The Peshawar Lancers

by S. M. Stirling

  In general, the enfranchised portion of the population (including families) ranged from 20 percent in Australia, 11 percent in India, to about 9 percent in the Cape. Rather more in each case could have qualified, but underreported their worth in order to avoid taxation. This was particularly so among the urban and merchant-industrialist middle classes; stocks and shares were easier to hide than land.

  Local and municipal franchises were generally on the same terms.

  Officially, the franchise was open to all Imperial subjects who met the qualifications. In India and Australia this was so in reality, with the significant proviso that the one-third of the Indian population who lived in “protected states” could not vote, since in theory their rulers were themselves sovereign and represented their peoples to the Imperial government.

  The Viceroyalty of the Cape managed, through a number of subterfuges—biased literacy testing, for example—to prevent otherwise qualified nonwhites from actually getting the franchise, although there would have been fairly few in any case. In this as in much else, it was the “bad boy of the Empire,” and the source of continual squabbles between Cape Town and Delhi.

  Appendix Four:

  Imperial English and Other Languages

  Apart from a few scholars and linguists, the sahib-log of the early twenty-first century were firmly convinced that they spoke English, slightly modified from the time of the Fall and Victoria I.

  In fact, the language they used—the spoken form as standardized in the Royal court and Imperial administration, and used by the sahib-log landed gentry, yeoman-tenantry, and urban upper classes of India—was a creolized English-based pidgin, one which would have been barely comprehensible to their Victorian ancestors. It was at least one-third Indian in vocabulary, with major loans from (in rough order of importance) Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Bihari, Pashtun, and Tamil; syntax also changed under the influence of Indian languages. In particular most of the vocabulary concerned with food, clothing, and sex had been Indianized, along with many everyday expressions. Tone, stress, and accent had all altered.

  For example, the intial “th” sound had dropped out of Imperial English, being replaced by “d” (“dat” and “dese” instead of “that” and “these”); “v” is transposed to “w,” (“wery” for “very”), etc.

  To a Victorian (or twentieth-century English speaker from our history) Imperial English would sound rapid, with a singsong quality and occasional gutturals. For purposes of comparison, it would be roughly as difficult for a hypothetical observer from our time line to understand as Jamaican Creole is to an American standard English speaker.

  The “Imperial” form of English also had a substantial influence in the Cape and Australian Viceroyalties, although their dialects remained more conservative; trade and travel links grew increasingly close during the twentieth century, with many upper-class residents of both the Viceroyalties spending much time in India, as Members of Parliament, students at prestigious boarding schools, Oxford and Cambridge, and the Imperial University in Delhi, etc. The standard speech of Delhi enjoyed a substantial, if frequently resented, prestige throughout the Angrezi Raj.

  A notable twentieth-century development was the manner in which the recivilized and immigrant communities in Britain insisted on adopting the Delhi standard wholesale, often taking enormous pains to do so.

  It should be noted that Imperial English in turn had a very strong influence on the indigenous tongues of India, as the second official language of education and administration, the language of business beyond the petty-trade level, and through household influence among the numerous servants and dependents of sahib-log households. It also served, together with Hindi, as the lingua franca between Indian linguistic communities. By 2025, about one-fifth of the population of India used Imperial English as its primary language, and another fifth could speak it to a greater or lesser degree.

  By the early twenty-first century the educated throughout the Empire spoke Imperial English well enough for easy intercommunication, although strong regional accents often remained to show origins. Lower-class dialects of English in Australia, and especially in the Cape (where the influence of Afrikaans and various Bantu languages was strong) diverged more or less strongly and in some cases they would not find mutual comprehension easy with a native Imperial English speaker.

  In the interior of North America, a wild variety of English-based creoles and pidgins were spoken among the neobarbarians; something fairly close to nineteenth-century standard English survived in the Mormon enclaves of the Rockies, which maintained a tradition of literacy; and Spanish-influenced forms were common in the Free Cities of California.

  Appendix Five:

  Technology and Economy

  Post-Fall India was not entirely without a base for industrial development. By the 1870s there were already thousands of miles of railway, and the railway workshops contained a fairly extensive set of heavy machine tools and skilled workers. Mineral surveys had been carried out. There were shipbuilding and repair yards in Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras, and a beginning had been made in mechanized cotton and jute mills as early as the 1850s.

  The refugee fleets of the Exodus brought in substantial additional machinery and artisans, as well as examples of nearly every important technical book and drawing in Britain. In many respects, the situation was better in India than Australia, which had been even more dependent on imports. India also had abundant supplies of highly skilled handicraftsmen, who could quickly learn most of the not-overly-complex operations of mid-Victorian machine work.

  Still, the early decades were desperate, not least because of the Second Mutiny. All available effort had to be concentrated on building up essentials that were not present in 1878. Exploiting the coal and iron deposits of southern Bihar, for instance, and establishing a small steel mill, required an epic struggle. Once mere survival was assured in the 1890s, emphasis was necessarily on the basics; rebuilding and expanding the railways, dams and irrigation canals, dockyards, housing.

  By the 1910s, a surplus over basic needs was available once more, even allowing for the demands of other parts of the Empire. There was also a small but high-quality training system for turning out men of practical learning; engineers civil and mechanical, applied chemistry, and mathematics. What had largely lapsed was any tradition of pure research, of science and scientific research proper. Rebuilding it was a slow process, although it was helped by the increased prestige of scientific-technological careers in comparison to pre-Fall Britain.

  In the ensuing decades, Imperial technology tended toward improvements in detail, rather than radical innovation. Steam engines were improved and widely applied, as were telegraphs, steam-driven manufacturing machinery, and basic industrial chemistry. Medical knowledge and biology did rather better, as the sahib-log adjusted to a new environment and ecology; for instance, the etiology of malaria and yellow fever were well understood by the 1890s, and cures for the former (based on Chinese artemisin) were more advanced than in our history. Forestry, plant and animal breeding, and practical agriculture made great strides.

  By the 1920s, a recovery to the level of the 1870s had been achieved—in the sense that it was now possible to manufacture without undue strain anything that the European nations of that date had been able to build. Population was growing, particularly that of the sahib-log, and production was consistently greater than consumption, allowing for increased savings and investment.

  Yet the economy of the Empire as a whole was quite different from that of Victorian Britain. Even Australia remained largely rural, with the coastal cities smaller than they had been at the time of the Fall; population had dispersed into the countryside and a semi-self-subsistent pattern had emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and persisted for far longer.

  India had a few large cities and a scattering of smaller ones, but it was nine-tenths rural; for the most part a landscape of zamindari-landlords, whether of the sahib-log or native in origin, an
d ryot-peasants paying rent in shares of their crops and labor-service. A few plantations remained, growing tea and coffee, indigo and jute. Most day-to-day needs, even for luxuries, were satisfied with hand-made goods from small shops. Trade was in exotic materials, and in an official sector supported by rent and taxes rather than consumer demand.

  This meant that patterns of demand were also different in the “modern” sector. For long years, the main customer of machine manufacture was the Imperial government, which itself owned much of the basic industry—providing rail and engines for Imperial Railways and the navy, armaments for the military, replacements for its own structure.

  However, an urban middle class did survive, even in the deeply rural Cape Viceroyalty; in India it included a substantial native element from the beginning, however shrunken the towns were in the first generations. The financial structure of the Raj was sound, with free trade, free movement of capital, and knowledge of sophisticated banking and the limited-liability company. Trade went on, and as population grew once more in a nearly empty world, standards of living increased and with them opportunities.

  By the later twentieth century an exuberant mercantile and industrial capitalism was reemerging, wheeling and dealing, disrupting ancient patterns as men and women began to trickle from the countryside into the growing cities. Knowledge increased, in a civilization where the sciences and their practical application had high respect and much official support.

  The roads taken were not always those which would have been, had the Fall not happened.

  Differences in detail were many; for instance, metal-hulled ships were uncommon, due to differences in patterns of demand, relative costs, and the availability of abundant and very high quality tropical timbers. Mineral fuels were relatively more expensive than they had been in northwestern Europe, and highly sophisticated sailing ships remained competitive into the early twenty-first century. Weapons technology progressed slowly; until the Asian empire of Dai-Nippon grew into a serious rival in the 1970s, the Angrezi Raj had no “advanced” competitors, and so the venerable Adams revolvers and Martini-Henry black-powder rifles of the 1870s were still being produced a century later at armories in Lahore and Delhi, Cape Town and Melbourne. Almost as important was the absence of a private, competitive arms industry; there the New Empire followed Indian precedent, with state-owned arsenals and strict control.

  Chemistry in particular, which had been largely a German specialty before the Fall, was underdeveloped; there was little of the economic drive to develop synthetic compounds which had motivated the research chemists of IG Farben. In fact, the whole German concept of the specialized research laboratory, or of the university as primarily a center of research rather than teaching, was slow to develop. The individualist-tinkerer model of the Anglo-Saxon generalists remained dominant, and was developed to new heights.

  In that might-have-been world without the Fall, the internal combustion engine had been a product of France and Germany as well.

  The Empire turned to the Stirling cycle instead when the steam engine became inadequate; external-combustion machines, pistons driven by the regenerative heating and cooling of a gas in a closed cycle, most often by air. (Hence their common name of “air engine.”) They were easier to manufacture and maintain than the Otto-cycle machines that would have been developed in the 1880s, if slightly less powerful; their thermal efficiency was unrivaled by any other heat engine. And they were silent, using any source of heat from the sun to kerosene; their complete and low-temperature combustion meant that they had few noxious byproducts even when burning petroleum. The New Empire’s cities would never know smog, although coal smoke was abundant.

  By the turn of the twenty-first century, the New Empire was a self-consciously modern society, for all that a man with a wooden plow or woman with a sickle was still its most common figure—the cotton or millet, rice or tea they cultivated was the product of scientific plant-breeding stations, irrigated by mammoth hydraulic works.

  The first kinematographic shows were open for business in Delhi and the other big cities, and even the poor could afford a few photographs, could dream of literacy and a clerk’s post for their children. Railroads webbed India and the Viceroyalties by the tens of thousands of miles, great articulated steam locomotives pulling expresses at up to seventy miles an hour, and dirigibles driven by air engines floated above; already thousands of motorcars swept with silent speed along its roads. In cities where factories grew apace, daring men of business dreamed of a day when those few thousand motors might be tens or even hundreds of thousands. Steamships and clippers designed with a profound knowledge of hydrodynamics tied colony and Viceroyalty together; telephones were following the telegraphs. Phonographs brought recorded music to remote villages, experiments went on apace with wireless telegraphy, while sanitation and vaccines battled disease even in the slums.

  And in the universities, men—and a few women—were growing unsatisfied with even the great Lord Kelvin’s picture of the universe. Telescopes probed the sky for the secrets of the Fall; savants tested and doubted the existence of the luminiferous aether, and grew troubled at the implications of the odd behavior of radium . . .

  The King-Emperors