Dark State

by Charles Stross

  In late 1746 a Jacobite army did indeed march south and attempt to take Berwick-upon-Tweed (which it held successfully until 1748). But there was no go-for-broke dash on London, and consequently no pivotal defeat for the Stuart Crown. Despite Hanoverian and Whig anguish, the Union between Scotland and England was severed, and Scotland became a hostile power once more, its lowland Presbyterian elite and highland clans warily united in loyalty to its new Catholic monarch largely out of fear of the old enemy to the south.

  * * *

  The British army—for the Hanoverian Crown in London did not relinquish its claim to Scotland—was faced with a difficult mission: to secure a northern border as well as maintaining its grip on overseas colonies and a presence in continental Europe. It was a mission made considerably harder by Louis XV of France, who knew a wedge when he saw one and who generously offered the Stuart kingdom the use of an army (freed up by the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, as the War of the Austrian Succession wound down). Louis XV was aware of the unpopularity of his territorial concessions in that treaty, but preferred to be seen as a peacemaker rather than a conqueror. Accordingly, he allowed an increasingly paranoid and beleaguered British Crown to back itself into a corner.

  War between England and France in the mid-eighteenth century was inevitable: the two powers were locked in a centuries-long conflict for control over the northern European coastline—sea travel being the most effective transport method in the pre-industrial age—and were rivals for imperial expansion in the New World and elsewhere. France, although larger and richer, was constrained by the difficulty of movement overland across its interior. Both powers had extensive maritime empires and sought to expand in North America.

  In time line two, the Seven Years’ War broke out in the mid-1750s as two alliances formed: Britain allied with Prussia, while France allied with Habsburg Austria (overturning two centuries of hostilities). In the colonies, the French and Indian War escalated, until in mid-1756 Britain declared war on France.

  But in time line three, England was isolated. With French warships operating out of the Clyde and the Firth of Forth, and Franco-Scottish armies garrisoned in Carlisle and Berwick-upon-Tweed, much of the English army was pinned down at home. The French victories of the War of the Austrian Succession were repeated in a series of crushing defeats, as Ferdinand of Brunswick’s attempt to defend the Protectorate of Hanover ended with the defeat of the Anglo-German army—and a string of victories at sea left the door open for the French invasion of England in 1759 which, in conjunction with the Stuart Crown’s victorious march south, ended in defeat for the armies of King George II.

  But this was not the end of the line for the Hanoverian monarchy.

  Frederick, Prince of Wales, born in 1707, was first in line to the throne—but thoroughly estranged from his father the King. In our own history, Prince Frederick died suddenly of a ruptured abscess in 1751. But in the wake of the Stuart seizure of Scotland George II sent his eldest on a tour of the colonies, possibly to get him out of the way of political maneuverings in London, but also as an insurance policy.

  When word reached New England in early 1760 that London had fallen to a Franco-Scottish invasion, and that the King had died of an aneurysm in the Tower of London, Frederick, Prince of Wales wasted no time. He sailed to Boston and, landing, rode to the Massachusetts Town House in that city where he declared himself King of Great Britain and King-Emperor of the British Empire in North America.

  * * *

  News of the English defeat and occupation by France sent shockwaves through the North American colonies—themselves intermittently under threat of French military expansion on the continent. News that the Hanoverian heir to the Crown had established himself in exile in Boston caused considerably more contention. Today in time line two we remember the War of Independence as being about taxation without representation, and about onerous terms imposed by a remote overseas empire. Having the King-Emperor appear on one’s doorstep, announce that the capital was moving (first to Boston, then a decade later to Manhattan Island, which was to be renamed New London), and announce a Continental Congress, the establishment of a House of Commons with tax-raising power, and start raising an army to fight the French, must have been shocking.

  One particular group felt the shock most acutely: the southern aristocracy descended from those loyalists to Charles Stuart who had chosen exile in the New World over bending their neck beneath the Puritan yoke of the Commonwealth. Although Protestants, this group despised and disliked the Hanoverian dynasty as a matter of principle. Faced with the prospect of a King-in-Exile levying taxes on their tobacco, sugar, and cotton plantations, a group of the wealthiest nobility in the West Indies and the Southern Colonies met in the council of the Lords Proprietors of Charleston, South Carolina, in 1762 and agreed to raise an army. They wrote to the French King, issuing a petition and calling for aid; and then they repudiated their membership in the British Empire. When the governor of Georgia refused to join them and denounced their rebellion as treason, he was hanged before the statehouse in Atlanta: and this began the incident known as the Slaveowners’ Treasonous Rebellion.

  The Rebellion lasted from 1762 to 1770, and was utterly devastating. In time line two, the American Civil War lasted four years and killed an estimated 3 percent of the US population; as many as 18 percent of all white males of military age in the South were killed. But the Slaveowners’ Treasonous Rebellion was far worse, with consequences that can only be compared to time line two’s Thirty Years War, or the War of the Triple Alliance, in which Paraguay attempted to conquer South America, attacked Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay simultaneously, and suffered nearly 80 percent fatalities (90 percent of the male population and 50 percent of the women and children dying during the conflict).

  From the King’s perspective, there was no alternative to total war: allowing secession to go unpunished would result in the remains of the British Empire being gobbled up by the rival French, Dutch, and Spanish empires. England was already under enemy occupation: his back was to the wall. His prosecution of the war was therefore brutal to a degree that students of the American Civil War find shocking. The arrival of French and Spanish armies in Florida in 1764 escalated the conflict even before the inflammatory addition of a delegation from the Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición. (This appears to have been the result of an initiative on the part of the Grand Inquisitor to shore up his office, already declining in influence at home. It was indulged by King Frederick VI, possibly in hope of allowing the Inquisition to undermine its own position—and was to have far-reaching consequences.) In particular, the mass executions and gibbetings of rebel prisoners along the Great Wagon Road between North Carolina and Augusta has few parallels in modern history other than the Siege of Vienna until we get to more recent post-nineteenth-century systematic genocide.

  In the wake of the advancing Royalist armies, the widows and orphans of the executed rebels were enslaved regardless of race, as a punishment for treason, much as slavery had been used as a sentence in the wake of the ’15 rebellion and against the Covenanters. Holdings were expropriated and titles granted to exiled British nobles, while former slaves were armed and used to police the conquered territory. In some cases, former slaves were placed over their ex-masters as overseers: by 1770 the geography of the planter states was unrecognizable.

  This was not, incidentally, a war fought over emancipation, or over the issue of the expansion of slavery. A common misconception among people from our time line is that a civil war between the states in time line three must have similar causes to those of time line two. Rather, the cause of the war was the royal imposition of direct rule from the throne-in-exile. But it was not an unmitigated despotism. As the war progressed, the Crown traded privilege and power for support, allowing the establishment of a formal parliament with houses for the Commons and Lords, and a new Bill of Rights.

  Emancipation and the end of chattel slavery followed the war (as early as 1811 throughout
the continental dominions of the New British Empire). Popular sentiment for emancipation grew after the subjugation of the white southern population after the rebellion; the French blockade of the Atlantic coast following the occupation of the British Isles acted to sever the three-cornered trade cycle that brought slaves from Africa to the New World, throttling the supply of new slaves, while indentured laborers emigrating from the Scottish lowlands, England, and Wales boosted the population of the northern colonies. Finally, because of the role of the slave-owning estates in fomenting the rebellion, the practice of slave-holding was seen as questionable and unpatriotic.

  * * *

  Although the term “World War” is historically associated in our time line with the great conflict between the Central Powers and the Triple Alliance, and the later emergence of the same geopolitical stresses in the shape of Hitler’s war, it is worth remembering that these were not the first global conflicts. The rise of the Spanish Hapsburg Empire in the Netherlands and Central and South America during the sixteenth century was intercontinental in scope; and the two-hundred-year-long struggle between the British and French empires in the late seventeenth to early eighteenth centuries could certainly be described as a global war, although not as all-embracing as the wars of the twentieth century.

  In time line three, the French occupation of England in 1760 had several consequences of global geopolitical significance that gave rise to a series of world wars.

  For the first time since the fall of the western Roman Empire, the northern coastline of Europe was dominated by a single power. Furthermore, the French treasury was far stronger at this time than in our own history. On occupying England, the Emperor granted the Farmers Generale a license to farm taxes in the newly conquered territory: customs tariff barriers were installed along the English canal system, breaking up what had hitherto been the largest free trade zone in Europe—and coincidentally making it difficult for organized resistance to emerge. Where in our time line the 1770s were a decade of repeated failures to reform the French taxation system, culminating in the fiscal crisis and subsequent revolution of 1789–91, in time line three Louis XV was able to pay off many of his creditors—and bought sufficient breathing space to make some moderate reforms of the tariff system, notably through selling titles of nobility to the new territories across the English Channel (and, highly optimistically, in the Americas). Consequently, the pressures that gave rise to the French Revolution were diffused, if not avoided entirely. The inevitable day of reckoning for the French Crown’s finances arrived in 1812, but by then events had taken a radically different turn and rather than outright revolt the issue was settled by relatively peaceful means.

  Free from the ruinous costs of continuous war with England, French trade around the Mediterranean flourished. An alliance with the Austrian Crown took place, between Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette: in the absence of the French fiscal crisis that led to revolution she was considerably less unpopular and when, in 1791, Russia attempted to annex East Prussia, the Franco-Austrian alliance not only repelled the invasion but reasserted the protectorate over the former Holy Roman Empire and Poland. French hegemony over Europe grew until in 1809 Tsar Alexander I attempted to regain his western possessions, triggering a genuine first world war.

  Friction between the European imperial powers and the American Empire had been growing in the Caribbean colonies: the New British navy, still weak (for the Crown was focused on suppression of internal dissent in the South), was ill-equipped to play a part in a trans-Atlantic war. Nevertheless, an Anglo-Russian entente in 1810 saw the Crown send warships as far as the Baltic to help the highly inadequate Russian navy interdict ships supporting the French invasion. It was to no avail. A well-supplied French grand army not commanded by Napoleon Bonaparte (who, living in obscurity in Lyons, ended his military career as a colonel in the 1820s) laid siege to St. Petersburg in 1811 and, with supplies delivered by sea, carved the Grand Duchy of Finland and much of Western Russia away from the Tsar’s Empire.

  The French fiscal crisis finally arrived in time line three much later than in our own history. It also arrived at the gates of a Versailles that ruled unchallenged over Northern Europe, with the wealth of England, Poland, the Holy Roman Empire, and much of Russia added to its assets—and a strong army organized along modern lines with which to enforce the King’s decrees. Of which there were many, as it turned out. A headlong reform of the system of aristocratic privilege, by which titles conferred exemption from taxes and the right of corvée (forced labor) over peasants associated with that title, caused considerable unrest among the nobility (who by this time numbered nearly 8 percent of the French population). But with decades more experience and an empire’s assets to draw on, Louis XVI was able to buy off much of the unrest with grants of land and titles at the expense of the peripheral new territories. Worker and peasant revolts in England were suppressed viciously, and the special taxation suppressed much of the development that in our time line gave birth to the industrial revolution: it simultaneously secured the future of the French Crown, as long as it could continue to expand, buying off its creditors with future income derived from new territories expropriated from their previous owners.

  Expansion to the east thus became the pattern of the French empire during the nineteenth century, while the British Crown in the Americas expanded to the west and south, digging aggressively into the vulnerable underbelly of the Portuguese and Spanish Empires—the creators of which were too busy fending off the French at home to focus on their possessions overseas.

  * * *

  The French invasion and occupation of England came about at a time when the building blocks of the British Industrial Revolution were coming together. The construction of canals coincided with the development of low-pressure steam engines for pumping water out of coal and iron mines: the lack of internal trade barriers and growing external, international trade made England a growing hub of industry in our own history. But with an uncanny effectiveness the French occupation shut down these harbingers of the modern. Canal transport was taxed. Mines were taxed. Engines for raising water by means of steam were taxed. The construction of ships and the harvesting of the oak from which their timbers were made were taxed. Road travel was taxed. Indeed, the whole of British industry was taxed, ruinously hard—as a deliberate policy to immiserate the capital-forming classes among whose ranks opposition to French rule might accrete over time. The industrial revolution was stillborn in time line three: the same ingredients came together a century later in the foothills of the Appalachians, but it is worth remembering that time line three’s first steam-powered commercial railroad was laid between Irontown (in a location roughly congruent with our world’s Philadelphia) and New London (the fortified imperial capital city on lower Manhattan Island) in the 1890s. And the first steam-powered ship, a tug boat, came into service on the Manhattan docksides in 1898.

  The role of the monarchy in North America can’t be said to be entirely negative in this respect. Nobody in time line three knew that industrial development was even possible. The Crown’s overriding obsession lay in securing itself against the threat of aggression arising from secessionist movements at home and foreign imperialists overseas—and the French Empire was a global threat to the North American colonies from the 1760s on. There were no Federalist Papers and no constitutional convention in time line three, but a Bill of Rights was nevertheless negotiated in the 1810–1818 period, in part as a measure by a newly crowned monarch to burnish his popularity by contrast with the absolutist Continental System. It seems outlandish to American ears, but the subjects of the New British Empire prided themselves on their freedom and liberty compared to the subjects of rival empires overseas, even though in the post-Rebellion period from 1761 to approximately 1810 the British monarchy reigned as an absolute despotism of a kind that had not been seen in the British Isles since the days of Charles I.

  Globally, the political pattern that emerges in the nineteenth century is not one of abs
olute monarchies set against post-revolutionary republics such as France and the United States, or constitutional monarchies like Great Britain: it is a pattern of absolute despotic monarchies set against somewhat more moderate absolute monarchies that permit representative assemblies of citizens and allow a free, albeit licensed, press to exist.

  The ideological climate of totalitarian monarchies was very different to the turbulent growth of free speech in the English-speaking world of our own history. It is important to understand this in order to comprehend the impact of these changes on philosophy, science, economics, and literature. A monarchical system is as much a hereditary dictatorship as North Korea: criticism of the monarch’s good taste, ideas, or philosophy is dangerous in the extreme. Adam Smith, who in our own history was the father of modern economics, engaged in his research and writing in the Stuart-ruled Kingdom of Scotland rather than the more economically liberal and outspoken Great Britain of our own time line. The Wealth of Nations appears to have been written, but was never published—suppressed by the censors of the Court of Chancery. Some highly circumspect papers discussing the theory of the division of labor and Smith’s criticism of tariff barriers were published during his lifetime, but no general theory of trade emerged to challenge the eighteenth-century consensus of the physiocrats. In the nineteenth century, the unrest during the decades following the French fiscal crisis claimed the life of the young Karl Marx: the only trace of Friedrich Engels to be found in the historical records identifies him as a Hessian mercenary who died in obscurity in Panama. Prince Peter Kropotkin was apparently never born, in a Russian territorial appendix to the French Empire. And so this was a time line bereft of the ideologies of industrial civilization—both capitalism and communism were stillborn.

  By the mid–nineteenth century, the growing distance between the macro-level history of time line three and our own history is such that most historical figures are absent or unrecognizable. There is no record of an Adolf Hitler, a Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin), or a Benito Mussolini. These people simply never existed. On the other hand, many of those killed during the Terror of the French Revolution survived. The noble and chemist Antoine Lavoisier did not die on the guillotine, and went on to triumphantly pioneer stoichiometry and, subsequently, to make the first partial draft of a periodic table of the elements, a full fifty-five years before Dmitri Mendeleev did so in our own time line. Similarly, the germ theory of disease spread rapidly after Agostino Bassi’s research in the early 1810s came to the attention of the French army’s surgeon-general. While industrialization was retarded for up to a century by the invasion of England, scientific progress was not automatically impaired and in some aspects advanced faster than in our own history—until it ran up against the barriers imposed by the lack of an industrial establishment able to provide funding, personnel, and equipment for research institutes.