Web Original / These Fair Shores

The world of These Fair Shores as of January 1, 2023.

These Fair Shores: The Commonwealth of New England is an Alternate History timeline and worldbuilding project by CosmicAsh/AutumnQueen, published on Discord and AlternateHistory.com. It is a spiritual successor to Our Fair Country by the same author, which had a similar premise and focus on a New England that remained loyal to the British Empire, but the world is significantly altered to distance itself from the parallelism originally found in Our Fair Country.

These Fair Shores showcases a world that diverges from our own in the 17th century, when Plymouth Colony formally obtained its own separate colonial charter and thereby avoided its incorporation into Massachusetts Bay. This leads to an American War of Independence delayed by a few years, which results in the New England colonies remaining loyal to the British Crown and therefore not joining the nascent United States, instead achieving self-government as a federated Commonwealth in the Empire. Accompanying this divergence, Napoléon Bonaparte manages to preserve many of the gains made in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, with Britain only managing to achieve a pyrrhic victory as opposed to the total deposition of the Bonapartes, allowing the French Empire to retain a central role over European affairs and define the global Great Power struggle for the coming decade. Meanwhile, the absence of New England leads the United States to become dominated by the Southern planter elite, while Russia avoids its regression towards reactionary absolute monarchy and progressively liberalises over time.

All of this sets the stage for a 20th century that sees such events as the rise of Argentina as an emergent Great Power, a new Chinese dynasty devoted to modernising the country while resisting Japan's ascendancy, Russia's rise to superpower status as a liberal bulwark, the United States slipping into revolution and isolation under a one-party state, and a decade-long Great Continental War that tears the European order apart and finally brings the Bonapartes' reign to a close. In the ashes, a thoroughly scarred Britain turns to her Empire to rebuild and restore her place in the world, with the struggle to preserve the Empire and the tensions that emerge from doing so defining global affairs into the modern day.

As with its predecessor, These Fair Shores is primarily told through visual media presented as in-universe, including but not limited to Wikipedia articles, news pages, social media, maps, charts, and other assorted graphics. It also makes use of "live events" depicting in-universe crises in real time and the responses to them by governments, the press, and ordinary citizens caught in the middle, which play out on a dedicated Discord channel which also discusses the timeline. Contributions from other users have also helped to enrich and flesh out the world, bringing attention to regions that tend to be neglected in alternate history works. The timeline balances hard and soft alternate history, maintaining 'soft' aspects like use of OTL figures well after the points of divergence but employing in-depth research like 'hard' works to justify the alternate fates of nations and individuals.

The thread can be found here, and the link to the Discord server can be found here.

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These Fair Shores provides examples of:

• Allohistorical Allusion:
  • The results of the 2022 New England election take cues from both the general elections in Australia (a Labour Party defeating the conservative incumbents with a landslide majority after a series of crises; an unusually strong performance by the Green Party; a wave of newly-elected independents holding the middle ground between the government and opposition) and Ontario (a Liberal Party in third place polling strongly, only to fall flat in the seat count).
  • Connecticut's provincial assembly has a conservative party consistently winning the most seats through malapportionment that heavily favours rural areas despite having a very small percentage of the popular vote, resembling Queensland under the premiership of Joh Bjelke-Petersen. This system has OTL precedent as it's modeled on Connecticut's state legislature prior to the 1960s reapportionment revolution, where all towns sent either one or two representatives each regardless of population.
  • The United Kingdom's Liberal Party bears a striking resemblance to OTL Japan's Liberal Democratic Party, being a big-tent party that uses a system of patronage and graft through local party associations to keep seats and maintain a decades-long dominance of the House of Commons.
• Alternative Calendar: The American revolutionaries of the 1920s established the American Calendar to evenly divide months, with the leftover days grouped into the month of Libertas between July and August, a five-day month to celebrate American labour.
• The Alternet: Britain, Russia, Japan, and the United States all developed their own Internets with varying degrees of use around the world.
• Ambiguous Situation: Was the explosion in Soho on the day Britain went to war against the U.S. an American attack? The prevailing in-universe assumption that it was notwithstanding, wording of the details has been vague and questions have been raised about whether it was simply an ill-timed coincidence.
• Amoral Afrikaner: Before being taken over by Niassa, the Boer statelets in southern Africa like Kafuestroom and Grootmyn were considered among the most authoritarian and unpleasant regimes in the world, being little more than mining colonies with resource economies built off slave labour. The other Boer republic, Vaalia, is not much better.
• Balkanize Me:
  • What we recognise as Malaysia and Indonesia is divided among an assortment of local governments under the British Crown with varying degrees of self-government. Though they do share institutions as part of the British Empire and enjoy regional collaboration through their common Malay heritage.
  • The Indian subcontinent was never united under a single government and is made up of an assortment of regional republics and monarchies, though they collaborate through a multinational Union of India.
  • A vastly different British approach to settling Australia and dealing with its indigenous inhabitants have led the continent to be divided between the settler nations of Australia along the east coast and Westralia on the west coast, with the rest occupied by various indigenous polities that have varying degrees of centralised organisation and ties to the British Crown.
• Blitz Evacuees: The fourteen year long bombing campaign waged by France against London and much of England known as the Tempest led to the evacuation of thousands of English residents to Scotland and Ireland out of range of French air raids.
• Bomb-Throwing Anarchists: The ideology of councilism has shades of this. It doesn't strictly fit a common understanding of socialism or anarchism and can even be opposed to both, but nonetheless retains a radical inclination that extolls localism against higher authorities. In practice this leads to local communities and interest groups pursuing wildly differing policies, as seen in Spain, and some can get particularly violent.
• Book Ends: The French Empire of the Bonapartes rose and fell with a long pan-European war spanning over a decade that largely pitted France against the United Kingdom and Russia.
• The Caligula:
  • Napoleon IV, the last Emperor of France, whose jingoism sparked the Great Continental War and led to the end of the French Empire and his family being exiled to America.
  • Henry John Adams, the 6th Lord Quincy, probably qualifies for his tenure as Lord-President of the British Empire by prolonging the War in America and attempting a coup d'etat to overturn British democracy and declare war on France.
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": A completely reworked periodic table features alternative names for various elements, such as solium for helium.
• The Chain of Command: The Lord-Presidency of British Empire is a constitutionally nebulous position ostensibly equal to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in stature despite possessing no democratic mandate, which causes as much confusion as horror when Lord Quincy launches his coup. After the Queen dismisses Quincy and appoints Julia Gillard, the position is more formalised while having much of its power removed.
• Civil War: For a while, the civil unrest in the United States edged close to one as states declared their secession and various arms of the government turned on each other, before the Anglo-American War and other events caused the unrest to wane.
  • In the past, the United States fell to one from 1916 to 1919 when the socialist movement overthrew a nominal democracy that was in fact dominated by robber baron industrialists.
  • Egypt is also in the midst of one, as the Kingdom which the Caliphate had overthrown still retains some control over the south and has advanced slowly to reclaim control.
• Cool Ship: Ocean liners are still the main form of transoceanic travel, with many surpassing the speeds that the fastest OTL liners achieved.
• Cool Train: Many countries have far more expansive and sophisticated rail networks, with the British and Russian Empires possessing continent-spanning high-speed railways.
• The Coup:
  • Philippine President Gregorio Honasan launched a self-coup and declared a military dictatorship after he lost re-election in 2020.
  • Lord Quincy attempted to launch a coup against the elected British government and impose a dictatorship on the United Kingdom in January 2022 in order to escalate the war against the United States and also attack France, but a quick response by the Queen and Prime Minister Dominic Grieve caused it to collapse as soon as it began.
• Cult of Personality: The mythologising of the Bonaparte dynasty in France has remained strong as a result of the republic's perceived failings, and Jerome Bonaparte's return and election was welcomed by the majority of French citizens.
• Darkest Africa: Largely averted by the lack of a full-on Scramble for Africa and British colonial ambitions in particular being stifled. The former Boer slave states like Kafuestroom and Grootmyn more closely fit this trope though.
• Democracy Is Bad: France post-Bonaparte went through decades of political apathy towards its parliamentary republican system. Only after Jerome Bonaparte was allowed to return and run for office did political engagement re-emerge.
• Democracy Is Flawed: While some of New England's provinces have fairly representative parliamentary systems of government, others suffer from issues such as egregious gerrymandering (Connecticut), dysfunctional personality politics (Rhode Island), or a strict two-party system (Île-Royale).
• Different States of America: The United States government is a very different entity from OTL as a result of Alexander Hamilton's influence, with a Privy Council being its main executive decision-making body and its Chairman being the top-ranking position in the country. The 1917 Revolution and Civil War which led to the DSU party-state system make it more closely resemble the Soviet Union.
• Dirty Communists: The United States, of all places - except not really. The modern incarnation of Hamiltonianism incorporates many of the authoritarian and centralising tenets of Leninism, but in a world where government intervention in the economy is far more normalised, it’s much more debatable as to whether the ideology can be considered socialist, much less communist. That said, overseas Hamiltonianists tend to identify politically as left-wing.
• Drugs Are Good: The United Kingdom has a very libertine drug culture, with recreational narcotics and LSD being commonplace. Truth in Television as this was the general attitude towards drugs in OTL before the American cultural influence of the War on Drugs stigmatised recreational drug use in polite society.
• The Empire: The British and Russian empires are the two dominant world powers, with China and Japan also being major players.
• Evil Colonialist: The consequences of colonialism on native peoples are not sugarcoated here. Just within the British Empire alone, Canada turned Vancouver Island into a reservation for First Nations across British North America, Darwin displaced an entire Aboriginal nation to build a reservoir, Westralia constantly encroaches on treaty-protected indigenous land to sustain its mining-based resource economy, and Avalon...is Avalon.
• The Exile:
  • The House of Bonaparte was exiled to Louisiana after the French Empire fell in the Great Continental War. However, Jerome Bonaparte, the grandson of Napoleon IV, returned to France in July 2021 and was made Prime Minister after leading his party to win the most seats.
  • Many Americans hoping to escape the repressiveness of the United States have found home in London's Soho as the Little Cincinnati enclave. Among them is Dayvehd Prais (David Price), a reformist former American head of state who fled the U.S. after a failed coup against Chairman Korerniljuas Sayl (Cornelius Sale/Robert Byrd).
• The Federation:
  • The titular Commonwealth of New England.
  • Canada became one against its own will.
• Fictional Political Party:
  • New England has a federal party system with shades of Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Its three largest parties are a Labour, Liberal, and Conservative party, with smaller parties including Greens and Acadian interest parties.
  • The Democratic Social Union is the sole political party that has governed the United States since the 1910s.
  • The Liberal Party that governs the United Kingdom closely resembles the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party in its nigh-unchallengable political hegemony and use of corrupt tactics through local constituency associations to maintain power.
  • Russia has a two-party system, with Socialism & Democracy on the left and the All Russian-Moderates on the right.
• Foreign Culture Fetish: The British took a liking to the cultures of their Nusantaran subjects, adopting sports like silat and sepak takraw, clothing like the Baju Kurung and sarong, and even the sacred kris as Empire-wide symbols.
• The Fundamentalist:
  • Ayman al-Zawahiri led an Islamist Caliphate in Egypt.
  • Former Adirondack Premier Alicia Purdy belongs to a hardline Evangelical sect, and her second term in office was marked with creeping anti-Catholic repression and erosion of the separation between religion and state, particularly after the Third Anglo-American War.
• Furry Fandom: Arises in Russia and is known as “pushism” as an Anglicised play on the Russian word for ‘fluffy’.
• Gay Conservative: The leader of the Conservative Party of New England, Haruko Shimamura, is a married lesbian.
• Ghost Town: Detroit and New Orleans become this over the course of the Third Anglo-American War due to urban combat and, in the latter case, a massive hurricane that necessitated the city’s total and permanent evacuation.
• Global Warming: Much, much further ahead of OTL due to heavier industrialisation and urbanisation worldwide as well as less environmentally friendly practices like coal-burning remaining unregulated. Sea level rise and natural disasters have already claimed the Mekong Delta, The Fens in eastern England, and southern Louisiana.
• A God Am I: Alicia Purdy, the Premier of Adirondack, refused to relinquish power after losing the 2023 provincial election after claiming she had a "Divine Mandate from God", forcing the New England military to arrest her.
• The Good Kingdom: After the German Revolution and the fall of Habsburg rule in Austria, Hungary led the Crown Lands of Saint Stephen to reform into a multicultural and pluralistic kingdom.
• Going Native: Paraguay's military government styles itself as an indigenous Guaraní state despite being majority mestizo, and considers itself the leading indigenous nation in South America despite Kinsantinsuyu's greater strength.
• Government in Exile:
  • The monarchy of Spain resides in the Canary Islands after the mainland came under councilist rule.
  • An American government in exile based out of Toronto claims continuity over the oligarchic democracy that was overthrown by socialists in 1917.
• The Gulag: Forced labour under the katorga system remains a common form of incarceration in the Russian Empire, though reforms have ostensibly given them a more rehabilitative image.
• Historical Domain Character: Roughly 90% of all named figures in the timeline are historical figures ranging from world-famous to highly obscure, and many of those that aren't still come from famous lineages like the Bonaparte dynasty and Adams family.
• Historical Hero Upgrade:
  • Among British political figures, several stand out in a big way.
    • Prince Albert Edward, later King Edward VII, is relatively obscure in OTL and known mostly for his role in shaping Britain's alliance with France and hostility towards Germany. However, his populist inclinations are front and centre here by depicting him as a key figure in the Splendid Revolution which led to universal suffrage in Britain.
    • Noel Skelton was an obscure Scottish MP overshadowed by his more well-known Conservative colleagues like Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan in OTL. Here he serves as the wartime Prime Minister of the United Kingdom during the Great Continental War, while also securing a peacetime legacy through his advocacy of "property-owning democracy."
    • Though a prominent political figure in his own right, Roy Jenkins would become even more notable as Prime Minister, overseeing the formation of the modern hegemony of the Liberal Party in Parliament and Britain's return to the world stage, though his record would be blackened by his conduct over the Bengal War.
    • Dominic Grieve, a longtime Conservative Cabinet minister and staunch Brexit opponent, serves as Britain's current Prime Minister and played a crucial role in halting Lord Quincy's coup in January 2022.
• Historical In-Joke: Very many, from William T. Sherman being a British general famous for burning down the U.S. capital, to the government of the United States more closely resembling the Soviet Union than the OTL federal government.
• Historical Villain Upgrade:
  • Larry Hogan, OTL Governor of Maryland, is the dictatorial President-Chairman of the United States. His name is romanised from Philadelphic as Lorerans Hougan.
  • Howard Worth Smith (Hauerd Smeth), in OTL a Southern Democratic Congressman known for his opposition to Civil Rights, became the founder of the DSU single-party state that would govern the United States from the 1930s onwards.
• The Home Front: Britain was subjected to an even longer campaign of air raids and starvation by Napoleonic France lasting fourteen years known as The Tempest. The destruction wrought by the French was so intense that for nearly two decades after the war ended, hunger and homelessness were so widespread this period became known as the "Locust Years".
• Invaded States of America: The British Empire invaded the United States in 2021 following a series of chemical weapons bombardments by rogue CPO missile units.
• The Irish Question: Ireland was granted greater rights and representation like Catholic emancipation and Home Rule throughout the 19th century and remains a loyal part of the United Kingdom. The most vocal secessionists in the present tend to be hardline Protestants who want to revert the island to the Ascendancy.
• Istanbul (Not Constantinople):
  • The British dominions roughly corresponding to OTL Kenya, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe are respectively known as Melimajaro, Uluguru, and Monomotapa.
  • With the Russian Empire still existing, many Russian cities retain their pre-Soviet names.
  • The site of Seattle is occupied by Vancouver, New Caledonia. What we know as Vancouver, British Columbia is instead on the periphery of the historical regional population centre, New Westminster, which is also in New Caledonia.
  • Speaking of New Caledonia, the OTL French Pacific territory of the same name is the British-ruled Dominion of Avalon.
• Knight Templar: CPO Commander Maikal Flehn (Michael Flynn), who instigated the war between Britain and America by launching chemical weapons at New England and invading Canada.
• La Résistance:
  • Protests in the United States shook the control of the party state and led to the secession of Louisiana, Texas, Cuba, Santo Domingo, and Puerto Rico - though the former two were brought back into the fold, the Anglo-American war and military support from Argentina and Mexico allowed the latter three to achieve full independence.
  • The Philippines' liberals and progressives have sustained a large-scale civil resistance against the authoritarian regime of Gregorio Honasan, and have kept up both violent and non-violent action even after Honasan declared a military dictatorship following his defeat in the 2020 election.
• Lensman Arms Race: Argentina has taken to mounting increasingly absurd stunts to claim supremacy in the Space Race, most recently by sending a pregnant woman to the Moon just to claim the national prestige of the first childbirth in space.^note A case of Truth in Television as OTL Argentina pulled off a similar stunt to achieve the first person born in Antarctica.
• Look on My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair:
  • New Orleans, once the largest city in the United States, was destroyed by one of the strongest hurricanes on record.
  • A similar massive typhoon happened to the Mekong Delta, turning it into the Gulf of Vietnam.
• MegaCorp:
  • The Hudson's Bay Company still governs huge swathes of Canada.
  • The Mitsubishi zaibatsu was Japan’s dominant economic institution for over a century, controlling a far larger share of the Japanese economy than in OTL. At least until it went bankrupt and dragged down Japan’s economy, leading to the Democracy Revolution.
• Modern Mayincatec Empire: Kinsantinsuyu is a revival of the Inca Empire following Túpac Amaru II's rebellion against the Spanish succeeding.
• Monumental Damage:
  • The British Army under William Sherman razed the previous American capital of Hamilton, D.C. to the ground during the Anglo-American War in the 1850s, forcing the United States to permanently relocate its capital to Cincinnati.
  • The Houses of Parliament were utterly demolished by French bombs during The Tempest. A new building would be built in the Arts and Crafts style.
• Multiple Government Polity: The British Empire has visibly moved towards this as Australia became a republic in 2024.
• A Nazi by Any Other Name: While many of the British Empire's settler states still have plenty of racism to deal with, the Dominion of Avalon (OTL French New Caledonia/Nouvelle-Calédonie) is by far the most unpleasant place to be if you're not a white landowner. It has so thoroughly displaced the indigenous Kanak that they are now a small minority, has an unfair electoral system that enforces an effective one-party state, and was a de facto police state for decades. Its parallels to OTL Rhodesia only get stronger when noting that many of its Prime Ministers were involved with the white supremacist Rhodesian regime.
• Newspeak: The American national language of Philadelphic arose as a result of adoption of Benjamin Franklin's proposed linguistic reforms and phonetic alphabet to better integrate territories conquered by America from Spain in the mid-19th century, and over time underwent linguistic drift to become its own unique language.
• Nuclear Weapons Taboo: Nuclear weapons proliferation is considerably more limited, with chemical weapons being the primary form of WM Ds.
• Occupiers Out of Our Country:
  • During the 1920s, Chinese general Wu Peifu brought about the collapse of the Manchu-led Ch'ing and proclaimed a new Chia Dynasty with himself as Emperor.
  • The Bengal War was a decade-long ordeal that saw the assorted states of the Indian Subcontinent unite to support Bengali revolutionaries to overthrow British rule in Bengal.
• Old British Money: The entire British Empire still adheres to sterling currency.
• Oppressive States of America: The United States has been an authoritarian single-party state since the 1930s, with its predecessors making up an oligarchy that adhered to the more extreme centralising philosophy of Alexander Hamilton.
• Proxy War: The unrest in the Philippines is to some extent an extension of the geopolitical struggle between the British and Japanese Empires in the Pacific, further complicated by Australia siding with Japan in support of the protests, though Subverted as both the protesters and government have more agency than in a true proxy war and both sides' support tends to amount to lip service.
• Puppet State: Brazil is effectively a resource colony of Argentina, with its resources and manpower fuelling Argentina's status as one of the world's largest economies while Brazilians languish in relatively less wealth.
• The Purge: The anti-DSU protests, declarations of independence, and war with the British Empire afforded Lorerans Hougan the ability to practically eliminate the CPO and merge the Presidency with the Chairmanship to make him both head of state and government.
• Rail Enthusiast: The current Tsar of Russia is stated to be one, to the extent that he will expropriate and move rolling stock and even entire railway stations to Tsarskoye Selo for his pleasure.
• Real Life Writes the Plot: Following the real-life resignation of John Tory as Mayor of Toronto after a sex scandal, his TFS equivalent stepped down as Canadian Prime Minister under similar circumstances.
• The Remnant: The Canary Islands is the last remaining holdout of the Bourbon-ruled Kingdom of Spain.
• The Republic: Argentina is one of the world's largest economies and a leader in space exploration, having won its independence decades ahead of OTL and become the main destination of European immigrants to the Americas.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized:
  • The Bengal War.
  • Partially averted with Japan’s recent Democracy Revolution, which despite being massive in scope mostly avoided casualties and exercised enormous restraint, even when invading the Imperial Palace.
• Richard Nixon, the Used Car Salesman: Lots and lots of examples.
  • As was the case in Our Fair Country, Elinor Carbone, the OTL Mayor of Torrington, Connecticut, was Prime Minister of New England. She left office when her party lost the 2022 federal election.
  • Carbone's successor as Prime Minister is Will Brownsberger, who in OTL is the President pro tempore of the Massachusetts Senate.
  • Larry Hogan, or rather Lorerans Hougan as romanised from Philadelphic, is the leader of the United States.
  • Julia Gillard never migrates from her native Wales for Australia and therefore remains a British resident. She is appointed Lady-President of the British Empire following the downfall of Lord Quincy.
  • The former Prime Minister of Canada, John Tory, is the disgraced former Mayor of Toronto in OTL. His replacement is André Lamontagne, who in OTL is a Cabinet minister in the Quebec provincial government.
  • Harold Wilson becomes Prime Minister - of Australia, not the United Kingdom.
• Royals Who Actually Do Something:
  • Queen Elizabeth II puts a halt to Lord Quincy’s coup attempt by asserting both her royal prerogatives and parliamentary supremacy to strip the insane Lord-President of his power.
  • Her great-grandfather, King Edward VII, took a leading role in the Splendid Revolution while still Crown Prince in support of the masses clamouring for democracy, much to his mother Queen Victoria’s dismay.
  • Emperor Akihito of Japan helps bring legitimacy to the Democracy Revolution by calling for a constitutional reform and convention.
• Russia Takes Over the World: Without the tragedies of the October Revolution and two world wars to leave the country starving and in ruins, Russia is on a significantly better social and economic footing than OTL and is one of the world's two leading Great Powers alongside Britain.
• Russian Guy Suffers Most: Subverted. Though it initially fared poorly in the Great Continental War, Russia rebounded and took the leading role in liberating Europe from France's Napoleonic grip, while its allies Prussia and Great Britain endured a brutal occupation and a decade-long strategic bombing campaign respectively.
• Sanity Slippage: Lord Quincy suffered from this towards the end of his reign as Lord-President.
• Secret Police: While it has had its authority curtailed, the Okhrana remains the instrument of the Russian state that enforces loyalty to the Tsars.
• Shocking Defeat Legacy: For the British Empire, ceding sea control to the French Navy during the Great Continental War caused the Royal Navy to develop a mindset of total maritime dominance as a strategic necessity. By the present day the Royal Navy is in possession of 40 carrier battle groups.
• Shout-Out:
  • Haruko Shimamura, the Leader of the Opposition in New England, is a reference to Adachi and Shimamura, one of the author's favourite yuri light novels.
  • Freshman Japanese legislator Suō Tsuki is an Expy of Tzuyu from TWICE, with allusions to the Taiwan flag incident and the rise of young geeky Taiwanese legislators in the late 2010s.
• Spell My Name With An S: The Other Wiki is spelled Wikipaedia, in line with the British spelling of encyclopaedia with an 'a'.
• Spiritual Successor: To Our Fair Country, maintaining that timeline’s premise of a New England that remained part of the British Empire, while expanding on the implications of a United States dominated by the ideals of Alexander Hamilton and the continued pervasion of British colonialism and imperialism.
• State Sec: The United States' Constitutional Protection Office (CPO) was the security and paramilitary arm of the DSU party state, with comparisons made to the SS and Iranian Revolutionary Guards.
• Suburbia: The norm of urban planning in Russia of all places.
• Suddenly Significant City: Shenzhen, which is part of British Hong Kong, eventually grows to eclipse the original colonial settlements on Hong Kong Island and Kowloon in population and economic power.
• The Theocracy: Egypt from 2014 to 2023.
• Values Dissonance: The stronger role played by kingdoms and empires in world affairs and instability faced by republics like the United States has led the 19th century conservative ideal of monarchy as a force for stability against the chaos of republicanism to remain rather more accepted in the present.
• Velvet Revolution:
  • The Splendid Revolution of 1889, spearheaded by the populist Prince of Wales and radical MP Joseph Chamberlain, instituted true universal suffrage for all British adults and opened the doors for mass civic engagement in Parliament.
  • Following a massive economic collapse, the Democracy Revolution in Japan brought down an anocratic corporatist regime and introduced constitutional democracy for the first time in over a century.
• Vestigial Empire:
  • Once the largest empire and foremost Great Power in the world, France lost all its overseas possessions (except Saint Pierre and Miquelon) and even Alsace and Corsica after the Great Continental War.
  • Kinsantinsuyu's name - Realm of the Three Parts - reflects the loss of the original Inca Empire's fourth and northernmost region, Chinchaysuyu, to the current state of Lima.
• Villainous Breakdown: Lord Quincy's final act as Lord-President was an hour-long rambling speech in which he attempted to declare war on France, put London under martial law, and usurp control of the British government. The Queen and Prime Minister Dominic Grieve were quick to dismiss him, declare him a fugitive, and reassert parliamentary sovereignty.
• Washington D.C. Invasion: Or Hamilton, D.C., rather. The former capital of the United States was razed by British troops led by New England General William Sherman, who apocryphally smoked the original copy of the Constitution of the United States as a cigar wrapper.
• Wham Episode:
  • The CPO's attacks on Canada and New England that triggered the Third Anglo-American War on May 28, 2021.
  • Jerome Bonaparte's return to France and the attempted assassination against him on July 8, 2021.
  • Lord Quincy's attempted coup d'etat and the British Empire's political crisis on January 30, 2022.
• A World Half Full: With the British Empire still a dominant world power, imperialism remains very normalised, even if it has put on a more humane face. The United States is authoritarian and insular, and has also endured a devastating war and internal unrest. Climate change has displaced millions and natural disasters are frequent and intense. However, many other parts of the world are much better off, enjoying both higher standards of living and freer, stabler government, with Russia in particular enjoying a happier 20th century without the legacy of the World Wars, the Civil War, and Stalinism to devastate it demographically. And while bickering on the global stage is still commonplace, there has been significant work put into climate change mitigation efforts and global temperatures have stabilised.
• Write What You Know: Contributors to These Fair Shores have extensively fleshed out and expanded on much of the world and its history, with focus on regions like China, the Philippines, and the Levant.
• Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters: Italy, which was awarded French-majority regions after the Great Continental War, is under constant terrorist violence from militants seeking to restore that territory to French control.