As a big fan of what-ifs I was looking forward to C.S.A. greatly. And, superficially, this is a very impressive film. With an almost fastidious attention to detail we are given the horror story of what would have happened if the South had won the US Civil War. Not only would slavery not have been abolished in the 1860s, it would be going on right now. In fact the whole history of the planet would have been different. South America under CSA rule. No American involvement in WW2. Canada the cultural capital of North America. But there are huge problems with this thesis. The main one is economic. Slavery only 'works', in an economic sense, when you have a largely agrarian economy, with a small population of wealthy landowners and a massive labour shortage. But we are led to believe that after the largely rustic South conquered the industrial North they could impose the same system - of free labour - on the cities and factories of the old Union. Think about it: Detroit - Motown - with slave labour. The great industrial combines of the Midwest staffed by slaves. Slaves in the Pittsburgh steel mills, slaves in the meatpacking plants of Chicago. See the problem? The problem would be catastrophic unemployment levels among the white working (and middle) classes, economic meltdown and certain revolution. Trying to impose slavery on a high-population, industrialised country would wreck the place in a decade or less. The CSA would effectively be saying to every blue-collar worker in the land, 'you're out of a job because here's someone who does it for free'. Of course the CSA could have stayed with cotton and tobacco, and missed out on the Industrial Revolution altogether. But then the country would soon plunge into a Third World morass. It would also have been nice to know what happened to the USSR in this alternate Universe, what the position of Europe was (we only got to her, rather tiresomely, about Canada) and how the Americans managed to build the Atomic Bomb without the help of German-Jewish refugee scientists. Still, a nice idea, excellent production values and the 'genuine' commercial breaks were painful to watch.
