(Part 2 of the article. Read it and weep)
“…Like all such visions it has to be set Somewhere Else, not on an undiscovered island, as did More and Swift, or another planet as did LeGuin. Nor simply in the future, as did Morris, Huxley and Orwell. Though Stirling’s tetralogy reaches its climax in a future, in 2442 AD. But the future of a different past. In a different timeline, in which things happened otherwise. This is a genre increasingly popular not merely amongst science fiction writers like Harry Turtledove but also some professional historians, who use counter-factual speculations of the "if such-and-such had happened otherwise, what would have happened next?" type to cast light on historical issues. The plethora of timelines thus depicted may indeed, incidentally, be fact rather than fiction if the 1956 Everett Conjecture on the Schroedinger’s Cat Paradox turns out to be correct, as increasingly physicists are coming to the conclusion it may be.
The historical details of Stirling’s Draka timeline, which diverges from ours during the American Rebellion in 1779, some of which are distinctly arguable, are, as in all utopian/dystopian fiction, secondary plot devices to get the reader to the society the author wishes to depict. A society Stirling, unlike many such writers, depicts at several stages during its evolution towards its ultimate form, the "Final Society". What Stirling offers us is a society based, fairly explicitly since its timeline’s Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche is among those whose writings are cited as influencing its development, upon such Nietzschean principles as the necessary subordination of the masses to the Will to Power of an aristocracy of genuine merit and of the objective of such an aristocracy to transcend its humanity in the quest for the Superman. By which the German philosopher meant the being as much beyond present-day mankind as we are beyond our apelike ancestors, rather than some American with a penchant for putting his underwear on over his tights in telephone boxes! The Draka would agree wholeheartedly with such sentiments as these, from Beyond Good and Evil: "A good and healthy aristocracy must acquiesce, with a good conscience, in the sacrifice of a legion of individuals who, for its benefit, must be reduced to slaves and tools. The masses have no right to exist on their own account: their sole excuse for living lies in their usefulness as a sort of superstructure or scaffolding, upon which a more select race of beings may be erected."
As erect them the Draka do. Starting as American Loyalist refugees from an American Rebellion Britain loses more comprehensively than in our history, settled in 1781 at a Cape of Good Hope seized from a Netherlands which jumped on Britain’s back while she was engaged in fighting the transatlantic rebels in 1779 rather than, as in our history, 1781. The Loyalists thus settled at the Cape as the Crown Colony of Drakia (after Sir Francis Drake), in their history as in ours, were drawn from the at least one-third of Americans who stood loyal to the Crown. They were joined by many of the Hessian mercenary troops Britain had deployed in America, paid off in South African land. Then by Icelanders made homeless by the great Mount Hekla eruptions of 1783-84, and French aristocrats fleeing the guillotines of the Revolution. Receiving a further refugee boost when the US overran Canada in the War of 1812. With such a massive influx of population, rapidly absorbing the Dutch colonists at the Cape, the Drakian settlers rapidly spread inland. Smashing the black tribes of the interior and reducing them, like the blacks many of them had owned in America, to slavery on farmsteads and, as they strike gold on the Whiteridge – our Witwatersrand – mines. Gold which pays for the Industrial Revolution to begin in Southern Africa as well as in England as steam engines are brought in to work the mines and later railways are built to transport the precious metals and agricultural produce of the Highveld to the coast.
Throughout the 19th Century the colony prospers and spreads north across Africa, and indeed south from an Egypt settled after Napoleon’s 1798 expedition there is repelled. Gradually but steadily becoming more and more independent of, and culturally and politically alienated, principally over the slavery issue, from, Britain. The Crown Colony of Drakia becomes the Dominion of a Drakia elided into Draka - first by dialect and later deliberately as its citizens sieze on the homophonic coincidence with Greek drakon – "dragon" (ultimately a red dragon clutching the sword of power and the shackle of mastery becomes the official insignia of the Drakan State). Initially the Drakians pay lip service to the British Imperial abolition of slavery in 1834 – converting black chattel slaves, as happened in many places in our history, into theoretically free but in fact no better off "indentured bondservants". Later, as their growing economic and military power enables them to ignore protests from London, the African "serfs" are placed legally in the same position as Roman slaves: pro nullis, pro mortis, pro quadrupedis – "as if nothing, as if dead, as if animals", their lives at the mercy of free Citizens (though killing someone else’s serf without the owner’s permission is a tort actionable at civil law!). The Dominion of the Draka achieves its final title, the Domination of the Draka, in 1919 after it breaks the last ties with Britain in a Great War which sees the Drakans grab much of the Middle East and Central Asia to add to all of Africa and the island of Ceylon.
The Domination’s European-descended Citizen population is further augmented throughout the 19th Century. By Confederate refugees, for example, after an unsuccessful attempt to help the South win its freedom in the 1860’s. The last mass immigration the Domination, which can afford to be increasingly choosy, allows. Though it welcomes exceptional individuals, Nietzsche, Carlyle, Gobineau, even Oscar Wilde, who sympathise with its growing rejection of Victorian Christianity and its egalitarian free-trade liberalism and puritanism.
Such is the Drakan State when we meet it in the first of Stirling’s books, Marching Through Georgia, set in the early 1940’s when the Drakans meet a (historically somewhat implausible given the radically altered history of the previous 160 years!) Nazi Reich in the Caucasus. By then the Domination has become a fully evolved alternative to America and its values, indeed, after it defeats the Nazis and overruns all of continental Eurasia except for India (grabbed by the Draka in 1975), SE Asia and American-defeated Japan, the only alternative. After which the rest of the 20th Century is an increasingly desperate arms, technology and space race, as the Domination and the US-led "Alliance for Democracy" (essentially our "Western" consumer-capitalist soi-disant "democratic" society) face off in a rather more vigorous Cold War.
The mature 20th Century Domination depicted in Marching Through Georgia and its sequels Under the Yoke and The Stone Dogs, describes itself as an "aristocratic republic", and its social system as "Feudal Socialism". Around 90% of its inhabitants, (rather less numerous in absolute population terms as time goes on than in our timeline, as the Draka prevent Third World populations breeding like maggots and devouring and destroying the lands they inhabit) are "serfs". In effect, chattel slaves. The 10% Citizen minority is exclusively European. Mostly northern European - according to figures dropped into the narrative at one point 40% of male Citizens are fair haired and 86% light-eyed, average male height being 183 cm; one character is described as having "eagle-faced blonde good looks...almost a caricature of what a landed aristocrat of the Domination of the Draka is supposed to be".
Citizens enjoy a considerable measure of freedom. As the Draka Karl von Shrakenberg explains it to an American journalist "the Domination is not a totalitarian dictatorship of the Nazi type…oligarchical collectivism is probably the best term. The citizen body as a whole is our idol, not the State or its officers; they merely execute and co-ordinate. And citizens all have the same fundamental interests, which means that criticism – tactical criticism - can safely be allowed. Which makes for greater efficiency". In fact, as Stirling puts it in the numerous and rather interesting Appendices in which he describes those details of Draka society, technology and history that cannot easily be worked into the narrative: "For the Citizen population, the Domination is a rather mild authoritarianism. There is an elected government, and a fair degree of freedom of speech and association. However, fundamental criticism (e.g. of serfdom) is not permitted, and the power of the Security Directorate has tended to gradually increase. Since there is a large degree of uniformity of opinion among the citizen population, that is not felt as much of a hardship." Citizen opinion is reflected in (free and fair!) election results, which give the pro-status quo Draka League a consistent 70%, with groups like the pro-free-market Liberals and the socially-liberal Rationalists the sort of miserable single-figure percentages with which any readers who have been involved in political efforts to offer western electorates any similar radical alternatives to the social status quo will be only too familiar! The Assembly thus elected itself elects the Head of State, the Archon, for a 20-year-term by a two-thirds majority. The Archon appoints the heads of the Government Directorates – Security, War, Technical (technology & science), Conservation, Eugenics, Transportation etc. but all are answerable to the elected Assembly. Provided they do not – as few do – question the fundamental ideological basis of their society, Draka Citizens perceive themselves as politically free. As they are: exactly as free, no more and no less, with exactly the same constraints on what they may do with our freedom, as we British and American citizens are today. If anything, Draka Citizens prize their freedom more than do ours. Individuality of thought and action is valued, even in the military, Draka "were disciplined enough, but lacked the sort of meekness that obeyed bureaucratic dictates without question". Unlike many of our Britons and Americans, alas.”