Brief History of Tripartite Alliance Earth
"There is no freedom in Europe-that's certain-it is besides a worn out portion of the globe."
The Generation of British Preeminence (1815-1850)
The Congress of Vienna was called by the victorious anti-Napoleonic coalition early in 1814. For the previous 22 years, Europe had been caught in a more-or-less continuous period of destructive international warfare, motivated by the modern forces of nationalism and of political radicalism. The anti-Napoleonic Great Powers of Europe -- Russia, Austria, Prussia, and Britain, soon joined by the conservative French monarchy of the Bourbon Louis XVIII -- sought to create a European order that would be resistant to another like period of international chaos.
The most visually spectacular event was the restoration of as many European frontiers as possible to pre-Napoleonic lines. Thus, France was stripped of all of the lands conquered by it after 1792. The Great Powers also sought to enhance their own strength and that of suitable proxies, in order to create a strong barrier against an expansionistic France. To this end, the Kingdom of the Netherlands received the former Austrian Netherlands and Archbishophric of Liège (the modern Belgium and Luxembourg) to create a strong anti-French state in the Low Countries, while Austria acquired Venetia, Lombardy, and an exclusive sphere of influence in the rest of Italy, and Prussia acquired the Rhineland, Westphalia, and parts of Poland and Saxony. Russia retained the core of Poland, along with Finland (acquired from Sweden in 1809). To replace the lost Holy Roman Empire, a German Confederation was created to serve as a reasonable political framework for the 39 independent states and growing common identity of Germany. Overseas, Britain took advantage of the disarray of the Netherlands to annex the former Dutch colonies of South Africa and Ceylon, and to acquire a sphere of influence in the peninsula of Malaya. All of the states of Europe agreed to suppress future liberal uprisings wherever they might occur.
While the Congress of Vienna managed to establish a stable international order -- the first war between Great Powers was the Crimean War of 1853-1856, and the Congress system only broke down twenty-odd years after that conflict -- it was unable to check the advance of liberal ideals and of nationalism among the smaller European nations, never mind overseas. The United States defiantly remained a liberal and democratic federal republic, while the collapse of the Spanish colonial empire in the Americas outside of insular Cuba and Puerto Rico in the 1810-1823 period and the establishment of an independent Empire of Brazil spawned a new host of independent states, most republics, all claiming to be liberal, to which the Congress of Vienna did not apply. Moreover, in Europe itself, the establishment of independent Belgian and Greek states in 1830 by local liberals and nationalists decisively overturned the dictates of the Congress of Vienna in Europe.
Throughout this period, Britain maintained its status as the hegemonic power in Europe and Europe's overseas offshoots. Unlike the states of continental Europe or the United States, Britain's naval dominance was always enough to ensure the security of the British homeland. Moreover, the existence of a stable yet liberal political regime in Britain, along with the large British merchant marine and Britain's pioneering of new manufacturing techniques, made Britain the first country in the world to enjoy the Industrial Revolution. While the western peripheries of the British Isles -- the Catholic and Celtic lands of Ireland and western Scotland, and mountainous Celtic Wales -- remained mostly agrarian, the dominant British nations of England and Scotland were transformed almost beyond all recognition by the rapid expansion of modern industrial factories and mines. Britain had the distinct advantage of being able to produce, in very large quantities, goods that were manufactured at a greater cost in time and money everywhere else in the world. This technological superiority drove the expansion of British exports worldwide and lay the foundations for the creation of a prosperous middle class. More so than any of Britain's European rivals, the British political system was able to incorporate the up-and-coming middle classes and industrialists, through programs of electoral reform and the enfranchisement of religious minorities -- in Britain's case, Catholics and non-Anglican Protestants. During this period, the rapid improvement in British living standards encouraged a population boom -- over the first half of the 19th century, the population of the British Isles almost doubled from 15.6 million in 1801 to 27.4 million in 1851. Most of the British Isles' increase in population was concentrated in London and the new industrial cities of northern England, while as many as seven million in the 1801-1851 period emigrated overseas, to the British colonies of Australia, South Africa, and Canada, to South America, to the United States. To be sure, Britain had its problems -- the exclusion of the lower classes and the Catholic Irish threatened the long-term political stability of Britain, while combinations of Great Powers (Russia and Prussia in 1815, France and the United States in 1838) threatened to involve the country in a war that it might well lose. Still, Britain's tremendous lead over the rest of its competitors survived even the catastrophe of the 1845-1848 Irish potato famine and the growth of Owenite cooperatives and Saint-Simonian socialism among the working classes; by the middle of the 19th century, Britons were confident in their invulnerability.
The inability of non-Western states to resist British encroachment -- most famously symbolized by the Anglo-Chinese war of 1839-1842, in which British naval forces were able to defeat the might of the Celestial Empire -- left the task of resisting British hegemony to Britain's Western counterparts. The independent states of Latin America were too unstable, and too dependent upon British trade, to effectively oppose Britain, while the collapse of the Spanish empire stripped Spain of its Great Power status and left it an effective French client-state. In central Europe, the Austrian empire maintained its dominance in southern Germany and Italy, while Prussia emerged as the dominant state in north Germany; neither Great Power, though, was interested in challenging British hegemony. The only three serious challengers to Britain were Russia, the United States, and France.
Under Tsar Alexander I (1801–25) and Nicholas I (1825-1856), the Russian Empire remained an exceptionally reactionary and backward country, as the legacy of the 1812-1813 French invasion of Russia and the attempted liberal coup by Decembrists in 1825 upon the accession of Nicholas I made the advocacy of any kind of radicalism -- political, nationalistic, religious -- dangerous for Russians. Throughout the first half of the century, Russia failed to absorb the new industrial techniques pioneered by Britain, while the Russian peasantry remained serfs, legally the property of their noble owners. The western provinces of the Russian Empire -- the Grand Duchy of Finland, the partly-Germanized Baltic provinces, and the Kingdom of Poland -- were moderately liberal, or at least less reactionary; however, the 1831 Polish rebellion led to the revocation of Polish autonomy and led to a crackdown against dissidents in the Baltic provinces. Worse, the educated classes in Russia proper that could precipitate reforms came to advocate outright revolution; in response, successive Tsars developed a feared secret police. Territorially extensive and home to the largest population of any European state, and allied with Austria and Prussia in the reactionary Holy Alliance, nonetheless Russia declined in stature relative to its European neighbours.
After the end of the Anglo-American theatre of the Napoleonic Wars in 1814, the United States of America set to the task of reconstruction. In 1816, a nationalist coalition led by Henry Clay succeeded in convincing Congress to enact high tariffs against British imports, in what is known as the American System. This tariff system was inspired by anti-British spite and by the desire to protect American manufacturers and farmers against foreign competition. Beginning in the 1820's, the United States does enjoy a period of breakneck industrialization, fueled by a domestic economy rapidly expanding through natural increase and through western expansion and colonization. The Native American populations living to the east of the Mississippi are expelled to the western Great Plains, while millions of migrants -- most native-born Americans, with only a few British and German immigrants -- go on to settle the east of the Mississippi and the Upper Louisiana purchase. The United States takes special care to expand its frontier west, to the Pacific -- the 1846 annexation of the portion of the Oregon Country south of 49ºN, is soon followed by the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848, in which the Union acquires Texas, New Mexico, California, Nevada, and California. Populist anti-British appeals acquire considerable popularity -- indeed, many Americans come to identify themselves as a liberal democratic state constantly threatened by the oppressive monarchy of Britain, and in 1838 Britain and the United States come close to war following the Upper Canadian rebellion. Ultimately, though, the United States was too concerned with its domestic colonization and industrial expansion to be interested in challenging Britain in the New World.
France remained the only viable competitor of Britain. Under its successive monarchs, France slowly recovered from the travails of the Napoleonic era. The country did enjoy a modest degree of urbanization and industrialization, and with a total population of some 36 million in the late 1840's -- a population surpassed, in Europe, only by Russia -- France remained a major power for all of the backwardness of its modern industries relative to their British counterparts. Throughout this period, France also engaged in colonial expansion -- Algeria fell to France in 1830, while France took it upon itself to colonize most of the South Pacific -- including Nouveau-Dauphiné -- over British protests, and the conclusion of the Franco-Brazilian War in 1839 left France with the vast territory of Guyana. Too, although Britain remained the main seafaring power in the world, France maintained the second-largest navy and third-largest merchant marine. Throughout this period, though, the instability of French politics prevented the emergence of a single coherent set of policies -- the roi fainéant Louis XVIII, who reigned until 1824, was unwilling to engage in any degree of political liberalization, while the reactionary policies of Charles X (1824-1830) and his minister Jules Armand de Polignac culminated in the July Ordinances of 1830, placing new controls on the press, dissolving the liberal Chamber of Deputies, and reducing the electorate. These laws directly precipitated the 1830 Revolution, as liberal-democratic and capitalist forces joined to overthrow Charles X , installing in his place the so-called "Citizen King," Louis-Philippe I, and the First Orleanist Kingdom. Even then, France remained too divided to embark on a consistent policy: Instead of trying to cultivate an entente cordiale with liberal Britain against the Holy Alliance, or of trying to create an anti-British coalition, the First Orleanist Kingdom inconsistently tried to cultivate British support at the same time that it challenged British power. Thus, the entente cordiale created in 1830 by the joint support of France and Britain for Belgian independence was soon broken by successive crises -- the South Pacific crisis of 1838, the Egyptian crisis of 1840, and the 1846 marriage of French Bourbons to members of the Spanish Bourbon family in 1846 in violation of a previous Franco-British agreement. Moreover, Louis-Philippe's manipulation of the liberals and cynical imposition of a conservative ministry under François Guizot alienated most of his supporters.
Eventually, the tensions accumulated in the course of a generation of reactionary politics in Europe and elsewhere exploded into the 1848 Revolutions. The proximate cause of the 1848 Revolutions was the growing disenchantment of France with Louis-Philippe; the underlying causes included the resentment of Europe's new urban classes at political repression and the emergence of radical Italian, German, and Magyar nationalisms. In January of 1848, the Sicilian people revolted against their corrupt king; in February, the mobs of Paris organized barricades and overthrew Louis Philippe, proclaiming the Second Republic. The effects of these revolutions soon percolated elsewhere in Europe. The stable constitutional monarchies of the United Kingdom, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia were able to resist revolutionary pressures despite the crop failures of 1846-1847, just like the British colonies and the stable United States. The peoples of the German states followed the cue of France and revolted against their authoritarian leaders, demanding constitutions and -- through the Frankfurt Parliament -- the creation of a united Germany empire under the Prussian king. In Italy, the Risorgimento nationalists sought to expel Austrian influence from the Italian peninsula and create a unified Italian state under the leadership of the liberal kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia. In the Austrian empire, Hungary declared its independence as a republic, while a Slav Congress assembled in Prague demanded autonomy for the Slavic peoples of Austria. Even in distant South America, the upset of South American populations at the arbitrary rule of their governments precipitated radical revolts -- often led, incidentally, by recent European immigrants -- that sought to establish authentically democratic republics.
Despite this initial success, though, the innate conservatism of the European peasantry, the hostility of the established order, and the fear (particularly in France) of a radical socialist revolution soon led to counterrevolution. The Austrian empire used the Russian army to suppress the Hungarian revolution, and pitted its different nationalities against one another in order to control the provinces left over. In Austria, the Piedmontese armies were crushed and revolting Italians slaughtered by the forces led by Austria's General Haynau. In the German state, the division of the revolutionaries and growing confidence of the conservative elites led to a reimposition of the Congress of Vienna's norms. Even in France, the socialist revolutionaries of Paris were forcibly suppressed by the newly-conservative Second Republic, and in the election of December 1848, Louis Napoléon -- nephew of Napoléon -- was elected president; in December of 1851, Louis Napoléon staged a coup against the republic and imposed his personal dictatorship. Only in South America, free from European armies and European elites, did the revolutions succeed in their goals.