"What If it Happened to White People Though?"
- cepmurphywrites
- 13 hours ago
- 9 min read
By Gary Oswald.
The appeal of alternate history is that it pokes at the certainties in our world. The theme, the message, of a lot of AH is “do not take for granted the world we live in”. A lot of what we consider natural – that we have two genders, that we don’t have slaves, that we own cash and work for bosses – is a choice that we made. Plenty of societies were ran very differently and it just so happened that this is how the world ended up. And given that, as we see with open non-binary and agender people, there is no reason it has to stay that way.
A lot of AH is about writing scenarios wherein the UK and the USA, two of the great winners of modern history, are instead occupied and brutalised the way many other countries were and they weren’t. Partly it’s about using the familiar to build a framework and partly it’s about building empathy by showing a dark mirror to reality and saying “we’re not special, it could have been us”, you shine a light on those real atrocities. “What if it happened here” was why The War of the Worlds hit so hard when it came out, by creating super powerful aliens it put the world's largest empire in the role of the conquered (Harry Turtledove's Vilcabamba uses the same trick).
You can tell stories about Nazi occupation in France and Poland, but it hits harder when it is happening in streets that the readers, who in English language fiction are mostly not French or Polish, recognise. Likewise you can talk about racism and the scars of colonisation by setting those stories in Africa and Asia (or that matter Ireland, there obviously are white victims of imperialism), but there is the idea that if the victims are white it allows you to talk about real life experiences in a way that is less likely to make a white audience feel they are being lectured and told to feel bad.
Malorie Blackman, a Black British author, hadn't written about racism until she wrote Noughts and Crosses in which a Black empire conquers Europe and the white natives are discriminated against. It clearly borrowed from South Africa, Rhodesia, and other British colonies but also Blackman's experience in the UK. Moments like all the plasters being made for black skin tones and not white ones are clearly taken from Blackman's own life experience, only flipped. But the way she chose to write about it was through that flipped world rather than as a thing that happens to black people.
For many people of a certain generation in the UK, one of the most iconic comedy sketches of all time is from Goodness Gracious Me, a sketch show starring four British Asian actors (Sanjeev Bhaskar, Meera Syal, Kulvinder Ghir and Nina Wadia), and is called “going out for an English”. In it the main cast visit an English restaurant while drunk, where they mispronounce the waiter’s name, order 24 plates of chips, and compete with each other over how bland their meal is, one asking for “the blandest thing on the menu”. (“And bring a fork and knife!”)
This is a funny parody of British curry culture, but the humour of it allowed them to critique that kind of behaviour in a way that wasn't alienating to the targets of it. British Asians also got to enjoy a certain schadenfreude in seeing the worst behaviours of white Brits reflected back at one of their own, the poor white waiter in the sketch.
This kind of thing is what Colin Salt calls “The World Turned Upside Down” and is a relatively easy way to solve the problem of trying to write about non white alternate history to an audience who doesn't know much about non white history. “What if Adal had beaten Ethiopia in a 16th century war” is not going to hit hard to people who don't know who Adal was, but most people know that Europe conquered the rest of the world so “what if the rest of the world conquered Europe instead” is pretty easy to get.
Two of the most acclaimed and famous AH books, 2002's The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson and 2019's Civilisations by Laurent Binet, take that as the premise. Both are great books that I fully recommend, in particular Civilisations, which I had braced myself for being dry, is a really funny and lively adventure story in which our Incan protagonists find themselves conquering a continent through wit and luck. It also does a good job at skewering its own mythmaking with later revelations about the dark side of a conquest blithely presented in the main chronicle as for the best of all.
But the idea of criticising bigotry by presenting a mad reverse world wherein the dominant group are discriminated against and loudly going “if it's bad for them maybe it’s bad the other round too, makes you think huh?”, is not uncontroversial. In particular the book Save the Pearls (where the white underclass suffer the terribly insulting indignity of being nicknamed after a famously beautiful thing) was roundly accused of being racist when it came out, and the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Outcast”, which came out against homophobia but not in favour of actually portraying any non-straight characters on screen, is not normally held as a high standard of allyship. Arguments certainly have been made that telling stories about bigotry without portraying the actual victims and power structures of that in real life doesn't do much to actually challenge that bigotry. There are plenty of people who can emphasise deeply with the poor mutants, werewolves, and robots who are ostracised in their fictional worlds while still campaigning for the loss of rights of real-life minorities, with Joanne Rowling being the latest famous example.
Moreover, depicting that flip in bigotry often comes close to the Zootopia problem of treating all prejudice as going both ways; the group who commit the main bigoted acts in the ending of that film are also the group discriminated against in the beginning. Prejudice in Hollywood's mind is too often depicted as a personal failing that anyone can suffer from and not something that is taught and empowered by a power structure, thus not properly representing what it is.
And because that flip is the point, to show how it would be bad if it happened to us, it becomes the story. Stories about fictional matriarchies are inevitably about the oppression of the men. For instance, in the remake of The Wicker Man all the men have their tongues cut out. But not every depiction of a patriarchal society is Gilead from The Handmaid's Tale. The Shire and Gondor in Lord of the Rings are also patriarchal societies but that's not the point of the story, the tale is about good men fighting for a good kingdom which happens to not allow women into power and that simply isn't commented on. You very rarely get a depiction of a matriarchal society which is like that.
So how do books like The Years of Rice and Salt and Civilisations depict their versions of colonisation and how does that compare to both how colonisation really happened and how it is often depicted in fiction?
Both books, unlike Noughts and Crosses, are written by people of white European ethnicity. These are not books about projecting their experiences as minorities into a white audience surrogate. As such, both are primarily told from the perspective of the colonisers and not the colonised. And so, both portray a colonisation that is considerably less brutal than real history would show it.
In The Years of Rice and Salt, Europe is emptied by diseases and so the invaders move into a mostly empty land, not having to kill the inhabitants. This is certainly how a lot of European colonisation is depicted but it was never true; as devastating as diseases were, neither the Americas nor Australia were emptied to the same extent. Europe conquered people weakened by diseases but still existent, whereas Asia, in this book, genuinely don't need to.
In Civilisations, the Incas luck their way into taking control of Spain, but they keep control because they increasingly win the support of the peasants of Europe who invite them into more countries as they want the Incans to rule them, as they treat them better than their own princes do. Once again, that isn't really how colonisation worked. There certainly were plenty of people who made alliances with new invaders against the old enemy, that is how most imperialist conquests were successful, but it was rare that they would come to the ultimate conclusion that they were better off as a result.
But then, that's because Civilisations isn't really about the Inca. It's about the feudal, religiously divided lands of Europe and how backwards and brutal they seem to an outsider. The targets of the book’s ire are the princes of Germany who devastated their lands in fighting over religion, it's Martin Luther's betrayal of the peasant revolt, it's the Spanish inquisition, it’s Henry VIII, it’s the slavers of the Barbary Coast. And there is a certain glee in the idea of those people running into someone else more powerful than them, and to keep that feeling the Incans can’t be as brutal as imperial conquest mostly was. Again, this surface idea that the conquest is for the best is punctured several times, there is a reason the book ends from the view of a slave being taken to Mexico and not the Incan Emperor, but Europe certainly doesn't see a decline in population that compares to what Mexico or Peru suffered at the time. Even the diseases that the invaders spread are largely unfatal.
These are books about colonisation but more as the Europeans saw it than how it actually was. They certainly never depict the brutality of how the conquest of the New World worked, and so they never allow that to stop you routing for the dominant cultures. They are essentially Gondor as a matriarchal society, the thing I complain you never see.
There is one other AH about reverse colonisation I think is worth talking about. A poem by a Māori poet called Robert Sullivan.
Robert's poem London Waka can be found online here and was recommended to me by Alex Wallace. It's a lovely humorous little tale about the Māori conquering England, brutally killing its leaders and thus winning the respect of the entire world when this frees India, Africa, and everyone else. The new Māori Governor then announces that the colony of England will now be handing out food to the colonies they have extracted food from and returned all the treasures they stored in museums.
It's a cute jokey stab at the idea of British moral superiority and as such it mostly focuses on modern controversies. I think it is fair to say that an actual 1870s Māori chief would care little about the Elgin Marbles, but that's fine, it's not about that, it's about British imperialism.
But the actual British conquest of New Zealand didn't involve them just turning up and stealing some objects. It involved them killing an estimated 20 percent of the Māori population of the North Island east coast, including the execution of over a hundred prisoners of war (mostly women and children) at Ngatapa. Imperialism done back to the British like they had done to others (they routinely massacred surrendering Xhosa in South Africa for instance) would have to include those massacres. After all, that kind of indiscriminate violence is pretty much how every conquering force operated.
And that includes how Māori conquest worked. Because we have an example of that happening.
In 1835, during the Musket Wars (a series of brutal wars fought between Māori people throughout New Zealand as a result of new weapons and foodstuff introduced into the island by British traders), several hundred Māori, who had been driven out of their traditional lands by rivals, hijacked a brig and sailed it to the Chatham Islands. The Chatham Islands were inhabited by a Māori tribe called the Moriori who, isolated from other tribes, had adapted pacifism so they could survive with a relatively small population without killing themselves in wars. The non-pacifistic Māori butchered them. Around 300 of the 1,700 Moriori were killed outright and the rest enslaved, with their women and children forced to marry into Māori bloodlines and their cultural markers largely extinguished within 40 years. Nowadays there are just under a thousand people of mixed descent who identify as Moriori. This is what conquest and integration largely meant both in a pre-nation state level and in the imperial level of what happened to the natives of the New World, regardless of who was doing it.
But that is not what the Māori do in London Waka, of course. It wouldn't be as fun if they started handing out smallpox infected blankets to the London homeless or forcing them into concentration camps such as the British and Germans built in Southern Africa. That turns the objects of satire and critique into the victims and heroes.
It is hard not to come to the conclusion that the only people who an actual AH of Europe being treated like Europe treated others would appeal to is paranoid white nationalists, in the same way that the audience of the remake of The Wicker Man in which all the men have their tongues cut out is clearly paranoid misogynists. It is perhaps for the best that the most prominent examples of this in the AH genre don't do that.
Gary Oswald is the editor of the Grapeshot and Guillotines, Emerald Isles, and If We'd Just Got That Penalty anthologies.