News about a new Alt History TV show. From the Guardian:
It will envision a post-reparations America, where black Americans inhabit a sovereign nation, New Colonia, comprised of the southern states of Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama. The series will chronicle the complicated relationship between New Colonia and the US in a post-Reconstruction milieu, where the former has established itself as a fully industrialized country while the US struggles to stay afloat economically. It will chart the complex relations between the two countries, which are geopolitically linked but marred by a violent past.
From the description seen here, it sounds pretty dumb.
I don’t know. The root premise sounds interesting. I can’t see that country actually being set up in the real 1860s, but perhaps a different and even more violent end to the war, CSA guerrilla resistance hardening attitudes in the North, and so forth. On the whole, the real world outcome or even African colonization would have been more likely outcomes but this is an interesting notion.
Even considering the geography alone, though, I can’t see New Colonia being an industrial power in any world economy in which the far larger, more resource-rich, more populous US is struggling.