Could the British Empire have Remained to the Modern Day?

[Thanas]

Not too infeasible actually. Colonial powers often starved colonies and killing citizens of occupied lands was far more common than people think (e.g. the US slaughter in the Philippines). Breaking up nations isn't too infeasible either, Germany was quite young and breaking it up into shards again is a task which could be accomplished.

It is infeasible considering that the European and American mindset at the time pretty much was "we don't give a crap about anything besdes Europe and US proper." But any power committing atrocities or overstepping was grand fodder for propaganda. Nobody cared about the Philippines but everybody cared about Lieuw, or about the civilians of Belgium etc.

Not to mention the US hardly gave a crap about Germans slaughtering everyone in E. Europe in WWII, it got involved due to Axis-Allied confrontation and geopolitical matters (war with Japan made Germany declare war on the US, if it hadn't not sure the US would even openly declare war on the Reich).

That is not true for WWI, US propaganda took a very hard line on how "barbaric" the Germans had behaved in WWI. Nobody cared about Russia and the colonies, but those were always considered somewhat extralegal territories when it came to this.

[K. A. Pital]

Propaganda - yes. It always depicts the enemy as monsters. Atrocities as a reason to start a war? Not really. Reasons are always geopolitical.

No nation has ever started a war to stop mass slaughter. Well, maybe with the exception of Vietnam invading Cambodia, but that was also done to stop Cambodian border incursions, not because Pol Pot killed almost the entire population of Pnom Penh.

[Thanas]

No nation has ever started a war to stop mass slaughter.

Not entirely, but you cannot deny that killing civilians as part of the sub campaign played a good role in getting the American public riled up for war. That being said, Britain still cannot simply annihilate Germany on its own. If however you have one fascist country conducting a war against another one then there is no reason to assume the USA will ally with the fascists, nor will there be the same propaganda impact.

Actually, I kinda doubt if there even would be a entente in the first place. Considering a fascist country is highly unlikely to mkake the same guarantees, concessions and compromises....I doubt the alliance system would look the same.

[Lonestar]

No nation has ever started a war to stop mass slaughter.

Kosovo.

Libya(when Qadaffi started making noise about killing everyone in Benghazi).

[K. A. Pital]

No nation has ever started a war to stop mass slaughter.

Kosovo.

Libya(when Qadaffi started making noise about killing everyone in Benghazi).

Both cases are refined geopolitics as well. The war crimes in Kosovo were certainly far smaller in extent than those during the prior course of the Yugoslav wars. The real cause of the war was Europe crying "NOOES there's a war it can overspill" and then basically engineering the whole intervention by demanding Serbia to allow NATO forces free movement through the entirety of its territory. With Libya that was playing into the hands of Saudi Arabia and Qatar - long-term "partners and friends" of the West in the Middle East - more than any real concern. They were bombing Libya at the same time as Saudites were squashing protests in Bahrain and nobody gave two shits about that.

I'm sorry to shatter the image of brave WORLD POLICE LIFESAVERS but that just ain't so.

[Kane Starkiller]

Breaking up Germany was simply not in British interest as the primary beneficiary of such action would be France which would then be free to expand its influence east more readily than Britain and would also be free from a land threat in that direction enabling it to compete with Britain more effectively.
This is why Britain always supported the weaker party in every Franco-German conflict: to keep the balance of power between France and Germany as they always saw each other as the primary enemy and wasted their strength countering each other freeing Britain to rule the waves.

US shares this strategy with UK except on a global level: support China against USSR, Pakistan against India, India against China, Japan against China etc.

France would be willing to dismember Germany, Britain and US would be against it. Even after WW2 it didn't take long for US and UK to see that Germany would be extremely useful against USSR.

[K. A. Pital]

Yes, this does make sense from a realpolitik point of view. We're however talking about decisions which are perhaps irrational, but which might allow the Empire to persevere.

[lance]

Breaking up Germany was simply not in British interest as the primary beneficiary of such action would be France which would then be free to expand its influence east more readily than Britain and would also be free from a land threat in that direction enabling it to compete with Britain more effectively.
This is why Britain always supported the weaker party in every Franco-German conflict: to keep the balance of power between France and Germany as they always saw each other as the primary enemy and wasted their strength countering each other freeing Britain to rule the waves.

Wouldn't the argument be that Germany could be split up a little bit and still leave it as a french deterrent, as events of WW2 showed?

[PainRack]

I would like to point out that internal security and nationalism is not the only problems facing the British Empire. The Commonwealth could never have become the replacement of a more looser British Empire when the British couldn't defend her colonies from external threats. The Boer War sounded the first cracks and World War 2 exposed the facade of British military policy.

The British military forces in 1950s were ran ragged, with increasing number of sabotage and decreasing morale in the Navy as an example just responding to the internal security situation. It could never have responded to an external security threat like the Soviets, so, the Canadians, Australia all went over to the American sphere of influence.

[K. A. Pital]

I would like to point out that internal security and nationalism is not the only problems facing the British Empire. The Commonwealth could never have become the replacement of a more looser British Empire when the British couldn't defend her colonies from external threats. The Boer War sounded the first cracks and World War 2 exposed the facade of British military policy.

The British military forces in 1950s were ran ragged, with increasing number of sabotage and decreasing morale in the Navy as an example just responding to the internal security situation. It could never have responded to an external security threat like the Soviets, so, the Canadians, Australia all went over to the American sphere of influence.

Why is that a given? What if the pre-WWI POD makes it so that no "Soviets" actually exist? We're not stuck with real history and exact copies of the two world wars as a consequence thereof.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

I question that the theme that the white colonies were given independence because they were difficult to govern from afar is true. The French incorporated portions of Indochina and of course Algeria directly into France without difficulty, and Cochin China had much more difficult communications link for France than Australia and New Zealand for Britain. I think the problem was that the British unitary state has even less administrative subdivision than the French one in the first, i.e., that the British constitution was not capable of handling widely territorially dispersed populations effectively; and secondly, that the leadership of the British Empire genuinely believed even after Westminster that the white colonies would always effectively be part of the UK in all respects and would always stand with Britain and form an economic union with Britain. It was a failure of vision, not of design, so to speak.

One can argue that there's one situation where a resumption of direct British rule could have persisted, in a single context, into the modern day: South Africa, if the British government had swept aside the Union and forcibly ended the move toward Apartheid, the appreciation of the black population would have cemented South Africa into the British Empire. But this is impossible because the strain of Enoch Powell conservatism in the UK would have never countenanced spending money on giving millions of blacks British citizenship, even if in general Britain proper was by the 1940s far less racist than before.

In general, if there had been reforms to a constitutional federal system in the UK, perhaps related to more successes from the Chartists in the mid-19th century, there would be little preventing a modern British Empire of the white colonies from existing, with "devo max" sorts of privileges constitutionally enshrined for Ireland, Scotland, Wales, England--and Canada, Australia, Newfoundland, New Zealand, etc. Likely the individual provinces and states of Canada and Australia to be precise. Some other territories such as Singapore and Malta would likely also remain, but none of the large non-white colonies.

[Simon_Jester]

Why is that a given? What if the pre-WWI POD makes it so that no "Soviets" actually exist? We're not stuck with real history and exact copies of the two world wars as a consequence thereof.

It's very hard to imagine a point of departure that makes Britain the only significant military power on Earth in the mid-20th century. Someone, somewhere in the world, would be bound to industrialize unless we give the British magic alien space bats to keep them all-powerful. And pretty much any large industrialized country could rival Britain given enough time to get up to speed.

Britain's unique, dominant position came from having industrialized early, not from being uniquely suited to sustain industrialization.

[K. A. Pital]

Why is that a given? What if the pre-WWI POD makes it so that no "Soviets" actually exist? We're not stuck with real history and exact copies of the two world wars as a consequence thereof.

It's very hard to imagine a point of departure that makes Britain the only significant military power on Earth in the mid-20th century. Someone, somewhere in the world, would be bound to industrialize unless we give the British magic alien space bats to keep them all-powerful. And pretty much any large industrialized country could rival Britain given enough time to get up to speed.

Britain's unique, dominant position came from having industrialized early, not from being uniquely suited to sustain industrialization.

Problem is that a nation like Germany and/or the Russian Empire would be hard pressed to compete with the Royal Navy and would have to start from scratch. And even such competition wouldn't necessarily mean open war - the naval race between US and Britain didn't lead to war either.

[Simon_Jester]

One, by 1950 or so this becomes less of an issue.

The size advantage of the British Navy came from their economic superiority, which was imperiled by World War One- had there been a building race between the RN and USN of 1920, it is very possible that the RN would have lost due to economic factors.

A naval arms race between 1850 and 1950 requires that the entire fleet be replaced roughly every twenty years. In 1900 this favors Britain, which has the world's largest shipyards and one of the world's largest GDPs. In 1950, neither of those conditions holds unless all other possible competitors are somehow annihilated by orbital bombardment from Martians or something.


Two, there doesn't need to be an open war. All that needs to happen is that a power bloc arise which is large enough that it presents a credible peer competitor to Britain. If the British system is unable to provide security as well as a peer competitor, people will desert that system for one that can protect them. It doesn't matter if the competitor is the Sixteenth French Republic, the USSR, the United States of Columbia, the Greater East-Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, or whatever strange alt-hist nation we dream up.

The historical British Empire, bankrupted by the World Wars, couldn't protect anyone very well after 1920 or so- World War II made this painfully clear; the Japanese invaded many British colonies easily, and the only thing that kept the dominions safe was that they were far from any attacker. The 1950s made this even more obvious, which is the source of the point here.

A world hegemon that cannot protect its friends and punish its enemies ceases to be a hegemon.

[K. A. Pital]

You once again refer to two World Wars which bankrupt the Empire. The question remains why these wars necessarily would be fought in the same fashion as real WWI and WWII, if at all.

[Simon_Jester]

I would argue that the World Wars merely accelerated the process.

At the crude level, the problem is this: 20th-century metropolitan Britain can only hold something like 40-60 million people in the era we're looking at. Compare this to 60-80 million Germans, 150-250 million Russians (in the territories of the Russian Empire), 75-250 million Americans, and so on.

Britain maintained its superiority over all comers in 1900 by superior industrialization. They had more infrastructure, and they had the legacy of having that infrastructure. Canals and railroads that had been in place long enough for the local economy to fully adapt to their presence, and take advantage of it. Factories that had existed long enough for population distributions to shift around to service them. London, which was nearly unique in its status as a vast world city.

With this, 40 million Britons could maintain an advantage of economic and industrial strength over 40 million Americans, enough to keep them from contesting global hegemony. They could even do the same to 80 million Russians, or 120 million. They could do the same so effectively to 80 million Indians, or 400 million Indians, that the 40 million industrialized Britons could utterly rule that vast population of Indians. You've said it yourself, many times. Industrialization is the road to economic and therefore military strength. One might say 'my strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is full of steam engines,' to wax a bit humorous about it.

Britain's dominance came from its economic force multipliers- giving its limited population more per capita power than other nations. That could not last forever.


Let us think about what a world hegemon needs in military strength. A good guideline is the "two-power rule:" the hegemon must have enough military power that even if its two strongest enemies combined their forces, they'd still not have enough strength to dominate it.

That is not just a military requirement for wartime. It's a practical need in peacetime as well, because the hegemon needs to know it has military security before it can act like a hegemon. Other countries will not defer to it the same way if they think "but if Country B pins down the bulk of their fleet/army/whatever in a staring match, and Country C ravages the periphery, the empire of A will fall!"

To illustrate this, the US military currently observes something like a "two power rule" in several ways. One, it maintains a large enough nuclear deterrent to lay waste to any two aggressors (and then some). Two, it maintains a navy larger than most of the rest of the world combined (for power projection). Three, it maintains an air force that could probably trounce any two enemies in conventional war (with difficulty, mostly through technical advantages). And four, it tries to maintain a large enough land army to at least try and fight two ground wars at once, subject to the limits of what kind of ground wars it actually expects to fight.

In the early 20th century, Britain observed a "two power rule" in naval strength. In 1900 this was easy to do. By 1910 it was becoming very expensive. What happened? Germany, a country that already came close to equalling Britain in population and productivity, decided to engage Britain in an arms race. Britain stayed well ahead, but could not have done so indefinitely as the old WWI-era weapons became obsolete. Nor could it have done so against two peer competitors at the same time (i.e. Germany and the US circa 1925, in a no-war world).

Here, World War One actually gave the British a temporary advantage in keeping their hegemon safe from competition, if not from dissent. All their European competitors were more badly damaged by the war- France permanently crippled, Germany seriously weakened, Russia outright disintegrated into civil war. The US was the only nation that took less demographic and economic damage, and the political experience of the war still sent them into isolationism, which made them no threat to British dominance of the colonialized world.

Now in absolute terms their ability to enforce their will decreased. But in relative terms, it decreased less than everyone else's. So Britain didn't have to worry about the kind of interference they'd experienced in the 1890-1910 window, with Germans selling weapons to Boers, Russians at work in Afghanistan and Persia, and so on.

Without the war, Britain would be absolutely stronger, but so would each of several other powers. Would it have given them a more protracted ability to sustain its power? I'm not sure, now that I really think about this.

To avoid this and keep up a permanent British Empire, you'd need to remove all economic and industrial powers capable of matching and exceeding Britain in the 20th century. It's very hard to imagine this happening, unless we posit something bizarre like aliens dropping asteroids on all major cities outside Britain in 1870.

[PainRack]

Stas, you are essentially suggesting that the historical forces elevating other powers to become a competitor and threat to Britain never emerge..... a tall order indeed.

Russia was always going to rise, it need not be the Soviets, but ineveitable industrialisation and modernisation had already made the Czars a security threat to the British in Afghanistan/India/Persia. For it not to rise, we would had to rewrite entire tracts of history that made the Russians remain poor and backward.... a somewhat fantastical approach given world politics in the 19th and 20th century.It isn't just Russia afterall. Its also the Japanese, the Germans, the Chinese even...

You also assume that war could only emerge from the Great Powers. The Thai occupation of Northern Malaya, ended by the Anglo-Siamese treaty of 1909 shows that even minor powers were capable of testing the security situation of the British Raj.

It didn't even have to lead to war but just increased adminstrative costs. The China and East Indies station for example always demanded increasing forces, from a need to expand anti-piracy that increased the Singapore gunboats, security for Hong Kong and Shanghai and hostility with China and later Japan. A possibility rest of course, that local forces raised by the colonies took over security, but the events of WW2 showed that the scale the British allowed their forces, including the mcuh larger largese given to the Dominions were just not equal to the task of defending the Empire as a whole.

[Eternal_Freedom]

I read earlier that there was serious attempts at an Anglo-German alliance in the time of Bismarck. Had such an alliance been formed, would that have helped preserve the Empire?

[Thanas]

I read earlier that there was serious attempts at an Anglo-German alliance in the time of Bismarck. Had such an alliance been formed, would that have helped preserve the Empire?

Of course, as that would have immediately eliminated the German challenge to Britain. The problem however is that Britain then would be eventually forced to wage war against Germany on much weaker terms than in OTL if it wanted to continue to be the premier power in Europe. If Britain wants to merely keep the empire then it is the best scenario for them.

[Eternal_Freedom]

I read earlier that there was serious attempts at an Anglo-German alliance in the time of Bismarck. Had such an alliance been formed, would that have helped preserve the Empire?

Of course, as that would have immediately eliminated the German challenge to Britain. The problem however is that Britain then would be eventually forced to wage war against Germany on much weaker terms than in OTL if it wanted to continue to be the premier power in Europe. If Britain wants to merely keep the empire then it is the best scenario for them.

I thought as much. Thanks!

[Simon_Jester]

But there's a catch.

If Britain ceases to be the premier power in Europe (and, in a larger sense, the developed world), can it maintain the empire indefinitely? If Britain and Germany are on very close terms, and Germany grows to surpass Britain as an industrial and economic power, how long will it be before German penetration into British colonies means those colonies are no longer 'British' at all?

As I mentioned, Germany would probably have been a lot stronger in the 1920-1950 period if it hadn't gotten its economy totally wrecked by the World Wars, twice. Especially if they got a stronger position on the Continent out of being on good terms with Britain.

If Bismarck pursued such an alliance, it was probably because he saw it as advantageous to Germany- not necessarily advantageous to Britain. And I would think he was right, if that was his perception.

[Thanas]

How exactly would this German penetration happen?

[Simon_Jester]

I don't know; I can't draw a straight line from 'that' to 'this' over a 20-30 year period- who could?

But for a qualitative argument... Look at Anglo-American partnerships in the Middle East for an example of how this works. In 1900, the British had influence over almost every part of the Middle East. By the 1930s, the US was beginning to build its own network; by the 1950s, the US was significantly more popular and had its own set of de facto client states. Mostly because the US got in through the oil companies, I think. American oil companies competed for concessions on an equal footing with European ones in the petro-states, and that completely bypassed the complex network of patronage the European powers had been building up for a hundred years before that.

If Germany became the dominant economic colossus of continental Europe (likely if an Anglo-German alliance held), in the long run it would be very hard for Britain to maintain an economic monopoly in its colonies. Eventually, client states would start favoring Germany over Britain; we saw this historically with states like the Boer republics, and it would get a lot more pronounced over time as Germany reached full parity with Britain.

[Thanas]

Well, assuming the Empire holds there is no reason why they cannot continue to be aligned to Britain politically, not economically. Germany most likely is not going to get a fleet, which removes power projection capabilities right there.

Of couse, there is no guarantee that eventually the alliance won't fall apart and Germany will start building a fleet from a much stronger position, but that is a risk in any alliance.

[Simon_Jester]

It very much is, I agree.

What I'm getting at is that there's no easy way for Britain to retain uncontested supremacy in the economic realm. Without that it can't have uncontested military supremacy forever, and it can't have uncontested political supremacy unless everyone in the world with enough power to matter loves it.

So the empire winds up under reduced circumstances eventually.