Brief History of Tripartite Alliance Earth
"The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveller from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St Paul's, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra."
The Rising Challengers (1851-1870)
The 20-odd years that followed the conservative suppression of Europe's 1848 Revolutions were a decidedly tumultuous era, filled with international and civil wars, the birth of new forms of political radicalism and new culture movements, and the coalescence of new states.
Throughout this period, the British Empire maintained its global prominence. Other Great Powers could conceivably overpower Britain in a given area of the world -- Russia might threaten the northwestern frontier of British India, the United States could strike against British interests in North American continent, and France might menace Britain's assorted trading partners in Germany, but the British Empire's global power ensured that it could outlast any other Great Power. Still, over this period unmistakable signs began to appear that British hegemony could not continue indefinitely: At long last, Britain's potential competitors among the empires of Europe, the emerging nation-states of the Americas, and even in once-moribund Asia began to respond to the British challenge.
Britain's most serious challenger was France. In November of 1852, a plebiscite held in France overwhelmingly approved the establishment of the Second Empire, and the naming of Louis Napoléon as Emperor Napoléon III. From the beginning of his reign, Napoléon III embodied the same authoritarian liberalism modified by a desire to enhance French national prestige as his famous predecessor. Although the Second Empire sought to maintain firm control of French political life and dealt harshly with critics, it was fundamentally a far different regime from Tsarist Russia. For instance, the Second Empire maintained the universal suffrage for men introduced by the Second Republic, while Napoléon III periodically ordered plebiscites in order to lend his major decisions a patina of public approval, while the Second Empire favoured economic modernization: Over the 1850's and 1860's, French industrial production soared, while railway building was encouraged, cities were rebuilt, and a modern financial system created. The Second Empire also encouraged the formation of agricultural and financial cooperatives in provincial France, in keeping with Owenite and Saint-Simonian doctrines, in order to give the French peasantry the chance to modernize its dispersed holdings and stem the depopulation of rural France. This prosperity returned Paris to its preeminence as the cultural centre of Europe, as Naturalist writers like Émile Zola and Gustave Flaubert shocked literati the world over with their frank descriptions of life in the provinces or among the lower classes, while the Impressionist painters echoed their literary counterparts in painting luminous and realistic images of scenes of modern life -- a Parisien street, a Normandy beach, the countryside of Île-de-France. The French language and French culture, driven by this economic prosperity and culture fluorescence, remained supreme across the West.
Had the Second Empire been a system of government that could be satiated by its domestic achievements, its effect on the wider world would have been less significant. However, the Second Empire under Napoléon III inherited something of the same foolhardy militarism of the First Empire under Napoléon III. As a regime that identified itself as an advocate of liberalism, the ideology that girded the Second Empire demanded that it, and Napoléon III, promote French-style liberalism worldwide, and to make the resulting regimes dependent upon France. This inspired a whole series of foreign military adventures. For instance, the Crimean War (1854-56), fought in conjunction with Britain against Russia, was waged by France simply in order to enhance French prestige at the expense of autocratic Tsarist Russia. Following the Franco-British victory over Russia, France tried to foster the creation of French-style liberal kingdoms elsewhere, particularly in areas populated by speakers of Romance languages. However, more often than not French interventionist policies unleashed new nationalisms among the target populations that quickly slipped beyond France's control.
Perhaps the most spectacular example of this began in Italy. As a liberal, Napoléon III supported the principle of Italian freedom from a harsh and oppressive Austrian domination. To this end, he conspired with the government of the kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia to create, under joint Franco-Piedmontese leadership, an Italian confederation. In 1859, France went to war against Austria, and to popular acclaim in both France and Italy managed to take from Austria that empire's Italian-populated lands. However, in warring against Austria on the grounds that Austrian domination in Italy deprived Italians of their right to self-determination, French policy in Italy inspired a new radical Italian nationalism that called for the unification of Italy into a single state. Thus, in 1864, when the Italian Confederation was transformed overnight into a federal Italian Empire that claimed to be a Great Power, French politicians found to their shock that French policies had managed to dramatically weaken the French position in the Mediterranean.
Moreover, the shock of France's defeat of the paramount Great Power inside the German Confederation inspired radical German nationalism. Throughout this period, the Austrian Empire of the Hapsburgs was the most powerful member-state of the German Confederation. However, over time the Kingdom of Prussia in northern Germany grew in importance as its policies of industrialization and military reforms paid off handsomely. By the early 1860's, the Prussian noble Otto von Bismarck had emerged as perhaps the leading non-royal politician in Prussia, through his advocacy of a ruthless policy of expanding Prussian power inside the German Confederation at the expense of competing powers. In 1864, under his leadership, Prussia led the German Confederation in a war against the Kingdom of Denmark on behalf of the German-populated duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. Although the interventions of France and Norway-Sweden sufficed to save Denmark from total defeat, most of the disputed territories were conquered and were divided between Prussia and Austria. Prussia under Bismarck then claimed Austrian interference in Prussian Schleswig, and prepared for a war against Austria, which in turn could afford to suffer a second victory at the hands of an upstart kingdom. When the Prusso-German War finally broke out in the summer of 1866, Prussia was outnumbered by enemies -- the Kingdom of Prussia was supported only by the duchies of Mecklenburg and Oldenburg. Still, Prussia's superior Prussian military organization let it defeat the remaining German states. The resulting peace treaties effectively expelled Austria from German affairs, and the south German kingdoms and grand duchies were allowed to remain independent, those north German states that Prussia did not annex outright were forced to join a North German Confederation dominated by Prussia. From across the Rhine, the French watched, appalled, as a "Greater Prussia" coalesced.
If French military strength had been concentrated in metropolitan France, conceivably the Second Empire could have attacked the Kingdom of Prussia's unprotected western border and ensuring the continued survival of the old German Confederation. Throughout this period, though, French military forces were concentrated overseas, as France expanded its colonial empire. In the South Pacific, the natives of Nouveau-Dauphiné and Nouvelle-Calédonie were "pacified" by veterans of Algerian colonial wars, and their lands taken for French settlers. Similarly, in Algeria, the lands of the native Algerian Muslims were confiscated and given to European Catholic immigrants. The French départements d'outremer of Martinique and Guadeloupe in the Caribbean and of Mauritius and Réunion in the Indian Ocean saw little change, if only because these four islands were so small and weighed down by the legacy of their slavery-era sugar plantation economies. The tropical climates of Guyana and the growing French empire in West Africa discouraged French settlement apart from sprinklings of soldiers, merchants, and missionaries, but the resources of the two areas were exploited throughout the Second Empire. In Indochina, beginning with the 1859 invasion and annexation of Cochin China in the south of Vietnam, France steadily advanced north, along the Mekong, into Cambodia (a French protectorate from 1866), Vietnam, and the Thai vassal state of Laos.
The most spectacular and costly French colonial adventure occurred in the Yucatán peninsula. In the United States, long-standing tensions between the slaveholding and agrarian Southern states and and non-slave industrial North broke into a civil war in 1861, when the Southern states announced their independence from the Union and created their own independent Confederacy. As the armies of the Union and the Confederacy fought, the Second Empire saw an opportunity to establish France once again as a major colonial power in North America while taking advantage of the Union's preoccupation, perhaps even acquiring the Union's support in so doing.
As the United States Civil War entered a new phase in early 1862, with the advance of the Confederate armies upon the free and Francophone state of Louisiana, Napoléon III announced the intervention of France alongside the Union February. As he himself told the surprised Union ambassador in Paris, France, as non-slaveholding country, would not tolerate a slaveholding country, least not one that persecuted co-linguals of France, and that in keeping with these national principles France would support to any naval campaigns against the Confederacy. By April of that same year, the Union was able to establish a reliable line of resupply to Louisiana, and could mount an offensive against the Confederacy from two fronts. Napoléon II had hoped that this crucial French intervention would allow France to invade Mexico, using the casus belli of the Mexican denial of port facilities to the French navy and using Yucatecan forces to supplement the invasion. He miscalculated badly, and it was only through careful diplomatic negotiations that a Franco-American war was avoided. Eventually, France was left with a useless protectorate over Yucatán, while both Mexico and the United States became virulently Francophobic and French liberal opinion was appalled by France's bare escape from a bloody war with the liberal Americans. The Second Empire suffered a blow from which it never recovered.
Elsewhere, in the transatlantic world, further changes occurred. Despite its disastrous civil war, the reunification of the United States in November of 1863 left intact a country that had the potential to become a major Great Power. With a well-educated and rapidly growing populations, a steadily advancing western agricultural frontier, and the transformation of the northeastern states into one of the most modern urban industrial economies in the world, it seemed certain that the United States would one day count as a major power. In the meantime, the United States was too concerned with its domestic expansion and modernization to take an abiding interest in the outside world.
More dramatic events occurred elsewhere in the world. In South America, modernization continued apace in the Empire of Brazil and most of the South American republics. The conscious actions of the Imperial government of Brazil in the civil war made reactionary dreams of renewed absolutism impossible; universal manhood suffrage was granted, a national parliament established, and state governments reined in. In Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay, and to a lesser degree also in the Colombian and Venezuelan republics, republican regimes similarly established durable democratic regimes, destroying the hold of provincial oligarchies over land and wealth and allowing for egalitarian patterns of settlement and land distribution on the North American and French models. The surge of immigrants -- Germans, Italians, Spanish, Portuguese, Britons, French -- into Brazil and the southern republics over this period further reinforced these radical changes, as freehold farmers settled Chile's central plain, the Argentine and Uruguayan pampas, the temperate south of Brazil, and even the highlands of Colombia and Venezuela. The talents of these immigrants, and the enlightened liberalism of their national governments, coincided with a decided increase in industrialization, and in the expansion of the merchant marines of Chile and Brazil. Though South America remained dependent on Franco-British trade and investment, towards the end of the period the most enlightened republics were becoming increasingly modern. The only major catastrophe in South America throughout this period was the disastrous War of the Triple Alliance, fought by an unlikely alliance of Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay against the single state of Paraguay, and ending in the deaths of a half-million Paraguayans and one hundred thousand Allied soldiers.
In Asia, European colonialism precipitated a whole bout of transformations. Perhaps the most spectacular example of this was the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864), led by the Cantonese schoolmaster Hong Xiuquan, who was inspired by Christian missionary texts to identify himself as the younger brother of Jesus, charged with overthrowing the decrepit Manchu (Qing) dynasty. Though the Taiping were eventually suppressed by the Qing armies, more than 20 million Chinese had died and weakened China was left easier prey for imperialism.
In 1857, a general uprising began against the rule of the British East India Company, inspired by the racism of the East India Company and the economic damage wrought by the Company's exploitation of the Indian domains. This revolt eventually failed, thanks to its poor organization and concentrated in the north of India, and the revolutionaries were brutally suppressed by 1859. In 1858, the British Parliament enacted legislation which transferred the administration of India from the East India Company to the British crown. Though this legislation did, theoretically, give Indians recourse against the worst examples of misrule, it did nothing to halt the decimation of India's industries by cheaper British exports, or the ever-increasing number of famines worsened by the British Indian government's refusal to contravene pure capitalist principles by offering famine relief.
In direct contrast to this was the rapid modernization of Japan. The initial contacts forced upon Japan by the Western maritime powers -- the United States, Britain, France, and the Netherlands -- destabilized the Tokugawa Shôgunate . A coalition of provincial nobles destroyed the Shôgunate, and in its place installed a new constitutional monarchy under the Emperor Meiji, charged with modernizing Japan at all costs. Similar though less dramatic changes also occurred in Egypt, in which French industrialists organized the construction of the Suez Canal.
In Europe, the Second Empire continued its decline. In the late 1860's, the North German Confederation continued to grow in strength under the domination of Prussia, with growing influence in the Catholic states of south Germany. Although the Second Empire had entered a liberal parliamentary phase in 1869 with the installation of the "Liberal Empire" under Émile Ollivier, the Second Empire could not survive the shock of German unification. In the summer of 1870, the Second Empire challenged the North German Confederation to war, using as a pretext the candidacy of a Hohenzollern prince for the then-vacated Spanish throne.
The resulting Franco-Prussian War was a crushing defeat for the French, as better-armed and -organized German armies easily defeated the overconfident Imperial armies. A bloodless revolution in Paris broke out in Paris, and the Third Republic was declared. Forced into an English exile with his wife, Eugénie, and his three daughters, Napoléon III was forced to watch as France was compelled not only to recognize the unity of Germany, but to pay an immense indemnity to Germany and to cede the frontier territory of Alsace-Moselle. This defeat, as devastating as it was for French prestige, symbolized the end of an era of uncontested Franco-British dominance.
On to: La Belle Époque (1871-1913)