Dark State--A Novel of the Merchant Princes Multiverse
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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.
Another important point to bear in mind is that knowing something is possible means that you are halfway to achieving it. In the absence of a model for an industrial revolution, nobody in time line three went looking for one. This was not because they were stupid or thoughtless: the industrial revolution constituted the most drastic upset in human economic history since the bronze age/iron age discontinuity circa 500 BC. One does not go looking for sources of disruption on such a scale unless one has been trained by experience to seek them out.
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In our own history, the American Frontier was closed by the end of the 1880s. With worse transportation technology and no telegraphs, the frontier in North America was nevertheless fully settled by the same time in time line three: a more structured state with a policy of imperial expansion saw to it. It also saw to the First Nation’s “problem” with singular brutality—either conscripting the more warlike tribes and sending them south as soldiers to support their settlers in South America, or killing them if they could not be put to use. Similarly, the growing New British Navy first enforced a blockade of the Spanish and Portuguese colonies during the middle of the nineteenth century, then provided transport for a wholesale invasion of Central and South America during the latter half of the century.
This was not the ad hoc economic imperialism of our own history, but a deliberate program of conquest by an empire with a large, well-equipped conscript army that was determined to leave no territorial toe-holds for the continental enemy. The Crown, as a matter of policy, used the descendants of freed slaves as the cutting-edge of their troops: they were believed to be hardier and less vulnerable to tropical diseases, and more ruthless in their treatment of the subjugated population. A century later, much of the aristocracy of South America was black—and notoriously loyal to the house of Hanover.
By the 1920s, the industrial revolution was gathering steam both in the New British Empire and on the continent. The construction of the Two Continents railroad, stretching down the spine of the Americas from the Bering Straits to Tierra del Fuego, mirrored that of the Trans-Siberian railway. The British navy adopted steam and oil almost simultaneously: the French had access to the oil fields of the Persian Gulf and did likewise. Both the major hegemons were beginning to modernize and had closed their internal frontiers.
The proximate trigger for the Third World War was the same as that of the Great Game fought between Britain and Russia in our own history: access to the riches of India through the passes of the Himalayas. The British Empire’s toehold on India was far weaker in time line three than in our own history—the British East India Company controlled trade within much of the territory around the Bay of Bengal, but could not by any stretch of the imagination claim the entire subcontinent as a dominion. The threat of French expansion kept the rulers of Baluchistan, the Kashmir, and Afghanistan anxious, but these nations remained independent, as did the Persian Empire.
The stage for the global conflict was set by a conclusive struggle for domination of the Mediterranean Sea between the French Navy and the Ottoman Empire in 1918–20. As the Ottoman Empire ceded territory to France—including the right to build a canal at Suez—the French Crown became convinced that with control of the oil fields of Persia they would be able to control the Indian Ocean. Louis XX was a canny strategic thinker, obsessed with consolidating power over an entire hemisphere: his ministers were able to make the Persian emperor an offer he couldn’t refuse, and when the first French ironclads arrived to take up their basing rights in Tehran in 1926 it became clear to all that a war with the British was inevitable. Both sides were already fighting a battleship construction race, with oil-fired reciprocating steam engines, iron-clad hulls, and, by the early 1940s, breech-loading rifled artillery in turrets.
The details of the conflict for the Indian Ocean are not germane to this briefing. The outcome is another matter. The French Empire won the war of attrition once their canal at Suez became fully available, culminating in a major naval victory—the Battle of the Andaman Islands—that traumatized the New British Navy for a generation. At the same time, the breakdown of the Qing dynasty’s authority in China (which in our time line took place in the latter half of the nineteenth century, running to completion with the declaration of the Republic of China in 1912) came to a head with the declaration of the French Protectorate and the expulsion of non-allied powers from the trading cities of Hong Kong and Shanghai.
By 1950, the French Empire—the capital of which was now St. Petersburg—had established a hegemony across Eurasia, with a trade empire in India and China as a protectorate. Africa was largely under French and Dutch rule, and the much-diminished Ottoman Empire was reduced to a rump around the eastern Mediterranean. Persia, officially neutral, was encircled by and dependent on the French. The British Empire in the Americas had been effectively excluded from the eastern hemisphere, with the exception of certain territorial dominions—the Australian colonies (including the islands known as New Zealand in our time line), and the Japanese Empire (for the Shogunate saw in the British a valuable ally in maintaining their independence from the expansionist French).
The stage was thus set for something never seen in our world—the complete partition of the eastern and western hemispheres into two opposing totalitarian power blocs, neither possessing sufficient leverage to attack the other within its own territory.
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It is important to note that, although it industrialized substantially between 1880 and 2002, the New British Empire lacked many of the values and political structures of the United States of America.
The US Constitution enumerated the balance of powers and rights of the arms of government in terms that would have been familiar to a British monarch in the 1770s—in our time line. The Hanoverian monarchy in North America was considerably more draconian in nature, having escaped from the crisis of the invasion of England only to be confronted by the emergency of a slaveowners’ rebellion. Many of the absolute powers of the Crown, carved away by Parliament after the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, were reassumed, including the power to raise taxes directly and to dissolve Parliament and rule by decree. These powers were used during the conquest of South America, and again during the prosecution of the Third World War and the (failed) defense of the empire in India. By the 1980s, while Parliament still existed, it was little more than a rubber stamp on the monarch’s legislative program: the judiciary was similarly an appointed bench, and the House of Lords packed with place-men who would vote for the crown that granted them their privileges.
The structures of a parliamentary democracy were not easily transplanted to an expansionist marcher kingdom spanning two continents, and were alien to the background of many of the colonists. While some of the New England colonies retained representative assemblies, large tracts of the southern continent were ruled directly by members of the House of Lords.
The broadly reactionary flavor of political life in the New British Empire, and the lack of recognizable free market capitalist or communist doctrines, should not mislead you into believing that there was no dissent. A strong tradition of radicalism with its roots in the dissenters of the British Isles during and immediately after the civil war flourished during the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The dissidence of Quakers and Ranters and Levelers, whose arguments found expression through religious metaphor and holy scripture, were both more dangerous and harder to deal with for a Crown with a role in the nominal state religion. In our own history, prior to the Arab Spring the suppression of political opposition by the dictatorships of the Middle East left religious radicalism as the only form of dissent available in the public sphere. Similarly, in East Germany during the cold war, the Lutheran Church experienced a degree of immunity to Communist oppression that provided a sanctuary for moral dissenters. Atheism and free-thinking were sheltered in the British Empire by reference to the Inquisition and the threat of a religious backlash against oppression: egalitarian religious communes that denied (at their own hazard) the primacy of the aristocratic landowner were not uncommon across the mid-west.
Growing industrialization and the spread of the mass media (newspapers and radio: television from the 1990s onwards) contributed to a rise in the political awareness of the general population of the Empire. Universal literacy emerged on the back of national educational standards intended to build a basis for indoctrination of the masses: just as Lenin’s Bolsheviks wanted the Soviet workers to be able to read their propaganda, the New British monarchy wanted its citizens to be able to understand their policies. But universal literacy is a two-edged sword: once your citizens begin to read, it’s very hard to make them stop.
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It is against this background that we come to the character of Adam Burroughs. Raised as the son of a moderately wealthy baronet (whose fortune was built on his ownership of a steam locomotive works) it is speculated that the young Adam’s interest in economics was raised first by his observation of factory production techniques—and his studies in turn led to his exposure and radicalization during a strike against his father’s foremen. Many children of privilege, exposed to radical and threatening views, will cleave to their background; but a few, including Adam Burroughs, start to question everything. In the case of Burroughs, the result was a pioneering study of political economy that paralleled the philosophy of Voltaire and some of the class-based analysis of Marx, but which was infused by a fierce awareness of and aversion to social injustice—and a determination that something must be done.
The Ethical Foundations of Equality anatomized the power structure of the empire in terms of its regression from the early expression of the rights of man during the Long Parliament and the English Commonwealth, and highlighted numerous injustices: it then made the revolutionary postulate that a republic based on the mutualism implicit in Leveler ideology was a desirable objective, that the disestablishment of the state Church was a necessity, and that at the very least the royal court (which for most of a century had operated as an engine of favoritism and nepotism) needed to be reined in.
The book was of course banned, which made it an immediate underground best seller.
During the 1980s, King George VIII showed promising signs of reform-mindedness. Parliament in New London was given increased rights to introduce primary legislation, and the franchise extended to all adult males (the previous land-ownership requirement being abolished). The new monarch (crowned in 1977) keenly felt the chill of his nation’s exclusion from the other hemisphere, and was attentive to the new schools of economic thought springing up in the wake of his country’s accelerating industrialization. Under George VII it is likely that Adam Burroughs would have been imprisoned or even exiled for sedition, but under George VIII he was tacitly permitted to run for a parliamentary seat in hope of providing a safety valve for the radical sentiments finding expression among working men’s self-improvement clubs throughout the realm. During this period, the League of Labor expanded and made some political gains in the northern continent, campaigning for reforms such as a right to free assembly, a free press, a fifty hour working week, and an old age or infirmity pension. With the labor force growing rapidly due to improvements in public transport infrastructure and agricultural productivity (internal combustion engines and artificial fertilizers were finally finding their way into farming) the League had considerable leverage: a reaction was perhaps inevitable.
On November 14, 1986, the reaction arrived from the other extreme. A group of extreme radicals—the Black Fist Freedom Guard—assassinated George VIII, the Queen, and one of his daughters; his son, John Frederick, witnessed the bombing. The new King ordered an immediate clampdown (just as in our own history Tsar Alexander III reacted to the assassination of his father), forcing Burroughs to flee to France, and having numerous members of the League arrested and tried for sedition. Over the next decade Parliament was reduced to a one month rubber-stamp session, the police (an internal security gendarmerie) were significantly expanded, and democratic and workers’ rights activists were mercilessly hounded.
The technological developments in the Empire during this period cannot be ignored. As a novelist observed, “the future is already here: it is just unevenly distributed.” The Empire began to undergo its industrial revolution late, in the 1880s, and the first heavier-than-air aircraft only took to the skies in 1969. However, between 1977 and 2002 the Empire acquired a telephone network, a continental electricity grid, the beginnings of an interstate road network (although the majority of freight and passenger transportation went by rail—the imperial railroad network was in many ways superior to that of the contemporary United States in our own time line), and many of the other seeds of modernity. The Imperial Air Army was experimenting with low-wing monoplanes and the first prototype jet engines: the Navy was bankrolling research into nuclear fission in the hope of finding a better power source for their battleships. For their part, by 2002 the French Imperium was on the threshold of detonating their first experimental atomic weapon. In 1890, the New British Empire had been more than a century behind the United States of 1890; by 1990 the gap had narrowed to perhaps 70 years.
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The French hegemony in the eastern hemisphere was not absolute. In particular, a number of satellite powers retained considerable autonomy: the Persian Empire, the Netherlands, Spain, the Italies, and so on. The Bourbon Empire dominated continental trade and the northern interior, but did not dictate the course of all events.
In 1999–2002 it became clear that a war was brewing between two of the second-rank powers: the Persian Empire had designs on the territories of the Mughal Crown. Mughal appeals to the British Empire for assistance were met with incautious enthusiasm in New London, and the Americas were drawn into what should by rights have been a regional conflict. The presence of British warships in the Persian Gulf drew the ire of the French Crown, and soon a full-scale naval war was developing in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters.
This was not a good time for the British Empire to enter a war. Anthropogenic climate change is as much a problem in time line three as in our own; the intersection of a large population with more primitive technologies aggravated many of the problems. Harvest failures in 1997 and 2000 led to famine in South America. Meanwhile, a rapid arms build-up—necessitated by preparation for war—coincided with a recession (partially induced by French trade sanctions) and raised the cos
t of government borrowing. Poor management of the economy was aggravated by the practice of granting tax exemptions with titles of nobility; much the same disease that had affected the French aristocracy in the late eighteenth century haunted the New British Empire in the wake of the closing of the frontier. For a while industrial output growth had masked the inefficiencies in the system, but from the mid-1980s onwards the Empire slipped into a period of low-grade debt-deflation, with interest rates pegged at zero (worsened by the King’s obstinate insistence on sticking to a gold-backed currency standard—his reactionary rejection of modernity extended to the field of economics).
Rearmament provided a brief Keynesian stimulus to the New British Empire’s economy, but now the secondary threat of inflation loomed. With further government borrowing blocked, the Treasury had no choice but to petition the King for permission to decouple the currency from the gold standard, to which he assented. If such a transition is conducted with due care it can be successful: but in time line three there was no cautionary historical tale of any equivalent to Weimar Germany. The Treasury printed money as the War Ministry demanded, and for a while there was a boom in employment in shipbuilding, munitions, and recruitment—but then the 2002 harvest also failed. The price of bread soared by 300 percent in two months in early 2003, and hyperinflation set in.
Great powers seldom win or lose wars due to their performance on an individual battlefield; rather, their ability to field and support armies and navies (which in turn depends on the soundness of their economic management) determines the ultimate outcome of the conflict. The British Empire was doing poorly in the Indian Ocean conflict even before the inflationary cycle commenced. The confluence of hyperinflation at home with a crop failure and overseas military setbacks was lethally toxic for confidence in the Crown’s ability to honor its debts. In the summer of 2003 it became clear that the government would have to default. This precipitated a bank run and a liquidity crisis at the same time that bread riots broke out, all the way from Santiago to Boston. At the same time, naval squadrons on coastal defense patrols off the western seaboard mutinied after six months’ non-payment of wages was followed by cuts to the sailors’ rations. And in the Winter Palace a decision was taken that was as momentous as the German General Staff’s decision to allow Lenin safe passage in a sealed carriage through the Central Powers to the Finland Station: Sir Adam Burroughs was given an exit visa and transport on neutral shipping to Mission City (on the San Francisco Bay).