Playing counter-factual history is good fun, but to succeed, and create a credible scenario, the player needs to stick as closely as possible to what actually happened, rather than allow the imagination to take flight. Thus, although a Confederate victory would almost certainly have effected the outcome of Napoleon 111's little adventure in Mexico, that needs to be discounted for the purposes of this game. To do otherwise would be to take a fairly simple counter-factual exercise and turn it into a monstrous one. Had France kept Mexico as an ally, would Prussia have dared wage war against her in 1870? If she had, would Emperor Maximilian have sent troops to aid his French allies against the Germanic threat? As the reader can see, that way lies madness, so let's keep it simple.

Keeping is simple means accepting that all other things remain equal. This being so, the rump USA would have continued to industrialise at a rapid pace, and the Confederate States of America would have remained as a decentralised, agrarian, confederation of sovereign states. This being so, it is conceivable that today the Confederacy would be a basically third world producer of primary products, achingly poor, and with an overwhelmingly black population.

During the American Civil War the British government decided that never again would Britain be in a position where her cotton supplies were threatened. Imperial cotton production was stimulated in both Egypt and India, and by the 1880s both those countries' fields had reached maturity. In other words had the Confederacy not diversified out of cotton, then her role as the world's supplier would have been threatened, anyway.

The problem is that the south's planter aristocracy would have been even less likely to diversify in victory than they did in defeat. Furthermore, what diversification there was in the South came about as a result of federal government policies; policies that the decentralised Confederacy would not even have thought of.

The Tennessee Valley Authority is a case in point. It was created as part of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, and it brought electricity and roads to a whole swathe of the Upper-South. Such a mobilisation of resources needed a strong central government - and that was precisely what the government in Richmond was not.

None of the federal government's programmes that aided the South would have happened. It is not just about the TVA. The federal highways would not have been built and neither

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