WI: British settler colony in Tibet

[fluttersky]

The British Empire tended to establish successful settler colonies in more temperate areas (e.g. USA, Canada, S. Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Falkland)
Colonization of the tropical areas like most of Africa and India did not involve many white settlers, due to the problems of climate and disease.

So, a thought. Tibet has quite a mild climate, though of course it's a bit different to the British oceanic climate. What if Britain annexes Tibet in the 19th century, and tries to make it a settler colony? Would many white settlers want to go to Tibet?

PoD: Maybe Britain and France decide to support the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom in the Chinese Civil War, and in return for their assistance Britain and France are given some of the peripheral regions of China. 

[MinnesotaNationalist]

I doubt that if Britain were to get Tibet for one reason or another that they'd establish settler colonies there. For one, there's much better places to go than there, and for two... Well, that's all I really got, but Tibet isn't exactly a resource rich land last time I checked (I could be wrong though)

[Gog3451]

Too far away, landlocked, and seems like Brits would rather move to South Africa, Australia or New Zealand if they were that far away.

[huojin]

Reasons not to go to Tibet:

1) It gets really cold.
2) The climate is kinda a mess all over the place, though admittedly not too bad at times.
3) No one lives there.
4) It's on the other side of some really big mountains called the Himalayas.
5) There are easier, more profitable targets.
6) Britain at least nominally recognised Chinese authority there, not least as a buffer to preserve India from attack.

etc.

I think people also tend to forget that the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was batshit insane, and that the European powers had a lot vested in preserving Qing stability in order to best take advantage of China. Weakness is good, war and chaos is not.

The most you'd probably see is a situation similar to British-influenced Afghanistan if the Qing allowed their control to lapse and didn't care about Tibet exercising independent power. But that's not far from what we had historically anyway. I'd imagine perhaps British garrisons, backing for and influence over the Tibetan government, etc. A colony seems unlikely - but you don't need to settle somewhere to "control" it anyway.

[shevek23]

We should not overlook that in the later stages of colonialism, European powers valued territory that resembled Europe climatically as a place where dependents of the colonial bureaucracy could live without having to habituate to the tropical climate. Before diseases were understood to be due mainly to infections of microorganisms, the non-European aspects of colonial climates were often blamed for high disease rates; even once the germ theory took hold, it became apparent that to an extent the "miasma" theories appeared to be true because in a moister, hotter environment than Europe, many disease germs can indeed be transmitted more easily, often by macroparasite vectors such as mosquitoes. In early days, lasting well into the 19th century, the European colonialist was an adventurer seeking opportunities for making a fortune and then getting back home. But in the later phases, from the latter half of the 19th century on, especially after the Mutiny in India, a combination of factors demanded higher levels of formal bureaucracy in the colonies and many civil servants or other hired agents of the formal regime or private companies operating under its wing would be increasingly likely to want to bring their families from Europe to reside somewhere near. By the 1920s, colonial air services to the highland refuges various regimes set up for these dependents were being promoted.

Now that said, I'm pretty sure that even for this purpose, the British Raj in India had already developed sites lower down and more accessible than Tibet as suitable refuges for these delicate wives and children and vacation spots for the actual employees. Some of these were indeed in the Himalayan foothills; another was I suspect he highlands of Sri Lanka. (The French had their refuges in places in Laos, and IIRC there were schemes to seek out and develop such a spot in the Philippines, both by the Spanish government and later by the USA).

Thus we can see that while an inland, high and cool place was something that European colonial empires did seek, in the more developed, bureaucratic, and formal phases of their empires, Tibet is first of all too high, too isolated, too far inland to have served that particular purpose well, and anyway providing residence for colonial government families, even adding in dependents of private businessmen and their staffs, would not be a basis for holding an extensive territory. A proper settler colony requires that Europeans seek to make the territory their permanent home and hope to make modest fortunes owning land, selling its products, or that extensive mineral resources are to be found there. I suppose Tibet does have some of the latter, but as for productive land, it is of course very marginal. Why then would the British want to claim it, and take on the troubles of conflict with the native peoples who actually are adapted, physically and culturally, to this extreme environment?

One might ask why the Chinese have done exactly as the OP suggests the British might have. But I think it is perfectly clear that the main reason the PRC aggressively asserted the old claims of the Qing Dynasty (maintained by the Kuomintang republic as well, though Chiang Kai-Shek was hardly strong enough to follow through the way Mao did) was strategic. Leaving Tibet free, even as a nominal neutral with no significant military force of its own, left a major salient through which a pro-Western government (or for that matter, pro-Soviet) could threaten heartland parts of China, not to mention Sinkiang, which protects the Chinese western frontiers and is also where the PRC put its secret nuclear and rocket program bases. For China, holding Tibet strongly, as an ally or better still (from their point of view!) integral possession, is pretty important. The British, or their American successors to world hegemony in the Cold War era, did not have a comparable degree of interest in Tibet; all they needed or wanted was to make sure it did not fall into the hands of a strong rival such as the PRC or USSR. Therefore the Americans, and the British before them, preferred indirect influence over the nominally independent Dalai Lama government, such as it was, and championed his claim to govern independently.

Given that the Chinese have decided to incorporate Tibet, their settler program makes sense in that the native Tibetans would be naturally hostile to Chinese control, therefore PRC policy does not favor them and instead moves in millions of Han Chinese to swamp and displace the Tibetans. Given that the regime must somehow provide for these millions, it makes sense for it to double down on seeking to develop what resources Tibet does have.

But in the reverse situation where China is weak and the British rule India, the British Empire would not be desperate for those resources, having better sources of just about anything the high, rugged plateau might offer. Given that Britain had more attractive places for its "surplus population" to settle, where they could hope to make considerably more money more easily, with a lot less worry about native resistance (in Australia and New Zealand and Canada anyway, if not in east or south Africa) and even the most marginal of these preferred destinations at least offers ample air for sea-level habituated lungs to breathe, the Empire would not enjoy a lot of volunteers to occupy the place and would have to deploy troops to hold it. I would guess that to this day, the PRC spends more money or equivalent resources on holding Tibet than the whole plateau yields. But the margin of cost over profit is worth paying for them, to secure their southwest flank; the British could secure their northern flank much more cheaply and cost-effectively by simply upholding the rule of the Lamas and taking nothing from Tibet.

I can only imagine that the OP even raised the question in the light of the Chinese apparently making a go of colonizing Tibet, and therefore have addressed that question.