Britain, rather than the United States, opened Japan to Western trade, in part because the United States became fragmented by interference from a Britain that foresaw the implications of a unified United States on the world stage. Counterpart successor states to our world's United States include a (truncated) United States; the Confederate States of America; the Republic of Texas; the Republic of California; a Communist Manhattan Island commune (with Karl Marx as a leading light); British North America (analogous to Canada, albeit slightly larger in this world); Russian America (Alaska); and "terra nullius". Napoleon III's French Empire holds an entente with the British, and Napoleon is even married to a British woman.