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Imperial World

xsampa

Well-known member
As in Randy McDonald's Empires Earth, a world where imperialism lasted a lot longer, affected even more places (China, Siam, Persia, Turkey, the Americas) and is only beginning to fall apart. TTL would likely have Imperial Federations of some kind, either as dominions-metropole or autonomous regions-core-other framework.
How could this be possible?

The French Imperial Federation mentioned:
...Big Seven to move towards industrializing their colonies by the 1930s, with inevitable effects on the economic and political consciousness of the subject people. Various different approaches were taken to deal with these changes, of which the fairly whole-hearted French effort to make good Frenchmen out of tens of millions of Africans and Asians

The French Empire is in fact in the lead in trying to create a post-racial (if still Frenchified) imperial identity, although it continues to have difficulties dealing with its Muslim subjects. A democratic global federation is the ultimate ideal,
 
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I don't understand the question. Every place mentioned was an empire or part of an empire, or a de facto part of an empire.
I meant a world where formal imperialism lasts longer and includes more countries, and is only beginning to turn into something else come the 21st century
 
I meant a world where formal imperialism lasts longer and includes more countries, and is only beginning to turn into something else come the 21st century

Again, the question doesn't make that much sense.

What was the 'formal' British Empire in 1914, for example? Did the self-governing Dominions count? How about client states like Argentina? South and Central America have never, in the main, been 'formal' possessions of the United States but clearly vast areas of them are within the American imperial embrace. What about the Ottomans? Turkey was, in that year, both at the mercy of the great empires and a very weak empire itself.

The PRC's rule over Xinjiang is explicitly traced to the borders of the Qing, but is it free from that now it's an 'Autonomous Region?' What about when it was de facto independent but ruled by a governor who nominally claimed allegiance to Nanjing? What about when it was in the Soviet Sphere?

To use an even murkier example: is Francafrique free of empire now?

The question presupposes a particular, clear-cut model of imperial rule that existed largely between 1857 and 1918. Furthermore, even in that period it was never as common as is popularly imagined- one of the things that strikes anyone about even a brief foray into the history of the Colonial Office is just how many types of governments and administrations in the late 19th Century British Empire.

If you want to extend the era of imperialism then you could delay or shorten the world wars; but that won't do anything to change the growing unsustainability of minority rule across Africa and Asia, nor the shrinking technological gap between subject and slavedriver, nor the growing caucus of anti-imperialist thought in the white powers (ranging from leftists to the isolationist right.)

Imperial Federation is interesting as an intellectual movement, but I struggle to imagine any scenario where it achieves any success, at least in the English speaking world. I suppose the French Union might have been forced through, though I doubt that lasts very long either once the Metropole gets tired of either bribing Africa or spending blood and treasure to impose membership.
 
To get more countries as colonies and protectorates, feels you either need the empires to be more powerful & have more warm bodies to send abroad, or you need a few extra empires to exist & grab land.
 
Imperial Federations are just White Supremacist rule with more constituencies. So it's just a more racist world propped up with far more genocides.
Is it necessarily going to be, though? Or could it simply be a world where this is far less true than was the case IOTL- i.e, one where Imperial Japan's the rule rather than the exception, with Europe's technological, industrial and military lead being far more rapidly closed down by the rest of the world, and where as a result, you have more multi-cultural, multi-racial genocides instead, and a world where anti-imperialism and anti-white supremacism aren't one and the same thing (with anti-imperialism gaining far less traction as a result)?
 
Ireland is very telling when it comes to the fate of colonies that get “integrated” into the metropole. Nominal integration did not stop it from being governed dictatorially from Dublin Castle, Irish people were still looked down upon, and voting rights were only given to the elites most amenable to the continued link with Britain and in the election immediately after the removal of Ireland’s extreme voting restrictions, nationalists won almost all Irish seats.

In any sort of Imperial Federation, either the relationship will continue to be fundamentally colonial and nothing will really change, or the federation will shatter under the strain and become little more than a Commonwealth with pretensions. Indeed, many understood this even in OTL, which is why advocates of Imperial Federation either tended to be extreme racists like Cecil Rhodes, or people who viewed it as a stepping stone to ending the Empire like Keshub Chandra Sen.
 
Ireland is very telling when it comes to the fate of colonies that get “integrated” into the metropole. Nominal integration did not stop it from being governed dictatorially from Dublin Castle, Irish people were still looked down upon, and voting rights were only given to the elites most amenable to the continued link with Britain and in the election immediately after the removal of Ireland’s extreme voting restrictions, nationalists won almost all Irish seats.

In any sort of Imperial Federation, either the relationship will continue to be fundamentally colonial and nothing will really change, or the federation will shatter under the strain and become little more than a Commonwealth with pretensions. Indeed, many understood this even in OTL, which is why advocates of Imperial Federation either tended to be extreme racists like Cecil Rhodes, or people who viewed it as a stepping stone to ending the Empire like Keshub Chandra Sen.
Would a world comprised overwhelmingly of "Commonwealths with pretensions" still count as an 'Imperial World' as specified here, though? Because if it did, this would be a lot more feasible.
 
Ireland is very telling when it comes to the fate of colonies that get “integrated” into the metropole. Nominal integration did not stop it from being governed dictatorially from Dublin Castle, Irish people were still looked down upon, and voting rights were only given to the elites most amenable to the continued link with Britain and in the election immediately after the removal of Ireland’s extreme voting restrictions, nationalists won almost all Irish seats.

In any sort of Imperial Federation, either the relationship will continue to be fundamentally colonial and nothing will really change, or the federation will shatter under the strain and become little more than a Commonwealth with pretensions. Indeed, many understood this even in OTL, which is why advocates of Imperial Federation either tended to be extreme racists like Cecil Rhodes, or people who viewed it as a stepping stone to ending the Empire like Keshub Chandra Sen.

See also: Austro-Hungary.
 
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