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Alternate History General Discussion

For all you naval rivet counters, there's Springsharp , which lets you build any steam-age warship you desire.

(It only really works until WWII because it's a weight simulator, and postwar ships became far more bound by volume. Still a great resource I've had a lot of fun with).
 
A fun deconstruction of the idea of the good man making colonialism itself good is to examine what the hell kinda person would want to try and run a colony and thinks that they’re actually improving their lives instead of just exploiting them.

I’d think the only kind of person who’d sign up for that kind of work and would have that mindset during those times would be extremely condescending and wholeheartedly believes that the white man has come to enlighten the savages.
 
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A fun deconstruction of the idea of the good man making colonialism itself good is to examine what the hell kinda person would try to want to run a colony and thinks that they’re actually improving their lives instead of just exploiting them.

I’d think the only kind of person who’d sign up for that kind of work and would have that mindset during those times would be extremely condescending and wholeheartedly believes that the white man has come to enlighten the savages.

Yeah but 1984 is still a banger so we let him off.
 
An alternate history scenario that is ASB is the US sending ground troops to China in the Chinese Civil War. It was politically impossible. Even MacArthur said that anyone who supported such needed mental help.
 
For all you naval rivet counters, there's Springsharp , which lets you build any steam-age warship you desire.

(It only really works until WWII because it's a weight simulator, and postwar ships became far more bound by volume. Still a great resource I've had a lot of fun with).
I've been having fun with it since the original Springstyle almost 20 years ago.
 
An alternate history scenario that is ASB is the US sending ground troops to China in the Chinese Civil War. It was politically impossible. Even MacArthur said that anyone who supported such needed mental help.

Considering the USMC was already there and was taking casualties from the Communists, this is a sweeping declaration that has little to back it up. Escalation was absolutely a potential outcome of Operation Beleaguer.
 
Yeah but 1984 is still a banger so we let him off.
Would you mind giving some sources on what Orwell said about colonialism? I know that a positive view on the empire was widespread even among the socialists in Britain but I'd like to know more on what Orwell specifically thought on it.
 
Would you mind giving some sources on what Orwell said about colonialism? I know that a positive view on the empire was widespread even among the socialists in Britain but I'd like to know more on what Orwell specifically thought on it.

Read the "Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius" for his full take.

But in short he was against rapid decolonisation and felt a socialist commonwealth could replace the empire.


"To a Labour government in power, three imperial policies would have been open.

One was to continue administering the Empire exactly as before, which meant dropping all pretensions to Socialism.

Another was to set the subject peoples 'free', which meant in practice handing them over to Japan, Italy and other predatory powers, and incidentally causing a catastrophic drop in the British standard of living.

The third was to develop a positive imperial policy, and aim at transforming the Empire into a federation of Socialist states, like a looser and freer version of the Union of Soviet Republics."

"A complete severance of the two countries would be a disaster for India no less than for England. Intelligent Indians know this. As things are at present not only can India not defend itself, it is hardly even capable of feeding itself. The whole administration depends on a series of experts who are predominately english and could not be replaced within 5 or 10 years. Moreover English is the lingua Franca and nearly the whole of the Indian intelligentsia is deeply anglicized.

If India were simply 'liberated', i.e. deprived of British military protection, the first result would be a fresh foreign conquest, and the second a series of enormous famines which would kill millions of people within a few years.

What India needs is the power to work out its own constitution without British interference, but in some kind of partnership that ensures its military protection and technical advice. This is unthinkable until there is a Socialist government in England.

That, roughly, is what would be meant by Dominion status if it were offered to India by a Socialist government. It is an offer of partnership on equal terms until such time as the world has ceased to be ruled by bombing planes. But we must add to it the unconditional right to secede. It is the only way of proving that we mean what we say. And what applies to India applies, mutatis mutandis, to Burma, Malaya and most of our African possessions."

I was being a little overharsh on him as a joke, tbf. An Unconditional right to secede is pretty progressive.
 
Read the "Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius" for his full take.

But in short he was against rapid decolonisation and felt a socialist commonwealth could replace the empire.


"To a Labour government in power, three imperial policies would have been open.

One was to continue administering the Empire exactly as before, which meant dropping all pretensions to Socialism.

Another was to set the subject peoples 'free', which meant in practice handing them over to Japan, Italy and other predatory powers, and incidentally causing a catastrophic drop in the British standard of living.

The third was to develop a positive imperial policy, and aim at transforming the Empire into a federation of Socialist states, like a looser and freer version of the Union of Soviet Republics."

"A complete severance of the two countries would be a disaster for India no less than for England. Intelligent Indians know this. As things are at present not only can India not defend itself, it is hardly even capable of feeding itself. The whole administration depends on a series of experts who are predominately english and could not be replaced within 5 or 10 years. Moreover English is the lingua Franca and nearly the whole of the Indian intelligentsia is deeply anglicized.

If India were simply 'liberated', i.e. deprived of British military protection, the first result would be a fresh foreign conquest, and the second a series of enormous famines which would kill millions of people within a few years.

What India needs is the power to work out its own constitution without British interference, but in some kind of partnership that ensures its military protection and technical advice. This is unthinkable until there is a Socialist government in England.

That, roughly, is what would be meant by Dominion status if it were offered to India by a Socialist government. It is an offer of partnership on equal terms until such time as the world has ceased to be ruled by bombing planes. But we must add to it the unconditional right to secede. It is the only way of proving that we mean what we say. And what applies to India applies, mutatis mutandis, to Burma, Malaya and most of our African possessions."

I was being a little overharsh on him as a joke, tbf. An Unconditional right to secede is pretty progressive.
If India were simply 'liberated', i.e. deprived of British military protection, the first result would be a fresh foreign conquest, and the second a series of enormous famines which would kill millions of people within a few years.
It is very easy to see that this seemed self-evident to Orwell at the time. Indeed independent India has faced the same periodic famine conditions and lack of food security that Orwell was treating as a natural law - it's just that the post-independence Indian government did a much better job of responding to them than probably anyone at the time (even Indian nationalists) would have dreamed. The inherent surprise is probably not so much that as the fact that, despite the troubles over Partition and annexing the princely states, the government held together with a degree of unity that made it possible; there was regionalist and partisan sniping later on like the whole thing about not funding West Bengal's roads, but it was never to the degree that people expected.

It's easy to look back at that now and say it's inherently racist and arrogant to expect India to fall apart without the tiny number of British administrators at the top of the Raj, considering the whole rest of the framework was always Indian and couldn't be anything else. Which, indeed, it is; Orwell will have been influenced by his own experiences growing up there and that will have affected his judgement. But it's not as if every example from history turns out that way; if messageboards had been more a thing at the time, what would we have said to people who confidently predicted that Yugoslavia is a diverse contradiction kept down only by authoritarian rule and it'll disintegrate as soon as that is removed?
 
Not sure if/where this has been discussed on the forum (other than in wikiboxes of course :) ), or in what detail, although I'd be shocked if it hasn't. Inspired by recently watching (most of) Recount while working as a substitute teacher for a social studies class; though there's obviously a lot of Hollywood over reality in specific parts, the tension and (IMO often reprehensible/terrifying) actions of the time covered so mirror those of today that I can't resist asking:

What if Gore had won? What would've needed to (plausibly) change for this to happen? What might be the immediate and long-term changes, for better or worse, from the local to the national and even global level?
 
Not sure if/where this has been discussed on the forum (other than in wikiboxes of course :) ), or in what detail, although I'd be shocked if it hasn't. Inspired by recently watching (most of) Recount while working as a substitute teacher for a social studies class; though there's obviously a lot of Hollywood over reality in specific parts, the tension and (IMO often reprehensible/terrifying) actions of the time covered so mirror those of today that I can't resist asking:

What if Gore had won? What would've needed to (plausibly) change for this to happen? What might be the immediate and long-term changes, for better or worse, from the local to the national and even global level?
What would a Gore presidency look like? | Sea Lion Press | Forum

President Al Gore (Snr or Jnr) ? | Sea Lion Press | Forum

Does this help?
 
Not sure if/where this has been discussed on the forum (other than in wikiboxes of course :) ), or in what detail, although I'd be shocked if it hasn't. Inspired by recently watching (most of) Recount while working as a substitute teacher for a social studies class; though there's obviously a lot of Hollywood over reality in specific parts, the tension and (IMO often reprehensible/terrifying) actions of the time covered so mirror those of today that I can't resist asking:

What if Gore had won? What would've needed to (plausibly) change for this to happen? What might be the immediate and long-term changes, for better or worse, from the local to the national and even global level?

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David Frum did not need two hands to write this.
 
Don’t agree with his proposed solution (at all) but yeah, if George Orwell had known how independent India was going to feed itself he would have been Norman Borlaug.

Not exporting a quarter of its rice to England would probably have helped even without the green revolution.

Like the main problem with arguing that the British Empire was a guard against famines is the history of British rule in India was one wherein a policy of discouraging food stores and the encouragement of cash crops led to a decrease in food security.

Just reversing a lot of british policies would have done the job.
 
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