Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals Read Free Page A

(for primarily religious reasons) to see the abolition of slavery throughout the American continent and the states’ righters who objected to this infringement of the states’ traditional liberties.
    The resulting conflict boiled over into civil war, despite every effort by the imperial government in London to mediate between the two sides. However, as so often in such conflicts, imperial influence was ultimately exercised in such a way as to tilt the balance in favour of the particularists. Following Lee’s decisive victory at Gettysburg, the northern states were effectively forced by Palmerston and Gladstone to accept a compromise settlement, whereby the black slaves were given formal emancipation but no political rights (much as happened to the Russian serfs at around the same time); and the powers of the Viceroy, Abraham Lincoln, were substantially curbed. This settlement was formally agreed in April 1865, despite withering criticism from centralist or ‘imperialist’ supporters of the North like John Bright and Benjamin Disraeli. In fact, Disraeli’s prediction that the tacit continuance of unfree labour would prove economically unsustainable was to prove false. However, where he was right was in his prediction that the two sides would never wholly forget the polarisation of the Civil War. Just as he predicted, post-bellum America increasingly divided into North and South.
    Much the same happened when Gladstone and his successors sought to deal with the not dissimilar North-South division in Ireland. Here, the problem was not only an economic one (as in America, the North was industrial, the South agrarian, though reliant on poor peasant farmers rather than slaves). It was also a religious one, thanks to the seventeenth-century colonisation of the north of the island by Calvinists from Scotland. In the rest of Ireland there was a further division between the Dublin-based established church (as reformed by Laud) and the Catholicism of the peasantry. As in America, conflict arose from the resistance of one region to increasing centralisation. As the power of the Irish Parliament increased (which it did steadily under the influence of Grattan in the 1790s), so the Ulster Protestants came to fear for their traditional religious liberties. In an effort to avoid another civil war, Gladstone proposed Home Rule for Ulster - a separate parliament in Belfast for the six predominantly Protestant counties. But this was overwhelmingly rejected by the Irish Prime Minister John Redmond, who saw no reason to relinquish Dublin’s authority over the prosperous North of the island, and fervently opposed in London by imperialists like Joseph Chamberlain. As Alvin Jackson has shown, it was not until 1912 that the Asquith government was able to enact qualified Home Rule for the six counties of Ulster; and even this limited measure precipitated violence between Catholic Irish Volunteers and Protestant Ulster Volunteers, necessitating military intervention from England.
    The second policy favoured by the nineteenth-century monarchies - emigration - led to rather different complications. From the 1840s onwards, millions of Irishmen, Scots, Germans, Italians, Poles and Russians were encouraged to depart their native lands. Russians mostly headed east to Siberia. But for most Europeans the most attractive destinations were undoubtedly in North America. However, both the Anglo-Americans and French-Canadians were profoundly hostile to any significant immigrations of people they regarded as foreigners. This did not present a problem for the Irish and Scots (curiously, the French did not prove to be such keen emigrants). But the Germans, Italians and Poles found themselves effectively without colonies to go to. It was partly the resulting sense of exclusion from the great global empires - and the growing fears of Central European governments about the social consequences of rural overpopulation - which inspired the great political changes which