The Independent States of America
I have long toyed with the idea of the major colonies simply going their separate ways at the end of the revolutionary war, with separate nations of Virginia, Massachusetts, and various others. If the Europeans had seemed like less of a threat at the end of the war I could see that happening. Maybe England doesn't settle the Irish problems that were going in at the same time as the American Revolution. The French see continued British weakness and get greedy. The war continues as an essentially inter-European affair, weakening both England and France to the point that they are not a threat for the immediate future. Or maybe one of the American assaults on Quebec or Montreal work-or they launch a new one in light of British weakness, and England is tossed entirely off the North American continent except for Hudson Bay and the area around it. With no British threat, and with Canadian colonies to deal with, I suspect that the American colonies would fragment into separate nations, just like the Spanish colonies in Latin America did. None would be particularly powerful in the European context. Only the largest ones like Virginia and Massachusetts would be militarily or economically all that viable.
In that situation you might very well have wars between the colonies, stimulated by conflicting claims to western lands. I believe that Virginia had a fairly good claim to all of the Old Northwest. That conflicted with claims by the New England states to the areas to the west of them. I could see a truly wild situation growing up in the area between the Appalachians and the Mississippi. I could easily see a French-speaking nation growing out of the Quebec/Montreal area. That nation could end up fighting a three or more way series of wars over the old Northwest, with Virginia, maybe New York or Massachusetts, and with the various Indian tribes maneuvering to take advantage of the situation or at least avoid getting devoured by it.
With no one in firm control of the area, you could have additional essentially independent states growing up in the area west of the Appalachians. You could have ‘normal’ white pioneers vying with mixed bloods like the ancestors of the Robeson (sp?) County "Indians", escaped slaves, out and out outlaws, bands of Tories that flee inland to escape persecution, and of course the various Indian tribes.
In our time-line the United States almost got sucked into the wars of the French Revolution (fighting an undeclared naval war with the French) and did get sucked into the Napoleonic wars (our war of 1812). The various little independent nations of North America could easily get sucked into the wars of the French Revolution, assuming that it still happened. I suspect that it would, possibly even sooner than it did in our time-line. If there was a French-speaking nation in North America, I could see French Royalists fleeing there and making the situation more dangerous.
I’m beginning to get enthusiastic about this scenario again. Maybe I’ll do some digging and write it up in detail for next POD. I’ll at least add it to my long list of things I want to write someday.
Any comments? Click to e-mail me.
The Independent States of Rome
What if the Roman Empire had broken up hundreds of years early? What if the Roman empire ceased to exist during the time of troubles that stretched, with a few periods of relative stability, for nearly a century from before 200 AD until nearly 300 AD? The empire nearly broke up in our time-line. It came especially close to breaking up around 260-275 AD. The army had become heavily involved in politics. There were often several rival regional contenders for emperor. Emperors tended to reign for months, not years. Several potential successor states were forming; the most powerful of which was the Gallo-Roman Empire in what is now France. There was a terrible epidemic of some kind during this era, along with barbarian invasions and nearly continuous civil wars. The empire managed to pull itself back together and last another 200 years in our time-line. What if it hadn’t though?
Epidemics can be reasonably close to random. Make it hit the key pillars of a united Rome a little harder—say the areas in what is now Yugoslavia where the Romans of this era recruited their best and most loyal troops, and maybe the bureaucracy in and around the city itself. As a result, the Roman State does not come back together. Instead, by 280 or 290 AD successor states are taking on their own identity in what is now France, maybe England, Egypt, the rest of North Africa, the Greek areas that in our time-line became the Byzantine empire, and maybe even the Roman parts of Romania. In Italy, would be emperors are still fighting over what is left of the empire, while their subjects grow hungry as food shipments from North Africa dwindle.
In this scenario, the successor states are still very much in the Roman tradition. They form disciplined legions led by people who still act and talk like Romans. Local Romans rather than barbarians from outside the empire run them. Learning still flourishes. The economies tend to contract a bit, though that is somewhat offset by the fact that the central Roman government is no longer extracting a major share. Unlike the Roman Empire, the Roman successor states are forced to remain efficient and militarily strong. If they don’t stay strong their rivals will gobble them up. Barbarians do invade, sometimes as allies of one or more of the successor states. Those invasions become less of a threat as time goes on. The successor states have better-organized armies, and those armies are continually honed by wars between the successor states.
For a while, the successor states all claim to be the true Roman Empire. As time goes on, they tend to legitimize their independence by emphasizing their uniqueness. They adopt different religions. Some adopt some flavor of Christianity. Others might adopt Mithrism. They also glorify their unique past. The Romanized Celts of Britain and France emphasize a romanticized version of their Celtic past. The Greeks emphasize their own past glories as they establish their own imperial identity.
This mini-scenario raises a lot of questions. What is likely to happen to Christianity? Are the successor states more friendly to innovation than the Romans? Do you get an earlier industrial revolution or do you get a later one or none at all? A key issue in that might be how compatible with progress the religions adopted by the various states are.
What do you think? I think I managed to get a credible "Christ versus Mithras" scenario out of this if some of the successor states choose Christianity and some choose Mithrism. (See Jim, I don’t always totally ignore your suggested scenarios).
Any comments? Click to e-mail me.
On Mexican Indian depopulation: Spanish rule made for fewer surviving Mexican Indians in a number of ways:
I have no way of knowing how significant those factors were. My guess is that in their absence, Mexican Indian population would have eventually fallen to somewhere in the range of twenty-five to forty percent of pre-contact levels, but that is just a guess.
I have to question Craig's statement that diseases alone would have been a society killer for Mexican Indians. If he means that Mexican Indians would have become physically extinct, then that is obviously not the case. If he means that in the absence of Spanish rule, diseases would have destroyed enough of Mexican Indian culture that it would no longer be recognizably Mexican Indian, then that is somewhat more defendable, but probably wrong. Of course whether the statement is true or false depends partly on how we define the essence of the society. If the essence of Mexican Indian society was the cities, the architecture, the political structures, the art, and the trade, then the statement may or may not be right. If the essence of Mexican Indian society was the underlying set of farming techniques and other technologies that made those more specialized aspects of the society possible, then again the statement is clearly wrong.
I suspect that the best analog for the fate of the Mexican Indians without Spanish conquest would be the Cherokee Indians. They got hit by a variety of diseases in the years before removal and lost a lot of their population. It simplified their culture a bit, but it didn’t change it to something unrecognizable. They stopped building temple mounds, and probably simplified their political structure quite a bit. Now Cherokees did change a lot, but that was primarily due to their adoption of European trade goods in the 1700’s. By 1680, after over 150 years of sporadic contact with Europeans and their diseases, the Cherokees were still recognizably Indian, and still recognizably descended from the same society that had been there when Columbus discovered the New World.
On Craig's reaction to my statement that Mexican Indians attempted to remodel the Catholic Church to make it their own: I suspect that we could go around and around on that one and bore everybody else to tears.
There are two problems here. First, the relative importance of native versus Spanish influences is very dependent on what you emphasize. Until recently, anthropologists have emphasized the Spanish elements—probably too much. Recently the Indian elements have been recognized and emphasized by some groups of anthropologists—arguably over-emphasized. Second, we are saying very close to the same thing, but saying it as though the two views were incompatible. Mexican Indians brought some of their pre-existing religious and cultural baggage into the Catholic Church, and to some extent made it more comfortable for them. They would have probably brought more of that baggage in if they could have gotten away with it. How important was the baggage they brought in? Did they change the structure or just sew in a few pieces of veneer? How conscious was the process? I suspect that the native aspects were much important to the Indians than they appeared to be to the Spaniards, at least for the first couple of generation of converts. I also suspect that the symbolism meant different things to the Indians than it did to either the Spanish or to modern anthropologists.
I don’t see how we can settle the issue of how important or conscious the process was without a time machine, a mind reader, and a translator. Since two of those three things are not available, we can either go around and around on the issue without any hope of convincing each other or agree to disagree.
Any comments? Click to e-mail me.