WI: Britain Promotes Interracial Population Growth In North American Colonies

What if Britain decided to pursue a policy of encouraging interracial marriages between native Americans, settlers, and Africans? Now they could do it for the sake of keeping peace between the sides so that they're more connected (like what happened in Paraguay). Using the carrot-and-stick method the British Empire uses an arsenal of incentives to get the racial groups to mingle together and produce interacial offspring.

If something like that happened in the British North American how are the cultural and political landscapes changed? How will the idea of race change? And would it necessary make the lives of Africans be Natives better?

Also could an independent US continue to pursue such a policy? If not how could they and what would happen if they did?
 
Well, they wouldn't, of course. At least not deliberately.
But something like that could happen 'by accident'. Early in British colonialism, there was a lot less racism than later happened. When the East India Company was running India, there were lots of mixed marriages, and sons were sometimes sent 'back' to England for schooling, etc. James Douglas (of Douglas fir fame), first Governor of BC, was the son of a Creole woman, so part black.

Some fur traders/factors in the HBC sent their half breed sons back to Scotland for schooling.

What we need, I think, is for a couple of early examples of this to become prominent. Have a mixed race son of an English Earl (say) be appointed to a senior position in one of the colonies, have a couple of half-Iroquois or half-Cherokee men rise to prominence (e.g. during the French and Indian wars). Have a handful of EIC mixed race sons be in Parliament and maybe have one rise to the Peerage.
 
Wasn't their a policy of such with Irish being moved to the Caribbean under Cromwell? For example Montserrat, Barbados?
 
Well, they wouldn't, of course. At least not deliberately.
But something like that could happen 'by accident'. Early in British colonialism, there was a lot less racism than later happened. When the East India Company was running India, there were lots of mixed marriages, and sons were sometimes sent 'back' to England for schooling, etc. James Douglas (of Douglas fir fame), first Governor of BC, was the son of a Creole woman, so part black.

Some fur traders/factors in the HBC sent their half breed sons back to Scotland for schooling.

What we need, I think, is for a couple of early examples of this to become prominent. Have a mixed race son of an English Earl (say) be appointed to a senior position in one of the colonies, have a couple of half-Iroquois or half-Cherokee men rise to prominence (e.g. during the French and Indian wars). Have a handful of EIC mixed race sons be in Parliament and maybe have one rise to the Peerage.

Why wouldn't they?
 
What if Britain decided to pursue a policy of encouraging interracial marriages between native Americans, settlers, and Africans? Now they could do it for the sake of keeping peace between the sides so that they're more connected (like what happened in Paraguay). Using the carrot-and-stick method the British Empire uses an arsenal of incentives to get the racial groups to mingle together and produce interacial offspring.

If something like that happened in the British North American how are the cultural and political landscapes changed? How will the idea of race change? And would it necessary make the lives of Africans be Natives better?

Also could an independent US continue to pursue such a policy? If not how could they and what would happen if they did?

Sadly, this exact scenario is not possible without a truly radical and far-reaching POD.....that said, though, it certainly is possible that the British authorities in N. America might indeed become rather more willing to turn a blind eye to interracial mingling than they had been IOTL; as @Dathi THorfinnsson pointed out, maybe folks like James Douglas become more prominent?
 
Sadly, this exact scenario is not possible without a truly radical and far-reaching POD.....that said, though, it certainly is possible that the British authorities in N. America might indeed become rather more willing to turn a blind eye to interracial mingling than they had been IOTL; as @Dathi THorfinnsson pointed out, maybe folks like James Douglas become more prominent?

Why is the scenario not possible?
 
Why is the scenario not possible?

It's quite possible, England just have to follow the French or Dutch settlement policies, and only send relative few settlers, instead of OTL mass settling. But the effect of only sending 1/10 or less of OTL 16th century settlers will make the whole racial mixing aspect rather secondary to the whole "what if eastern seaboard was split between UK, Netherlands, France and Sweden".
 
Wasn't their a policy of such with Irish being moved to the Caribbean under Cromwell? For example Montserrat, Barbados?

Those were royalist rebels enslaved as a punishment and sent to work in the Caribbean. There wasn't any policy of encouraging intermarriage between Britons and local Caribbeans.
 
Those were royalist rebels enslaved as a punishment and sent to work in the Caribbean. There wasn't any policy of encouraging intermarriage between Britons and local Caribbeans.

There was "encouragement" for Irish women and local's to have children though.
 
Why is the scenario not possible?

Sorry to say, but here's the thing: there was just too much racism running around even in the most enlightened sectors of society to allow for that, even in the 17th Century, let alone in the 18th and 19th, to allow for that, even before scientific racism was a thing.

That's not to say it's impossible, period-it's not, but you would, again, need a truly radical and far-reaching POD to make it really work(in fact, it'd be less difficult to have interracial marriage legal, and largely accepted in all of the U.S. by the 1960s with a POD in the 1860s), without copious amounts of handwavium. Maybe Bacon's Rebellion is successful, for a start? The failure of that movement, as I recall, went a long way to cementing racial divisions in what was to become the United States, and if Bacon & company manages to pull it off, there may not be such a strong incentive to exacerbate divisions. The question is, though, where does it go from there? And even with this, it'd still be a long way away from this particular scenario of actively, openly encouraged by the British government interracial courtships-that said, with Bacon's Rebellion being the POD, it does seem that maybe by 1900 or so this could actually work(but again, how exactly do we arrive there?).
 
The most plausible scenario I can think of would be if for whatever reason there's an imbalance of men:women emigrating to the colonies. In such circumstances, the government might encourage male settles to marry local women and bring their children up as Englishmen, in order to keep the population numbers up and avoid having to deal with a load of randy young men with no marriage prospects.
 
Just have the HBC allow mixed-race marriages for the three hundred years they sat on Hudson's Bay rather than trying (in vain usually) to force their employees to be celibate. Easy to do, and it was already happening to a large extent anyways.

Oddly, you probably get a much darker shade of future generations in the Orkney Islands since that was predominantly where they recruited from for the longest time.

This is only a small area and might not affect North American policy as a whole, but given the length of time the HBC was established there it could have long term consequences trickling down throughout the rest of the colonies.
 
The Renaissance and the Enlightenment could throw up all kinds of balls-to-the-wall ideologies in protest against the Medieval traditions of feudalism and the Church. France had a pretty significant lead on the British Isles in terms of population until really the later decades of the 19th Century, in the Late Middle Ages it was three times the size. Perhaps a revolution happens and takes hold in England/Britain, which promotes polygamy and the taking of African and Native American women for second wives, for the sake of giving the nation the highest population possible?

And now I've written a synopsis for a piece of pornographic media that would either disgust a white supremacist, or excite one.
 
The Renaissance and the Enlightenment could throw up all kinds of balls-to-the-wall ideologies in protest against the Medieval traditions of feudalism and the Church. France had a pretty significant lead on the British Isles in terms of population until really the later decades of the 19th Century, in the Late Middle Ages it was three times the size. Perhaps a revolution happens and takes hold in England/Britain, which promotes polygamy and the taking of African and Native American women for second wives, for the sake of giving the nation the highest population possible?

I know that the Reformation threw up some wacky sects, but I'd be surprised (to put it mildly) to find one openly advocating polygamy becoming that prominent. Not least because the King or Queen would be sure to squash any ideas too outside the mainstream as a threat to social order.
 
I know that the Reformation threw up some wacky sects, but I'd be surprised (to put it mildly) to find one openly advocating polygamy becoming that prominent. Not least because the King or Queen would be sure to squash any ideas too outside the mainstream as a threat to social order.

It also suffer from the fact, that while Jesus didn't say anything about polygamy, it really shine through that when Jesus talk about marriage, he talk about one wife and only one.
 
Sorry to say, but here's the thing: there was just too much racism running around even in the most enlightened sectors of society to allow for that, even in the 17th Century, let alone in the 18th and 19th, to allow for that, even before scientific racism was a thing.

That's not to say it's impossible, period-it's not, but you would, again, need a truly radical and far-reaching POD to make it really work(in fact, it'd be less difficult to have interracial marriage legal, and largely accepted in all of the U.S. by the 1960s with a POD in the 1860s), without copious amounts of handwavium. Maybe Bacon's Rebellion is successful, for a start? The failure of that movement, as I recall, went a long way to cementing racial divisions in what was to become the United States, and if Bacon & company manages to pull it off, there may not be such a strong incentive to exacerbate divisions. The question is, though, where does it go from there? And even with this, it'd still be a long way away from this particular scenario of actively, openly encouraged by the British government interracial courtships-that said, with Bacon's Rebellion being the POD, it does seem that maybe by 1900 or so this could actually work(but again, how exactly do we arrive there?).

Maybe Britain promotes it to keep the peace between both sides?

Why did Bacon's Rebellion cause racial divisions?

The most plausible scenario I can think of would be if for whatever reason there's an imbalance of men:women emigrating to the colonies. In such circumstances, the government might encourage male settles to marry local women and bring their children up as Englishmen, in order to keep the population numbers up and avoid having to deal with a load of randy young men with no marriage prospects.

That's what they did in Latin America. Britain could encourage single soldiers to... you know.

Just have the HBC allow mixed-race marriages for the three hundred years they sat on Hudson's Bay rather than trying (in vain usually) to force their employees to be celibate. Easy to do, and it was already happening to a large extent anyways.

Oddly, you probably get a much darker shade of future generations in the Orkney Islands since that was predominantly where they recruited from for the longest time.

This is only a small area and might not affect North American policy as a whole, but given the length of time the HBC was established there it could have long term consequences trickling down throughout the rest of the colonies.

Would they make a substantial part of the Canadian population? And what trickle down effects can we see?
 
I know that the Reformation threw up some wacky sects, but I'd be surprised (to put it mildly) to find one openly advocating polygamy becoming that prominent. Not least because the King or Queen would be sure to squash any ideas too outside the mainstream as a threat to social order.

A big aspect of Revolutionary France was the abolition of 'archaic' traditions that were holding the country back from efficient, rational government. This could result in some surprising changes. The Napoleonic Code, for instance, made no mention of what we would now call homosexuality, considering the old sodomy laws an infringement of religion on the matters of State, and so technically legalised homosexuality, or a least decriminalised it. Looking at the world from a 17th/18th Century intellectual's perspective (rich white male, obviously), it makes sense for a farmer with a hundred acres to grow more food than the farmer with fifty, so two wives should be better than one, right? It's a kind of logic that makes sense to a Nazi, buy it's still a kind of logic.
 
My big concern is that for this to work, the British Authorities (rather than the colonial authorities) need to be more clearly involved, and ready and willing to acknowledge the rights of native tribes, and induct them as colonies/counties/vassals - which I can only see happening if they accept a common law for white and native. This equality at least creates a system where there is less animosity between natives and colonists, and may even lead to marriages and partnerships on its own. If the policy for expansion then continues to be to have local tribes provide representatives to the British Authorities (I won't lie, I'm seeing a sort of hodge-podge council turned Parliament here), then with the benefit of trade, technology and legal rights under the law, a lot of conflict could be avoided, less bad blood means more intermixing and interracial babies.

This then changes the precedent when slavery really kicks off. If 'White and Red' are equal, then why not 'Black'? Britain already has a precedent for anti-slavery laws from William the Conqueror. Just the fact that there is an organised government, and involving native americans who may make my above point - slavery may not be legal in the colonies, at which point the slave trade basically stops. If you add that with a "Freedom Bounty", you could have American and Native sailors intercepting slave traders in the Caribbean, capturing their ships and slaves, and claiming bounties. This incentive not only leads to essentially British-Sponsored Piracy on Slavery, but increases the Free Black populations. When you've just been saved from being a slave and given freedom, you tend to not take issue - and if you're willing to risk your life to save slaves and earn coin, I can see more than a few taking freedmen/women as lovers.

If you can get the equality of Natives and Blacks under the law without instituting a central Colonial government then you can get something similar, but I think that Britain might have to put its foot down early and hard - perhaps wanting to use the New World as a place to send criminals, or undesirables (be they Catholic or Protestant). Doing so under the pretence of providing a land of freedom (probably easier to do under the Protestants IMO) and then this hodge-podge council-turned-Parliament of the Americas can begin.
 
Race mixing in British America would be more likely if:
-Colonization started earlier (so despite small founding population England would still be ahead of Dutch and French) but with smaller number of (mostly male) settlers
-England stayed Catholic and put great pressure into evangelisation of Natives
-There are restrictions about emigration of English peasants to New World (as in OTL Spain)
 
Would they make a substantial part of the Canadian population? And what trickle down effects can we see?

They'd be a fairly negligible percentage of the Canadian population given the low numbers involved by both sides. But if you allow the marriages then you probably allow the native sons and daughters to be educated in Britain and it might make stronger ties between the two groups as opposed to the strictly platonic trading relationship of OTL. As it was, they were generally employed by the company but disavowed by them as having any entitlements.

It might encourage more frontiersmen to have a greater amount of fidelity to their "country wife" and less throwing them under the bus when payday arrives and they return to civilization.

Part of the reason marriages with natives were frowned upon in the 19th century onwards was that they didn't really do anything to advance you socially. Early on a marriage contract was hugely beneficial for trade with certain tribes due to being able to set up shop in certain areas, own property, etc. But as the natives power eroded so did the reason for marriages. Most of this will happen in any ATL, but you could reduce the severity of the 'otherness' of the two groups and achieve a higher level of native American integration if there's less stigma attached to half Native-Caucasian offspring.
 
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