Timeline Planning: The Rise and Fall of the British Empire

RedBeret

Back last year I made a thread questioning what would happen if the collapse of the British Empire was more analogous to the fall of the Roman one . Lately I've got back to thinking about it, and now mean to actually start planning it out. As I'm not too experienced with writing timelines like this, and there are doubtless many people with way more knowledge on both Rome and Britain than me, I'm leaving this very open to others' ideas and suggestions.

The Premise: The rise and fall of the British Empire follows a very different trajectory to OTL, one heavily analogous to that of the Roman Empire: a long, reign, marked by civil war, instability and violence as much as the opposite. Washington is Augustus (with a bit of Napoleon too), first dictator of a new Imperial Commonwealth. France is Iran, eternal rival in the wake of a Napoleon whose continental ambitions are significantly more successful. The 1900s are the halcyon days of the Empire, but climate change, resource depletion and local rebellion coalesce into the Crisis of the 21st Century: a decades-long disaster that nearly leads to the collapse, not just of the Empire, but industrial civilisation itself. Whilst the Empire persists, it is forever altered, never able to truly recover and split in twain: the 'Western Empire', the British Isles and American colonies, and the 'Eastern Empire', centred around India and the Indo-Pacific (India being a region with more political and cultural influence than OTL). Whilst the former never escapes its death spiral and ultimately collapses in the 23rd century, the latter persists and reinvents itself, lasting all the way into the early 4th millennium AD.

The Point of Divergence: An alternate American Revolution escalates into a far greater conflict, a war for revolution not just on the continent, but in the Empire as a whole – a war which ultimately ends with the overthrow of the old government and the establishment of a new 'Imperial Commonwealth' under the rule of George Washington

Isn't this incredibly implausible/impossible/ASB?: Yes, absolutely. But I find the general idea of this sort of analogy fun and interesting, so I'm rolling with it anyways. Inspiration in large part comes from Ephraim Ben Raphael's Alis Volat Propriis: The Great Ship.
 

RedBeret

Thought: Socialism/Communism (or its ATL equivalent) as the analogue to Christianity
• Though they take different approaches (religious vs political/economic), the basis of appealing to the poor, the lowly, the hungry, practising sharing and redistribution, criticising the rich and wealthy, are quite alike.
• With the POD going back to the American Revolution, it's fairly safe to say that the 1818 birth of Karl Marx will be eliminated by butterflies. Early figures like Fourier, Saint-Simon and Owen will still exist though, and the general social and economic conditions remain in play (potentially to a more extreme degree still considering the British and French empires remain dictatorships that failed to live up to the promise of their founders)
• The Marx/Jesus equivalent here arises sometime around 1840 (during the rule of either an aging Alexander Hamilton or his successor): a charismatic and revolutionary figure, quick to gather a dedicated following of supporters. Ultimately this leads to his execution, but the movement persists, now with a founding martyr.
• Over the coming centuries, Alt!Socialism faces varying degrees of persecution and 'red scares' harsher than what occurred in our own timeline, the first organised instance taking place in the mid-1870s, and the last only winding down in the early 22nd century – by which point the chaos of the 21st Century Crisis and its demonstration of the failure and fragility of the old systems had driven significant numbers into its camp.
• Ultimately, Alt!Socialism is adopted as the official state ideology of the British Empire around 2190, albeit in a form somewhat more palatable to the authoritarian systems of the time. Even when the empire fell in America and the British Isles less than a century later, variations on it endure as the prevailing system of governance, and in the Indian Ocean where the Eastern Empire yet prevails, its grip is stronger still.
 

Beatriz

Maybe China could play the role that the Indian kingdoms played as a distant source of trade goods, maybe as multiple post-Qing kingdoms.

Also will you be doing EBR-style maps?
 
Last edited:

RedBeret

Beatriz said:
Maybe China could play the role that the Indian kingdoms played as a distant source of trade goods, maybe as multiple post-Qing kingdoms.

Also will you be doing EBR-style maps?
Click to expand...

I will indeed be doing maps, though I confess I don't have a great deal of experience in that regard. And that's definitely an idea regarding China – perhaps an earlier and more destructive fall of the Qing that leaves it shattered into several states, states which individually reform and modernise into prosperity at a better pace than OTL, but divided as they are lack the ability to become globally influential like the French and British superpowers.
 
Whiteshore

Whiteshore

RedBeret said:
I will indeed be doing maps, though I confess I don't have a great deal of experience in that regard. And that's definitely an idea regarding China – perhaps an earlier and more destructive fall of the Qing that leaves it shattered into several states, states which individually reform and modernise into prosperity at a better pace than OTL, but divided as they are lack the ability to become globally influential like the French and British superpowers.
Click to expand...
Maybe a rump Qing could be the Kushan Empire equivalent while an ethnically Han dynasty which reunifies the North and Center but is unable to subdue the South could be the Gupta equivalent, on that note?
 
Whiteshore

Whiteshore

What would be equivalent to Han China? The Empire of the Tsars, isolated from the rest of the world and basically its own thing?
 

Beatriz

1660374296094.png

the world in 400ce
 

Beatriz

Based on the map and the Chinese states as India, does Siam as Axum make sense? On the trade route to China and too distant to conquer (or at least too much of a bother, with most of its population on the coast). Also could Latin America be the *Germania of TTL?
 

RedBeret

Beatriz said:
Also could Latin America be the *Germania of TTL?
Click to expand...
I was actually having a bit of trouble figuring out where Germania would be, but I could see this working. Plus there's potential for another plausible convergence – IIRC, one of the main theorised factors in the OTL Migration Period was climate change, a cooling world forcing groups westward and southward into the Empire. And in the Crisis of the 21st Century and its aftermath, one sees climate change hold a similar impact, a heating world forcing the peoples of Latin America north and eastward (along with the myriad other migrations taking place across the world at that time).

I confess I know very little about Latin America around this time though and how it would be affected by the divergence. At the time of the POD I know that Spain still retains most of its empire, but a persisting British America under a dictatorship and successful Napoleonic Empire feel bound to change something.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top
Top