by Tom Anderson
Corea: The spelling in TTL remains the older OTL one, with C rather than K. Corea under the Joseon dynasty remained isolationist until events in China meant that the status quo was no longer tenable – once more, records of the relevant period are sketchy. There appear to have been no significant changes in rulers or policy relative to OTL throughout much of the eighteenth century. This changed, however, in 1770… (q.v.)
China and Burma: During the reign of the Yongzheng Emperor, his favourite son, Hongli, the Prince Bao (who in OTL became the Qianlong Emperor) seems to have drowned in a river in 1733. This was a dramatic shock to both Yongzheng and Chinese political culture in general, as everyone had expected Hongli to become Emperor and he had been beloved of both Yongzheng and his predecessor, the illustrious Kangxi Emperor. Foul play by siblings was suspected, as Yongzheng had himself risen to his position by defeating his brothers and been frustrated in his ambitions ever since. Yongzheng fell into a long fevered illness as a result, but recovered and, unlike OTL, lived until 1754 rather than 1735. Possibly he realised that he needed to create a clear new line of succession before his death, else China fall back into a warlord period with no obvious candidate for Emperor.
Although suspicious that he had, in fact, been responsible for Hongli’s death, Yongzheng eventually settled on his elder brother Hongshi, favoured by Yongzheng’s minister Yinsi the Prince Lian. Hongshi adopted the name Prince Zhong, which evoked the idea that he would be a bridge between a glorious past and a glorious future. When Yongzheng did die, Hongshi/Zhong ascended to the Dragon Throne in a fairly peaceable manner, with only desultory attempts from other candidates. He took the era name Daguo or Great Nation, with overtones of a strong fortress. This reflected his policies as Son of Heaven: due to his father’s own lack of success in combating the Dzungars on the steppes, he decided that it was not possible for the Chinese army to beat the nomads on their own turf—inaccurately, as Qianlong managed it OTL—and instead adopted a more conservative, defensive policy. Daguo created what was known poetically as Xin Chengchang, the New Great Wall, on China’s eastern frontier with the Dzungars – in practice this was more of a series of fortified towns and military outposts than a ‘wall’ in the literal sense of the original. While Dzungaria proper was not brought under Chinese rule, the Dzungars were defeated twice during attempted invasions and eventually paid at least token homage to the Daguo Emperor.
During Daguo’s reign, the Dzungars seemed a decidedly minor threat compared to expansionist Burma under the Konbaung dynasty, which successfully conquered the Mon kingdom of Pegu and the Siamese kingdom of Ayutthaya. Burmese power and influence was beginning to extend into Chinese areas, which was unacceptable to the Emperor. In the 1760s, Burmese General Myat Htun seized the capital Ava and attempted to establish a renewed Toungoo Dynasty, overthrowing King Naungdawgyi of the Konbaung. However, Naungdawgyi assembled his own army and gave siege. It was at this point that the British East India Company offered to support the royal forces in return for greater trading rights, and Naungdawgyi accepted. (In OTL the Burmese massacred some Britons in 1759 and the EIC, after briefly attempting to secure reparations and an apology and then continue trade, decided it wasn’t worth it, as they were no longer competing with the French for Burmese trade anyway. In TTL French power in India was anything but crushed, there was no massacre and the EIC greatly desired the superior trading position with Burma).
Myat Htun fled with his army when he heard of the British deal, having learned of the power that the BEIC could call upon during one of his western campaigns, and sought exile in China. The Daguo Emperor’s ministers realised that this could be used as a weapon against expansionist Burma, and sent Myat Htun back with a Qing army to “restore the native dynasty” – this being a little hypocritical considering the Qing’s own origins as Manchu invaders of China.
Naungdawgyi had ruled Burma unopposed, with extensive trade with the BEIC, from 1760 to 1768, when the Chinese invaded. By this point, only token BEIC forces remained in Burma, and Naungdawgyi was defeated by the Qing. In OTL Naungdawgyi died young and was succeeded by his brother Hsingbyushin, who successfully defeated several Chinese invasions with some able generals – as Naungdawgyi did not exactly inspire loyalty in OTL, with many more rebellions and breakaway generals than Hsingbyushin, I gather that the Burmese response to the Chinese invasion in TTL was much less coherent and decisive.
The Kingdom crumbled after the Chinese took Ava and Myat Htun installed Mahadammayaza as restored Tougou Dynasty King. The new state, which extended little beyond Ava, was firmly in China’s pocket and closed to British trade, as were the “freed” states of Pegu and Ayutthaya. Naungdawgyi’s brother Minhkaung Nawrahta, the Viceroy of Tougou (the city, no present connection to the dynasty) established his own state, which continued trade with Britain and requested EIC assistance against further Chinese expansion. In truth, though, Daguo was content to have smashed any semblance of a united, powerful Burmese state, and did not seek further control among the remnants.
More importantly in the long run, Hsinbyushin, another brother of Naungdawgyi, fled south and west with much of what remained of the Burmese army, abandoning Ava. A charismatic leader, Hsinbyushin managed to inspire even this dispirited remnant to overrun and seize the kingdom of Arakan, which had already been weakened by several Burmese attempts in recent years. After defeating the Arakanese army, Hsinbyushin established his seat of power in the Arakanese capital Mraukou and continued to exercise control over the south and west of what had been the Burmese kingdom. During his reign the Arakanese language was suppressed in favour of Burman, and direct contact with the British in Bengal was made. Hsinbyushin’s minor empire is generally referred to in later histories as “Burmese-Arakan”.
Having secured a position of power in the south and defended against the Dzungars in the east, it appears that the Chinese government remained oblivious of what was happening on its northern frontier until 1799…
Chapter 27: New Worlds
“…there is no better example than America, when one considers the notion that our actions have consequences far removed from the present. Groups have gone into that wilderness and been swallowed like a black star,[160] only to re-emerge as strange tribes or nations centuries later. It is a furnace and a forge, which takes up raw material and spits it out against as strange tools indeed…”
– private journal of President Henry Starling, on the election of Andrew Everett as President of Superia (1994)
*
From: “Annum Septentrium: A History of North America”, by Paul Withers (1978)—
Although the Continental Parliament of the Empire of North America was not truly instated until 1788, it had been widely recognised that this step was inevitable since the (oftsince exaggerated) protests of the ‘Troubled Sixties’. The Pitt Ministry in London had begun the constitutional processes to set the new Parliament in motion, despite opposition from the Tories. Indeed, it was Pitt’s position which had brought a large number of Radical Whigs into the succeeding First Rockingham Ministry, when (as a study of his second ministry will show) Rockingham was hardly a man to attract men of such political persuasion in the abstract.
The British Radicals approved of the Continental Parliament, both on principle and because it allowed them to ‘test’ more revolutionary political ideas which would never be accepted at home, at least not yet. In fact some British Radicals took the opportunity in the 1760s to move across the Atlantic and gain residency in American provinces so they might stand as MCPs. This did not meet with much success, however. The American people had been used to more minor parliamentary institutions, such as the Virginian House of Burgesses, for many years, and typically had a stronger preference for electing local men than the British, who were willing to tolerate absentee MPs providing they defended local interests. Only three of the hopeful Radical statesmen were elected, all of them in borough constituencies,[161] and the vast majority eventually returned home and re-engaged with British politi
cs. It is interesting to speculate on the consequences if more of them had been elected, as the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century was largely a time of reactionary thought in America and radicalism in Britain – it could easily have been reversed.
It is also, then, not a surprise that the Continental Parliament began business almost immediately, and outstanding issues considered universal by the Confederations were dealt with first. While there was a general disagreement on how much power the federal Continental Parliament should have vis-à-vis the Confederal assemblies (broadly speaking, even at this point the sentiment became less federal and more confederal as one moved south), some areas were considered important enough by all the confederacies to move on regardless of constitutional questions. Arguably, this set the scene for the general federal consensus that persisted for some decades, as this became ‘the way things are done, the way that we know works’. It is generally considered that the Constitutionalist Party would have instituted a more Confederal consensus stance if they had had a majority in the first parliament, but by the time they achieved power, moderate Imperial federalism had become the accepted status quo.
Some of the areas in which the Continental Parliament was most active in the early days included: transfer of control of all taxation from Westminster to Fredericksburg save military-related taxes; agreement on the settlement lines for the different Confederations and the territories assigned to the allied Indian nations (only the Howden were actually consulted on this); the issue of American stamps and the establishment of an Imperial Mint so that the American economy would not rely chiefly on Spanish dollars (the first gold ‘Imperials’, equivalent to Britain’s Sovereign, were minted in 1794) and, most significantly perhaps in the long run, the closing of all Confederate lands to transportation.
Britain had been using the American colonies as a dumping ground for convicts for decades, a policy that was (understandably) rather unpopular with the colonists who had settled there by choice. In 1789 the Continental Parliament passed the Anti-Transportation Act, signed into law by Lord Deputy William North, which made transportation to the Empire illegal unless specific permission was granted by Confederal legislatures (a sop to the more Confederal-supremacy sympathies in the Constitutionalist Party). The bill had been passed overwhelmingly, and North advised the King-Emperor in a letter that American public feeling on the issue was too strong to ignore. In this he was supported by Prince Frederick George, the Prince of Wales, who was touring the colonies at the time. George III and Edmund Burke (the real power behind the nominal Prime Minister Lord Portland) took this advice seriously and, despite strong protests from some established interests at Westminster, an accompanying Anti-Transportation (North America) Act was passed—far more narrowly—by the Liberal Whig government. Transportation to Imperial lands became illegal, although it still continued to a lesser extent by privateering transporters who sold out their services to corrupt magistrates, usually in British seaports.
This in turn arguably led to the creation of the American Preventive Cutter Service[162] in 1796 to take action against illegal transportation and smuggling, one of the two geneses of the Imperial Navy (see also: HMS Enterprize). The British had no intention of ceasing transportation with all the advantages it seemed to offer as a means of disposing of criminals, so a new location for a penal colony was required. In reality several were used, and it is simply that Susan-Mary was the largest and most infamous.
Initially, it appeared Newfoundland would be the new choice. It was easily accessible from the Atlantic, was isolated and an island, thus making escape difficult, and the British interests who supported its use believed the existing population was too small to matter. However, this proved an incorrect assumption when, in 1803, the Newfoundland colonists petitioned to join the Confederation of New England as a province, disliking the establishment of the Cloudborough penal colony on the island’s northwest coast. Although arms were twisted and only the free-settled half of the island was actually accepted as a province, this soon tied up the penal colony in red tape and meant it never became the primary solution to the transportation problem that its instigators had hoped it would be.
Some convicts were sent to West Africa, playing a role in the early projects of Filling and Space, of which more shall be found in the Bibliography. The American West Indies, then jointly controlled through the Imperial government, also accepted a few convicts, often finding it difficult to obtain volunteers for some of the more infamous and fever-prone islands.
However, even compared to such places, the most infamous penal colony was that of Susan-Mary. At first its location may seem rather nonsensical, even paradoxical, and some have theorised that its choice was deliberately forced by idealistic parliamentary Radicals who wanted to discourage the practice of transportation by making it more difficult. In practice, however, it appears that it was primarily a Wolfean colonisation policy.[163] As a result of the Treaty of London (1785) which ended the Second Platinean War, Britain and latterly the Empire had gained control over much of the northern hinterland of the former French Louisiana territory, though France had retained New Orleans and some of the surrounding lands. While the newly-won Louisiana territory was mostly unsettled, the lands around Lake Michigan had possessed a small but significant French presence dating back to the seventeenth century. This was considered dangerous by both London and Fredericksburg; few doubted that yet another war with France was shortly around the corner (although few could have predicted the form it would take) and there was always the possibility that the French colonists centred around Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit might be able to stab the Empire in the back, particularly if they could threaten the Confederation of New York’s traffic on the Great Lakes.
An agreement signed in 1794 killed two birds with one stone. The British would create a new penal colony out of the lands around the north of Lake Michigan—ceded by New England to Imperial control in return for taking possession of Canada. The penal colony would represent the enaction of Wolfean policies there to ‘dilute out’, as it was euphemistically put, the French population. At the same time, New York and New England would create a Great Lakes Patrol which, though far less ambitious in scope than the later, Atlantic coastal American Preventive Cutter Service, would serve to prevent prisoner escape (at least by a water route) and guard against any attempt by the French colonists to build a fleet. In truth these ideas were largely borne of American paranoia, the remaining French being too few and in no position to threaten anyone, but it sold the idea to the American public.
The first survey of the region was conducted in 1796 by HMS Marlborough, whose crew included the naturalist Erasmus Darwin (jr.), who published a series of articles on the flora and fauna of the Great Lakes. The Marlborough’s Captain Paul Wilkinson recommended the use of the small French city of Sault-Ste-Marie as the centre of the new colony, rather than Fort Pontchartrain as had been initially assumed. Wilkinson argued that Pontchartrain was unsuitable for a variety of reasons and that the fort would have to be demolished or re-manned for safety (today it is the modern city of Lerhoult). By contrast, Sault-Ste-Marie was a major French population centre by Michigan Country standards and most urgently required a ‘Wolfean Dilution’.
The First Fleet of convicts left Britain on May 15th, 1801. After a brief stop at Mount Royal, the fleet sailed up the remainder of the St Lawrence and its living cargo was transferred overland from Lake Ontario to an American counterpart fleet on Lake Erie. This, it must be remembered, was a time before any of the later canal bypasses, and Niagara Falls was not merely a wonder of nature but a huge problem in transferring ships between the Atlantic and the Great Lakes’ interior. The American fleet arrived at its destination on November 12th of the same year.
The early history of the colony has much been attested to in its harshness, of cruel treatment of both the British convicts and French colonists by the military regime in place there. The colony swiftly became a dumping ground for incompetent and cruel Brit
ish military officers as much as it was for the convicts themselves: the coming war and the successor to Rockingham’s government would ensure there were plenty of those being demobbed. The official name of Marlborough Colony was soon forgotten, and it was a crude convict anglicisation of the French name…Sault-Ste-Marie becoming Soo San Maree and then Susan-Mary. That would be the name the colony would be known by in the eyes of history.
A history on which it would have far more impact than anyone would have dreamed, a history written in letters of blood, one which would begin to play out while the eyes of the world, even the eyes of North America, were turned elsewhere…
Chapter 28: The Trident
La terreur n’est autre chose que la justice du Peuple.
Terror is nothing more than the People’s justice.
–Jean-Baptiste Robespierre
*
From: “France Under the Consulate” by Étienne Jacquard (1925)—
Scholars debate upon defining when Robespierre’s Reign of Terror truly began. Some date it from the start of the Consulate, when Robespierre became First Consul and cowed the National Legislative Assembly. However, though the chirurgien and the phlogisticateur were both in bloody action from that day, it is possible to argue that in the early days of Robespierre’s reign, such measures were at least aimed at men and women who had been privileged under the ancien régime, sometimes even having committed directly attributable crimes.