What other unifications could've happened?

Just thought of one. England and Scotland. Now before you throw rotten fruits or vegetables, hear me out. What if Scotland and England had been unified earlier on with better terms? Doesn't even need to be all of it. Perhaps just the Lowlands, with the Highlands ending up as a sort of Wales.

The obvious POD is having poor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret,_Maid_of_Norway, survive, and marry as planned, Edward of Carnarvon, uniting the English and Scottish crowns. At this time, many of the greater Scottish lords also have major land holdings in England, so there are incentives to make this work.
Of course, given what an ass Edward I was and what a berk Edward II turned out to be, the English could very well screw this up.
 
This is very unlikely, but if you get Queen Victoria and Alexander II to marry each other (they had a mutual attraction to each other when Alexsabder II visited Britain) and create a personal Union between the British and Russian Empires you’d create the largest empire of all time. Wonder how the flag would look...

Parliament would move to strip the monarchy of anything but purely ceremonial powers if their kid showed even the faintest hint of autocratic tendencies. It's ASB that this would be anything more than a personal union only... hardly a unificiation in any political sense,
 
Pan-Scandinavianism is probably the most viable ahistoric option though. The Baltic Sea gives them a natural geographic and commercial connection along their core population regions, they have the advantage of near mutually intelligible languages and close cultural-religious basis (Unlike the south Slavs in the later case), and politically the governing structures are similar enough so as not to panic\overly alienate the elite. Your biggest hurdle is the fact that unlike in German or Italian unification (or if we want to jump back for another example, Russian and English) there isent a natural and isolated "Independece hegemon" of sorts to bare the torch of the cause (thus connecting nationalist sentiment to the institutional power you need to make it dominant geopolitically) and thus remove the question of the new Union's dominant faction. Get a POD where either Sweden or Denmark is heavily enough brought low (though not by the other) and that other goes on a major acent though and I could see a union form.

There are other earlier options as well. The Kalmar Union surviving at any odd point of time is the obvious suggestion, but other possibilities could include e.g. a successful Swedish conquest of Denmark during the 1658-60 war, as it was the stated intention of Charles X Gustav to annex the remaining Danish-Norwegian provinces.
 
There are other earlier options as well. The Kalmar Union surviving at any odd point of time is the obvious suggestion, but other possibilities could include e.g. a successful Swedish conquest of Denmark during the 1658-60 war, as it was the stated intention of Charles X Gustav to annex the remaining Danish-Norwegian provinces.

I'd hesitate to call such an early consolidation as a Pan-Scandinavianist unification, since it's more of a dynastic project\classical empire-building,but you're certainly right such a state might emerge. The question though is weather such a top down, centeralizing approach would result in a state that could survive the local power struggles and benefit from rather than dissolve under the forces of nationalism
 
I suppose another option for a "united" polynesia would be Tonga getting a second wind in the 1800s (perhaps the cattle they got in the late 1700s start to pay dividends?) and reestablishes its former empire.
 
I'd hesitate to call such an early consolidation as a Pan-Scandinavianist unification, since it's more of a dynastic project\classical empire-building,but you're certainly right such a state might emerge. The question though is weather such a top down, centeralizing approach would result in a state that could survive the local power struggles and benefit from rather than dissolve under the forces of nationalism

I wasn’t implying that it would be a pan-Scandivanist undertaking, seeing as the events I described are way before the advent of said modern “nationalist movement.”
 
Greece and Cyprus would have united without a Turkish invasion in response to a Greek nationalist coup in Cyprus.
 
I wasn’t implying that it would be a pan-Scandivanist undertaking, seeing as the events I described are way before the advent of said modern “nationalist movement.”

Which is why I'd hesitate to classify it as a "unification", as the topic of the thread necessitates. Itd fall more under the conquest\empire building label.
 
With a different outcome in the Hundred Years' War, possibly France and England. A Plantagenet victory meant that they would have been separate kingdoms in personal union, but this could have eventually led to a unified state, as with England and Scotland.
 
I suppose another option for a "united" polynesia would be Tonga getting a second wind in the 1800s (perhaps the cattle they got in the late 1700s start to pay dividends?) and reestablishes its former empire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enele_Maʻafu - This guy might be the way for that. Even if it's unlikely he could conquer all of Fiji, it's plausible that the Lau Islands (his powerbase) could be severed from Fiji and attached to Tonga, probably by the British.

The Lau Islands are also more culturally Tongan than Fijian, so it would definitely count as a unification. In fact, there's been some movement recently in both countries to transfer the islands to Tonga.

https://archive.is/20140707051436/http://www.tongadailynews.to/
 
Just thought of one. England and Scotland. Now before you throw rotten fruits or vegetables, hear me out. What if Scotland and England had been unified earlier on with better terms? Doesn't even need to be all of it. Perhaps just the Lowlands, with the Highlands ending up as a sort of Wales.

I've been playing around with something of the sort in a Max-Briton timeline on a folder somewhere. Scotland is instead Cumberland (because it formed around much of the Old North), with the Highlands instead known as the Pictlands. In that situation England+Wales made up Britain, and I was playing with Cumberland claiming their southern neighbors to form "Great Britain".

Granted, that same timeline has Briton refugees to Galicia assimilate and form the Kingdoms of Galicia and Portugal and migrates the Belgic Celts from the mainland to the British Isles in the stead of Wessex so 100% fair and balanced reasoning isn't guaranteed.
 
Which is why I'd hesitate to classify it as a "unification", as the topic of the thread necessitates. Itd fall more under the conquest\empire building label.

That's a bit of a pedantic distinction really. It would be the unification of three realms who had had a previous supranational state framework in common. The Risorgimento included a fair bit of conquest too, but is still referred to as a unification in the OP.
 
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