We’d sure eat funny stuff. Bubble and squeak, anyone?
With marmite, however one spells it.
Being free of such things is worth Great Britain almost losing the Big One.
At this point it would have been too late for “Germany” (by which I assume you mean a hypothetical united German state which is not at all guaranteed in the late 18th Century considering it was divided into Prussia, Austria, and several other states) much less Japan (which would not modernize for several decades) to get into the colonial game in the Americas).
Hitler would not exist much less come to power after a century and a half of radically diverged history. Simply put, the chance that the ancestors of Hitler would copulate at the exact same time and have the exact same sperm and egg unite to produce the members of Hitler’s family (much less Hitler himself) is essentially zero.
To repeat, World War II would not happen in a world that would be so unrecognizable (it’d even be uncertain that a “Victorian age” would occur considering Queen Victoria was not born 'til a generation after the Revolutionary War).
One of the problems the South suffered from was that Britain (and the rest of the Empire) had virtually limitless supplies of cheap, slavery-free cotton from India. They didn’t need what the Confederates/US were making, basically.
And Victoria was an unlikely successor. Her grandfather, George III, had fifteen children, thirteen of whom lived to adulthood. But his children produced surprisingly few heirs. Victoria only became Queen because three of her uncles died childless and her own father did not have a son. (The fertility gene apparently skipped a generation. Victoria went on to have nine children.)
They produced surprisingly few legitimate heirs. Of the illegitimate heirs, one their descendants in David Cameron.
England rather than Great Britain?
re. Germany: while the specifics might have been different, it seems likely that by the end of the nineteenth century there would have been a united Germany of some sort. The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were the heyday of the maritime powers; but by the latter nineteenth century the emergence of industrialism gave a boost to land-bound powers. The coal and iron resources of central Europe, and especially the development of railroads, meant that a united Germany could be as prosperous and powerful as the Holy Roman Empire had been in it’s day. And the emergence of a new player in the geopolitical sphere would inevitably have caused the sort of frictions that led to World War One. But again, the specifics might have been a lot different.
Oh, and back to the colonies: forget about that antiquated notion of “judicial review”- it was something the colonies had inherited from the English Chief Justice Edward Coke, and subsequently overridden in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when Parliament was declared the supreme sovereign. So we have a system where anything passed by a duly seated legislature is The Law.
Not strictly true. Judicial review has a long history in English law, far predating the colonies, the US Constitution or Marbury. And it has never stopped.
Really? Wiki’s article on judicial review in English law has this to say:
Read it more carefully. There is no judicial review of primary legislation, meaning an Act of Parliament. In England, there is no greater law than Parliaments enactments, Parliament is sovereign. In the US, the highest law of the land is the constitution, the US Congress is a creature of said constitution with powers derived from the same. They is no judicial review of the highest law in the US either.
That is what judicial review is generally, asking whether a body has acted in excess of its powers granted by the enabling law. Be that law a statute or a constitutional provision.
Mea Culpa. Officially, yes, the united states (small first letter) revolted against the United Kingdom of Great Britain which eventually became the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801.
I don’t remember Scotland or Wales having much influence in the foreign policies of the UK of GB and their participation has been mostly overlooked - on this side of the pond. England was the big stick.
The UK only shifted primarily to Indian cotton during the US Civil War, and the British textile industry suffered a depression for a few years when it happened. It would have been even more difficult to make that switch in 1833 (when the UK set out to stop the slave trade IRL). Besides which, it would have been much more politically difficult to outlaw slavery if doing so would mean bankrupting several colonies that were still part of the Empire.
I’m not an expert on Victorian economics and trade but my understanding is the British were a bit wary of Indian goods following the Indian Mutiny/Sepoy Rebellion/Great Uprising of 1857.
Prior to that, the British textiles industry were rather fond of cheap Indian cotton (provided as it was by the East India Company, Exclusive Agents by Royal Appointment for Pretty Much Everything East of Suez), as I understand it.
The problem once, once the cotton had been shipped halfway round the world to England and turned into textiles, the Indians didn’t want it any more since tweed and other such heavy duty fabric was way too hot to be practical in much of India, especially in the summer.