On Jul 6, 11:54 pm, bm2...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
> But, given the fact that Great Britain was in the middle of the
> industrial revolution, and probably the grandest expansion of wealth
> in history to that point, how sustainable is that narrow a franchise?
At its literal interpretation, not particularly, but if you pick up
any novel starting around, say, 1780 onward, and there's a fair amount
of "moneyless titled family marries son to daughter of moneyed
merchant" or "aspiring middle class family buys a title" and at that
point, it'd been going on for about 100 years. But with the take off
of the Industrial Revolution, the trend accelerated.
Alternatively, you need to whack 1649 and 1688 /hard/ to produce a
bloody British Revolution, but let's continue.
> The middle cl***** are going to be expanding, and with them, the % of
> people with political power purchasing wealth. On the other hand, we
> have a rapidly expanding industrial workforce, which even in the
> absence of the French revolution and Karl Marx, is probably going to
> find literate people to find theoretical justifications for their
> discontent. (Peasant rebellions rarely have gone anywhere, but the
> urban proletariat has a better idea of where you live.)
I'd suppose. But the ATL, presumably, will lack Corn Laws to feed
their industrial discontent and grind poverty higher.
> So, proposed: the narrow oligarchy, even in the absence of the example
> of a successful American revolution [1], is either going to expand
> over the next century in an evolutionary manner as OTL, if perhaps a
> bit slower, or there's going to be a messy explosion at some point. On
> our TL the British ruling cl***** managed the dilution of their power
> very well indeed: would they have been clumsier and less willing to
> compromise if they had been victorious over the first great democratic
> revolution?
It's hard to make the Hannoverians even more stupid as a group. You're
going to have to do significant damage to economic expansion in
specific and sort of repetitive ways to enhance tensions, combined
with fairly persistent food shortages and regressive taxes. Then you'd
have to alienate the armed services and some chunk of the ruling class
to collaborate in a violent revolution.
I think the divergence has to precede 1688 to get there. Having one
violent regicide and one half-revolution in recent family memory
dampens the ardor and probability of revolution in Great Britain. Even
in LMHR, it took a lot of micromanaging to ramp up social violence to
the point that repression might produce revolution....
Best
L
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