and rather unreasonable if it was done by accident.
Many things are illegal despite being perfectly possible to do by accident.
I'd probably still be in China. I don't know much about how China was in the 1850s, though I think it was probably under British colonial influence through opium and naval power.
The Brits actually didn't have particularly large concession zones in China. Unless you were somewhere at the coast (or the Yangtze) it would be really unlikely you were in one---and even then you probably would need to be in a city or close to one. On the other hand you could also have been under American, Austro--Hungarian, Russian, French or German dominance.
Especially in the 1850s where the concession zones were only getting up and running.
Not that it would matter that much, since I'd be a peasant, farming the land under the hot sun and probably indebted to someone. I would probably not be able to read and I might have internalized misogyny. Wow, that's a depressing thought.
I on the other hand could be residing in the family manor (lost to another line over a century ago; bloody rules preventing females from inheriting
) lording it over peasants. Or be a successful businessman with several businesses (large enough that when the king came past our part of the country he several times came to meet us; sadly all the decorations given by the king on those occasions were destroyed in a fire over half a century ago
) and have money like dirt. That actually sounds really nice and alluring. On the other hand being not just conservative, but actually quite reactionary doesn't sound good at all.
(Some of the businessmen actually believed in equality between the sexes and wanted women's suffrage shortly after 1900 despite belonging to the lower upper class; though that is half a century too late so can't go with that line.)
Would you be sickened by the very idea of a welfare state?
Probably yes. Especially if I picked the reactionary parts. There at least until the 1940s e.g. females had to behave in a very particular way. Despite having a bazillion under dresses they for instance still had to sit in a few very particular positions lest they got a rebuke and were told they were visible "all the way up to next Sunday" (actual expression used). And that is female children playing we are talking about... Good thing all those Old Norse ideas have died out in later generations.
But I was more thinking about how I probably would be a national liberal (unless I went with the nobles; then I would be another type of conservative which was really undemocratic). The national liberals were really popular among the upper class people who weren't nobles; they were the ones with stupid ideas about how Denmark could beat Germany and how you should stubbornly continue to demand that Denmark should go to the Eider and negotiating with the Germans was completely out of the picture despite them having conquered a large part of Jutland already and having almost annihilated the army. Bloody idiots.
Don't know. Did your ancestors live in the South back then? Were they middle or upper class? If yes then probably.
By the way move it a few decades further back and I might actually have owned slaves.
Could Marty survive a potato shortage?
Who knows. Though I think the question is whether he would be able to resist making alcohol from the potatoes.
