What would Alaska be today, if Seward had not bought it?

[history nerd]

Originally Posted by robertbrianbush

Liechtensteinian North America! Boy, that changes history lol.
Can you imagine seeing that on the globe!
To be serious though, the Liechtenstein family was and is very wealthy ...the current ruling prince actually has the largest personal fortune of any currently reigning European monarch. The country was actually created to give the family, which was fantastically wealthy...they owned a third of Austrian Silesia, for instance... a principality which was required for the family to hold a seat in the Holy Roman Empire. It was actually a number of years after the creation of the principality before a member of the Liechtenstein family even set foot in it.
Given the family's close ties to the Hapsburgs and their extreme wealth and great landholdings in the Austri-Hungarian Empire it is not unreasonable to assume that Alaska under the House if Liechtenstein may have enjoyed the protection of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which while lacking the capability to command the seas around Alaska certainly had the power to do great damage to the European interests of anybody attacking Alaska as well as possessing tremendous diplomatic stature.
So they certainly would have had the financial resources to make the purchase and launch development efforts
A fun and interesting point to ponder pertaining to any of the several scenarios presented in this thread which posit Alaska becoming an independent state...or a part of Liechtenstein (or a separate independent duchy or kingdom ruled by the House of Liechtenstein)...do you feel Alaska could have developed into a prosperous and more populated sovereign nation based not only on its natural resources but also as an off shore banking/tax/regulatory/etc haven located between North America and Asia (Liechtenstein has priseperd by being an offshore haven..it literally has more businesses, at least on paper, than people)

I imagine it would be a good investment for Liechtenstein much like it was for us (GOLD! OIL!). I can't imagine it being much more populated than it is on our world though.

[danielj72]

At the end of ww1 the US and its allies intervened in the Russian civil war on behalf of the White Russians. Allied troops were in archangel Russia, Vladivostok and parts of Siberia. We were there until 1920. It’s easy to see how we would have taken advantage of that time period and occupied Alaska. When the Bolsheviks won the Russian civil war we could have justified keeping Alaska by saying we would not tolerate communism on the North American continent. This would have been a red hot button issue throughout the 20th century for the Soviets.

[Anhityk]

Originally Posted by boxus

If it stayed with the USSR, I imagine it would have been an SSR,

Yes and the Alaskan coat of arms would have looked like this:

[2x3x29x41]

[Thoreau424]

The Canadians would have taken it, and it would be as irrelevant to the US now as the neighboring Yukon and Northwest Territories provinces are.

[jbgusa]

Originally Posted by cebuan

Would Alaska eventually become American anyway? How and when? Or would it still be Russian? How would that have affected WWII, and the Cold War?


(Thanks to the genius of web desingers, it is impossible to respell Seward correctly in the title. A useless and unnecessary frill.)

My out-of-the-box thought is the Hudson Bay Company would have purchased it, as part of Rupert's Land. Hudson Bay Company later sold Rupert's Land to the Dominion of Canada for $1,500,000.00.