New Reality Seeds

[Drifter]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

Doctor King and other Civil Rights workers came up with many of the non-violent resistance methods on there own. Also Gandhi's main ideas on non-violence were known in the late 1920's. Gandhi in this history would be as much a martyr as in our own.

If he is killed before he becomes an international symbol, or even before his works start giving big results in India, he is known but is more of a philosopher instead of a political figure. He'd be a martyr but with a less dedicated and more amorphous following.

[Drifter]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

Doctor King and other Civil Rights workers came up with many of the non-violent resistance methods on there own.

"A testament to the revolutionary power of nonviolence, Gandhi’s approach directly influenced Martin Luther King, Jr., who argued that the Gandhian philosophy was ‘‘the only morally and practically sound method open to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom’’"

From the Stanford website.

[Astromancer]

On another tack with India. Suppose that a noble, favored by both George IV and Victoria, were to marry into the family of a Maharaja? If intermarrige between the high nobility of India and Britain became first acceptable then (because of the vast wealth) fashionable. Picture an British Empire with a powerful resurgent nobility and a total rejection of 19th century racism, but otherwise rather right-wing. It could be a lively, if low probability, world.

Certainly the Great Game would be wildly different.

[scc]

Astromancer, two effects I can see from that. The first is that eugenics never gets mixed up with racism in the UK and likely doesn't die at the end WW2. The other is that the British Empire never declines.

Depending on how you want to play things it could get very interesting, the BE could well have gene screening tech by the present day, putting genetic illness on a step decline

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

On another tack with India. Suppose that a noble, favored by both George IV and Victoria, were to marry into the family of a Maharaja? If intermarrige between the high nobility of India and Britain became first acceptable then (because of the vast wealth) fashionable. Picture an British Empire with a powerful resurgent nobility and a total rejection of 19th century racism, but otherwise rather right-wing. It could be a lively, if low probability, world.

Certainly the Great Game would be wildly different.

Why would racism stop? Wouldn't you just have racism against anyone not British white or Indian brown? And doubling down on classism/caste-ism?

[scc]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Why would racism stop? Wouldn't you just have racism against anyone not British white or Indian brown? And doubling down on classism/caste-ism?

Because Britain's multiculturalism will pre-date the rise of racism, people will reject it

[tantric]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

On another tack with India. Suppose that a noble, favored by both George IV and Victoria, were to marry into the family of a Maharaja? If intermarrige between the high nobility of India and Britain became first acceptable then (because of the vast wealth) fashionable. Picture an British Empire with a powerful resurgent nobility and a total rejection of 19th century racism, but otherwise rather right-wing. It could be a lively, if low probability, world.

Certainly the Great Game would be wildly different.

Are you particularly knowledgeable about India politics? If so, I'd like to pick your brain sometime for my own India timeline (actually, it's Daniken-1) where ancient Indians really did interact with aliens. After independence the saddhi and such that preserved bits of the knowledge come forward, giving India a tech boost (well - pulse jets and a few other things). I'd really like to see India and China ally and win a three-way cold war/space race when they find a well preserved abandoned Raman moon-base.

[Drifter]

Originally Posted by scc

Because Britain's multiculturalism will pre-date the rise of racism, people will reject it

How and when did modern concepts of racism arise? It seems to me that it was firmly established by George IV's time IF you link ideas about race with the African slave trade. So maybe the change came earlier, effecting the British view of race so that by the time of George IV and Victoria you get a culture that isn't quite so racist and allows a darker skinned person to be treated as an equal.

Per wikipedia John Lok first brought Africans to England in 1555 - voluntary immigrants - with the purpose of teaching them English to start a trade relationship with West Africa. The rise of tobacco farming and later sugar plantations meant the colonies needed cheap labor. Somehow this labor was not supplied by African slaves, but co-opted native Americans. The West African trade did not concentrate on slavery but was lucrative in some other way. Ideas that darker skinned people where naturally inferior didn't take hold - they were trade partners in Africa, labor and political allies in the Americas.

This would take a comb-punch of maybe failures of the tobacco crops in the early American colonies. Or lack of demand - say tobacco gets the same reputation that early tomatoes did; they're poisonous so don't use them. Maybe associate them with witchcraft. The other punch would be a bump in West African trade. Both can be combined in a temporary shift in weather patterns - bad weather in North America, good weather in Africa, leads to stunted American colonies and more close association with native Africans who had been given a boost with Lok's help in facilitating trade.

[tantric]

Originally Posted by Drifter

How and when did modern concepts of racism arise? It seems to me that it was firmly established by George IV's time IF you link ideas about race with the African slave trade. So maybe the change came earlier, effecting the British view of race so that by the time of George IV and Victoria you get a culture that isn't quite so racist and allows a darker skinned person to be treated as an equal.

Per wikipedia John Lok first brought Africans to England in 1555 - voluntary immigrants - with the purpose of teaching them English to start a trade relationship with West Africa. The rise of tobacco farming and later sugar plantations meant the colonies needed cheap labor. Somehow this labor was not supplied by African slaves, but co-opted native Americans. The West African trade did not concentrate on slavery but was lucrative in some other way. Ideas that darker skinned people where naturally inferior didn't take hold - they were trade partners in Africa, labor and political allies in the Americas.

This would take a comb-punch of maybe failures of the tobacco crops in the early American colonies. Or lack of demand - say tobacco gets the same reputation that early tomatoes did; they're poisonous so don't use them. Maybe associate them with witchcraft. The other punch would be a bump in West African trade. Both can be combined in a temporary shift in weather patterns - bad weather in North America, good weather in Africa, leads to stunted American colonies and more close association with native Africans who had been given a boost with Lok's help in facilitating trade.

For a LONG time religion played the role of race. There were black nobles in the Middle Ages in Europe - it was odd, but they were Christians. That same page have a link to a find of skeleton of a black African in 13th Century England.

The slave trade was an integral part of the Kongo Kingdom's economy long before European contact. There was a period before the destabilization when several kingdoms around that area grew very rich, but the end result was internecine warfare. Slavery really is a normal part of society at some technological levels (what else are you going to do with prisoners of war?). It was the weird coincidence of the African societies practicing low tech slavery and the development of plantation agriculture in the Americas that was so hateful. You had an industrial agarian society without a sufficient population base to drive it.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by tantric

For a LONG time religion played the role of race. There were black nobles in the Middle Ages in Europe - it was odd, but they were Christians. That same page have a link to a find of skeleton of a black African in 13th Century England.

...

OT: But that's how I develop my multi-species worlds. Species isn't anywhere near as important as language and culture, for the most part.

It's odd that we all find that odd. Why should melanin amount matter more than whether we like the same music, books, or pronounce cumin the same way?