Phil Holland

Britannia's Fist Phil Holland

The first volume in an extraordinary trilogy of alternative history.

In this, the first volume of renowned author and historian Peter G. Tsouras's alternative history trilogy, Great Britain's support for the Confederacy takes it to the brink of war with the Union. The escape of a British-built Confederate ironclad finally ignites the heap of combustible animosities and national interests. When the US Navy seizes it in British waters, the ensuing battle spirals into all-out war. Napoleon III eagerly joins the British and declares war on the United States. Meanwhile, treason uncoils in the North as the antiwar Democrats, known as Copperheads, plot to overthrow the US government and take the Midwest into the Confederacy.

Britannia's Fist brilliantly describes not just a war of stroke and counterstroke but one in which new technologies--repeating weapons, observation balloons, advances in naval ordnance and armament--become vital factors in the struggle of the young country against the Old World's empires. For one of the great missed stories of the Civil War was not the advance of military technology but its impediment by incompetence, disorganization, and in some serious cases outright refusal to contemplate anything innovative. Britannia's Fist is the compelling story of powerful historical personalities who come together as the Union goes into total war mobilization in the fight for its life.