Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

Noting that most historians hate counterfactuals, many people have wondered over the years what the world would be like if the tax thing had been settled amicably with suitable representation.

Aside from Baron Baltimore being less an anomoly and more a sign of landed gentry in the USA, I suspect it's very likely the confederation of north america would have become the logical heartland of a british empire/co-dominium and that at least two major wars of the 20th century would have taken different shape, if only because the need for a Pearl Harbour event to bring the US into the war would have not been present. Canada would be provinces of a unified (or not!) landmass.

I hesitate to say the slaughter of indigenous would not have happened, frankly the British are simply better at hiding their iniquity, I have little doubt they would have pushed tribes aside to occupy the land, every bit as much as the US states did. Only New Zealand stands as a treaty outcome (Hawaii was superceded by circumstances beyond their control) and it's far from perfect.

On the other hand since Australia exists in part, to solve the overflowing prison hulk system, a function of loss of ability to send people to America, my home would either not exist, or be french territory. Quelle Suprise!

German land holdings would have looked very different too, and Belgian. The white man's burden would have taken a very different shape if the British state was confident in the American landscape. India I suspect would have worked out exactly the same: the east india company had to be pushed aside well after the US thing, that wasn't going to change much.

I suspect the British would not have been able to resist taking up land across the Bering Straights. So what we think of as the "German problem" might in fact, have been "the Russian problem" re-written. There isn't much the Tsars could do if Vladivostok turned out to be Georgetown.

Perhaps not such a bad outcome?

George Bernard Shaw had a crack at the US coming back into the fold in "upset the apple cart" which is at least entertaining.

> On the other hand since Australia exists in part, to solve the overflowing prison hulk system, a function of loss of ability to send people to America, my home would either not exist, or be french territory. Quelle Suprise!

Perhaps in greater part due to a British desire to thumb their nose at the French (thanks to a letter from the infant US intelligence):

The French had plans for the east coast, and planted a flag on the west:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-04-29/how-the-french-almost...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Western_Australia

Any reconciliation would have shattered within decades due to inherent differences in their respective support for slavery, which I note you oddly did not mention.

The slaughter of indigenous had occurred also under British colonial rule in the Americas.

It isn't like taxes were the sole issue.

British control of the Americas was too weak to enforce the Proclamation Line of 1763, which "marked the beginning of a clear ideological break with the mother country" quoting https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-e... . Also from that link, "the British government viewed westward expansion as a threat to their mercantile economic system, expressing concern that opening up the west to farming families would provide the colonies with opportunities to gain economic independence through commercial agriculture."

Mercantile opposition seems to be transitional more than permanent. It was unable to entirely dominate "king cotton" during the later civil war despite huge losses to trade. So I don't see pre 76 opposition to westward development as particularly critical because influxes of money would have changed this. Had the British government offered land and titles to the right people, it would have vanished overnight.

But you're probably right a breach was inevitable. Perhaps the rush of loyalists north to Canada entrenched it as a set of colonies more than a dominion for some time.

Similarly if Darien hadn't failed, much would be different.

I don't understand your comment about indigenous slaughter. Did I not make it plain I believe it would have happened irrespective? Maybe "continued" would be better, is that it?

My major issue was how you ignored mention of slavery at all in your counter-factual.

Had the British government offered land and titles to the right people -- assuming such people existed, which seems unlikely -- how much longer would the British Empire have supported slavery as official policy?

With titles would have come representation in Parliament, increasing the control of slaveholders on British rule.

> I don't understand your comment about indigenous slaughter.

You wrote "I hesitate to say the slaughter of indigenous would not have happened", implying you think it might not have happened.

But British opposition to slavery did not pick up steam in earnest until the late 18th and early 19th century, and at first was mostly limited to opposition to slavery in the British home islands and the transatlantic slave trade. Neither of those practices were particularly lucrative. Only once sugar plantations in the Caribbean ceased to be lucrative was slavery abolished in the 1830s. While it's almost impossible to argue a "what if," the fact that British economic interests were so intertwined with British positions on slavery suggests that Britain would not have willingly freed slaves in the colonies.

In a comment proposing a counterfactual world where all of the North American colonies stayed with the US, surely it's important to consider how that would have affected British support for slavery, rather than skip the topic altogether and imply that the additional ... years? ... decades? of British slave trade and use of slave labor would be "Perhaps not such a bad outcome".

I'm pretty sure we agree; I misread your statement about "inherent differences in their respective support for slavery" as an implication that Britain would have been just as opposed to the slave trade (and later slavery) in this counterfactual scenario.

> I hesitate to say the slaughter of indigenous would not have happened, frankly the British are simply better at hiding their iniquity.

The British indigenous headcount is likely only surpassed by Ghengis Khan, and I am not at all convinced they really went out of their way to hide anything. At the time, nobody cared about the folks they slaughtered and enslaved, and many Western cultures _still_ don’t care about them. They are the people that do the mining, make your sneakers, and develop your shitty games. They are the tech support people that are doing the needful, they are the folks living in the lands where we dump our trash - we in the West have _never_ cared for them, why start now?

The British didn’t need to _hide_ anything, they know that if they don’t bring it up, nobody else in polite society will either.

The British tried to expand across the Bering Strait during the Crimean War. They failed badly and abandoned the idea.

The Bering Strait, which is between the Russian Far East and Alaska, is nowhere near where the Crimean War was. Do you mean the Black Sea straits?

No, the Bering Strait.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Petropavlovsk

https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/petropavlovsk-the-...

https://dawlishchronicles.com/2021/12/04/crimean-wars-north-...

I had no idea - thanks! I had double-checked the Crimean War Wikipedia page and saw no mention of the Bering Strait.

Could you give me another pointer? Even with your links, I don't see how the Bering Strait was part of the Crimean War.

Your first link mentions Novo-Arkhangelsk (modern day Sitka in southeast Alaska), Okhotsk (on the Sea of Okhotsk east of the Kamchatka Peninsula), and Petropavlovsk (on the southern end of the Kamchatka Peninsula). None of those are close to the Bering Strait. Petropavlovsk is about 2,000 km away, for example, and I don't see why anyone would travel to the north end of the Bering Sea in that theater.

Your second link mentions the Battle of Tsushima Strait, between Korea and Japan but nothing about the Bering Strait or Bering Sea. The last link mentions the Bering Strait only because Petropavlovsk was founded by Bering.

I frankly have no idea how the Bering Strait relates to the war beyond the geographic proximity(?). I just found those links from dumping "bering strait crimean war britain" on Google.

Thing is, otabdeveloper4 wrote "The British tried to expand across the Bering Strait during the Crimean War".

None of those links mention anything about British expansion across the Bering Strait nor anything within 2,000 km of the Bering Strait.

Your first link said nothing about British territorial expansion from Canada's west, saying only "The primary concern of the Anglo-French allies was that cruisers of the Russian Siberian flotilla would operate against British and French trade in the area".

All of your links appear to be false positives which show up because the British were involved in the Siege of Petropavlovsk as part of the Pacific theater of the Crimean War, because Petropavlovsk was founded in 1740 during Vitus Bering's second Kamchatka expedition, and because that's the Bering that the Bering Strait is named after.

The original topic starter mentioned the British Empire trying to expand across the Bering Strait in a hypothetical alternative history where Alaska was British.

(Of course this is meant figuratively, nobody would be sailing across the literal Bering Strait even in this alternative reality. "Bering Strait" means crossing the North Pacific from the American side to the Asian side.)

I thought it was an observation about what the British actually did, not about what they might have done in some counterfactual world where somehow the Crimean War still existed even though the preceding 80 years of history were drastically different.

This counterfactual world doesn't make any sense. Why would the British Empire "[take] up land across the Bering Straights" from sparsely populated Alaska when they can come in from the south using established colonies in Asia which are closer?

How are these colonists supposed to get to "Georgetown" nee Vladivostok from the British American Pacific Coast?

It's not like Alaska or the Pacific Coast had much in the way of shipbuilding at the time, so the transport and war ships would have to come from, what, England?, the American East Coast? Then go around South America (about 14,000 nautical miles), pick up colonists and troops in sparely settled Alaska/western North America, to settle an area which is much harsher than they are used to? Because why?

The distances are huge and the available American population small.

The sea distance from Sitka to Vladivostok is 3,651 nautical miles, which is a bit further than the 3,342 nautical miles from London to New York. From Juneau it's 3,720 nautical miles. Problem is, there are almost no potential colonists to draw from as they have fewer than 1,000 people in the 1880 census, and only a few hundred were non-aboriginal and non-Russian. From Vancouver it's 4,262 nautical miles, but Vancouver Island's non-aboriginal population was about 500 in the 1850s. It's 4,554 nm to San Francisco, which in our timeline is the first place you could get colonists - because of the new settlers drawn there by the Gold Rush. (Distances from https://sea-distances.org/ , population numbers from Wikipedia.)

From Hong Kong to Vladivostok it's only 1,639 nautical miles, from Singapore 3,007 nautical miles. Both are closer, can act as staging areas, and can draw from much better established British colonies in Asia and Oceania. Kolkata, at 4,657 nm, is only slightly further away from Vladivostok than San Francisco is. Even Boston-Vladivostok via the Cape of Good Hope is shorter than going around South America.

Even if Vladivostok had been turned into a British colony, there's still a lot of territory between there and the Bering Strait several thousand km away Vladivostok is 2,586 nautical miles sea distance from Nome, which I'm taking as a proxy for the Bering Strait. As a comparison, the sea distance from Boston to Houston is 2,142 nautical miles. Who is taking all that land from the Russians?

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