Colonialism in the Potterverse

[wiresandbooks]

I was writing some Harry Potter fanfics, as one does, and I found myself wondering what the Patil sisters’ home life would be like. We can assume, based on their names, that Rowling intended for them to maintain some aspects of Indian¹ culture. Rowling has told us nothing about Indian wixen² culture, not even having bothered to give the world’s most populous democracy its own magical school. Since the Patil sisters are not first-generation wixen³, as shown by their presence at Hogwarts in their 7^th year, we should assume they know at least something about Indian wixen culture. I started by asking how Indian wixen might have been affected by the British Raj, but unfortunately Harry Potter worldbuilding is so messed up that each question just brings up more questions.

A note on Canon

Canon, for my purposes, consists of the seven books, specifically the UK editions. These already give us enough worldbuilding problems; there’s no reason to add any more. I do not consider Pottermore and other Word-of-God to be authoritative when it comes to characters and events; however, Word-of-God can be useful in clarifying Rowling’s intent.

Secrets

The first thing that comes up whenever someone asks about magic affecting non-magical people is, of course, the International Statute of Secrecy. Canon gives us very few details about the Statute; we know it was established by the ICW and signed in 1689 CE, but everything else is left up to implication.

The flaw in the statute has always been that magical and non-magical populations cannot be fully separated; first-generation and mixed-heritage wixen have their feet in both worlds. If a first-generation wix’s family are threatened, it’s ridiculous to assume the wix will always retreat into the wixen world.

Statistics

Figuring the population of the wixen world is hard, given Rowling’s innumeracy and apparent tendency to make up whatever detail seems useful for the matter at hand, but many fans consider a population of 15,000 wixen in 1991 Britain to be a believable number, versus 57,439,000 non-magical people, or 0.026% of the population. Of those wixen, perhaps 20% are first-generation, assuming Harry’s year is representative. (There are various arguments that it is not, either because the first Voldemort war killed off too many wixen families, or alternatively because Voldemort and his Death Eaters specially tried killing off first-generation wixen toward the end of the war, but 20% seems a solid target number.)

Assuming these statistics apply equally in any population (the Hogwarts students do seem to be a microcosm of the UK demographics), we find that in any population of 20,000 people, there are 5 wixen, of which 1 is first-generation.

On Colonization

Let us assume for the moment that the Potterverse history prior to 1492 CE is identical to our own, modulo some small magical meddling here and there. (This is absurd, as I will explain later, but we have to start somewhere.)

The most reliable pre-Columbian population estimates⁴ are around 40,000,000 (if not more) in the American hemisphere. If we assume the non-magical populations are the same in the Potterverse, this gives us approximately 10,400 wixen, of which 2080 are first-generation. (Equivalent European population in this timeframe is 60,000,000, for 15,600 wixen, 3120 of which are first-generation.) Within a few centuries, our universe’s American populations had fallen by as much as 97 percent, partly due to internal warfare, partly due to conflict with Europeans, but mostly due to disease. Smallpox ravaged the Americans in wave after wave after wave; other diseases left their mark as well.

Non-magical diseases never pose a problem in the canon books; on Pottermore, Rowling indicates that wixen find it trivial to cure non-magical diseases and are bothered only by magical maladies. When Cortés led a few thousand Spanish soldiers and perhaps twenty thousand American allies into Tenochtitlan, Central Mexico was home to about 25,000,000 people. A century later, the population had fallen to 700,000. Tenochtitlan itself had 200,000 people, before losing a third of them to an epidemic during the war with Cortés. Had the epidemic been prevented, Cortés’ narrow victory would certainly have been a decisive defeat.

Thought Experiment

Put yourself in the position of one of the fifty wixen in Tenochtitlan. Even if you’re not one of the ten first-generation wixen, you still interact with non-magical people on a daily basis. Now, suddenly, everyone around you is falling ill. What do you do?

Magic is a force multiplier. Just a handful of those wixen would probably be able to control the epidemic; if most of them worked together, they could not only save the city but completely destroy Cortés’ army as a fighting force. The result: no New Spain, no Spanish treasure fleets, no Spanish Armada, no Catholic victory at Lepanto, and a drastically different Europe.

Suppose something similar happens in most of the population centers in the Americas. Small groups, with at most one or two wixen, might fall to smallpox, while larger ones, such as Cahokia (near modern St. Louis, Missouri), Tawantinsuyu (modern Peru), and the Dawnland (modern New England) would remain and thrive, placing strict limits on the success of European colonization. (Granted, Pizarro defeated Tawantinsuyu as much through taking advantage of internal strife as through disease, but without the five smallpox epidemics, how easy a time would he have had?)

On Slavery

But we were talking about the Raj, which means we have to talk about the British Empire. In our timeline, the English colonized several islands in the Caribbean, many of which had already been depopulated by disease or warfare. To work in the plantations, they imported slaves. Not all of them were African, especially at first, but over the centuries, English ships transported millions of Africans into slave labor.

Of course, the widespread plantations on mainland North America never existed in the Potterverse, for reasons we’ve already discussed. But suppose the English did successfully create sugar cane plantations in the Caribbean and force enslaved Africans to work there. Of every 20,000 slaves, one of them would be a first-generation wix; Jamaica in our timeline eventually had a population of over 300,000 slaves.

I don’t know enough about this part of history to say for sure what would happen, but I’m confident in saying that, combined with the English failure to exploit the mainland, the presence of slaves with magic would swiftly change the timeline from what we expect.

In our universe, the profits from English colonies in the Americas funded their naval fleets, funded opposition to France under Napoleon, and ultimately funded the East India Company. At this point, simply by assuming magic can prevent epidemics in major American cities, the whole political situation from Europe to India has been upended. Perhaps India was dominated by the French; perhaps one of the Mughal’s successor states managed to dominate. Certainly England does not do so. The British Raj simply does not exist.

Disunited

But what about Britain itself? It’s poorer, less powerful, and has left its mark on much less of the world, but fundamentally it still looks the same, right? Maybe not. In the late 1690s, Scotland attempted to establish a colony on the Isthmus of Panama, with an eye to connecting Pacific and Atlantic trade. (This was known as the “Darien scheme”.) There were a variety of reasons for doing this, some of which had to do with internal politics in Britain and some of which had to do with England’s success at colonization. However, in our timeline, the colony failed dramatically and in so doing, destroyed 20% of Scotland’s wealth. This, plus economic pressures from England’s successes, forced Scotland to agree to the Act of Union, transforming Great Britain from a personal union of two kingdoms into a single unified kingdom.

In the Potterverse timeline, however, England has no great success in colonization. Very likely the Darien Scheme was never launched. It’s possible some other events forced Scotland to join with England, but it’s equally possible that Vernon Dursley lives in the Kingdom of England, rather than the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. In such a world, is Hogwarts really the only magical school in Great Britain? Perhaps Harry instead attends a school somewhere in Cornwall…

Go Deeper

But remember, all of this assumes the Potterverse timeline is identical to our own up until 1492 CE. When we look at the massive divergence in the modern day, we have to ask ourselves why not look for earlier divergences. Apparition isn’t a practical means of inter-continental transport, but portkeys probably are; even if they aren’t, imagine the impact enchanted ships would have had on exploration, trade, and warfare. Ollivander claims his shop was founded in 382 BCE; that happens to be the birth year of Philip II of Macedon, whose son was Alexander the Great. If we try to construct a world history with magic, starting from that date, I don’t know where we’ll end up, but I very much doubt anyone named “Harry Potter” would be born in that world.

Conclusion

As I’ve demonstrated, the non-magical world as depicted in the Harry Potter books cannot possibly actually exist given the setting premises. Thus, we can do whatever the hell we want. I choose to say the Statute of Secrecy is loosely enforced outside of Western Europe, that British rule in India was more in the way of hegemony than conquest, India was never unified into a single colonial possession and thus never needed to be partitioned, and that Indian wixen culture and Indian non-magical culture are basically connected in ways that aren’t true for most British folks.

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1. More specifically, given their surname, Marathi culture.↩
2. I use the fan-created term “wix” and “wixen” to encompass wizard, witch, wizarding, etc.↩
3. “Muggle” and “Muggleborn” are honestly offensive terms, when you stop and think about it.↩
4. For a fascinating discussion of how these estimates have varied over the years, as new scholarship becomes available, read 1491, by Charles C. Mann.↩