The Empire Parnell Built
- Thread starter Rattigan
- Start date
boredhistorylover1211
Banned
A ratio of 3.4:1 between PPP and nominal GDP is quite high; for comparison, the same figure for Taiwan and China IOTL is about half that. Such ratios are usually found only in poorer countries, as well, like Bangladesh would be a good example. The only middling-advanced economy I know of with a similar split is Malaysia, at 2.8:1, and that’s largely because its economy is not solely export-oriented.
Like various wars OTL (including the 2nd Boer War), do you get any attempt to use interment/concetration by the British?
Yes. Boer populations, especially rural ones, were rounded up and relocated en masse.
Urgh...I hoped the Brits had learned their lesson from the last two times.
These are not your cuddly, social democratic imperialists of the Anglo Saxon Social Model...
Also, the sieges of Bloemfontein and Pretoria were particularly brutal: the republicans tried to use the prisoners as human shields and the imperial army was just like “okay” and basically levelled the cities
For future leaders of the ILPU, maybe have Ian Paisley make an appearance as the first non-noble ILPU leader here?
I have plans for Paisley. The ILPU as it is now is more of an agrarian Tory party than a sectarian one anyway
Just binge-read this whole thing and I must say @Rattigan this is one of my fave TLs on the site. I really like how you’ve structured it and think many of the choices you’ve made are quite plausible. (It’s also curious/frustrating to see that in a TL with a similar PoD period to mine how many decisions you’ve made that I had thought of too! Harrumph!) Eagerly waiting to see this progress to present day.
A few questions:
1) What caused Charles Parnell to live as long as he did here?
2) I’m skeptical Chile wouldn’t get involved in any of Argentina’s conflicts ITTL, considering their long-standing rivalry and the considerable professional and well-equipped military (Navy in particular) Chile enjoyed in the early 20th century. Feels like they’ve been missing from this TL a bit. Is that just them being the Switzerland of the New World?
3) Is Thomas Crerar’s longevity as PM meant to mirror Mackenzie King? What’s the latest in Australia and NZ?
A few questions:
1) What caused Charles Parnell to live as long as he did here?
2) I’m skeptical Chile wouldn’t get involved in any of Argentina’s conflicts ITTL, considering their long-standing rivalry and the considerable professional and well-equipped military (Navy in particular) Chile enjoyed in the early 20th century. Feels like they’ve been missing from this TL a bit. Is that just them being the Switzerland of the New World?
3) Is Thomas Crerar’s longevity as PM meant to mirror Mackenzie King? What’s the latest in Australia and NZ?
Always glad to have someone along for the ride. This was originally meant to be a quick and dirty dark mirror to my earlier timeline but, as you can see, it's expanded a bit beyond that. I'd be fascinated to hear more about your similar POD though, I think Irish Home Rule and the associated debates are underused as PODs on this site.
On your specific questions:
1) Parnell's survival comes for a number of reasons. Firstly, on a structural level I kind of 'needed' a figure like him to hold together the IPP in the first years of home rule and build a non-sectarian (broadly speaking) Irish politics with a dominant centre-right party. Secondly, I just admire him and so wanted to give him a (kind of) happy ending. Thirdly, TTL sees the O'Shea Affair butterflied away (waves hands as to precisely how that happens) so by the early 1890s he's not running around Ireland on campaign in dreadful weather but ensconced in a nice warm office in Dublin Castle - I think that's generally plausible, at least for the purposes of a TL like this.
2) With hindsight, my neglect of Chile is definitely a problem - originally I had planned for a three-way conflict between Chile, Argentina and Brazil but dropped Chile out because it got too complicated and I was trying to draw things down at bit. Looking at my notes, I've still got parts of northern Chile belonging to Argentina TTL, which is a hangover from the original plan... So, yeah, I think Chile's status will have to remain a bit of a plot hole TBH but I do imagine it as being the Switzerland of the New World.
3) No, I hadn't imagined Crerar as being a replica of Mackenzie King, although obviously his long term in office will result him being very much perceived in the same kind of light King is OTL. As for Australia and NZ, NZ is more or less the same while the various Australian states never federated and are all independent realms. NSW, Victoria, Queensland, Tasmania and Western Australia (Westralia) are all more or less congruent with OTL - I originally had plans for elections in all the countries but eventually it just became too vast. The one state with huge differences from OTL is South Australia. Because of the size of TTL imperial space program, Adelaide becomes the centre for the Empire's military industrial complex and, by extension, an important base for the computing and tech industries. Now the whole state is basically the TTL equivalent of the Bay Area and Adelaide is TTL's San Francisco (with the same kind of housing problems, among other things).
Haha I love that, Adelaide as a combined Houston/SF Bay Area analogue. Would love to see specific wikiboxes describing that in the future. I also really liked seeing some of those British national champion companies make it to present day; Rootes, ICI, Bristol, Barings and others surviving and being such dominant forces is kind of cool to see!
My PoD isn’t Home Rule related per se; Cinco de Mayo’s PoD is, quite literally as the name would suggest and as occurs in its very first update, France winning the Battle of Puebla on May 5th, 1862, thus helping speed up the collapse of the Juarez regime and securing the Second Mexican Empire for Maximilian von Habsburg.
How that relates to Home Rule, though, is that Gladstone stays retired from butterflies (and Disraeli never becomes PM either) so there’s a more tense political atmosphere in Britain without a Liberal government at all sympathetic to the Irish plight and no Tory Democracy either
That's really interesting - from a British perspective having Disraeli out of politics is such a big change. I'll have to check your TL out...