WI Britain really took everything it ever conquered

Especially in Napoleonic or Louisiana related "what ifs" so many AH posters talk about how Britain would just keep Louisiana (or Haiti or whatever is being discussed) just because they could conquer it (was there anything outside of Europe that Britain COULDN'T?). IMHO that's not how Britain worked in OTL and that's not how Britain would in a realistic ATL either.

Britain conquered just about everything overseas that was French or Dutch and kept very little. They gave Guadaloupe to Sweden as promised to get them in the war (and Sweden turned around and sold it back to France afterwards). After what in the USA is called the French and Indians the British could have taken more in the Americas but didn't, and in fact returned quite a bit to the French.

So, my question is- What would history have been like if after every war the English/British said "We'll keep everything we occupied during that war" and did this for every war?
 
So, my question is- What would history have been like if after every war the English/British said "We'll keep everything we occupied during that war" and did this for every war?

There'll be no one left in England as they'll all be overseas on occupation duties. Seriously, you'll see some of our...prouder Anglophilic Britons insisting that they could get by with employing natives to enforce British rule (mainly by using divide-and-conquer tactics). But the British at one time or another occupied vast regions of the globe that were far far beyond their reach in terms of securing permanently.

Just looking at the "monster" targets alone...most of France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, North America, Northern Germany, the Crimea, Africa, the Caribbean, the Middle East, the Lands Down Under, Burma, China-stop me when you want-:rolleyes:
 

GdwnsnHo

Banned
For that even to be begin to work (Which is doubtful) you'd end up seeing the 'British Empire' drastically change to adopt cultural aspects of everyone it conquered.

But there is no way, outside of an ambitious breeding program that Britain could ever do the proposed.

Or, frankly - they'd conquer the territory, sign a treaty, and then lose it in a rebellion swiftly after without significant local support.
 
Or, frankly - they'd conquer the territory, sign a treaty, and then lose it in a rebellion swiftly after without significant local support.

Yep and even if that doesn't happen, everyone else who wants a colonial empire would team up against the british when it became clear they wanted to take everything.

There's a reason why empires which expand too quickly tend to collapse.
 
Yep and even if that doesn't happen, everyone else who wants a colonial empire would team up against the british when it became clear they wanted to take everything.

There's a reason why empires which expand too quickly tend to collapse.

While I agree the premise is ridiculous, this point is not necessarily true. If you study power politics, there becomes a point where a hegemon becomes powerful enough that smaller players move from uniting to oppose it, to accepting its supremacy is a fact of life and moving to ingratiate themselves with it. See the Roman Empire or the British East India Company. In short, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
 
The only way this would work is if the conquered territories became "British".

The Romans managed to hold their conquests by the initial granting of citizenship to rulers and the gradual Romanisation of the conquered populations.

If Britain had behaved in a similar way then I believe the Empire could have grown even larger.
 
The only way this would work is if the conquered territories became "British".

The Romans managed to hold their conquests by the initial granting of citizenship to rulers and the gradual Romanisation of the conquered populations.

If Britain had behaved in a similar way then I believe the Empire could have grown even larger.

How do you think the US and white dominions managed to stay together instead of failing catastrophically? They converted all the immigrants to white Anglo culture.
 
An empire is not a nation. Expanding it too much implies risk of overextension.

Just consider what happened when Britain expelled France from continental north America : it quickly faced the american revolution war and lost it.

The key criterion was not maximum extension but profitability. That´s why India was so important for Britain : it was a giant milk cow.
 
The only way this would work is if the conquered territories became "British".

The Romans managed to hold their conquests by the initial granting of citizenship to rulers and the gradual Romanisation of the conquered populations.

If Britain had behaved in a similar way then I believe the Empire could have grown even larger.

Yes. This is the reason why the British Empire no longer exists. The failure to integrate the cultures of newly conquered territories led to a distinct sense of otherness which in turn led to independence/liberation movements.
 
An empire is not a nation. Expanding it too much implies risk of overextension.

Just consider what happened when Britain expelled France from continental north America : it quickly faced the american revolution war and lost it.

The key criterion was not maximum extension but profitability. That´s why India was so important for Britain : it was a giant milk cow.

The Quebec example is merely a threat being eliminated, not an example of overextension. If the French had never settled there the dynamic would have been the same. The existence of British rule somewhere does not reduce its existence anywhere else. The reason the premise is foolish is nothing to do with overextension but just because some places were not holdable, regardless of the total size of the Empire.
 
Yes. This is the reason why the British Empire no longer exists. The failure to integrate the cultures of newly conquered territories led to a distinct sense of otherness which in turn led to independence/liberation movements.

The failure was inevitable in some places. The Portuguese and French met the same fate despite every effort to integrate a national identity.
 

GdwnsnHo

Banned
I recall the argument that British/English and Indian cultures worked remarkably well together because of the strong Class/Caste systems in both. If the two cultures could coalesce in the same way that Norman/Saxon did to make English, then THAT 'British' Empire would have a vastly larger ruling demographic.
 
They couldn't even keep South Africa, which had a substantial minority in comparison for other colonial possessions.

Unless the British start committing genocide against all native inhabitants they encounter, which isn't going to happen.
 
While I agree the premise is ridiculous, this point is not necessarily true. If you study power politics, there becomes a point where a hegemon becomes powerful enough that smaller players move from uniting to oppose it, to accepting its supremacy is a fact of life and moving to ingratiate themselves with it. See the Roman Empire or the British East India Company. In short, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

I am waiting with baited breath for you to tell me how Britain holds on to Greater Aquitaine to the present day.:p:rolleyes::D
 
How do you think the US and white dominions managed to stay together instead of failing catastrophically? They converted all the immigrants to white Anglo culture.

Of course it did help that the indigenous population of these areas were small and technologically primitive and could be easily dispossessed and/or exterminated.
 
Of course it did help that the indigenous population of these areas were small and technologically primitive and could be easily dispossessed and/or exterminated.

True. For all the holier-than-thou attitudes the USA (and even Canada isn't 100% perfect on this subject, as even some of our Canadian members will admit) gets from the rest of the world over what happened to the Native-Americans:(:eek::(, do these same people want to talk about what happened to the Carib Indians, the Tasmanians, and the Aborigines? How many Sub-saharan Africans and Asian Indians would have survived a European onslaught had they the Native population density of post-1600 America? Imagine: How many Aborigine would be left today IF Britain could have settled Australia at the same time as the American Colonies AND it was a fully lush and fertile (plus resource and water rich) continent, rather than being 70% desert?:(

The Africans, Chinese, and Indians were lucky. They had numbers and a resistance to White Man's diseases that the poor Native-Americans couldn't even dream of.:( Indeed, in those climes disease was the killer of the Whites, not the other way around.
 
I am waiting with baited breath for you to tell me how Britain holds on to Greater Aquitaine to the present day.:p:rolleyes::D

Because England was nowhere close to being the hegemon in Western Europe during the Hundred Years War.

Not that. How DO THEY pull it off?:p You'd be surprised at the level of "What if Henry V had lived to a ripe old age/Henry VI hadn't become witless?" threads/posts there have been.
 
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