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The British Empire in the aftermath of defeat in 1918

Based on numbers:

Population 1914 around 7.5 million. Dead in battle: 350,000. Just over 30% dead of able bodied men of fighting age. Russia's probably in disorder, Ottoman Empire's in no state to do anything, A-H ditto.

My guess would be not so much being chopped into bits as falling into bits, with internal struggles between those who were able to sidestep the 4-year picnics.
So does that means Transylvania,Bukovina and Bessarabia could still become Romanian territory more or less or not?If not,what becomes of them?
 
So does that means Transylvania,Bukovina and Bessarabia could still become Romanian territory more or less or not?If not,what becomes of them?

My guess would be:

Transylvania: A Romanian milita/popular uprising attempts to take over in the collapse of A-H. Budapest and Bucharest may end up in a short war over this one- both determined to get a win of some sorts.

Bukovina and Bessarabia: by contrast, the Romanians might be able to just walk in and occupy these areas.

So we could see the Romanian government stabilise themselves by claiming B+B but with a hostile Hungary and running sore of the Transylvanian mess.
 
I'm wondering if the Germans might try to get involved in the post-AH nations, out of fear if they don't the Russians might. (It might not be a good idea but neither was foreign involvement in the Russian Civil War)
 
The devil of a question is how Germany wins without breaking the blockade. The only card I can think of is Soviet assistance via shipping to the Northern Ports like Gilma and Archangelsk, but at that point you're going off the rail network and adding several months of travel time, not to mention a whopping big dose of SOD breakage.
 
Thought also with Ireland - many Irishmen died in the war, a war that's been lost. Expect that to be an election campaign theme by Sinn Fein, "we died for nothing"

Which could end up with a 'we were stabbed in the back by Irish Nationalists' mentality among some in Ireland and rather more elsewhere.

Belfast could get quite difficult for Catholics.
 
If you're willing to use a large butterfly net a way to dramatically improve German odds is have A-H field a modern military. They had the ambition OTL and were putting money in that direction but the war started too soon.

Of course if AH could rely on a powerful modern army it may have the confidence to act less belligerently and the Serbs may be note cautious in stabbing a bear in the eye.


If the Austrians can crush Serbia and blunt a Russian offensive on their own then that frees up a lot of German manpower whilst also putting more pressure on the Russians.
 
It could get complicated, depending on whether OTL's not bringing in Conscription for Ireland holds true. The Loyalist element volunteered readily enough, the Nationalist element was more patchy.

It also depends on what happened in Easter 1916, and many other things.

Good point, how conscription works is going to have a big impact.

Which could end up with a 'we were stabbed in the back by Irish Nationalists' mentality among some in Ireland and rather more elsewhere.

Oh damn, I hadn't thought about that. The initial response to the Easter Rising was antagonism towards the rebels for doing it while sons, brothers, and husbands were at war and for causing Dublin to be scorched, up until the executions and roundups started. How many catholics change their mind again if they can be convinced the Volunteers did a 'stab in the back'? What happens if they've got that and violent protestant gangs in Ulster on 'revenge' rampages? What if Sinn Fein doesn't quite win a majority, making it clear they're someone you have to listen to but not having a mandate to claim independence?
 
I think that a stab in the back myth won't appeal to Catholics as they did largely resent the volunteers until the executions and internment and the following years saw the British government counter terror with terror including assassinations and arson. I imagine in such a world where attitudes are even more hardline towards rebels the response is likely going to be even less gentle.

I don't see Ireland remaining in the UK at gun point in the longer term.
 
'Cause this is regarding the Empire, and not just the UK, I'm curious as to what happens to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. I can see particular upheaval in the last one. And overall earlier nationalist sentiment and a drifting away from an over Imperial Britannic identity; it's easy to see yourself as a Canadian rather then a "Britainnic" in Canada if you've been fighting a losing war for the metropole.
 
'Cause this is regarding the Empire, and not just the UK, I'm curious as to what happens to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. I can see particular upheaval in the last one. And overall earlier nationalist sentiment and a drifting away from an over Imperial Britannic identity; it's easy to see yourself as a Canadian rather then a "Britainnic" in Canada if you've been fighting a losing war for the metropole.


I had some thoughts on Australasia on page one.

One big determinant will be how much of Germany's Empire the British keep. If the settlement can be spun as 'the Kaiser has won in Europe, but the world is British,' that will be very different to a negotiated peace where thousands upon thousands of square miles of captured territory are handed back despite the defeat of their garrisons.

South Africa will, I presume, be upset about losing Sudwestafrika. New Zealand and Australia will be seriously pissed about handing back Germany's islands in the Pacific. There is, in fact, probably going to be some politicians who talk about refusing to return them- though I doubt they'd get much traction, it could embarrass the home government.
Australasia really cared about those islands. Richard Seddon irritated the Germans to no end during Britain's negotiations to withdraw from Samoa. He's gone, but there are plenty of NZ politicians who think that control of Samoa (plus Tonga & Fiji) is vital to the colony's security, growth and prestige.
Alfred Deakin is still about in Australia, and he had become bitterly convinced by 1907 that Britain wouldn't have any territory in the islands if it hadn't been for the courage and persistence of Australasian. To some extent he'd feel that he'd been vindicated in his assessment if the British return Germany's colonies- and he's still very much the elder statesman of Australian politics.

Overall, I think both strains of colonial nationalism would be severely agitated by a defeat in the Great War- the working-class, Labour movement focused, often Irish, street level type that I discussed earlier in the thread; and the more middle class Liberals who believed that the Imperial government wasn't paying sufficient attention to legitimate colonial concerns.

Certainly, I would expect that the Australian Republican movement would come roaring back to life. It had been very strong in the late 1880s and 1890s, and one of the best arguments against it was the need for British protection. If that protection has proven to be hollow, expect to see the virulent nationalism of White Australia regain its ancestral link with republicanism.
 
Interesting scenario and discussion. My guess is that if Germany wins, it will be due to British and French financial collapse. It is my understanding that by 1917 the French and Brits were running the war on credit from US banks. Historically, that stopped mattering temporarily when the US joined the war and those loans became part of the war effort.

If Germany doesn't provoke the US into war, at some point, US banks would probably realize that the western Allies had no way of paying existing loans back, much less new ones. At that point, they start rolling over existing loans but not making new ones. No new loans equals the western Allies are restricted to cash and carry in terms of imports from the US. They may even be forced to default on existing loans, though I don't know the details well enough to be sure of that. Historically, both France and Britain did default on US loans in the 1930s, after paying them out of German reparations until that turnip ran dry of blood.

When they went to cash and carry, the western Allies would be dependent on remaining currency reserves, plus raw materials extracted from their colonies. Nothing from the New World or the non-colonized parts of Asia that they didn't pay for in cash.

From old and possibly faulty memory, I believe that British leaders admitted years later that if the US hadn't entered the war, they would have run out of money and credit sometime in 1917. Give them a little leeway for desperation measures and call it financial collapse in early 1918. The western Allies can no longer pay for imports.

The Brits would face another threat that might push them toward peace: The US had committed to "A Fleet Second to None" and had planned battleship and battlecruisers to implement that. Historically, when the US went to war, they postponed most of the planned new ships in favor of destroyers for the U-boat war, but even so, the US was able to go into the postwar naval limitation treaties with the ability to out-build the rest of the world. Most of the ships in that buildup were scrapped as the result of the postwar naval treaties, but if the US stayed out of the war, they would be on track to eclipse Britain as a naval power. By sometime in 1918, that might even be baked in, no matter what Britain did, but I could see the Brits deciding that they had to settle the war in order to move resources to the naval arms race with the US.
 
Interesting sources. I'm by no means an expert on international economics after two undergrad courses at the local community college, but it seems to me that the Allies faced two problems while the Germans really only faced one. The Allies had to maintain a debt to GDP ratio low enough that they could service the debt and keep their economies going while not going into runaway inflation. The Germans had a similar problem, and as noted, they were closer to the edge on that one than the Allies.

The Allies had a second problem: They were running huge trade deficits with the world outside their empires and especially the US. As you noted, the Germans didn't have that problem to the same extent because of the blockade. They weren't running trade deficits because they couldn't import stuff in significant quantities from outside Europe.

The two problems aren't totally unrelated, but they are to some extent independent. The Allies had to convince the outside world to continue sending them a lot more stuff than they were sending back. The Allies could do that easily as long as they had gold, currencies considered as good as gold or currency from the countries they were trying to buy from. When they ran low on all of those, they would be dependent on loans denominated in the exporting country's money. Those loans, in turn, would be dependent on the exporting country banks being pretty sure they were going to be paid back. At what point would the Allies be forced to reduce imports due to lack of gold or hard currency? I had heard sometime in 1917, but I would be interested in seeing the numbers. This would be influenced partly by the course of the war. If it looked as though the Allies were losing, as it did after the Russians were knocked out and then Italy pushed back, US loans to the Allies would be a harder sell.

What would happen when the Allies didn't have enough gold or acceptable currency for imports? That sort of happened to Britain early in World War II, from the fall of France until the advent of Lend Lease. They were chronically short of dollars and gold and were forced to respond by diverting resources into increasing exports and getting as much as they could from inside their empire (the sterling zone). Even with those efforts, they were pretty much out of ability to import at a war-fighting tempo when Lend-Lease clicked in.
 
The war in the East would be interesting in this scenario. I'm assuming that Russia has its revolution on schedule, that Lenin and company seize power from the Provisional Government after destroying what was left of the Russian army's morale and are then forced to sign essentially the same "Brigand's Peace" that the Germans made them sign historically. There is no reason to believe the Germans and Austria-Hungary would do too much different in the east in late 1917 and 1918. That would mean a semi-puppet regime in Poland, the German-imposed Hetmanate in the Ukraine and a Soviet Union looking for revenge but not able to get it militarily at the moment.

The Soviets would target German morale as they did historically and attempt to consolidate power against a wide variety of Russian enemies. Historically, the Allies tried to find non-Bolshevik Russians willing to fight on and built them up in opposition to the Soviets. Czech POWs revolted against the Soviets historically and temporarily destroyed Soviet control over much of the Trans-Siberian railroad. How would all of this play out if Germany won in the west? Who, if anyone would the Germans back in the inevitable Russian civil war? How would the Soviets cope if Ukraine and its resources remained solidly in German hands?

Would Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman empire hold together? If they didn't, Germany would have to cope with chaos on their eastern flank.
 
This one I can answer.

If we assume that the course of the war is pretty much the same as OTL, with Germany somehow scrapping a victory in 1918 (which is left as an exercise for the reader), but other details left much as they are, then the A-H and O Empires are dead, and it's just a matter of burying the bodies. The Ottoman Empire was busy Turkifying, and the infrastructure to hold on the rebellious and disturbed outer areas was basically non-existent. It's quicker and easier for Britain to get forces to support any of the rebelling elements, and the Ottoman simply can't get enough forces and supplies to Palestine or Arabia or Mesopotamia to do anything about it.

The A-H Empire doesn't have a reliable army that can do anything other than sit in strong defensive positions; the ethnic tensions have risen to the point that the constituent parts of the Empire are basically enemies rather than reluctantly staying in.

Manpower losses and internal divisions are such that these empires are dead.
I'd say that comes with the very slight caveat that intervention by an external force might have kept them alive a bit longer--but it's hard to see anyone with incentive to do so. I suppose you could imagine in a CP victory scenario Germany wanting to prop up A-H out of stability but nobody had any great enthusiasm for keeping the Hapsburgs going.
 
I'd say that comes with the very slight caveat that intervention by an external force might have kept them alive a bit longer--but it's hard to see anyone with incentive to do so. I suppose you could imagine in a CP victory scenario Germany wanting to prop up A-H out of stability but nobody had any great enthusiasm for keeping the Hapsburgs going.

I reckon 'German intervention' at best gets you Austro-Bohemia as a thing- keep the Czechs down with enough German inhabitants being there to do so. Potentially you've also got Germans from Transylvania, the Banat etc. who are fleeing from a collapsing state of affairs in Hungary who could be resettled in the Czech lands to bolster the population there.
 
A peace of mutual exhaustion wherein basically everyone collapses would be interesting. Like what happened in Eastern Europe but to the entire continent.

I do have an idea involving Germany falling apart as the north and Rhineland go communist/democratic socialist and the monarchies stay in the south, the Irish War spilling out of control and Britian itself experiencing major trouble, things like that.

Michael Collins would feature. As would Jan Smuts in some manner.
 
I would love to see a scenario where, somehow, the Hapsburgs and Ottomans are the only major monarchies left by 1920.

I can't remotely see how you'd get there, but a lad can dream.
 
Going back through the thread, I may have taken it off-topic a little. The thrust of the original post is what happens in the British empire given a Central Powers victory? A possible set of PODs was given later that are mostly non-viable, with the exception of the Germans not doing unrestricted submarine warfare. Not going there is essential for a CP victory. It might be enough for a CP victory due to economic factors, but that's debatable and still leaves Germany exhausted, with collapsing Allies on the Eastern Front.

Let's say that the US is still sitting out the war in 1917 and early 1918. It is building the "Navy Second to None" that it historically planned and actually started on. The Russians are out of the war as of March 3, 1918. Italy has suffered the big defeat that they did historically in October/November 1917.. The Germans are gathering their forces for their big historic offensive into France. Britain seems on the road to seeing the two pillars of their empire--naval superiority and being the financial capital of the world going down the tubes. The Germans are moving 50 divisions from the eastern to the western front, which will give them a big edge there, with no relief in sight from the Americans. The French army is fought out, with multiple mutinies in 1917 that affected around half of the front line units, if I'm remembering correctly. Historically, French morale recovered in late 1917 and 1918, partly because the French high command became more reluctant to use up their army in useless offensives and partly because the French knew the Americans were coming.

In the absence of an American intervention, the western Allies would logically start serious negotiations in late summer-1917 and get gradually more urgent with the French mutinies, the Italian defeat and especially with the Soviets leaving the war. That being the logical course of action doesn't mean it would have happened. I don't know enough about British politics of the time to know if they would follow that logic. If the Brits and French had been doing peace feelers since spring/summer 1917, they would see an increased urgency as it became obvious that Russia was leaving the war.

Germany would have a chance at a favorable but reasonably fair peace in spring 1918. Would they take it? Logically they should, but given the peace treaty they imposed on the Soviets, they probably wouldn't have. So the Germans do their offensive, or at least the initial stages of it, and makes good progress. France and Britain sue for peace and the war ends in mid-April, with the Germans annexing Belgium and being given the Belgium Congo and the bulk of their colonies back, with the possible exceptions of Southwest Africa, the German part of New Guinea and maybe some of the stuff Japan took. The blockade is lifted. The Germans hold onto the parts of northern France that they occupy until the allies pay large reparations. It's a brigand's peace but allows Britain to start rebuilding its financial power and concentrate on meeting the US naval challenge.

Is that all realistic? I don't have a detailed enough knowledge of British and French politics of the period to be sure.

Assuming that it is, my money is on the British empire holding together in the absence of additional catastrophes, with maybe some minor pieces flaking off. (part of Ireland) The Commonwealth countries would, I suspect, have remained loyal and without the example of an Asian people defeating the Brits as in the Japanese in Singapore, the Asian and African parts of the empire would have maybe experienced unrest, but probably wouldn't have flaked off.

All of the major World War 1 participants would face economic and political issues for decades of course. Germany would face a running sore in the east in the ex-Russian states, possibly in Austria-Hungary and in the Balkans.
 
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