English Canada/French Carolina: A Timeline

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Seven Years War
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    • Gabingston

    Gabingston

    Part 13: Seven Years War​

    Note: This post on this alternate Seven Years War will focus mainly on North America, as butterflies have not hit Europe to a significant enough extent to change the war over there. Anyway, here’s to the update.

    After the War of Austrian Succession in Europe, European politics and diplomacy underwent a huge reversal. France and Austria, traditionally rivals, entered an alliance, while Britain and Prussia did the same. However, this TL is not primarily European-focused, and the war’s result in Europe was quite similar to OTL, so let’s get back to North America.

    Both the British and the French had their own advantages in the North American theater of the war. On the one hand, the Brits had a vast, vast population advantage of 10:1, but the French on the other hand had more native allies and had held off the British in other colonial conflicts.

    There were two main fronts in the North American Theater of the Seven Years War: The Coastal and Frontier Theaters. The Coastal Theatre was fought East of the Appalachians, while the Frontier theatre was fought west of the mountains.

    In the coastal theatre, the British militias had a numerical advantage, and the British Royal Navy was superior to the French Navy, so the British made advances on the coastal plains, both with victories on the land as well as the Royal Navy bombarding coastal settlements into surrender, culminating with the capture of the capital of La Floride, Ville-Marie in 1758.

    On the frontier, though, it was a more even fight. Here, the British did not have the vast numerical advantage that they did in settled areas, and the French had more native allies, notably the Salaguis and Mascoquis. The British militia made an offensive down through the Great Valley/Grande Vallée, capturing the French trading post of Mûreposte along the way, towards the French fort and outpost of Rocheville. However, the militia was held back by a combined force of Frenchmen and Natives. An attempted British invasion of the Mouth of the Mississippi also failed, so the scores were rather close to even in this game of war.

    During the peace negotiations, the British offered to let the French keep the Atlantic coast, while giving the Brits the Mississippi Valley (even though the British seized the Atlantic Coast, while they failed to take the Mississippi Valley during the war). However, the French for some reason decided to cede the incredibly profitable Caribbean Sugar Islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique to the British, who had taken it during the war, in exchange for keeping both the Atlantic Coast and Mississippi Valley (yes, this wouldn’t have happened in reality, but it’s my TL and I want a large French North America ITTL), while also keeping the even more profitable sugar colony of Saint-Domingue. ​
     
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    • Gabingston

    Gabingston

    A bit more logical a reason that the French would give up Guadeloupe and Martinique in order to keep the Mississippi: For any sugar they lost from those two islands, they could simply replace by starting sugarcane plantations in OTL Florida, East Texas and Louisiana.
     

    Hominid

    Just caught up with this. I love it so far!

    Voted for a successful American Revolution, but I'm not entirely sure what that would look like ITTL. Interested in finding out if you end up going in that direction.
     
    Gabingston

    Gabingston

    Hominid said:
    Just caught up with this. I love it so far!

    Voted for a successful American Revolution, but I'm not entirely sure what that would look like ITTL. Interested in finding out if you end up going in that direction.
    Click to expand...
    I will say that the capital of British America ITTL would be Albany, NY, due to it's relatively central location in the colonies and it's role in colonial politics, even IOTL.
     

    Hominid

    Gabingston said:
    I will say that the capital of British America ITTL would be Albany, NY, due to it's relatively central location in the colonies and it's role in colonial politics, even IOTL.
    Click to expand...

    I like this.

    Also with earlier settlement around tge Great Lakes, westward expansion should go faster--lots of interesting possibilities.
     
    Gabingston

    Gabingston

    If I were to pick what's gonna happen to the American Colonies, I'd have some sort of British Dominion, but hey, it's your call.
     
    Gabingston

    Gabingston

    Ok, since none of the options on the poll got a majority, I'm gonna make a second poll with the two most popular options (Successful American Revolution and British Dominion), let's a go!
    https://www.strawpoll.me/17659005/r
    BTW, I did cast a vote for British Dominion, since that's the direction I'd like to see this TL go, but in the end it's your guys' choice.
     
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    Gian

    Gian

    Banned
    Gabingston said:
    Ok, since none of the options on the poll got a majority, I'm gonna make a second poll with the two most popular options (Successful American Revolution and British Dominion), let's a go!
    https://www.strawpoll.me/17659005/r
    BTW, I did cast a vote for British Dominion, since that's the direction I'd like to see this TL go, but in the end it's your guys' choice.
    Click to expand...

    I'd rather go for a successful American Revolution (just because)
     
    Gabingston

    Gabingston

    Here's a bit of historical trivia and something that could be butterflied ITTL.
    During the 19th and Early 20th Century, France had an abnormally low birth rate as compared to their neighbors, often time being just slightly above the replacement rate (the replacement rate was higher back then due to infant and maternal mortality). While some cultural factors such as secularization and early birth control (France's relationship with the Catholic Church has been... complicated, and not just since the French Revolution) played a role in the low fertility rate (those factors could change ITTL as well if the French Revolution doesn't happen, although Enlightenment ideas will still be quite influential even if the Revolution is butterflied), there was another entirely preventable factor.
    In the Early 19th Century (I think it might've been under Napoleon, but I'm not sure), French land inheritance laws were changed so that one's land would be divided among one's (presumably male) children rather than being given to the firstborn son, so it was now advantageous to have fewer children. If that law isn't a thing ITTL, then the French fertility rate might be higher during the 19th Century. I'd guess another factor was France's lack of a release valve in the form of a (present or former) settler colony like Britain (USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) or Spain/Portugal had (Latin America, Brazil and Argentina in particular). Germany and Italy never had settler colonies, but there was still mass German (to the U.S. mainly) and Italian (to Brazil, Argentina and the U.S.) emigration, which France didn't see (due to the low population growth). If the French have a release valve and the pre-Napoleonic inheritance laws, might France see much greater population growth and emigration ITTL? Share your thoughts.
     
    The Flames of Rebellion
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    • Gabingston

    Gabingston

    Part 14: The Flames of Rebellion​

    It’s now the end of the Seven Years War, and discontent was brewing in the British American colonies. The American colonies up to this point had been mainly autonomous, so the Crown introducing taxes on the colonists (even if it was to pay back debts from the Seven Years War) was quite upsetting. In order to maintain good relations with the natives, the British Government put restrictions on settlement west of the Appalachians (or west of the headwaters of the St. Lawrence at Lake Ontario in the case of Canada), which also stirred up discontent among the American colonists. With the population of British America soaring from 325,000 in 1700 to 1.29 Million in 1750, and continuing to soar due to a high birth rate and large waves of immigration, land east of the Appalachians and along the St. Lawrence was filling up fast, and with the Great Lakes and Ohio River Valley beckoning, it was only inevitable that Anglo-Americans would spread across the mountains, whether the Crown approved of it or not.


    Meanwhile, south of the Roanoke/Roanoque River, the non-Indigenous population of French Florida was about 230,000, of which around 40% were Afro-Floridians. Despite my mentioning of frontier settlements, most of the non-Indigenous population lived in the coastal lowlands. Most of the 133,000 Europeans in La Floride or Louisiana as of 1750 had origins in Northern and Western France, with smaller amounts having Other French, Basque, German, Irish or Indigenous ancestry. At the end of the Seven Years War in 1763, the European population of La Floride et La Louisiane had grown to just more than 160,000, 1/9th that of the English colonies to the North. After the war, King Louis XV, with his foreign minister Étienne François, duc de Choiseul recruited tens of thousands of new settlers to La Floride, with promises of land and a new start (IOTL the settlers were sent to Guiana, where most of them starved or caught malaria, and while disease is present in the South, it is nowhere near what it is in the Amazon Jungle). It worked, as between 1764 and 1770, around 20,000 settlers arrived in La Floride, barely offset by a minor disease outbreak. Most of the new arrivals became farmers, while others went into forestry, craftsmanship, construction or fishing. New settlers established towns and villages, as well as contributing to the growth of existing inland towns like     Saint-Denis, Boischeville and Hocquart. Thousands of settlers also went to La Louisiane, further solidifying French control of the Mouth of the Mississippi.

    Anyway, back to British America. By 1760, Kirkeston had grown to 17,500 inhabitants, the third most populous in North America, after Philadelphia and New York. Kirkeston was a thriving port city, exporting grain, furs, fish and timber. Most important to the city was it’s shipbuilding industry, as the docks of Kirkeston had become the Royal Navy’s unofficial shipbuilding base. Further up the Saint Lawrence, Mount Royal had also grown to population of 7,150, making it one of the ten largest cities in the British American colonies. Mount Royal was the base of the Great Lakes fur trade, and thus furs were the mainstay of Mount Royal’s economy in the Mid 18th Century. Otherwise, Canada was mainly a colony of small scale yeoman farmers inhabiting either homesteads or small villages surrounded by trees of green and fields of gold.

    As for Nova Scotia, Saint John was the largest city in the colony in 1760, with a population of 6,300, with the port town of Halifax (same city as OTL) the second largest at 3,500. Along the coast were scattered numerous small fishing villages, many of them inhabited only seasonally, and many were venturing further inland to find land. Contrary to one of my earlier posts ITTL, the land in Nova Scotia was/is heavily forested, and thus not good for raising sheep or cattle, but limited ranching did take place in less forested areas. Wheat was the main crop grown by farmers in Nova Scotia, and as implied by the text above, forestry and fishing were the other main economic sectors.

    Anyway, I have a poll between a Successful American Revolution and Greater Autonomy Within The British Empire, so go and vote on that if you haven’t already (poll closing within a few days of this post), and have a good day.
     
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    • Gabingston

    Gabingston

    Current Poll Tally as of 3:35 CST on March 24th, 2019.
    British Dominion: 7 (6 if you exclude my vote)
    Successful American Revolution: 5
     
    The Deal
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    • Gabingston

    Gabingston

    So, the vote ended up an 8-8 tie (counting my vote), so it came down to my personal preference, which was for a British Dominion of North America, so here we go. I will be having more polls over the direction of this TL in the future (expect one on the French Revolution once we get there), but without further ado, let's a go!

    Part 15: The Deal​

    As mentioned in the last update, there was increasing discontent with the status quo in the Thirteen British American colonies. The imposition of taxes on the Colonies without any representation in Parliament did not make the Colonists happy to say the least, nor did the restrictions on settlement west of the Appalachians.

    However, most American Colonists still viewed themselves as loyal subjects of the Crown, and with the French to the south, they still wanted to be under British protection. A plan had already been drafted a decade earlier detailing a separate American government that still had influence from the Crown. A delegation from the American Colonies, lead by one Benjamin Franklin was sent to the crown, making the case for America autonomy. One of the points made was that the Colonial population was growing at a much faster rate than in the Motherland, and that American separation from the British Isles was inevitable, so why not make it peaceful and keep American ties to the Crown intact?

    The King somewhat reluctantly approved, and the American Commonwealth Act was approved, ratified on July 4th, 1776 (yes, that was absolutely intentional), giving the Americans their own parliament based out of Albany (which would act in tandem with the British Parliament based in London), with a President-General appointed by the Crown and the delegates to be appointed by colonial legislatures. This would give the colonies more control over their issues, notably taxation. The Colonies would still cooperate with the Homeland militarily and economically, notably against the French if need be.

    As for the settlement restrictions, those were for the most part lifted, but immunity from settlement was given to tribes like the Five Nations in parts of Upper New York and tribes could request land to be off limits to settlers.

    Thus, the Commonwealth of America was formed, a collection of 13 British Colonies, from Virginia in the South to Newfoundland in the North.
     
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