May 7, 2007
Royal America Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:35 PM EST John Steele Gordon points out that Louis XVI was not the grandson but the great-great-great-grandson of Louis XIV. My error, and an embarrassing one; I once knew this, more or less (I might have been off by one or two grands) and wrote without thinking. He also notes, parenthetically, that “the counterfactual history of an undivided British Empire is toothsome to contemplate, but I prefer what actually happened.” “Toothsome” means agreeable, attractive, or delicious. I am pretty sure Mr. Gordon does not mean that he finds the idea of a durably hegemonic British empire purely exhilarating, or preferable to the history that actually happened, but rather that he finds it intriguing and not absolutely repellent to think about that alternate world, and if so, I agree with him. But while we agree, I am pretty sure many either don’t or wouldn’t, not least because of my strong impression that an undivided British Empire—undivided in the sense of retaining control of what is now the United States—is oddly underrepresented in novels of alternate history. So people who enjoy thinking about alternate historical worlds have been oddly chary about thinking about that one. Is that because a British empire including what is now the United States is too awful to contemplate? That seems unlikely. People write a lot of novels about dystopian alternate worlds—the most common themes of alternate history are Hitler victorious and the Confederate States of America victorious—but amazingly few people write about George III victorious. One exception is the 1995 novel The Two Georges, by Harry Turtledove and the actor Richard Dreyfuss, who imagined an imperial America abolishing slavery without a Civil War, with the results that technological innovation is much slower and the subversive, pro–American independence Sons of Liberty terrorist group is a viciously racist organization, with the result in turn that black Americans are very, very loyal royalists. I don’t remember whether this British Empire was also better for Native Americans, but it very possibly would have been. In the historical empire, the imperial authorities back in London tended to be less mass-murderous than the settlers on the expanding frontiers. Turtledove and Dreyfus seemed to be liberals thinking hard, and a bit pessimistically, about American populism and democracy; it was not a brilliantly-written book, but it was a mildly interesting one. Uchronia.net, the magisterial Internet resource for alternate history, contains a list of all points of divergence for alternate histories, and it looks as if Turtledove and Dreyfuss have rather few rivals in exploring this theme. Tracking it by looking at points of divergence in the 1760s and 1780s does not exhaust the possibilities. That approach would miss, for example, Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy stories, which are playful fantasies of an Angevin Empire grown to include North America and surviving into the twentieth century. But it is suggestive. There are more alternate histories of a British Empire that retained greater relative strength because the United States didn’t stay unified—not just the Confederacy-victorious books but also intriguing one like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine, where the British Empire develops computers in the early nineteenth century. There is a grim and fascinating novel, Simon Louvish’s The Resurrections, in which post–World War II decolonization never happens because the Second World War is averted, and there is The Peshawar Lancers, by a leading writer of alternate history, S. M. Stirling, which creates a world where the British Raj survives in India but nowhere else, and is the only superpower—but that is more of a playful homage to Anglo-Indian literature than a straightforward alternate history. A recent academic book, Unmaking The West, edited by Philip E. Tetlock, Ned Lebow, and Geoffrey Parker, contains essays imagining a world without Western hegemony, but none of its essays abolish the strongest Western power while preserving and strengthening its predecessor. So when you think about it, the almost-perfect absence of anyone thinking much about the downstream effects of the defeat of the American Revolution is pretty striking.
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