Brief History of Empires Earth
The First Civil War and French America
In a series of articles published in the 1830's and 1840's, the French writer de Tocqueville presented to Europeans the hitherto novel idea that the young United States might one day approach, or even surpass, the European Great Powers. For the first sixty years of the 19th century, the population of the United States expanded rapidly as its empty but fertile western territories were settled and its eastern territories developed one of the most modern urban industrial economies in the world. The evidence of alterworlds demonstrates that had situations differed, the United States of Empires-Earth could also have evolved into a state capable of challenging the established Great Powers of Europe.
Unfortunately for the United States, a civil war broke out in early 1860 between the economically dominant northern and western states of the Union, and the slaveholding states and territories of the southern states. By the end of 1860, the slaveholding states had organized to declare their independence as the Confederate States of America and appealed to Britain and France for diplomatic recognition and military intervention. The growth of liberal anti-slavery attitudes in both countries seemingly would have prevented any Franco-British intervention on the Confederacy's behalf. Fortunately for the Confederacy, a rash Union declaration of war upon France and Britain led to their intervention. The steady defeats inflicted by Franco-British forces in New Mexico and Canada, and the terrible effects of the British blockade of the Union, forced the Union to seek peace with its enemies. On the 9th of March, 1863 - the third anniversary of the beginning of the First Civil War - the Union recognized the independence of the Confederacy.
The French Second Empire, under Emperor Napoléon III, shrewdly took advantange of France's involvement in the First Civil War to establish a French empire in America for the first time in a century. Supposedly acting to gain compensation for holders of Mexican debt, a French expeditionary force had landed in Veracruz in 1862 and proceeded to take control of the entire country. Maximillian, brother of the Austrian Emperor, was installed as the Emperor of Mexico, and Mexico was transformed into a French-dependent state. For the remainder of the 1860's, France was concerned with solidly establishing its empire in the Caribbean. Mexico's conquest was completed in 1865, though nationalist guerrillas exerted influence in the rural areas of northern Mexico, and the Mexican Empire was firmly established. In 1866, a pro-French government was installed in Venezuela, and in 1866 the struggling republics of Haiti and Santo Domingo were occupied in and amalgamated into three départements d'outremer on the model of Guadeloupe or Martinique. Over British and Confederate protests, France had managed to establish itself - at great expense - as the supreme power in Middle America and the Caribbean. Though this position would prove useful in later years, France's distractions in the Americas kept its government from reacting to developments in Germany in time.
Prusso-German War of 1866
At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the German Confederation was created in the place of the vanished Holy Roman Empire, to serve as a reasonable political framework for the 39 independent states and growing common identity of Germany. This loose political framework was simply not enough to satisfy German nationalists, and in 1830 and 1848 abortive revolutions were waged in the name of a unified Germany. The Austrian Empire constituted the largest state in terms of population, but the Kingdom of Prussia increasingly grew in importance as industrialization and military reforms proceeded.
In the early 1860's, Prussian noble Otto von Bismarck gradually emerged as a powerful figure in Prussian politics. He initiated a policy of aggressive Prussian aggrandizement with the eventual aim of establishing a Prussian-dominated Germn state. In 1864, Prussia led the rest of the German Confederation - including the Austrian Empire - in a war against the Kingdom of Denmark on behalf of the German-populated duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. The two duchies were divided between Prussia and Austria, and Bismarck began planning for another war, this time against Austria, to expel its influence from Germany.
When the war finally broke out in the summer of 1866, most people expected an Austrian victory. Prussia was widely viewed as the aggressor by the other states of Germany, and had only the support of the duchies of Mecklenburg and Oldenburg in its aggressive campaign. Superior Prussian military organization led to a series of crushing defeats over the armies of the other German states, culminating in the occupation of the Austrian province of Bohemia in September of 1866. France looked upon the events in Germany with alarm, but the placement of half of its army in colonial postings left it unable to intervene in any meaningful way. Shattered, Austria and her allies sued for peace.
The resulting Peace of Berlin was described even by Bismarck as draconian. All those states which raised arms against Prussia were required to pay sizable indemnities to her, and many were forced to cede territory to Prussia - Bavaria was forced to transfer her Rhine Province to Prussia, many of the petty states and even some of the grand duchies and kingdoms were absorbed altogether, and even Austria was forced to cede northeastern Bohemia to Prussia. At the end of 1867, Prussia withdrew her forces from southern Germany and Austria, repositioning them in a new North German Confederation securely under Prussian dominance.
Austria and her remaining German allies sought revenge. Under the leadership of Vienna, each state engaged in a far-reaching program of military modernization. At the same time, Austria was forced to concede a certain degree of autonomy to its non-German nationalities in order to ensure their loyalty; the Ausgleich of 1868 gave the Czechs of Bohemia-Moravia and the neighbouring Slovaks, the Croats, the Poles of Galicia, and the Magyars their own self-governing kingdoms. At the same time, it searched for an ally, finding it in France, which, by the end of the 1860's, had itself completed an impressive modernization and expansion of its army and navy. Even the Italian states, fearful of Austrian ambitions, joined the alliance under French proddings. The growth of liberal parliamentary politics in the French and Austrian Hapsburg empires led to a popular desire in both countries to gain revenge upon Prussia.
Course of the Great European War
The past decade of warfare in Europe had managed to successfully polarize all of continental Europe into anti-Prussian and pro-Prussian blocs. Allied with the vengeful Austrian Empire was the French Empire, and the states of south Germany and Italy, all of which feared that the successful unification of Germany under Prussia would lead to their gradual decline. For its part, the North German Confederation was serenely unconcerned with its isolation in continental Europe, counting on the Confederation's remarkably successful industrialization and the pervasive militarism of Prussia to hold off its enemies. Given the bellicose sentiments throughout continental Europe, war between the two blocs was inevitable.
The pretext for the war arrived upon the acccession to the Spanish throne of Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen in the summer of 1870. The Prussian government underestimated the determination of the French to avoid another diplomatic humiliation like that of 1866, while the nationalist Spaniards who favoured the accession of a Catholic Hohenzollern hoped to chart greater independence from France. For their part, the French were determined that Prussia would not gain a dynastic ally to its rear, while the Austrians and south Germans were determined to get revenge for their defeat in the Seven Weeks War. Over the first two weeks of July, France, Austria, and their allies proceeded to declare war upon the North German Confederation and its Spanish ally.
The naval and colonial wars were one-sided. France was able to blockade the Prussian ports on the North Sea, and quickly managed to destroy those elements of the Prussian navy not yet in port. Overseas, French forces quickly seized Spain's colonial possessions - with Mexican reinforcements, the Spanish Caribbean fell by September of 1870, while the Canaries and the Spanish possessions in Africa fell the next month and the Philippines fell by the end of the year. The French ground war against Spain was completed similarly quickly, and with large swathes of northern and eastern Spain including Navarre and Catalonia in French hands, Spain was forced to sue for peace.
The war against the North German Confederation was slower, but as 1870 continued Prussia's superior military was being worn down by the sheer number of French, Austrian, and allied troops. Abortive Prussian offensives into Alsace and Bohemia were quickly repelled, and by the end of the year, French forces had reached the Rhine while the Danes had intervened in the hope of regaining Schleswig. French and Austrian statesmen were carelessly predicting the post-war partition of Prussia and the destruction of the North German Confederation.
The Franco-Austrian dreams of European hegemony were halted by the Russian invasion of Austrian Galicia. For the next two years, the Allies and the Russo-German alliance were to experience the horrors of warfare in the industrial age. Most of the civilian suffering was confined to western Germany under French occupation and to Poland, the main battleground of all of the armies. For two years, each side waged ceaseless war against the other, refusing Britain's numerous efforts to mediate and demanding nothing short of total victory over the other side. In the spring of 1873, it seemed as if the Allies were finally going to win, as a series of determined Austrian and Romanian offensives against Russia led to the collapse of the Bessarabian front. As Allied forces poured into central Ukraine, threatening to cut off North Germany and Poland from Russia, Sweden declared war against Russia in the hope of reclaiming lost territories. If it hadn't been for the revolutions in Paris, Vienna, and München, the Allies might well have continued the fight.
As both sides were perilously close to exhaustion, they finally agreed to British mediation with a view to a final peace. After much debate, Britain and the combatant states decided to hold the peace conference in the French city of Strasbourg, overlooking the Rhine and Germany.
On the 1st of September, 1873, the Great European War came to its official end. In three years of warfare, more than two million soldiers - a bare majority of them Russians - had died, and much of central and eastern Europe had been devastated. The immense destruction wrought terrified all of the European Great Powers, who now realized the potential destructive force of modern warfare. It became apparent that a new international system had to be built to replace the dead system established in 1815 by the Congress of Vienna, else Europe would risk destruction.
Peace of Strasbourg
Although the British mediators sought to portray the Peace of Strasbourg as a compromise peace, the fact of the Allied occupation of most of Germany and nearly all of central Europe ensured that the Peace of Strasbourg would favour the Allies.
The Allies achieved their aims of territorial gain: Denmark succeeded in securing the Danish-populated areas of Schleswig, while Austria regained northeastern Bohemia, France was able to annex the southern half of the Prussian Rhineland without a trouble and to purchase the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg from the Dutch king, and the Russian Empire was forced to cede to the Romanian kingdom the border region of Bessarabia. The French annexation of the entire Spanish colonial empire and the Basque Country, and the independence of the Kingdom of Catalonia and the Grand Duchy of Galicia, was also recognized by all parties.
Despite these resounding losses, though, Prussia and Russia did manage to achieve their war aims of maintaining their national independence and the integrity of (most of) their national territory. Prussia was allowed to assume its leadership of the federal German Empire, allowing the Hannoverian and Hessian kingdoms and the dozen minor duchies limited independence within their own borders. Russia, for its part, established a federal dynastic link with a Kingdom of Poland that included not only Congress Poland but the former Prussian province of Posen/Poznán and the former Austrian province of West Galicia; the limited independence of the Baltic grand duchies of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia was difficult to take for the Russian Imperial government, but it did manage to secure the continued Russo-German alliance.
For all of these far-reaching territorial and political changes, the most important result of the Peace of Strasbourg was the establishment of a permanent Congress of Strasbourg in the French city of the same name. Unlike the Congress of Vienna, which dissolved upon the finalization of the post-Napoleonic settlement, the Congress was to be a permanent body, dominated by the Great Powers, capable of maintaining peace and stability in Europe - and even abroad - for an indefinite period. The strength of the Congress of Strasbourg was demonstrated in its 1875 dealings with Belgium.
The Belgian Incident
The establishment of a cohesive and united German Empire covering the entire northern half of Germanophone Europe overturned the European balance of power, even after the independence of the southern half of Germanophone Europe and France's territorial acquisitions in the Rhineland were taken into consideration. France, in particular, felt a neeed to establish a defensible strategic frontier and to acquire more industry. The Kingdom of Belgium - independent since 1830, but historically a component of Napoleonic France and possessing a dominant Francophone population - was the logical target for French ambitions. With the support of the other members of the Congress of Strasbourg, the French Imperial government dispatched a sharp note to the Belgian government demanding the cession of the various territories along the Franco-Belgian border.When the Belgian government refused, France invaded the country, managing to subdue it within a month.
The Second Congress of Strasbourg was held in the summer of 1875, immediately after France had completed its occupation of the country. France was allowed to annex the Francophone provinces of the southern half of Belgium and western Flanders; the remainder of Belgium, with an overwhelmingly Netherlandophone population, was transferred to the Kingdom of the Netherlands, as "compensation" for the loss of the eastern half of the Dutch East Indies to the German Empire.
The destruction of Belgiun independence also graphically demonstrated to the smaller states of Europe the possible result of defying the will of the Congress of Strasbourg, thus ensuring the subordination of the smaller states of Scandinavia and Continental Europe to one or more protecting powers. The Congress of Strasbourg was now secure.
Partition of the World
For the first time in the 19th century since the ill-fated Holy Alliance, all five European Great Powers were now united in a single body. With the internecine struggles that plagued European civilization over, the full members of the Congress of Strasbourg were now able to turn their full attention upon the extra-European world.
Since its independence, the Confederacy had foundered in the midst of the worst agricultural depression in its history. Anti-slavery activists in the United Kingdom and the French Empire had precipitated the passage of legislation which prohibited British and French industrialists from using Confederate cotton. Despite alternating threats and promises by the United Kingdom, the French Empire, and the United States, the white slaveowning elite continued to oppose the very idea of emancipating the growing slave population of the Confederacy. By the beginning of the 1870's, the Confederacy had grown to look upon the United States and the French sphere of influence in the Caribbean as the two major threats to Confederate independence. Leading Confederate strategists posited a quick war intended to permanently expel the French from Cuba, followed by a war to retake the Confederate irredenta in southern Indiana and Missouri.
The Confederate War began in June of 1875, while France's attention was still focused upon the negotiations in Strasbourg. >From Key West, the Confederate Navy launched raids against Havana, while the Confederate army began to mass on the Mexican and Union borders. By itself, France would have been barely able to retain its holdings. A secret alliance with the United States aimed against the Confederacy ensured the rapid destruction of the latter state in the course of two years of war. The Treaty of New York ended with the cession of south Florida to France, the cession of Texas to Mexico, the independence of Louisiana as a principality under a minor branch of the Bonaparte, and of the northern tier of Confederate states to the United States. The Confederacy itself was transformed into a homeland for the slave majority, and made dependent upon France and the United States for protection and support.
When the Great European War ended, the European colonial powers had made few inroads in Africa. As a result of the the Napoleonic Wars, Britain had gained full sovereignty over the region of the Cape of Good Hope, in southern Africa. Sundry other acquisitions led to a formal British presence in regions as dispersed as Gambia, the Gold Coast, and the Lagos district. France also maintained a substantial presence in Africa, not only maintaining Algeria as a colony of settlement but establishing protectorates over Senegal and the Guinea coast. African colonial possessions had generally been viewed by the Great Powers as encouraging overseas prestige, but too costly to be worth the effort of conquest.
In the 1880's, a variety of factors such as the desire to increase colonial exports, attempts to expand the prestige of the various Great Powers, and the desire to engage in mass conversions of the indigenous African population to Christianity, led to the partition of Africa. France began the imperial competition by launching, in 1881-84, a campaign using colonial troops to conquer the entire Guinea coast, including the nominally independence Liberian republic, and the basin of the upper Niger. The next year saw the German fleet steam to Zanzibar, in support of Germany's claim to a protectorate over the Zanzibari empire in eastern Africa. Following the Austrian invasion and annexation of Libya, Britain finally participated, announcing the annexation of the southern African highlands and conquering the Abyssinian kingdom. The Fourth Congress of Strasbourg finally resolved the question of the Congo basin, ceding the upper Congo basin to the German-Zanzibari empire, the north bank and mouth of the Congo to France, and the remainder to Britain. In the 1890's, financial crisis led Portugal to sell her overseas colonies to the highest bidder. To Britain's consternation, Germany acquired Mozambique, but Brasil surprised the world by banking on her dynastic and linguistic ties with Portugal to acquire the West African port of Bissau and the vast territory of Angola.
The Congress of Strasbourg's Fifth Congress gave permission for a general partition of the teetering Ottoman Empire. Austria managed to secure most of Macedonia and Thrace for its Bulgarian client, while Greece gained control of much of western Anatolia. Russia, in the meantime, took over the remainder of Anatolia, annexing the formerly Turkish Armenian provinces into itself, and establish a puppet sultanate in the remainder of Anatolia on the model of the Turkestani khanates. Britain, France, and Germany made more limited territorial gains in, respectively, Cyprus, Lebanon, and Syria, while Egypt was given its independence under Franco-British supervision, and the Holy Land was made into a territory administered jointly by all of the member states of the Congress of Strasbourg.
The partition of the Chinese empire removed the last traces of non-Western independence. The attempts of the Empress Dowager in 1899 to consolidate her control over the crumbling Chinese state by encouraging xenophobic riots and massacres of foreigners backfired spectacularly when the Congress of Strasbourg, along with then middle-ranking powers such as Italy, Brasil, and Japan, dispatched a mission to overturn the Qing dynasty and to establish a Congress-run government. Over the fervent objections of Chinese nationalists, the 1903 Sixth Congress of Strasbourg formally partitioned China between Britain, France, Russia, Germany, and Japan.
Even though France had initiated modern imperialism through its adventures in Middle America, the Congress powers took a long time to turn from the easier prizes of Asia and Africa to the more difficult Americas. Brasil was virtually unique in managing to hold off the acquisitive powers; it even managed to gain marginal territories, like Uruguay and the Guianas. The rest of the Americas was ruthlessly partitioned, as Chile and Argentina became German protectorates, Patagonia a British colony, Middle America was fully incorporated into the French sphere of influence and Colombia and Venezuela were federated to produce a new Hapsburg monarchy under joint Franco-Austrian protection. In 1890, the French and Franco-Austrian states of the New World were federated into the American Union, a regional confederation under the ultimate control of France.
Even North America was opened up to Congress imperialism. The British Empire and the United States fought a naval war in 1888-89 that led to the establishment of New England as a British Dominion and the annexation of the southern half of Upper Canada to the Union. This initial mixed success was soon followed by tremendous political instability, as the different political and regional factions inside the United States fought for control of the American polity. The United States finally collapsed in 1911 in the middle of the Second Civil War. To the horror of Europeans, the full horror of industrialized warfare was exposed as trench warfare and chemical weapons decimated an entire generation. When the Civil War ended in exhaustion a decade later, the United States had fragmented into a half-dozen impoverished and paranoid republics. France took advantage of the weakness of the Midwestern Federation to seize the American prairies, at the same time that Germany's intervention behalf of German immigrants in California led to the creature of a Hohenzollern puppet state. The collapse of the United States removed the only republican candidate for Great Power status, and confirmed the opinion of the ruling classes of the Great Powers that war between themselves must be avoided at all costs.
Imperial Modernization
Despite generations of general progress throughout Europe, Britain remained by far the largest industrial power at the end of the European War, with a total national production of steel and coal five times that of either France or Germany. Modern industry had also been established in the United States, in the Hapsburg kingdoms of Austria and Bohemia-Moravia, and even in the autonomous Poland federated to Russia, but in these territories it was little developed. The rest of the world, including Brazil, Japan, Russia proper, and the American Union, remained agrarian peasant economies.
As the 19th century progressed, however, this situation had begun to change. France had made the greatest strides, thanks to the mass industrialization forced by the European War and to the annexations of prosperous industrial regions in the Rhineland and Belgium in the war's aftermath. From 1880 until the end of the century, almost four million immigrants settled permanently in France. By 1900, France had gained full parity with the United Kingdom in terms of total industrial production, and had become the largest exporter of capital in the world after the United Kingdom.
France's abundant capital exports played an important role in allowing the Hapsburg Empire and the north Italian states to begin their industrialization. Industrial development was accelerated in Hapsburg Austria and Bohemia-Moravia, with Vienna and Prague emerging as nuclei of productive manufacturing and mining districts, while the city of Trieste/Trst became one of the largest ports in all of Europe and the Kingdoms of Hungary, Croatia, and Romania began to develop a modern agricultural system following social reforms. Italian and Tuscan prosperity was closely tied to that of France, with the two kingdoms becoming little more than French economic satellites. Naples, Rome, and Sicily remained permanently depressed areas, providing surplus labour for the factories of Italy and France, and colonists for Algeria and Tunisia.
The Russo-German bloc practiced a studied autarchy throughout the industrialization of Europe. Before the onset of the European War, the North German Confederation had managed to gain parity with France in terms of steel and coal production. Despite the cession of the rich industrial territories of the southern Rhineland to France, the rapid expansion of the corresponding industries in Westphalia and Saxony allowed the German Empire to retain basic parity with France, all while undergoing rapid population growth that made the German population as large as the French in 1910. German agriculture was steadily modernized, freeing up a population of workers for the world-class industrial areas of the Ruhr, Berlin, and Silesia.
German exports necessarily increased as Germany established a sizable overseas empire, but by far the largest market for German products was found in the Russian Empire. The self-governing states in dynastic union with Russia - Finland, Estonia, unified Latvia, Lithuania, and the Kingdom of Poland - quickly recovered their former prosperity upon the end of the European War. By the 1890's, these liberal parliamentary states had begun to attract a large amount of German investment, in their agriculture and in their manufacturing industries. Finland eventually emerged as one of the most prosperous states in all of Europe, while the Baltic German merchant class made the Baltic grand duchies an indispensable conduit to the expanding industry and population of Russia proper. Polish nationalists continued to rally against the nominal union of Poland with Russia, but the majority of Poles concentrated upon the exciting new experience of industrial capitalism. Even Russia proper began to modernize, with the Ukrainian peasantry managing to produce a sizable grain export to provide capital for industrial technology, allowing St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Kiev developing huge industrial districts with millions of workers.
Less noted, though equally important for the future, was the modernization of the American Union, the Empire of Brazil, and Japan. The American Union had the notable advantage of having full access to European markets, through France. Even though the American Union was constructed so as to give France uncontested military and political supremacy in all of Middle America, the American Union's constituent states nonetheless retained enough autonomy to allow for state-funded industrialization programs. Following the completion of the Nicaraguan Canal in 1886 by Ferdinand de Lesseps, the Kingdom of Nicaragua slowly began to modernize; Cuba and Lousiana, major sources of sugar cane and cotton for the French Imperial market, also enjoyed prosperity. The Mexican Empire enjoyed the greatest degree of success, simply because the Mexican population was the single largest and best educated national population in the entire American Union. Mexico City and the northern departments of the Mexican Empire began to enjoy a remarkable degree of prosperity that had managed, by the time of first contact by the ITA, to transform Mexico into a middling-developed economy. The prosperity of the American Union played a vital role in enhancing the relative power of France, by giving it an equivalent to Britain's prosperous overseas colonies of settlement.
Emergence of Brasil and Japan.
If anything, the development of Brasil and Japan from isolated agrarian economies to prosperous industrial states held even more portent for the future, since Brasil and Japan would emerge to become Great Powers and full voting members of the Congress of Strasbourg. Brasil's transformation began in the 1870's, when it became the major overseas destination for immigrants from continental Europe following the prohibition of immigration to the United States. Brasil's aid to the Allies in the Great European War ensured that France and Austria would defend Brasilian independence against either the British or the Germans. First slowly, then more rapidly, Brasil began to emerge as an industrial power. By the beginning of the 20th century, it had become the most important independent middle-rank state in the Americas. Its territorial acquisitions in Africa in the 1880's were followed by the establishment of a dynastic union with Portugal in 1910 following revolution there. As the 20th century progressed, Brasil was increasingly becoming recognized by the Great Powers of Europe as an equal.
Japan had few of the initial advantanges of Brasil - isolated from the technologies of the West for more than two centuries before its opening, only its extreme distance prevented its conquest by one or another of the imperial powers. A coup d'état and civil war by reformers led to the rapid industrialization of Japan, and to the expansion of the Japanese military. The Russo-Japanese Treaty of 1875 reaffirmed Japan's control over the northern islands of Hokkaido, Karafuto, and the Kurils, which it proceeded to colonize at the same time that it forged a colonial empire of its own in Formosa and Korea. By the early 1920's, Japan had emerged as a Great Power bringing it in conflict with Russia over the territory of Manchuria. War between the two empires was inevitable.
Japan's victory in the Russo-Japanese War demonstrated Japanese strength. At the same time that defended the isolated settlements in Karafuto and the Kurils from attack, it mounted an offensive against the isolated Russian holdings in the North Pacific and destroyed the Russian Pacific Fleet. The Peace of Halifax ratified Japanese gains, as Japan acquired the territories of Alaska and southern Manchuria, though at the cost of a sizable indemnity. Japan's successful prosecution of the war convinced the established Great Powers that Japan had to be admitted to the Congress of Strasbourg in order to maintain the peace.
On the 6th of October, 1927, Brasil and Japan were admitted simultaneously to the Congress of Strasbourg as full voting members, bringing the total number of Great Powers up to seven. The international situation established by these admissions would endured for more than seventy years.
First Contact and Aftermath
The ITA had first come across Empires Earth in 1929, and had begun full-scale scouting on the world beginning in the 1930's. Occasional discussions in the ITA bureaucracy about establishing first contact with the seemingly stable world only came to fruition when Napoleonic Earth gained full membership in the ITA in 1947. Emperor Napoléon VIII began to apply pressure on the First Five to establishing first contact with a world home to the only stable neo-Napoleonic empire then known to exist in the ITA.
Finally, after years of preparation, Empires Earth was formally contacted by the ITA in 1952. Compared to other worlds, Empires Earth took first contact fairly well, avoiding most of the riots common on many of the alterworlds. In 1953, the Congress of Strasbourg voted unanimously to accept the ITA's offer of associate membership. Fifteen years later, Empires Earth gained full ITA membership.
Soon after its contact, Empires Earth gained a reputation for being one of the more reclusive worlds of the ITA, limiting its official trade to importants of civilian and military technology, and the export of simple manufactures and raw materials. The condemnation of colonial policies by alterworld liberals and socialists contributed to this, but probably more important was the belief, on the part of the leaderships of the world empires and the Congress of Strasbourg itself, that Empires was entirely self-sufficient.
The most notable event of the 1970's and 1980's was the birth of a large native middle class in French Indochina and French West Africa. The maturation of industry in Europe and the American Union left French capital with nowhere else to go but France's possessions in Africa and Asia. When the metropole finally took notice of its neglected territories, West Africa and Indochina slowly began to prosper. The transformation was most pronounced in French West Africa, where intensive economic development led to the emergence of a Francophone culture concentrated in the great cities of the West African coast. In the 1970's, first the largest cities, then the entire West African coast, were made into fully-fledged départements d'outremer (overseas departments) of France, including the right to elect representatives in the French Corps législatif. Gradually, West Africa's cultures began to influence the popular culture - particularly the pop music - of metropolitan France, and even the entire world.
Collapse of the British Empire and the British War
While the other world empires were experiencing unparalelled prosperity, the British Empire found itself lagging sadly behind the other world empires in all major fields, be they economic, power-political, and military. For a combination of reasons ranging from laziness to a reactionary aristocracy to an inefficient bureaucracy, the British Empire - particularly the British Isles - never managed to maintain its leading position. Almost invisibly, Britain began to slip in power relative to its rivals. Progressively worsening misadministration in Britain's colonies led to rebellions against British rule by the exaseperated native populations. Troops from loyal regions of the empire - though, to be sure, not from any of the Dominions - were used to brutally suppress these insurgent populations. Massacres of entire villages became sadly commonplace, as was the use of chemical weapons to engage in aerial bombardments of rebel-held regions. Perhaps the most notorious war crime was the use of various chemicals to sterilize large numbers of Indian and Nigerian civilians. Many British justified the near-genocidal conflict by saying that it would suppress the rebels and lead to real reforms, but as soon as the British imperial command turned its attention away from a supposedly-pacified region, full-scale revolution broke out again. By the middle of the 1990's, despite rapidly expanding military expenditure, the British Empire had proven itself incapable of suppressing the Indian and Nigerian rebellions. Political unrest in the British Isles culminated in a renewed rebellion against British rule in Ireland, and in open declarations of secessionist intent by the governments of the Dominions.
The British War of 1998 was initiated by the Congress of Strasbourg following the British provocation of an attempt to enlist the support of France in reestablishing Hannoverian independence in exchange for a French frontier on the Rhine. A unanimous decision by the remaining Congress powers to partition the fringes of the British Empire led to the first Great Power war in more than a century. Initial British offensives soon ended, and as the Great Powers began to focus their overwhelming forces upon British forces, the complete destruction of the British state and empire seemed a likely outcome. Three remarkable facts intervened to prevent this fate: The world of Jane Grey Earth took control of the Irish Sea sea gridney and allowed the British Navy and almost a million refugees to flee to their world, defusing the military situation; Queen Beatrice of the Netherlands managed to succeed in getting the British Parliament to recognize her as Emperor of the Dutch and British empires; and, the Congress of Strasbourg chose to recognize the resulting Netherlando-British, or Dutch-British, empire as a successor state to the British Empire.
The Netherlando-British Empire is an awkward regime. Its core is formed by the federated kingdoms of England, the Netherlands, Scotland, and Wales, and by the associated kingdom of Ireland under the Wittelsbachs of Bavaria, the closest relatives to the Catholic Stuart dynasty. Each of these five kingdoms retains full control of their domestic affairs, and each kingdom can even maintain semi-autonomous colonial empires - just as the Dutch East Indies remain administered by Amsterdam, so is Bengal by London. Further, the self-governing Dominions - Newfoundland, the Cape Province, Australia, and New Zealand - are virtually independent of the central government in York, England. Still, the Netherlando-British Empire seems to be an entirely viable imperial state.
The Russian War
The 1998 Nineteenth Congress of Strasbourg divided most of the vast territory that had once belonged to the British Empire between the various powers. The Russian Empire gained by far the largest share of these territories, including Abyssinia, Persia, and northwestern India. At the end of 1998, on paper Russia was the single largest and most populous empire in the world, and potentially the most powerful. In fact, Russia was terribly overstretched, with nationalist Chinese and Persians agitating for independence. A brutal campaign against Islamic nationalists in Russian India precipitated first a general Islamic uprising, then a Chinese uprising, in the summer of 1998. As the war steadily worsened for Russia, the Russian Empire came close to collapse.
The televised assassination of Czar Nicolas III by his Crimean Tatar guard shocked Russia, Empires Earth, and the multiverse. The self-identified "Council of National Salvation" proceeded to take power. Claiming to represent rightful authority, the Council was a frightful neo-Fascist government that sought to solve the revolutions in Russia's colonies and in Russia itself through mass murder. Pogroms took tens of thousands of lives in Russian cities, and soon Russian society began to dissolve at the seams. The terrified autonomous Kingdom of Finland declared its independence without a shot fired, while Poland and the Baltic grand duchies succeeded in being placed under German protectorates. Even Ukraine erupted in anti-Russian violence and separatist revolt. Russia itself was torn by a terrible civil war between the Council and the liberal Imperialist faction, which organized around the banners of heir Alexei III and the near-saint Olga of Kolomna.
Russia and its empire were devastated by the fighting. The Council engaged in numerous barbarities against non-Russians and Russians alike, though non-Russians suffered by far the worse terror. Civilians in Abyssinia, Persia, and Russian China were subjected to genocide as the pro-Council regimes bombarded Abyssinian, Persian, and Chinese cities with military-grade chemical weapons. Until the final defeat of Council forces at Yekaterinburg in December of 1999, Cossack units operating under Council authority engaged in an appalling pattern of rape, murder, and pillage against defenseless villagers, and the mysterious self-destruction of the Moscow deep bunker precipitated a firestorm that killed more than five million Muscovites. The Council even engaged in biological and chemical warfare against alterworlds, using biological weapons against cities on Prime, Estates-General, and Tripartite Alliance Earth, and chemical weapons on Weimar Earth.
The eventual victory of the Imperialist forces did nothing to conceal Russia's tremendous losses. The entire Russian colonial empire, including even territories like the northern Caucasus, Kazakstan, and Buryatia which had been Russian territory for centuries, was stripped from Moscow. Russian China fell under the control of a new Republic of China organized by Japan, while most of the Islamic and Caucasian successor states promptly fell into civil war. Ukraine was organized as a kingdom federated with Russia, while the succession of Alexei III to the Russian throne was secured. Perhaps as many as twenty million Russians, and eighty million non-Russians, had died in 1999.
The Future
The world was shocked when, on the 1st of December, 1999, the Congress of Strasbourg announced that dependent self-governing territories of each of the seven empires would be permitted to hold non-voting membership on the Council. Australia, California, China, Mexico, Peru, Ukraine and Venezuela all gained membership as the protégés of Britain, Germany, Japan, France, Brasil, Russia, and the Hapsburg Empire, respectively. This surprising announcement signalled how the full members of the Congress of Strasbourg had begun to realize the importance of including everyone, both the colonial rulers and the colonial ruled, in the governance of their world. The sheer brutality displayed by the Council in its dealings with non-Russian colonial subjects revealed to the world the logical consequences of a colonialism unrestrained by anything approaching morality.
Vast changes are afoot on Empires. France is becoming more open than ever before to influence from its colonial empire, and the new rail Gridney connection with the Federation of Mali on Estates-General Earth has exposed French to the fascinating culture of a powerful Francophone states. The Hapsburg and the Netherlando-British Empire are undergoing similar changes, though with more immediate import as their core states renegotiate their mutual relationships. Japan, Brasil, and Germany are making the first timid moves towards enfranchising their colonial populations. Above all else, Russia is in the midst of tremendous soul-searching as it recovers from its sufferings in 1999.
Still, there is little doubt that Empires Earth will not abide. After all, the Congress of Strasbourg is still active after a century and a quarter.
Maps
Map 1. Europe as of 1 January 2000.
Map 2. Empires Earth as of 1 January 2000.
