Poor Austrians, things were going so well. At least the Australians are doing ridiculously well in their place.
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William Morris! My favourite Marxist! He's sure to usher in a new, more beautiful, epoch for Britain.
Morris as a dictator is brilliantly odd, he would be very interesting and in the odd idealism of revolution I don't think its all that unrealistic, I mean didn't the Bavarian Soviet end up with an anarchist poet for a leader at one point?
The explosion of communists so 'early' is quite odd, the Australian Outback doesn't seem like the natural place for Marxism to develop.
The explosion of communists so 'early' is quite odd, the Australian Outback doesn't seem like the natural place for Marxism to develop.
Yeah, none of the British colonies had the sense to escape communist domination through rebellions... yet. I don't know how it's going to affect militancy, but I presume we'll find out with time.
Also, I don't mind the Austro-Hungarian flag myself, but whatever.
Their decline seems to have halted with the institution of democracy; I guess they're lucky that Italy didn't take any more territories from them during their last war.
Perhaps, but his successors seem a bit grimdark in comparison. Think of Morris as the local Lenin or Trotsky in comparison to Stalin, although that's not an ideal comparison.
I'll put one at the end of this post.
It really isn't. The events enabling socialist and communist ideology in the world fired in Prussia, yet I don't see any signs of communism in Germany. I decided to (for narrative purposes) put most of the Australian socialists in South Australia because I got my first socialism themed event in that region. There really aren't very many, but since the capital is now in Adelaide, it's easier for them to get their way.
Anyways, here's a map current to 1878. I'm going to put it in spoiler tags since it reveals some events in the upcoming episode.
A few interesting things:
- Sweden somehow got a conquest CB on Norway and won the war. Normally, Norway is a satellite of Sweden.
- Canada is receiving the events that give them the Yukon and Northwest territories for free, albeit at the cost of a prestige hit.
- Independent Tatarstan is discussed in the upcoming episodes.
- The Heavenly Kingdom has lost some territory to Mongolia, somehow. Also, the Fuijan clique has been on the map for some time...
- In Indonesia, I conquered Siak and Atjeh (this episode). The Dutch, meanwhile, have moved into Borneo.
- Japan has unified under the Emperor through the Boshin War event chain, but they are still uncivilized! What the heck is going on? I have half an urge to try and conquer them...
Update within the hour as usual.
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Chapter 14: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Conquer New Lands
Let me tell you a little story about a nation called Atjeh. It was pretty great. The end.
Before the first Anglo-Australian treaty, the sultanate of Atjeh was formally within the British sphere of influence. After the British pulled out (read: loss interest), it carried on essentially independent, since the Dutch really didn't seem to care. Once the Dutch got kicked out of the good parts of Indonesia, though, Atjeh was thoroughly screwed because their sultan looked like too much of a dictator to Alexander John Flemingbrooke. He may have been viewing the situation through a very skewed lens - sultan Bayezid Syah was a fairly typical monarch for the 19th century Islamic world. Not particularly just, not particularly cruel, basically the Robert MacDowell of Indonesia. Thing is, even if Minister Flemingbrooke hadn't decided Syah was a tyrant, there were even more jingoistic nutcases in the Australian government than there were before the Java war. It's probably because the Indonesians bore the brunt of the casualties in that war. The 'proxy' view of Australian and Dutch conflict in the East Indies isn't very popular (and I'm pulling mostly from my historian friend Minnie Rohrig here), but it does seem to fit a lot of the little steps. At the very least, Australians had always used some sort of conflict within the states of Indonesia to justify territorial gains. Atjeh, then, is the first clear exception, and it marks a pretty major shift in how we approached our colonialism.
What is a tyrant, and what does he do?
Bayezid Syah hadn't done anything to particularly deserve the invasion we gave him, beyond perhaps running a rather more centralized state than his predecessors. Atjeh's governmental efficiency was beginning to rather outstrip that of the remaining independent states in Indonesia as a result of this (approaching that of your average European monarchy), but did Flemingbrooke care? Nope, Bayezid gets to be a tyrant and have his country invaded. You see, while he was rather efficiently improving the economic merits of his country, the Sultan had paid little attention to military manners. The average soldier in his army was lucky to have a flintlock musket and would probably have to kris his enemies to death. Not exactly a good weapon to wield in an age of artillery.
The real reason we decided to conquer the sultanate of Atjeh was almost certainly because we didn't want their land in the hands of the Dutch. Admittedly, a couple loyal Atjehnese people within the sad remains of the Dutch East Indies would not exactly prevent us from exercising supremacy, but allowing your enemies to gather their strength is what left the Taiping dynasty in charge of China a few decades back, amongst other things.
People in China were beginning to realize that the Taiping were a little more open to foreign devils than they perhaps wanted.
Alternatively, a diplomatically savvy enough Atjeh might ask for another power (19th century China doesn't count) to protect it, leading to complaints that could escalate into more dangerous wars. The military decided it was best to move quickly; one day, they suddenly slammed a large amount of troops into Banda Aceh and started relentlessly marching them southeast, killing anyone who looked at them funny. Not exactly a strategy, but when you reach Australian levels of military supremacy, strategy is reserved for nations that might put up an actual resistance.
Corollary - if you see an Australian charging at you with a mad gleam in his eyes, it means that he thinks you're a pathetic weakling.
Atjeh, as well as the small chiefdoms of Riau, were incidentally a proving ground for indigenous Australian aborigines hoping to prove their legitimacy in a country where they had been totally, utterly swamped by foreigners. In 1875, about 2% of the population claimed primarily aboriginal descent; another 1% or so were willing to accept they might have some significant ancestry of that sort. As blatant non-Euros, they faced (often highly illegal) discrimination from their peers, and therefore either ended up falling back into the interior or desperately crawling into well-paying professional jobs like doctor or lawyer in an attempt to appear respectable. During the Atjehnese conquest, a brigade from the interior of Queensland had a chance to prove themselves as soldiers; while it didn't earn particularly many mentions in the press, they were decorated enough that over the next few decades, military service became an easy way for them to acquire not only a decent standard of living, but the skills they needed to defend their property. For instance, in the early 1900s, spearings would give way to machine gun nests... but that's a story for a later chapter, if it comes up.
Either way, for being a relatively unimportant war, Atjeh would become the proving grounds for well meaning, if racist Australians who sought to 'uplift' the local Indonesian population through the miracle of technology and cultural indoctrination. Since Atjeh relied primarily on raising cash crops (particularly various spices) for its livelihood, modern farming equipment was desperately scrambled to the area without thought for how it might affect the local economy.
To be fair, the Atjehnese had not mass-adopted most of the cutting edge farming techniques of the 1870s, but I'm sure they would've even if they'd remained independent.
Within only a year, production of tea and coffee had risen 20%, and by the end of the decade, the yields of the Atjehnese plantations had tripled. However, almost all of that money went into the hands of landowners; farmers' wages rose about 10% at the same time. Even then, all the money floating around, along with a lack of banks to guide speculation... followed by a flood of cheap manufactured goods... let's just say Atjeh's economy was a bit unstable for a while afterwards, with a boom-bust cycle that put that of the United States of America to shame!
In any other time, this blatant land grab might've drawn serious flak from the rest of the international community. To be fair, there were quite a few people in the pro-Dutch camp throughout the world who denounced this action, but Europe as a whole was quite occupied with other conquests. Desperate flailing and self-strengthening measures tend to show up after revolutionary waves, so it just so happened many of the powers of Europe were looking to devour one another. Oddly enough, some of the most violent conflict happened near the Baltic Sea... must've been something in the water.
Yet again the history of the German Empire was intertwined with that of Australia! By absorbing the Hannovers, as well as any influence we could exert in their politics by virtue of golden gifts (or at least coffee and tea, which became our largest exports to Germany after the conquest of Java), the people of Germany liberalized almost overnight. While their intellectuals discussed the virtues of self-determination and limited government, Kaiser Wilhelm spoke of bringing technology and limited democracy to the oppressed peoples of Europe. With most of his neighbors either friendly, genuinely democratic, or (if neither) capable of defending themselves, he turned to the Russian Empire and, in the course of a few short days, utterly broke their diplomatic relations by recognizing a Volga Tatar revolt in the heart of Russia as a sovereign nation. I'm not sure what to make of it myself - in researching this book, I learned that Russia is home to so many submerged ethnicities that you could launch a thousand simultaneous independence movements in the Caucasus alone.
Wilhelm and his cabinet were inhumanly good at diplomacy and realpolitik.
Most likely, the Tatars were an excuse, as Kaiser Wilhelm declared war and promptly sent hundreds of thousands of German soldiers into the western Pale of the Russian Empire (read: the place that furnished most of the country's migration to Australia). The Russo-German War of 1876 wasn't particularly long or bloody, but it was a good way for Germany to claim it was now master of Europe - while this might be due to the weakness of Russian infrastructure, Germany was able to deploy a larger army to the border than Russia despite having about 60% of the population. Combined with their better equipment and discipline, it made for slaughter. I figure that the Germans could have done what Napoleon failed to do and conquer Russia if they'd been up for it, but they settled with annexing a portion of Poland in addition to forcing Russia to recognize Tatar independence.
Poles, given the choice between wealthy slavery and impoverished slavery, tend to choose the former. German-controlled Poland was relatively quiet outside of the occasional organic work movement or Kulturkampf.
Needless to say, the state of Tatarstan was almost certainly doomed to reconquest once Germany lost interest in defending it, but even momentarily recognizing it would lead to decades of new nationalist revolts in Russia. More instability meant more migration to Australia, so we technically benefited from German aggression.
The war did lead to government officials like Alexander Flemingbrooke trying yet again to earn the favor of German monarchs, and while we still couldn't secure an alliance (political cartoons from Germany at the time like to depict us as a stray cat dropping dead birds on Kaiser Wilhelm's doorstep), we did manage to clear up the Hannover succession issue. In the middle of 1876, our countries signed an arguably unnecessary 20 year non-aggression pact that placed particular emphasis on reaffirming Australian independence, much to the disinterest of the German citizenry and to tangible relief of our own. Most of the Hannovers, however, renounced their claim to any of the British Empire; they'd been completely and utterly cowed by the whole rebellion, and Supreme Foreman William Morris sure wasn't going to let them come back, except perhaps in a coffin. Furthermore, Albert Edward had managed to arranges marriages for some of the royal family to the house of Hohenzollern. I'm guessing he thought that he could have descendants kaisering Germany within two or three generations. The one Hannover that did make his way over (Albert's younger brother Leopold) had enlisted in the army, killed a couple Atjehnese during our conquest, and promptly died of an 'honorable' war wound.
Or was it tropical disease? One can exacerbate another.
While it did save us from the horrors of German efficiency and frugality, this treaty did leave Australia without a dynasty, so Alexander Flemingbrooke asked the local dynasts and foreign monarchs of the world if they wanted to try their hand at Australian kingship, with the caveat that their powers would be limited to ceremonial nonsense. A surprising amount of royals expressed interest in that, including a few pretenders to the Ottoman throne. Most were ignored, and with good reason - the only royal families that had much fiat with the Australian population were the now disinterested Hanovers and the expatriate Habsburgs. So you know what we did? Apparently a lot of people wanted to give Franz Joseph his empire back, but he turned down the crown in favor of his son Rudolf. Now, Rudolf was something of an idle playboy who liked to debauch with the eligible bachelorettes, in contrast to his father's dreams of distinguished statesmanhood.
Considered so fashionable that Austrian military dress became Australian casualwear for a few decades.
I guess that made Rudolf the perfect candidate for the job, and in 1878 he was crowned King of Australia. After the ornate ceremony, he went off to a Russian bar to sample some more vodka, and life went on.
On the other hand, the Habsburgs now ruled over a land over 10 times the size of their previous holdings, so I guess they were closer to dominating the world than before...
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Considered so fashionable that Austrian military dress became Australian casualwear for a few decades.
Damn, that IS classy
I personally much prefer a proper Australian Habsburg over a Saxe-Coburg-Gotha who prefers lowly consolation-prize Hannover over a proper Pacific Empire. Long may Rudolf reign!
Well it has been a bit before I had put in my comment in here, but I'm back from the worries of school and all!
Man, Australia is doing pretty nicely. The commies from what I saw in the last update from here got a bit uppity, but at least they have been defeated. Woot for the Empire!
Man, Australia is doing pretty nicely. The commies from what I saw in the last update from here got a bit uppity, but at least they have been defeated. Woot for the Empire!
Oh the potential for Austria-Australia jokes.
This was one very good chapter.
Glad to see you enjoyed it!
Australia actually starts out as an HM's Government when released, both in POP Demand Mod and in Vanilla. I had half a mind to switch by console to a plain democracy when the UK went communist, but I decided against in favor of this.
Damn, that IS classy
I personally much prefer a proper Australian Habsburg over a Saxe-Coburg-Gotha who prefers lowly consolation-prize Hannover over a proper Pacific Empire. Long may Rudolf reign!
Truely, the Habsburgs just are more... imperial and royal, although the Hohenzollerns may have some objections.
The communists have been contained in Australia and most civilized countries, for now. Hopefully, they will see that communism does not work before we have to beat some sense into them.
If I'm feeling particularly imperial by the 1900s, I may try to dismantle the former Ottoman Empire... which probably would not be difficult so long as too many European great powers do not come to their aid.
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Chapter 15: Nothing Stops The Freedom Train
History in the grindstone is not a pleasant sight. Australia ran on the inertia of Indonesian conquest for quite a long time; it's like they didn't care at all that I'd be writing a work of popular history about them in the future and that I might want some dramatic tension to keep people interested. But no, the people of Australia just HAD to be wise and prudent, and... ...occasionally savage and violent if it earned us some land and money. Oh well - if I wanted to make things up, I would try my hands at writing novels. You know what? I might take myself up on that someday.
You'll notice that in only a few decades of development, much of Australia had went from barely settled frontier to either cosmopolitan cities or well exploited industrial complexes (depends on where you live). Meanwhile, surrounding areas went from being not Australia to being part of Australia! People were quick to assume that some sort of Australian exceptionalism was wringing civilization out of the local wilderness. Needless to say, much of the first generation of immigrants had already forgotten much of their own heritage and taken up a unified Australian identity. Over the years, they would tap into every major branch of philosophy and ideology and adjust it to suit their needs.
One discipline that comes to mind is painting, as cutting edge art managed to play into our social policies in unexpected ways. During the 1870s, Australians played a major role in the 'impressionist' school of painting, which unenlightened art historians would call an inexorable step towards the development of abstract art. Now, Australia wasn't entirely free of landscape paintings prior to the rise of this movement, but by now there were more and better painters in the country willing to try their hands by the time French 'experts' traveled to Sydney in an attempt to enforce the style. Either way, the end result was that you had lots of rich, snooty people puttering around in art galleries, looking out the windows to see industrial pollution taking hold around them, and panicking at the difference.
A hint for policymakers worldwide: When rich, powerful people are telling you to protect the environment, you've gone way too far against Mother Earth and need to backpedal. Alexander Flemingbrooke and the Australian parliament under him understood there was a major desire for this sort of thing, even if he wasn't entirely informed on the effects of industrialization on the environment. As a good career politician who at least intended to follow the will of his people, he was quick to collude with various factions in the government and convince them to tighten up environmental regulations. There were plenty of complaints from factory owners, but given that even some of the wealthy industrialists were scared, what could they do? The workers had less sludge in their lungs after a while, and the funny thing about the matter is that if you STOP coughing up black goo, you never really want to start again. With Australia's decently literate (~70%) population, they were quick to read up on the apparent effects of environmental mismanagement and declare themselves opposed to it.
One of the forgotten casualties of the environmentalist movement was the sludge sandwich, composed of whatever industrial waste you could put between two slices of bread. Delicious, and totally not deadly! Saves money on waste disposal, too.
Even then, there was immediate backlash. A huge wave of shoddy 'environmentally friendly' products crashed into the Australian markets, and immediately started wreaking havoc. Plows broke, steam engines caught fire, and the mines that provided the people of Darwin their vodka money collapsed when the local machinery went haywire, killing at least 70 people.
Farming, finance, what's the difference? Food futures are real, and if they weren't, there would be no future.
No attempt was ever made to reopen the local mine for some decades - I believe that back in the late 1870s, Australians perceived themselves as having plenty of iron between mines in Western Australia, as well as from other countries if it needed to be imported. Meanwhile, Darwin was still the point where colonial wealth entered Australia proper, so it wasn't like the locals had to get their hands dirty in the mines to enjoy a reasonable standard of living. Darwin would also later become the focal point of Australia's textile industries, which had begun to grow dramatically in response to our new access to Indonesian batik and were fast becoming a major export; if you're interested in that, check out my reading list at the beginning of this book's appendix.
Were it not for Indonesia (and advances in synthetic dye production), Australia would not have much more than subsistence textile and clothing industries. With the conquest of Java, our economy began to depend rather more on colonial fortunes (or lack thereof). Coffee and tea - those much were obvious and they did become rather significant parts of the Australian diet that began to compete with the homegrown vodka industries. One problem that crossed over from Atjeh to the rest of Australian Indonesia was that of overproduction - yields rise, prices die, small landowners starve. On a larger scale, the inability of Java to earn survival money began to endanger the livelihoods of Australians, who desperately needed large colonial Asian markets to buy their manufactured goods. While exports to Europe continued unabated and grew constantly, the inconvenience of having to sail all the way around Africa did retard the development of our sea exports, as well as limiting what we could offer the rest of the world in heavier industries. In other words, we were inheriting many of the problems of the Dutch. However (and this is a big however), our much larger, closer, and more efficient administration kept us from having to declare strategic bankruptcies.
Europe, in fact, was beginning to take a particularly hungry look at Egypt, as the Sinai Peninsula represented a potential way to close the distance between Europe and the Indian Ocean. British commissioners and bureaucrats in particular were beginning to talk of constructing railroads and possibly a canal in the area to facilitate the movement of goods, people, and information. Given their already advanced political and economic ties with the Khedivate, the non-communist equivalents on the continent had already conceded that Britain would play the greatest role in the canal's construction... but they still were rapidly setting up their own administrative and commercial interests in the area in an attempt to siphon off some of the implied future wealth.
Egyptian cotton is worth its weight in gold... or at least wool.
As the only country on the other side of the Sinai that Europeans weren't planning to carve up and devour for personal gain (except perhaps Persia), we had made some efforts to assist our European brethren. Just our good luck then that William Morris was in an optimistic mood at the end of the decade and willing to forge new, more equal ties with its former colony. Austro-British relations, which had declined precipitously after the flight of the Hannovers, became cautiously optimistic. There was something of an unspoken agreement - Britain would not attempt to install communist governments in the world, and in return would be allowed to participate in its imperial ambitions.
Britain technically got a fairly raw deal on the political end, because the great powers of the world were committed to containing them, and furthermore pushing their own political ideologies on the populations of the world. Given how tightly parliamentary democracy was tied up with our own imperial ambitions, I can safely say Australia was not free of this trend. Local assemblies and parliaments went up in the islands of Indonesia even when the occasional backwards conservative insisted the colonies needed further education before they could run a functioning democracy.
"Central place theory" enthusiasts would claim that democratic institutions evolved mostly rapidly in cities and that the concepts increasingly spread outwards.
More importantly, a couple of years of grudgingly providing representation for the colonies without explosive rebellions had left Australians believing that they had done the right thing.
Even without a 100% approval rate, some Indonesians understood that Australian rule was not all doom and gloom and were willing to protect it.
As a well-meaning 20th century political activist, I'm obviously going to agree (and I'd say so even if I didn't, since it sells more books), but back in the past there was quite a bit of doubt on the subject. The fact of the matter is that no matter how flawed or underwhelming Australianized government institutions on our periphery were, the lack of them in foreign colonies became a major rallying point of our activists... and when you have an increasingly jingoistic, warmongering prime minister (Thanks, Flemingbrooke!), it's only a matter of time before your Australia begins to invade its neighbors.
Atjeh was sort of the proving ground for this trend, but Spain would be the next government to lose its foothold in the Pacific. Spanish colonial policy at this time was fairly simple, and really boiled down to one rule: Spain must never lose the Philippines. From the mid-1500s, it had served as the center of their activities in the Pacific, ranging from the Manila galleon trade to (later) more conventional economic exploitation of the natives and enforced Christianization. Its loss would represent irreparable damage to Spain's colonial empire, albeit only because they'd long ago lost their chokehold on the Americas. For a long time, Australians had little reason to visit this colony except perhaps the fact it was a convenient stopping point on the way to Japan or China, so it was ironic that the gradual flowering of those markets would give us an interest in the Philippines themselves.
One day, a group of Australian Orthodox missionaries landed in Manila with intent to bring Christianity to new natives, and possibly dose them with Australian capitalism in order to make them more receptive to business ventures. They managed to get a congregation of about 50 together before the Spanish noticed and promptly arrested them for not spreading Catholicism instead. A more peaceful country would have left the matter at that (possibly raising some diplomatic protests regardless), but in Australia, the land of religious freedom by necessity, people took to the streets to demand the rescue of the missionaries... a good number of Catholics among them. If that's not ecumenical, then nothing is. Either way, they were able to stir up the government to new heights of bloodlust - the Golden Fleet had recently been expanded and needed proving in battle. We just had to escalate this into war, lest our Prime Minister had to resort to human sacrifice to contain his growing need to kill. Indeed, Flemingbrooke apparently sunk deep into the occult and was found sacrificing people to Kali in what Balinese brahmins described as a "desecration of Hindu traditions" about a decade after leaving office, but I'm not such a sensationalist that I'd link the two, right?
... uh oh.
Yeah! Make 'em wish they were Australian!
...Er, getting back to the Philippine conflict. While our declaration of war on Spain was flimsy, it did at least have precedent - it'd been only 30 years or so since Sulawesi was occupied to protect Torajan Christians. It was accompanied by a stern proclamation that if Spain would not protect religious freedom in the Philippines, they would have it seized in order to protect their victims. Given the iron rule of Spanish colonial policy, however, the 'liberation' (conquest) of the Philippines took far long than desired due to difficulties in diplomacy. The plan was childishly simple - land a division of troops in Mindanao and extend control north as quickly as possible. However, the troops we sent to the Philippines were more disciplined and perhaps better equipped than those used to conquer Atjeh, in the belief that even the Spanish could muster more of an army. The Spanish, to their credit, managed to hold our troops on Mindanao for several weeks despite having absolutely no military navy in the area solely through guerrilla warfare. I think they were hoping that mainland Spain would send some of their new, fast troop transports with an army of reconquest.
That supposed fleet never arrived. I'm not sure what happened to them, and apparently neither are the Spanish! There are rumors of saboteurs in Tangiers, misguided expeditions in Guinea, piracy around the British Cape Colony - honestly, there's so many conspiracy theories involving the disappearance of the fleet that it's hard to know what actual authorities believe happened! The Spanish garrison in the Philippines grudgingly surrendered about a month after the scheduled arrival of their reinforcements, essentially ending all formal resistance to the Australian invasion. Thus followed an awkward year where the crown of Spain simultaneously refused to cede the Philippines and refused to deploy any military resources to the region. Given their limited participation in the Austro-Dutch war, I'm guessing this was just a gesture of defiance on their part, if a needlessly petty and stupid one that alienated their citizens. They were about to hold out for about a year before the streets of Madrid broke out in riots and forced them to relinquish the Philippines.
Realpolitk'ed.
The natives of that archipelago would have perhaps been incorporated into the Indonesian administration had King Rudolf not released an idealistic manifesto about an "Australian Commonwealth" - a treaty organization of democracies in the South Pacific intended to demonstrate its value in creating strong, vibrant nations. I guess the vague resurgence of Austria-Hungary after its rebirth as a democracy really got to him. After Australia's failure to acquire military allies in Europe, though, the idea of creating local friendships had more luster, and the Philippines were suddenly rather more independent than they had expected. It was assured to be a difficult transition for them, but with a new ally in the form of us, it was one they could handle. After all, colonial thought was growing ever more popular and prevalent; it was only a matter of time before Europe would attempt to dominate the world.
Perhaps the best sign that we were committed to their independence and autonomy was our choice to allow them to incorporate the Sultanate of Sulu into their new country. Previously, it seems the people of the Sulu archipelago were resigned to British domination, so the fact that the Philippines soon had their own little colony to administer had to mean something...
If imperialism was a color, its hue was changing.
Good to see that after that lovey-dovey environmentalism and political freedom Australia hasn't lost its conquering edge!
And did I spot a hint there of far more ambitious goals? A certain canal, perhaps?
And did I spot a hint there of far more ambitious goals? A certain canal, perhaps?
At first: It has taken me a while, but I have finally caught up with this great AAR!
At second: Congratulations, you have won the Weekly AAR Showcase!
At second: Congratulations, you have won the Weekly AAR Showcase!
I think it's color would be some sort of unholy union of brown and blue.
What do you think?
Good to see that after that lovey-dovey environmentalism and political freedom Australia hasn't lost its conquering edge!
And did I spot a hint there of far more ambitious goals? A certain canal, perhaps?
Australians in-universe are pretty big about protecting their gains, even if it means environmentalism.
Based on what happens in this episode, I may have to take over the Suez Canal project, but we'll see...
Glad to see you're still with us! Also, Weekly AAR Showcase is quite an honor. I will do my best to find a suitable successor.
It's hard to gauge, especially if it's in transition.
Chapter 16: Complacency Is The Seed of Communism
Let's talk economics. I mentioned central place theory the last time you read a chapter (assuming, of course, you read the book in order... which I recommend). As I write these chapters about the late 1800s, economic relationships are on my mind. You have nexii like London, New York, Berlin, Stockholm, Perth, etc. that require huge tracts of land and resources to support. In the deep past, this would basically be rural farmland perhaps spotted with a few villages and towns, but in the 20th century, some of the satellites are major cities in their own right with hinterlands to support them as well! In Australia, these secondary cities began to rise in their own right in the 1880s.
The first tier of Australian cities has been Sydney, Melbourne, Kalgoorlie, and Perth since the beginning of mass migration. Adelaide, Brisbane, and Darwin seem to round out the second tier quite nicely - while smaller than their counterparts, each provides important functionality to the country - Adelaide hosts the seat of government, Brisbane is a major hub of manufacturing (and it brought you me, before you forget), and Darwin has always been our gateway to Asia. With the growth of these secondaries into significant players on the world stage, Australia wielded ever growing influence through finance alone.
Cement? I wouldn't have guessed that was so important to our economy, but cement is basically gold for construction workers.
While the mainland continued to develop into a series of industrial giants and financial juggernauts, the acquisition of Java and the rest of our gains in the Austro-Dutch war grew our internal economy dramatically, if only due to the huge amounts of cash crops we gained access to. Economists claim that by 1880, Australia and our portion of Indonesia produced over 5% of the world's wealth! The average Australian continued to benefit from the spread of wealth, but Indonesians didn't gain as much per dollar invested.
We quickly learned that Indonesian wealth had always sort of been based off valuable crops and the occasional thalossocratic empire to drive production.
It kind of skews appraisals of our entire country's wealth, particularly per capita, but even the ultranationalist Indonesian historians agree that the region became wealthier under our stewardship/dominion/repression (take one, only one label).
When a gigantic supervolcano named Krakatoa messed itself in the Sunda Strait separating Java and Sumatra, people heard its explosion even in Australia and panicked as far as Europe and the Americas! The eruption caused immense damage to the island's infrastructure - plantations, railroads, even the small factories in Batavia, although most of the serious damage was to the western half of Java; the east recovered quite rapidly. The west needed a huge relief program spearheaded primarily by, of all people, the persecuted communist hardliners of the rural west. With much of the Dutch-era investments destroyed or damaged beyond all repair, they managed to convince the government to replace it all with cutting edge developments; after a few years, parts of Java were briefly more productive and efficient than farms around Sydney! Politically, the communist relief program didn't have nearly as much impact as its supporters must've hoped; the masses of Java reverted to their previous political positions once they'd forgotten their prior hardships, and the vanguards drifted into south Sumatra, where they would eventually fraternize with the remaining Dutch in the area. This would have disturbing ramifications later.
So loud that my ears are ringing even now.
Alexander John Flemingbrooke, having run into his term limit in 1881, used this opportunity to launch a series of criticisms at his successor, Peter Vasilyev, primarily revolving around him not cracking down enough on radical communism. Vasilyev responded with little more than an awkward counterspeech. Frankly, this new prime minister was sort of a milestone for Australia; not only was he as stuffy as the British pseudo-aristocracy that brought us MacDowell, he was as proud of his Ukrainian heritage and his nominal allegiance to the Federal Party as your average immigrant. In between meals of borscht and shchi, his style of government was labeled 'relaxed' and 'laissez faire' by his supporters and 'incredibly indolent and lazy' by his opponents. Now, I'm sure he was committed to small government, but when it comes to Slavic politicans, he's no Ivan Seversky. Arguably, in a period of relative peace and prosperity, he didn't have to be, and it is almost certainly worth mentioning that he was a wealthy industrialist with major investments in Australian ranches and slaughterhouses.
One advance we can definitely attribute to Vasilyev was his comprehensive physical infrastructure program, which was inspired by the growing industrial utility and availability of petroleum. Australia gained access to these as a new wave of prospectors discovered oilfields on Siak and Sulawesi.
Those in Sulawesi were initially more productive due to having a larger workforce.
This meant that an entire generation of hopefuls trying to scrounge up enough oil from the rest of the world to make fuel now had something useful to do with their life. Only a few years later, Australia would see its first diesel powered trains, allowing internal cities like Kalgoorlie to grow at rates unseen since the 1840s... although to be fair, it allowed all of Australia to grow further. The western half of the country experienced the most dramatic levels of population growth during this period, however; it's really just a case of a well known effect becoming apparent yet again.
The west has always relied on trading food for gold. Literally!
Our westernmost naval base these days. Parts of it are occasionally leased out to other countries for profit's sake.
In contrast to lazy, domestic Vasilyev, our top admiral at the time (Roger Cromwell) was interested in continuing imperialist policies by further expanding the Australian colonial empire, and he clashed with Vasilyev over this on numerous occasions. Despite being metaphorically covered with the blood of a thousand cattle, Vasilyev's opposition to this may have very well been on pacifist grounds - amongst other things he was a devout Catholic (an Eastern Catholic, but whatever), a personal sponsor of hospitals (opening a major one in Melbourne out of his own pocket even when refusing to extend government sponsorship of healthcare), and other things that make his legacy harder to gauge.
I suppose one thing you could theoretically claim is that Peter Vasilyev liked to put his problems out of sight, as once it became clear he could not prevent the seizure of Fiji, he signed a bill that would turn a significant portion of it into a penal colony. Fiji quickly turned into the Devil's Island of the Pacific; while the natives on Viti Levu (the largest island in this particular archipelago) tried to retain some of their traditional lifestyle, the Australian lease on the island filled up with political dissidents (almost entirely communist) and the occasional psychopath.
They occasionally propagandized from within prison, but had the average Australian ever really paid attention?
Ironically, it was because the Fijians feared for their safety that this prison became incredibly brutal; an estimated 40% of the prisoners did not survive their terms even without a life sentence. The smaller island of Vanua Levu hosted our naval facilities in the region; its inhabitants didn't have to deal with the constant fear of a prison break and occasionally ended up joining the Australian navy. Funny how that works out.
While Vasilyev did engage in this one form of political repression like several of his predecessors, the general populace of Australia actually lucked out and benefited from several liberalizing reforms.
Little known was that Vasilyev also established a 'Civilian Corps' for conscientious objectors. It was geared primarily towards creating doctors and teachers for military academies.
For instance, Vasilyev reduced the amount of Australians who would be conscripted into the military due to an increasingly prevalent belief that there would be enough volunteers to defend the country effectively in a real crisis. When his admiral buddy Cromwell knuckled him in the ribs, he also grudgingly admitted that without any land neighbors, Australia would also rely far more on its navy in order to protect itself. Indonesia was obviously a different story, while much of the Australian army would be deployed there as a general rule as part-time colonial police, there were still Dutch holdings in the area that needed to be contained for supremacy's sake. Vasilyev also came to the aid of the various immigrant communities of the West, strengthening anti-discrimination laws intended to keep them safe from mass persecution at the hands of other immigrants. With growing awareness of world politics, a war in Europe could spill over into violence between, let's say the Austrian and Turkish populations in Perth, and Vasilyev figured that preventing that would allow the populace to take a more "objective" approach to international relations.
When he introduced it, Vasilyev spoke of the Nika riots in Byzantium. A political cartoonist started calling him "Hippo", and the name stuck.
To be fair, the example I gave actually happened. For a well-functioning democracy, the people of the republic of Austria-Hungary were incredibly savage and violent; being responsible for several of the major wars of the late 19th century. At one point, they managed to retake the Serbian concession that Russia had wrung from them, and in 1885, they invaded Italy for a second time, hoping to regain long lost territories. Ironically, it was the Near East Popular Union that first tried to contain them - after staging several dubious border incidents at the Croatian-Bosnian frontier, they poured over into the country hoping to steal coastline and naval facilities from the distracted Austrians.
It's hard to take communists seriously when they mismanage their country like the NEPU's commissioners did.
Of all people, the French came to Austria-Hungary's aid; much of their former antagonism towards the country had disappeared along with the Habsburg presence in Europe. King Rudolf met this news with mild consternation at best; for being beset with the red specter, the former Ottoman Empire was not exactly a potent state in any regards.
Given that the United Kingdom was busy pillaging Africa and that the NEPU's military was laughable, the anti-communist fervor of the 1870s had lost some of its edge. However, when the Netherlands was finally overcome by communist fervor (that's what happens when the vanguard makes its way from Sumatra to Holland!), continental Europe ramped up its internal suppression programs almost overnight. The Netherlands almost certainly would have been invaded had their new government not immediately signed an alliance with Britain. A lot of people suspected that the new regime in the Netherlands had been financed by the new regime in England - William Morris had finally pined away over the distinctively non-utopian turn his dictatorship had underwent in 1884 and been replaced by Mohinder Buckley, his infamously bloodthirsty underling. Because continental Europe had a serious problem with racism, they took one look at this guy's complexion and euphemistically referred to him as a "Punjabi warlord" forever more. Britain remained a palpable threat to Europe, though, especially with their foothold in the Netherlands, so the slander stopped there.
In Australia, however, the Dutch colonies had been seen as sources of instability that could easily boil over into Australian holdings (even though, as you've read, our colonies tended to seed liberty and freedom in the region without absorbing major amounts of communism). The Dutch seemed far more enthusiastic than the British to implement communist programs in their colonies, so there was an immediate outcry for war from our populace. Peter Vasilyev was perhaps the most prominent voice AGAINST this, but on July 2nd, 1885, only months after being reelected to a second term, he collapsed from chest pains while eating dinner and was soon found to have died of a heart attack apparently brought on by obesity related concerns. This made him the first Prime Minister to die in office - a dubious honor at best.
Vasilyev's deputy, however, was much more amenable to war. Enter Joseph Ragland-Baker, nephew of renowned mercenary turned governor turned general Ferdinand Ragland. He'd been raised on stories of glorious conquest and war against savages, both of the noble and Dutch variety. With a reason to fight the latter, he was quick to take Roger Cromwell's advice and declare war on the Dutch, even though doing so would almost certainly inspire the wrath of Britain... and it did.
We wondered how many ships the British would send. They couldn't send them all, of course - not without losing hegemony around the home island.
Australia had emancipated itself from Britain entirely through peaceful diplomacy. Now we would face the full might of the British Empire, but we did so as a mature, sovereign nation...
The circle has been closed. But what of the good old Britain remains with the monarchy disrupted? This red abomination deserves to be slain.
Advance Australia fair!
Indeed, the circle has closed, as now you are colonies no longer. Give the Brits a good beating and show them what it means to be an Australian!
Indeed, the circle has closed, as now you are colonies no longer. Give the Brits a good beating and show them what it means to be an Australian!
Here's a potential anthem if you go with the idea presented in it. "Britain doesn't colonize Australia, Australia colonizes Britain!"