by way of correspondence from the governors (Ralph Darling of New South Wales and George Arthur of Van Diemen’s Land) and copies of the local newspapers, the
Australian and the
Monitor.
The impression he’s getting is that Darling is a failure. Terrible abuses of convicts are taking place at outlying colonies like Moreton Bay, while the papers are full of the criminal exploits of bushrangers — prisoners who’ve escaped into the Blue Mountains and taken to banditry. Note that the common theme here is lack of control. The guards and camp commandants can’t control their basest impulses, the governor can’t control his underlings and none of them can control the bushrangers. That isn’t a problem in Van Diemen’s Land under George Arthur, who has established a rigid, all-encompassing, bureaucratic system of punishment and reward for good and bad behavior. This system within the System, like the Eastern State Penitentiary on the other side of the world, is designed to allow no room for either kindness or cruelty, and to Russell it sounds pretty good. If he talked to some other people in Van Diemen’s Land, he might get a different opinion, but Russell is trying to serve as Cabinet official and legislator in support of an ambitious agenda. He’s got a lot on his plate right now.
To the north… either Sultan Jamalul-Kiram of Sulu hasn’t heard what happened to the Barbary Coast, or he just doesn’t care. Either way, he’s given free rein to the Moro pirates to raid the island communities and attack any ships that look vulnerable. Normally it would be the job of the Spanish Navy to sort this out, but they’ve been busy with the wars in the Caribbean and the Barbary Partition. Down in Temmasek, Governor Johannes van den Bosch has had enough, and has written to Amsterdam for permission and naval backup. If the Spaniards won’t deal with this situation, he’ll do it for them.
