Diverge and Conquer (Look to the West Book 1)

by Tom Anderson

  [1] Everything up to now is as in Our TimeLine (OTL); George really did have such a plan, but nothing came of it in the history we know and love. But what if things had been just slightly different...?

  [2] This is the Point Of Divergence (POD) from our history. A minor thing in the grand scheme of things. ‘For want of a nail...’

  [3] Williamsburg was the capital of Virginia between 1699 and 1776 in OTL, upon which it was abandoned for Richmond as British and Loyalist forces controlled much of the coastline and its cities—for a similar reason many other American colonies moved their capitals inland, and it is likely this is the origin of the American tradition of the capital of a state rarely being its largest and most important city. In OTL, Williamsburg is today a preserved/reconstructed colonial town and living museum.

  [4] The terms used in TTL to refer to what we would call the War of the Spanish Succession/Queen Anne’s war, and the War of the Austrian Succession/War of Jenkins’ Ear/King George’s War, respectively. Note that although the War of the Spanish Succession predates the POD, naming wars is usually a matter of after-the-fact historiography and often varies between countries and times: in OTL, the English-speaking world used the term ‘Great War’ to describe the French Revolutionary and Napleonic Wars in the nineteenth century, before it was then displaced for that title by World War I.

  [5] St James’ Palace was the primary royal residence of the British monarch at this point in history, which is preserved in the fact that the British royal court is still referred to as the Court of St. James’ in OTL. (In OTL the building itself was damaged by fire in 1809 and this, together with it being too cramped for an increasingly large Royal Family, meant that they spent more time at Buckingham Palace—Queen Victoria finally making the move official in 1837; her descendants have remained there ever since).

  [6] Unlike many colonial-era universities, the College of William and Mary still retains its old name in the modern USA, and it is indeed the second oldest American university after Harvard.

  [7] Unlike many of the other colonies, New York’s colonial Governor did actually travel there and fulfil his duties rather than handing it off to a Lieutenant Governor.

  [8] Thus, unlike OTL, there is no extended ‘Zenger Case’. One consequence of that is that there is no precedent set on the matter of libel law, i.e. that a statement is not libellous if it is true, as was the case in OTL.

  [9] This rather anachronistic statement—many Englishmen of the time referred to all Germans as Dutch—has persuaded some historians in TTL that this story may be a fabrication.

  [10] And which in OTL would not be abolished until the turn of the nineteenth century.

  [11] At this time, North Carolina had just been split off as a separate colony and the remainder was referred to simply as ‘Carolina’, as it was the part most Europeans thought of when they heard the name. It eventually became known as South Carolina. Carolina had been a royal colony for some years at this point, but North Carolina had only just finished its period of proprietory (Company) rule and still retained huge swathes of land owned privately by one of the Company’s Lords Proprietors—the Granville District.

  [12] This group existed in OTL but was a purely British phenomenon as Frederick was still in Britain.

  [13] Between 1701 and 1772 in OTL, the Prince-Electors of Brandenburg were allowed to call themselves “King in Prussia” by the Holy Roman Emperors, but it only after the successes of the Silesian Wars and the First Partition of Poland did they feel strong enough to proclaim themselves “King of Prussia”. In TTL, things will end up a little differently...

  [14] OTL modern Belgium, more or less.

  [15] TTL term for feminist, approximately.

  [16] Today in OTL this is the town of Portobelo in Colón Province, Panama.

  [17] A contemporary term for amphibious assault.

  [18] In OTL he named it Cumberland Bay, for the same person.

  [19] OTL modern St Augustine, Florida.

  [20] In OTL George also fought at Dettingen—indeed he was the last British monarch to personally command troops in battle—but he was not wounded in the process.

  [21] This observation was made by Napoleon Bonaparte in OTL.

  [22] A diplomatic term meaning ‘put everything back the way it was before the war’.

  [23] “Yankee Doodle” may have been around as early as the 1740s in OTL, though its history is disputed. What is certain is that it began as a British army song disparaging American colonial troops as rustic and reluctant to fight, but in OTL was reclaimed by the Americans as a bit of calculated irony after several American Revolutionary War victories over the British. Note the last line of this version is a reference to the now universal praise for Virginia tobacco thanks to William Gooch’s policies.

  [24] Speculative romance is the term used in TTL for what we would call alternate history or counterfactual history (though the division of genres is slightly different in any case). It is a somewhat more mainstream genre there.

  [25] In OTL Byng is best known for being controversially court-martialled and executed by firing squad for his actions at the Battle of Malta, leading to Voltaire’s satirical phrase in Candide: “The English occasionally feel the need to execute an admiral, to encourage the others.”

  [26] The Starbuck family, originally from Derbyshire, emigrated to Nantucket in the 1630s and soon became synonymous with whaling. Several members of the family discovered Pacific islands in OTL. The Starbucks coffee chain is indirectly named after them, taking its name from the first mate of the Pequod in Moby Dick, who was so named by Herman Melville as he knew of the family’s whaling connections.

  [27] Short for ‘bombardment ships’, bomb-ships were a type of warship used in this era designed for amphibious siege operations. Rather than conventional cannon firing solid cannonballs at short range, they were armed with mortars firing explosive shells on a ballistic trajectory that could arc over defensive walls and detonate, destroying whatever was behind them. They are remembered in the line from The Star-Spangled Banner, ‘and the rockets’ red glare / bombs bursting in air’, the bomb-ship HMS Meteor being largely responsible for the latter in its bombardment of Fort McHenry, Maryland in 1814. As for the rockets, those would take a little longer...

  [28] The original Over the Hills and Far Away comes from the War of the Spanish Succession, aka the First War of Supremacy in OTL, and it has undergone many permutations for later wars in OTL, just as it has here in TTL.

  [29] The Jacobite Stuart claimants denied the legitimacy of the Act of Union, which had been passed after James II had been deposed, and thus continued to claim the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland separately rather than Great Britain and Ireland.

  [30] In OTL Charles made this claim in 1759 after the Duc de Choiseul approached him with a proposal to make him King of Ireland alone, backed by a French invasion.

  [31] An older term for psychologist in OTL, still in current usage in TTL.

  [32] (Dr. Pylos’ note): The introduction to this book mentions that this unauthorised translation has reintroduced the more usual terms for countries and geographic regions in place of the original, which used terms like “Zone 14 Island Groups 16-25” for the British Isles.

  [33] There is a historiographic reason why a twentieth century Societist writer does not refer to these two as the Dutch Republic and Holy Roman Empire respectively.

  [34] Note that in OTL the corresponding war is known as the Seven Years’ War, but in TTL it did not last seven years. We are now starting to see more global divergences from OTL in terms of historical events, as well as merely relabelling older ones due to down-the-line shifts in attitudes.

  [35] The Wesleyans are more often known in OTL as Methodists, originally an insulting name. For one reason and another, that disparaging term did not catch on in TTL.

  [36] Technically, they had to take an oath against the Pope. In practice there were a fair number of secretly Catholic officers who lied through their teeth
.

  [37] Madras is generally known as Chennai today in OTL, although the older name continues to be used for a style of curry.

  [38] In OTL the Honourable East India Company did not formally have a ‘British’ adjective, in the same way the Royal Navy is simply the Royal Navy. It unofficially acquires one in TTL because it does not have such a pre-eminent position that ‘the’ East India Company automatically means the British one.

  [39] Robert Clive indeed suffered from depression in OTL and twice attempted suicide before finally succeeding aged 49. However, this came after presiding over Plassey and other huge victories for the East India Company. In TTL Britain’s colonial ventures in India will therefore have to manage without Clive’s leadership...

  [40] Due to the absence of Robert Clive. Yes, no matter how ‘Great Man Theory of History’ it might sound, the battle was won by the British in OTL because the young Ensign Clive led a diversionary attack of 300 men that drew part of Chanda Sahib’s army away from the battlefield.

  [41] In OTL Lawrence Washington died young of tuberculosis in 1752 at the age of 34. In TTL he has managed to avoid picking up the disease.

  [42] This is probably an error on the part of the author of the book quoted here. Frederick of Prussia spoke French as his first and preferred language and diplomacy was still predominantly conducted in French, so the term might as easily have originated with the Prussian or British governments as with the French.

  [43] The term used in TTL for what we in OTL would call a cold war.

  [44] The OTL version of George III used this as an alias for publishing pamphlets about agriculture and environmentalism.

  [45] The slightly strange government setup in eighteenth-century Great Britain divided matters between the Secretary of State for the Northern Department, whose responsibility was domestic policy for northern England and Scotland and foreign relations with the Protestant northern states of Europe, and the Secretary of State for the Southern Department, whose responsibility was domestic policy for southern England and Ireland and foreign relations with the entire rest of the world. It would not be for some decades in both OTL and TTL until these were reorganised into the more sensible positions of Foreign Secretary and Home Secretary.

  [46] In OTL it was seven million. This version of Britain, lacking as many rich Indian possessions thanks to the French retaining Madras and therefore having a smaller share of the Indian trade, has less to spare.

  [47] Dakar was also captured by British forces in the OTL Seven Years’ War, but was returned at the Treaty of Paris in 1763. In OTL it went on to become the capital of French West Africa, and then the modern Republic of Senegal.

  [48] In OTL the Governor of New York was George Clinton, who as an ally of the Pelhams had been sacked by Frederick and excluded from power. In OTL Clinton failed to sufficiently reassure Hendrick and so the Covenant Chain between Britain and the Iroquois Confederacy was broken. In TTL the Anglo-Iroquois alliance remains fairly firm, and the Iroquois do not become divided in their allegiances.

  [49] Dinwiddie also held this post in OTL, and unlike Clinton lacks any political connections of the type that would get him blacklisted in TTL.

  [50] As Frederick’s Britain threw out the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, technically Britain and France had been in a state of resumed war ever since, but only in the same way that North and South Korea today are still technically at war.

  [51] George Washington is still in Britain in 1754 in TTL and is therefore not involved (unlike OTL, where his presence at these battles helped make his name).

  [52] A major divergence from OTL, where Wolfe died at his moment of triumph and James Cook survived, famously going on to discover Australia (or rather New South Wales).

  [53] Equivalent to the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ in OTL.

  [54] This happened in OTL as well, and is the origin of the ‘Cajun’ group in Louisiana, being a corruption of ‘Acadian’. However, in TTL they will not be the last francophones to make the journey...

  [55] OTL Frederick was persuaded to retreat by a Captain Prittwitz and his cavalry squad, which failed to get through in TTL. Mind you, he considered suicide even after being rescued OTL as well.

  [56] In OTL he died of this, years earlier in 1751, in combination with being hit on the head by a cricket ball of all things.

  [57] Both the Linnaeus quote and the second part of the Churchill quote are from OTL, though the latter was made in OTL by Winston Churchill.

  [58] Just as true in OTL.

  [59] The Great Chain of Being is a concept popular in the Middle Ages and Early Modern period but ultimately derived from the writings of Plato and Aristotle. It is based on the idea that everything falls into a stable hierarchy, with God at the top, then angels, astronomical objects, people (kings, aristocracy, then commoners), then animals, plants, and minerals. For obvious reasons, this view was popular with the ruling classes.

  [60] In OTL Priestley trained as a dissenting clergyman and only later became primarily a natural philosopher, although he had always had that inclination. Frederick’s reforms make it possible for him to pursue that path earlier on.

  [61] (Dr. Pylos’ note: This is an annotation from the translation, with the footnote that most people in this world would call this ideology simply ‘Linnaean Racism’ or more imprecisely ‘Jacobinism’ and the term used here is part of Societist jargon).

  [62] In OTL Voltaire was a slave owner and notably contemptuous of black Africans in his writings; this has not changed here.

  [63] Samuel Johnson failed to gain Chesterfield’s patronage for his dictionary in OTL and had to look elsewhere.

  [64] There was a minor anti-French, anti-Latin spelling “Back to Anglo-Saxon” movement in this time of OTL, which is somewhat more influential in TTL (though the words used as examples here also had their spellings changed in OTL). One impact is that in TTL’s English, spellings like almanack and physick remain in use to the present day. One will notice that that means all the excerpts of the books in this report have been changed into modern OTL English spelling by Nuttall’s team.

  [65] These are oxygen and nitrogen respectively, worn down from the Swedish eldluft and illaluktandeluft, ‘fire air’ and ‘foul air’. Scheele made all these discoveries in OTL, as well as an early means of pasteurisation, an easy way of making phosphorus matches, chlorine, barium, tungsten, manganese, molybdenum, citric acid, glycerol, prussic acid, hydrogen fluoride AND hydrogen sulfide! And yet he received credit for little of it in OTL due to his works being published in Swedish, a language which few non-Swedes spoke. Thanks to the Linnaean controversy in TTL, though, Swedish-speaking British and French intellectuals learn of his discoveries and they are not lost. Note that the term ‘luft’ is that used for gas in TTL—our word gas is a peculiar spelling of the Flemish word for chaos, and before the nineteenth century gases were referred to as ‘airs’ in OTL—but here it has been ‘translated’ into gas by Nuttall’s team. This is not the only translation they have made, but they are not very consistent about it.

  [66] Though not quite as bad as OTL due to the increased French East India trade from French-dominated southern India.

  [67] The territory in question is around where the borders of the modern OTL states of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay come together.

  [68] Note that in TTL he doesn’t become Marquis of Pombal, so he is referred to as ‘Carvalho’ rather than ‘Pombal’.

  [69] This happened in 1759 OTL. Butterflies from the POD are taking effect: in OTL Ferdinand VI lost the will to live after the death of his beloved wife Barbara of Portugal from asthma in 1758 and he died the following year. In TTL she manages a few more years, and hence so does he. The primary impact of this is that the Spanish-Portuguese falling-out is delayed to the point that it does not become a part of an existing global conflict as it did OTL.

  [70] OTL modern Uruguay.

  [71] Related to ‘Creole’ in English, a term used in Spanish America to describe people of wholly Iberian
blood but born in the Americas rather than in Iberia—those who were born in Iberia being known as peninsulares. The Casta (caste) system meant that the peninsulares had all the power and influence in the colonies, with the criollos as second-class citizens followed by a complex hierarchy of mixed-race people based on different racial combinations, then the native Indians, and with blacks at the bottom.

  [72] He died in 1779 OTL. He long suffered from the wound of a failed assassination attempt in 1758 which could have killed him at any time, In TTL the failed attempt still occurs, and the wound happens to kill him ten years earlier than OTL.

  [73] The Prussian wits are not being that serious in TTL, but in fact this actually happened in OTL—at least, Russia pulled out of the war, although it didn’t formally switch sides, when Peter came to the throne. This move made Peter very unpopular in Russia OTL as Russian troops had been occupying Berlin itself, and yet after the war Russia was not even invited to the negotiating table. Because these events are averted in TTL, Peter’s position and authority are a bit more secure than in OTL.

  [74] The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was an elective monarchy, with a king being elected for life by the Election Sejm, a special session of the Polish Sejm (parliament). Although only nobility (szlachta) could vote, the definition of what constituted noble blood was very broad and incorporated many poor farmers, meaning that over ten percent of the population could vote for the king—a bigger proportion than could vote for parliamentary representation in Great Britain due to the restrictive property franchise there.

  [75] The Interrex is a temporary position appointed by the Sejm to oversee the transitional period between monarchs, modelled on a similar office used in the classical Roman Republic. The office was usually given to the Archbishop of Gniezno and Primate of Poland, the most senior Catholic clergyman in the Commonwealth, who at this point was Władysław Aleksander Łubieński.

  [76] Vojvodship, also spelled voivodeship, is an anglicised term for the word used in Poland (and many neighbouring countries) for province or subdivision (województwo in Polish).