Well the British Navy while big is not that much usefull in this situation due to Russia and the USA so a blockade is not possible and the British financial resources will not be in good place if they support the French and Austrian war effort and while you are right that appeasing the UK will be in German interest if such effort is not linked to a too high price, the big problem is that, what will be considered a 'too high price'.
I say that because after such type of war, Germany and Italy main objective will be please their pubblic opinion and not London due to pure internal reason and too much British pressure can make any of their request gone in 'too high price' territory regardless of their effective cost in geopolitical term.
The British trying to 2:1 ratio any two of Germany, Russia or USA postwar will... probably not end well. Especially since there won't be a WNT and Russia will likely want multiple dreadnoughts and superdreadnoughts in all three of her major fleet groups (Baltic, Black, Pacific) and could give two shits what the UK says about it.
Which works out to a timeline of a month or two in which the Confederates:
1. Have substantial artillery assets in-theater.
2. Are not using them to try to prosecute a cross-river offensive.
3. Are not using them to defend against a US offensive.
It’s just not that easy to use limited supplies of ammunition to destroy manufacturing machinery in that era. Even in WWII the US and Britain routinely bombed factories in Germany to rubble only to discover workers using the machine tools and equipment or removing them intact for use elsewhere, and that was with easily 20x the ordinance under discussion here.
Agreed
Russia should still be a premier naval power to worry the UK; even with the disaster that was Tsushima they were building back and had 14" armed BCs in construction by the time WW1 begun IOTL, without it and with a better industrial and economical situation they should be futher along.
Right idea, though I'd caution that 1919 Russia is probably more like OTL 1904-05ish Russia in terms of its economy and industrialization. So it is emerging and has plenty of ships in the pipeline, but it is very much playing catchup to the CEW quartet and Britain.
How long is Jix going to be prime minister for, 7-8 years>
Something like that, though I'll evade specifics.
he did die in 1933 OTL, after all, so there's a limit on how long he can realistically be in office.
Speaking of Russia, it will be interesting to see how populous Russia will be without the post-Great War demographic catastrophes.
The Russian Empire had about 9% of the world's population in 1914 (170 million to 1.8 billion worldwide).
With Asia and Africa's massive population boom not having occurred yet in 1914, Russia's proportion is fairly a bit smaller than that. Also, I've spoiled a bit that certain parts of the Russian Empire don't quite... remain Russian. How exactly that border falls I will try not to spoil.
But my headcanon for the area constituting the "core" Russian Empire (YMMV on what exactly that constitutes) is probably about 550 million by present day (with that number variant depending on what exactly is inside those lines), and with a GDP per capita similar to OTL Greece. So it'd be a top five economy, for sure.
On the topic of Britain, I might sound perhaps a bit to brash but think they might spend the first few few years drying their tears with their money. They are still one of the largest empires in the world with one of the biggest navies, in fact while German hegemony is not good well if France's hold on the colonies is shaky you might see the Union Jack look to fill in the void as the world continues to spin.
I don't think they will accept German hegemony forever, in fact would not be terribly surprised if Britain begins probing before the new lines are fully drawn but for a combination of factors think Britain will protest the status quo but be willing to enter the ring for a long while.
Ireland will be the major stumbling block, building up a major army for a continental war rapidly will require demanding sacrifices from the general population that's a bit hard to justify unless Germany providing a lot of convenient excuses or begin say recruiting ideologically committed British imperialists into militias to form a nucleus of a bigger army. The latter though just got a lot harder as many of them either have softly been purged and side-lined or fought in Ireland.
Think you might see a push for Britain to develop a larger army but think they will see France's move and avoid rash actions but in turn get's absorbed into other matters. A bigger British army would be good in theory for overthrowing German hegemony but also the present realties of a increasingly hard to govern India, a Ottoman empire that seems to trying to be independent ect.
Very much agree. Wars are expensive as hell, and the immediate post-war period will find Britain in a better position than everyone else. Germany might dominate continental Europe, but a war-torn Europe is not gonna yield a profit immediately. In the meantime they'll be saddled with war debt, destruction and occupation costs, while the British will not have any of these issues.
Britain not being a debtor to the United States but rather holding a lot of US war debt as well as financing the war on the continent is a huge boost to the British economy, too, if only in the finance sector... though that also makes the City even more disproportionately critical to global finance and "too big to fail," a term I use purposefully.
Isn't Britain more dependent on international trade, making it more vulnerable to the damage that large-scale wars, such as the Central European War, can cause to its economy than a power more oriented towards industrial production like Germany?
Well, there will obviously be disruptions, but Britain should still be able to trade with all belligerents, and whatever they lose in trade is more than offset by the lack of war-related expenses. And Germany was also an export oriented economy, arguably even more dependent on international markets since they lacked a huge domestic market like the US or captive markets in the form of colonies like the UK or France.
As
@1962strat points out, British trade was hugely important (go figure, it's an island) but it was not as export-driven an economy as Germany was (indeed, Britain's weakness was its reliance on imports) so in this alt-WW1 scenario where Britain is A) not participating and thus B) has no risks to its freedom of maritime movement, its immediate disruptions are minimized, a fair bit.
Didn’t Britain earlier have sort of land reform or something under the good chamberlain
That's correct, mid-1890s or thereabouts. It was fairly limited, of course, but more than anything pursued OTL. (I don't have any specifics on that beyond "Joe does land reform" lol)
