re-verse: North America ISOT 1891-1791

The United States of America is automatically the economic, industrial and technological colossus of this world, and thus a trading and commercial colossus, of this world, by default:

And Canada and Mexico are nothing to sneeze at either, with technology in urban areas far exceeding that available in the rest of the world, highly productive farming and a good standard of living (especially in Canada), and a well-developed, capitalized and productive mineral extraction sector (in Canada and Mexico, and to some degree Central America), and productive fruit and coffee and ranching export sector (Central America as well as Mexico, as well as Canada and USA, for ranching).

While interested in exports and global commerce, none of these American governments have interest in political dominion, control or influence over areas outside of the hemisphere.

Routine foreign sources of capital and imports, especially luxury imports, will soon dry up, as odd encounters at sea, the severing of the Trans-Atlantic cable(s), and odd encounters with sailors from different times with different reckonings of the calendar and year take place in North America, the Caribbean, South America, and Hawaii, and a bit less often, Europe and Africa and Asia. [More of the cross-time encounters occur in North America's coasts and the Caribbean because so much more of the ocean is 1791 instead of 1891, despite so many 1891 steam vessels being speedier than 1791 vessels.]

Routine foreign market for American goods, especially manufactured goods, at 1891 levels, also dry up.

However, the substantial diminution of the export sector is still a diminution of something under 10% of the American economy, even less with Canada and Mexico still around for cross border trade, so the impact is not severely negative. And American grain and cotton and alcohol and fishery products still find foreign buyers, if not quite as many.

The Democratic opposition to the ruling Republican Harrison Administration, under the new circumstances, immediately points to the economic illogic of the protective tariff policy. There are no producers of manufactures abroad competitive with the USA on price and quality, and in agriculture, no one is more efficient except for reasons of climatic difference or suitability. Under these circumstances tariffs rates protect nothing except the profit margins of trusts and corporations, and keep the cost of living and business higher.

The only thing the protective tariff has going for it is inertia, and many, perhaps most Republicans won't bother to defend it, and would join Democrats in supporting free trade. The 1791 world is not exactly on a gold standard either, so it may create a more permissive, even completely permissive, environment for the coinage of silver in the United States as well, and in Mexico and Canada and Central America.

Europe is watching the developments of the Constitutional revolution in France with hope and increasing amounts of nervousness. It is also watching an Austro-Russian war against the Ottoman Turks, and the Poles are getting restless, while the Prussians (and French) are concerned lest the Austrians and Russians make too many uncompensated gains at Ottoman expense.

Britain and Spain had been posturing with each other of Spanish detention of British seamen at the Pacific Northwest's Nootka Sound. But the ISOT event "disappears" all British and Spanish establishments on shore and all ships of either side near to shore. Any 1791 Spanish or British ships who were far enough out to sea to escape ISOT transportation and then who inspect the coastline, will see a vastly different picture when closing in on the coast of 1891 British Columbia or Washington state. Possibly making a close enough encounter to meet uptime Canadians or Americans and venture ashore, or being intimidated and made wary by the differences and venturing hundreds of miles back out to sea until they can find a familiar, known port. In any case, in a few months, both sides will be getting reports from some of their own Captains that the object of their previous contention is now vastly different, and spoken for. And uptimer diplomats will provide updated maps to prove the point by the same time.

Visiting North American ships will be providing demonstrations of technology, offers of trade, and "news from the future" that will provide quite a scramble of warnings to all sorts of audiences from French aristocrats and royals, to French Republicans, to Poles about the near-term demise about their country, to France's neighbors about France's invasions of them, and vice versa.

Diplomats and naval attaches of the French 3rd Republic in North America, for example, may try to see if they could, for example, help their downtime countrymen stabilize their national revolution into stable republic like had been found by 1891, or a stable constitutional monarchy. This attempt would probably be in vain, given their limited resources and the passions of the time.

British diplomats and officials in Canada would seek to give downtime England/Britain a "leg up" for the French Revolutionary War and Napoleonic trials ahead. German and Spanish and Russian and Italian uptime diplomats would all have "agendas" in reporting "news from the future" back to their home states or precursor states.

Similarly, non-state immigrant diasporas in the USA and Canada could easily have their own voluntaristic "agendas" toward the old continent, as of 1891. Irish North Americans of the Fenian persuasion seeking to support separatism and republicanism in Ireland against England. German North Americans seeking to support the German states's military technology, tactics, and unity against French invasions, probably seeing Prussia as the natural leader in most cases. Some Mexicans and Central Americans and Spanish-heritage American citizens seeking to 'harden' Spain against French invasion and devastation in the peninsular war. But Mexicans and Central Americans will have diverse and mixed feelings about the mother country of Spain. For any number that feel a cultural kinship for Spain, hoping to see it be less violated by French or British armies, others would feel discomfort with so much of the map all South America being once more repainted all Spanish, alongside Hispaniola, in addition to Cuba and Puerto Rico. Some of these might try to accelerate South American and Caribbean independence movements.

One thing about the 1791 world that will be a big turn off to 1891 North Americans (most of them) will be slavery and the various slave trades, in the Caribbean, South America, and trans-Atlantic from Africa. Additionally, the Barbary slave trade.

There could easily be "awkward" moments of slave ship Captains, American, British or European, from 1791, pulling into American or Mexican, or Belizean or Central American ports with holds full of human cargo, looking to sell, and getting sent away, or to their surprise arrested, and then having thorny questions, for instance in ports like New Orleans or Charleston or Savannah about where to house the human cargo next.

Foreign policy debates would emerge inside the USA, Canada, and Mexico about whether to tolerate slavery's continued existence in the Caribbean or South America, or the international slave trade, with the dying embers of the abolition generation perhaps a bit reheated, but competing in the USA with the reconciliation generation, and a probable rise of a Democratic President in the 1892 election.

I suspect a quick bipartisan and pan-regional USA, and uptime North American consensus to form around banning the oceanic and African slave trades, at a minimum, with the US navy and Canadian based Royal Navy elements having the tech superiority to crush the trade as a "legitimate business" and reduce it into at most a set of small, daring criminal smuggling rings in the south Atlantic, mainly within the Portuguese empire.

Whatever irritation the British, Dutch, Danes, Spanish, and Portuguese feel at the Americans and Canadians doing this, they are pretty soon getting distracted enough by French Revolutionary Wars that they are in a poor position to retaliate. And Revolutionary France is distracted from the very beginning of the scenario.

The American and Canadian based fleets can also do a "favor" for the downtime Europeans and themselves that provides a service in return for imposing new rules. Replaying the Barbary Pirates War, and basically put their slaving and hostage-taking activities out of business, so they get none of their final heyday of profit from the neglect of European navies during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.

Unless the Canadian government, local parliament, PM, Governor-General, are super-excessively shy, diffident, and all around "sore-y", it lacks a region with slavery nostalgia and a present-day antiblack white supremacy commitment, like the 1891 USA, so it should not be too bold a move for the 1891 Dominion of Canada in the 1790s, to arrogate to its own control and defence, the colonies of British Honduras, and the British Caribbean and Guiana to "loyally" help the United Kingdom with the burden of defence during the "European crisis, and to incidentally abolish slavery on all those islands and ashore territories.

Porfirio Diaz might make a similarly bold move with downtime Spanish Cuba, which is really not far from his own Yucatan peninsula, but I would still call his odds of acting even in such a modest territorially expansive way, well south of 50%.

The vast supply of European immigrant labor arriving to the USA and Canada in the early 1890s and beyond dries up instantly. Circa 1790 Europeans, even Britons, were not emigrating in vast numbers to America. Now America was not fabulously wealthy then. But it would take time for news to spread and for people to afford passage even America became known as an attractive destination to 1790s Europeans. And many of them may lack some rudimentary mechanical skills in demand in America. And presuming wars still break out in Europe on time, there will be "full employment" in Europe for people, and ships.

To some extent labor shortages won't be a big deal in the USA, with some of the trade-reduction induced slowing of the US economy. But the US economy and market for industry should still grow, still increasing labor demand. And presuming decades long disconnection of Europe, Africa, and Asia, still not yet open to international commerce, to the international labor market, industry in the northern, midwestern, and west coast of the USA will have to source its labor differently, probably primarily at first from its own southern states, from among impoverished black and white sharecroppers, and later from Mexicans and Central Americans, and also rural Quebecois. This should mean a substantially earlier black, and overall southern, Great Migration north and west, and Mexican/Chicano migration into the US southwest.

Further consequences are potentially interesting for the presumed wars of the French revolution in Europe and possibly the Caribbean. --
Unlike in OTL, while Britain and France will prosecute vigorous and brutal war of privateering and blockade against each other, they will not mess with the neutral American flag that can summon the protection of higher technology US Navy. Each side has incentives to be non-offensive to the Americans to retain access to American goods, services, and technology. While on average, American.....and certainly Canadian, and probably even Mexican, readings of the Napoleonic wars, should Napoleon even rise, would be more Anglophilic than Francophilic, I do not see this situation rapidly leading by circa 1800/1900 to a US leader analogous to Woodrow Wilson to intervene on Britain's side a la WWI. On the other hand, a 1895-1900 Canada feeling obligated to provide decisive help to Britain.....maybe it *would* shut down that cycle of European wars and French ambition pretty quickly once fully engaged, all by its own additional tech and resource contributions.

If not, it may be left to the USA of 1891-1901 to force the downtime East Asian monarchies to "open" to commerce with America and the west, with slightly more upgraded versions of the Matthew Perry Mission. I do not think the US government would make opium sales its hill to die (or kill) on, in forcing free trade and diplomatic relation with the Chinese. But I could just about see Uncle Sam forcing a war for free trade in the 1890s, early 1900s (uptime/North America time) to give American merchants free reign for unimpeded selling of tobacco cigars and cigarettes (and menthols when they get invented) [but Church ladies will draw the line at playing cards and demon rum or other alcohol], Coca-cola/Pepsi-cola/moxie, and kerosene lamps and kerosene, and various other products, and the right to missionize and have extraterritoriality.

I see the smaller (Canada and possibly Mexico) and more backward downtime powers as being more resistant to movement to perfect free trade or tariff reciprocity in this situation, with US consumers and businesses coming to see protective tariffs as at worst onerous taxes and fees that lack a positive protective rationale and that at worst are irrelevant as a supposed generator revenue because imports ad valorem will be so low.



What kind of scale and type of attacks on the British/European American colonies are you envisioning from the United States here? Outright land grabs and annexations? That was not really anything I was expecting. The USA 1891 already has the Lower 48, plus Alaska, and was not conducting Caribbean occupations or filibusters in the years 1891-1898. The filibuster equivalent takeover of Hawaii by the American expat and business community in Hawaii in 1895 was contingent on a long established American community there, which would need to restart from scratch.

Maybe after about a decade or so, as we got into this ATL's 1898-1901/1798-1801, and 1901-1915/1801-1815 era, the US would get more greedy and bossy in the Caribbean and South America to the point it could include getting "grabby" with European colonies in the Caribbean, South America, the fringes of Asia, etc. But I have no reason to count on it.




Oh, now if US intervention is focused on suppression of slavery, I am not even certain the USA government would even do any armed interventions to occupy colonies/islands to abolish the institution of slavery and emancipate slaves. Believe it or not that my be considered controversial, "too involved" or too expensive to some 1891 Americans, especially Americans on the south. Maritime intervention against the middle passage and slave trade at sea, across the Atlantic from Africa to the western hemisphere is where the USA, and likely other uptime western hemisphere nations, would have a consensus to oppose the *international slave trade*. William Wilberforce was already a known more campaigner against this by 1791. Shipping and business concerns of downtime Portugal, Spain, and Britain will have some outrage at bossy interference with their business and profits, but downtime outrage won't be universal. In legal terms, the US came out against the international slave trade by 1808, Britain by 1807, France against the slave trade *and slavery* in its Jacobin phase in 1793-95 - despite Napoleon's later attempted reversal, and the Congress of Vienna had resolutions against the international slave trade in 1814-15, so it was already controversial and a dirty business in polite society by 1791 downtime.

Additionally, I imagine that Americans and Canadians would want to boycott slave produced Caribbean, South American goods in favor of domestic substitutes.




Well I was suggesting that the Americans would shut down the slave-trade, piracy, kidnapping trade in that far west end of Middle East/North Africa, by earlier, more thorough naval suppression of the Barbary Pirates - that renders a service, mainly to downtime Europeans by eliminate a hive of criminal activity that chiefly victimized white, Christian, Europeans. I don't think the USA would extend itself and make great efforts to actually go onshore into Africa to suppress and destroy slave-taking operations or send anti-slave trade patrols up deep into the armpit of the Indian Ocean to really disrupt the Horn of Africa, Arab, and Indian slave trades. That sort of "brown on black" abuse did not have the same more implications or saliency or immediacy for Americans or even West Europeans as the white (and sometimes brown) on black abuse of the trans-Atlantic slave trade or brown on white abuse of the Barbary slave trade.



There's some I'll admit, but I think there are some potential mitigating or softening factors. The more the USA or uptime people are tempted to impose actual abolition/emancipation on downtime pieces of territory, like Caribbean islands, the more tense downtime people will get. But, years long profound warfare in Europe surrounding the French Revolution could do a lot to distract Europeans from such meddling and provide uptimers with faits accomplis. Especially countries like Denmark, Netherlands that will spend a great deal of time under occupation or without fleets. This applies to Spain significantly as well, and somewhat to Portugal. To a limited extent to France which will always be fighting. Britain has the greatest potential to be offended.




I have some strong skepticism about this as a deliberate US government policy. Especially if, as I suspect, we have a Cleveland Administration take power from Harrison after the 1892 election. The US government, elite and white population would probably have a bit of discomfort with encouraging 'do-it-yourself' (DIY) armed activism/filibustering by African-Americans abroad and could be worried about a spiral of white supremacist southerners or ex-Confederates deliberately volunteering for the opposing side.

We cannot rule out some genuine "DIY" actions I suppose. Given the vast economic/industrial gulf between uptime USA/North America and the downtime world, some African-Americans (Afro-Canadians, Mexicans, Belizeans) may within a decade or so amass funds and other resources that.....in the downtime world, go quite far in terms of funding operations in Africa putting potentially multiple Liberia style projects into operation or funding the purchase or buyout of some lesser colonies or slave forts.

One thing I would think the US 1890s government would try to have the presence of mind to do would be to try to prevent Haiti from devolving into a situation of race war. Which means once the French announce slavery abolition themselves, doing everything in their power to show French authorities, local and in France, the utter folly of trying to restore slavery on the island, and the necessity of accepting emancipation and self-government.



Yep, exactly. I mean do you even come down on a position on whether the French Revolution will be stopped in its tracks whether there will be a lengthy batch of wars of the French Revolution, or feel completely unable to guess?




I agree, it would take many, many knocks on that door, especially Emperor Qianlong's door, to open up China.


You think so? Think there would be a strong anti-imperial contingent arguing, "hey, if they say they want to be left alone, leave them alone", and "remember, nine years ago, we decided we did not want Chinese moving here and that they could not become good Americans. Would Japanese, Koreans, Annamites work any better? And should we insist on going to their countries if that is the case?"




This is rather huge I think. It could basically become a question of accept the relationship, on Canada's terms, and thus benefit from having Canada as an ally, protector, but sidekick and bootstrapper building you up and making sure win efficiently against all your foes like France. Or tell Canada "my way or the high way" and basically cause Canada to become truly independent and ultimately indifferent to Britain's position and welfare. Because while Britain outnumbers Canada in population, Britain is in no way suppressing the quite extensive, wealthy, and tech forward Canada, nor "bringing it to heel" without its consent. It's just not.

And actually, Canada connects back in with the slavery issue. I think the Canadian public by 1891, on its third Prime Minister was well used to being Dominion and responsible self-government by that point, since 1867. It valued its relationship with Britain, especially as a counterweight to the colossus to the south, but had self-respect and expectations to control its destiny. It also had 'modern' late Victorian moral expectations, more advanced in multiple areas than Georgian moral expectations. But how self-confident was it. I envisioned the Dominion of Canada being bold enough and having enough uptime Royal Navy units located there out of stations like Halifax and Vancouver, to *impose* some of its preferences on part of the British Empire, namely the part in the western hemisphere, including uptime, orphaned British Honduras, and the downtime Bermuda, Guyana, and British Caribbean islands. Possibly the Falklands. And here they could impose their moral views, including abolition of slavery, and certainly end to the slave trade.

But to 1791 Britain that's some real insubordination, to the point of else-majeste. Did I imagine 1891 Canada, backtimed to 1791, being bolder than it would realistically dare to be?




Canada is going to have the Catholic policy it wants....in Canada...hands down. Canada is not going to dictate to England or the government of Ireland, as constituted by the Protestant ascendancy of the time....its Catholic policy, however much it complains, despite complaints and agitations of Irish-Canadians, and Irish-Americans. Indeed, where the Protestant Ascendancy has on the ground control might be exactly where it responds to outside pressures by getting its back up.



To the extent that Spain actually deludes itself that it can boss Porfirio Diaz, forgets to call him Señor, and listen respectfully, and tries to actually deploy armies acting like they are in charge to Mexico or Central American republics....that is the extent they are pissing away their chance for goodwill and advance assistance against France and Britain, and almost goading the Mexicans into liberating Cuba from them, and the Panamanians from liberating the whole of Colombia from them.



I think Russia will need to learn fast, and will learn fast, to appreciate that it has a nice neighbor in Alaska that provides a useful supply station and search and rescue station for people Russia has operating in extreme northeast Siberia, and it should well trust that Russia was paid enough for Alyeska in another dimension, and has no sovereignty questions to ask.