“the British Empire, in all likelihood, would have abolished slavery earlier than the US did, and with less bloodshed.”
“Independence was bad for Native Americans”, and
“America would have a better system of government if we’d stuck with Britain”
I think Matthews has a strong case for the first 2 items. As he states,
Abolition in most of the British Empire occurred in 1834, following the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act. That left out India, but slavery was banned there, too, in 1843. In England itself, slavery was illegal at least going back to 1772. That’s decades earlier than the United States.
It would have saved a monstrously awful Civil War, the deadliest war in American history.
The main benefit of the revolution to colonists was that it gave more political power to America’s white male minority. For the vast majority of the country — its women, slaves, American Indians — the difference between disenfranchisement in an independent America and disenfranchisement in a British-controlled colonial America was negligible. If anything, the latter would’ve been preferable, since at least women and minorities wouldn’t be singled out for disenfranchisement. From the vantage point of most of the country, who cares if white men had to suffer through what everyone else did for a while longer, especially if them doing so meant slaves gained decades of free life?
…
If George Washington was executed as a traitor, how different would America be now?
In 1775, after the war had begun in Massachusetts, the Earl of Dunmore, then governor of Virginia, offered the slaves of rebels freedom if they came and fought for the British cause. Eric Herschthal, a PhD student in history at Columbia, notes that the proclamation united white Virginians behind the rebel effort. He quotes Philip Fithian, who was traveling through Virginia when the proclamation was made, saying, “The Inhabitants of this Colony are deeply alarmed at this infernal Scheme. It seems to quicken all in Revolution to overpower him at any Risk.” Anger at Dunmore’s emancipation ran so deep that Thomas Jefferson included it as a grievance in a draft of the Declaration of Independence. That’s right: the declaration could’ve included “they’re conscripting our slaves” as a reason for independence.
For white slaveholders in the South, Simon Schama writes in Rough Crossings, his history of black loyalism during the Revolution, the war was “a revolution, first and foremost, mobilized to protect slavery.”
Slaves also understood that their odds of liberation were better under British rule than independence. Over the course of the war, about 100,000 African slaves escaped, died, or were killed, and tens of thousands enlisted in the British army, far more than joined the rebels. “Black Americans’ quest for liberty was mostly tied to fighting for the British — the side in the War for Independence that offered them freedom,” historian Gary Nash writes in The Forgotten Fifth, his history of African Americans in the revolution. At the end of the war, thousands who helped the British were evacuated to freedom in Nova Scotia, Jamaica, and England.
This is not to say the British were motivated by a desire to help slaves; of course they weren’t. But American slaves chose a side in the revolution, the side of the crown. They were no fools. They knew that independence meant more power for the plantation class that had enslaved them and that a British victory offered far greater prospects for freedom.
I think it’s pretty clear that blacks had it worse under American leadership than they would have under the British empire. Indians also had it rough under the American system of government. Canadians didn’t treat Indians very well either, but it was better than America did.
“It’s a hard case to make because even though I do think Canada’s treatment of Natives was better than the United States, it was still terrible,” the Canadian essayist Jeet Heer tells me in an email (Heer has also written a great case against American independence). “On the plus side for Canada: there were no outright genocides like the Trail of Tears (aside from the Beothuks of Newfoundland). The population statistics are telling: 1.4 million people of aboriginal descent in Canada as against 5.2 million in the USA. Given the fact that America is far more hospitable as an environment and has 10 times the non-aboriginal population, that’s telling.”
Independence also enabled acquisition of territory in the West through the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican-American War. That ensured that America’s particularly rapacious brand of colonialism ensnared yet more native peoples. And while Mexico and France were no angels, what America brought was worse. Before the war, the Apache and Comanche were in frequent violent conflict with the Mexican government. But they were Mexican citizens. The US refused to make them American citizens for a century. And then, of course, it violently forced them into reservations, killing many in the process.
American Indians would have still, in all likelihood, faced violence and oppression absent American independence, just as First Nations people in Canada did. But American-scale ethnic cleansing wouldn’t have occurred. And like America’s slaves, American Indians knew this. Most tribes sided with the British or stayed neutral; only a small minority backed the rebels. Generally speaking, when a cause is opposed by the two most vulnerable groups in a society, it’s probably a bad idea. So it is with the cause of American independence.
The last item Matthews lists is a bit tough to swallow though: “America would have a better system of government if we’d stuck with Britain.” Matthews argues that if the US had stayed with Britain, and perhaps voted for independence the same way that Canada did,
we would’ve, in all likelihood, become a parliamentary democracy rather than a presidential one.
And parliamentary democracies are a lot, lot better than presidential ones. They’re significantly less likely to collapse into dictatorship because they don’t lead to irresolvable conflicts between, say, the president and the legislature. They lead to much less gridlock.
It’s clear what Matthews is arguing for, and he doesn’t like America’s system of government.
Government spending in parliamentary countries is about 5 percent of GDP higher, after controlling for other factors, than in presidential countries. If you believe in redistribution, that’s very good news indeed.
The Westminister system of parliamentary democracy also benefits from weaker upper houses. The US is saddled with a Senate that gives Wyoming the same power as California, which has more than 66 times as many people. Worse, the Senate is equal in power to the lower, more representative house. Most countries following the British system have upper houses — only New Zealand was wise enough to abolish it — but they’re far, far weaker than their lower houses. The Canadian Senate and the House of Lords affect legislation only in rare cases. At most, they can hold things up a bit or force minor tweaks. They aren’t capable of obstruction anywhere near the level of the US Senate.
While I think Matthews has some good points on items 1 and 2, he loses me with the following statements.
Finally, we’d still likely be a monarchy, under the rule of Elizabeth II, and constitutional monarchy is the best system of government known to man. Generally speaking, in a parliamentary system, you need a head of state who is not the prime minister to serve as a disinterested arbiter when there are disputes about how to form a government — say, if the largest party should be allowed to form a minority government or if smaller parties should be allowed to form a coalition, to name a recent example from Canada. That head of state is usually a figurehead president elected by the parliament (Germany, Italy) or the people (Ireland, Finland), or a monarch. And monarchs are better.
Monarchs are more effective than presidents precisely because they lack any semblance of legitimacy. It would be offensive for Queen Elizabeth or her representatives in Canada, New Zealand, etc. to meddle in domestic politics. Indeed, when the governor-general of Australia did so in 1975 it set off a constitutional crisis that made it clear such behavior would not be tolerated. But figurehead presidents have some degree of democratic legitimacy and are typically former politicians. That enables a greater rate of shenanigans — like when Italian President Giorgio Napolitano schemed, successfully, to remove Silvio Berlusconi as prime minister due at least in part to German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s entreaties to do so.
“What is distasteful about Trump is not that he offends old-fashioned American values,”wrote Mother Jones’s Tim Murphy in one typical reaction. “Trump is distasteful because he taps into certain old-fashioned American values — nativism, brash tough talk, slow-burning authoritarianism; family dynasties — that have played a not-inconsequential role throughout our history.”
…
Over the last generation, liberals have become increasingly emboldened in their denunciations of America’s founders, says Yale historian Steven Pincus. The American left stands poised to throw the Revolution overboard, to dismiss the spirit and legacy of 1776 as merely the cause of a racist, sexist, hypocritical aristocracy we should firmly reject.
Instead, Stein argues that the bottom-up radicalism of 1776 was a true political revolution of equality, and it led to emancipation of slaves.
When the Revolution began in 1776, slavery was legal in every colony. Only Pennsylvania even had an abolition society. Slavery had existed on American soil for two centuries without being substantially challenged by whites.
The American Revolution changed that. Pennsylvania’s emancipation act of 1780, the first of its kind, was written by revolutionary leaders and explicitly cited the fight against British rule as its inspiration. Similar Northern emancipation acts followed: in Massachusetts and New Hampshire in 1783, and then in Connecticut and Rhode Island the next year.
That’s not to let the founding fathers off the hook.
Many of the founders were racist, sexist colonizers determined to wipe American Indians from the continent.
Those charges are true. No one should ever forget that while opposed to slavery as a matter of principle, many of the founders created commercial fortunes by owning other human beings.
…
It’s important to denounce the founders for their racism and acquiescence to slavery. That’s obviously correct and necessary.
The problem is that by applying 21st-century views on race and gender to an 18th-century context, we risk missing the real legacy of the Revolution. The founders were indeed racists by any modern standard. But even within its own time, the Revolution was a force for both racial and economic equality — and can remain the blueprint for those goals more than 240 years later.
He justifies this by noting that “Every major movement for American progress has cloaked itself in the founders’ rhetoric.”
Abraham Lincoln once remarked, “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.”
He’s hardly alone. Indeed, nearly every major movement for social, economic, or racial equality in America has cloaked itself in the rhetoric initially established during the revolutionary era. The modern American left that wants to distance itself from the Declaration of Independence is also thus breaking with:
Frederick Douglass and the early abolitionists, who spoke about their mission as fulfilling the Revolution’s promise of racial emancipation. (“In justification of their revolt against the established regime, the abolitionists naturally turned to the Declaration of Independence,” Becker writes.)
The Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 — the launch pad of the women’s rights movement in America — where Elizabeth Cady Stanton authored the “Declaration of Sentiments.” A huge chunk of it is directly lifted from the Declaration of Independence, and the Seneca Falls delegates explicitly talked about their mission as an extension of the Continental Congress.
Eugene V. Debs, the most successful socialist presidential candidate not from Vermont, who also worked within the framework established by the revolutionaries. “I like the Fourth of July. It breathes the spirit of revolution,” Debs said.
Martin Luther King Jr., whose lavish praise of the American Revolution is even more over the top than mine.
Revolutionary, egalitarian movements in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries in France, Latin America, Haiti, communist Vietnam(!), and Hungary that have explicitly cited the American Revolution’s egalitarian aims as inspiration.
I could go on, but the pattern here is clear: The path to progress has come not from rejecting the declaration and Revolution but by broadening its scope to those the founders wrongfully neglected.
What do you make of these points? Would it be better for blacks, Indians, and women under the British Empire? Could the Civil War and all those horrible deaths have been avoided? Would America be a super power, or more similar to Canada? Would we have a better government if we had voted out the British instead of fought them out? What do we make of the Book of Mormon prophecies that seem to imply the founding fathers were acting under God’s will to free America from the British?
Ol’ George Washington whooped that king,
And the eagle squalled, “Let freedom ring!”
Wouldn’t it have been better if the Visigoths never sacked Rome? Or if the Muslims never conquered Constantinople?
In my view, the world is far better because of the United States of America. I am not ashamed of our noble experiment, of government of the people, by the people, and for the people. I appreciate the United States’s friendship with Great Britain, but I don’t want to bow and scrape before a hereditary sovereign and a noble classes. May God bless America.
I’m a bit of a royalist by nature. I like many things about Parliamentary government and constitutional monarchy, and agree that a hypothetical America which had behaved more like Canada COULD have resulted in a somewhat more peaceful outcome.
But in the end, we have to judge the founding fathers from their own perspective. They were espousing noble and progressive ideals, ideals that would soon sweep over the world. Whether or not those ideals would have later swept over the world in a more peaceful way than the American way, is not a question we should use to judge the founding fathers. They wanted freedom for themselves, not just their children. It is fundamental to the American character to be at the forefront of change and transformation. We wanted the freedom to work out our OWN challenges, our OWN issues with racism, etc., not Britain’s. That is the important thing. The autonomy of the American spirit is what was important, even if the American spirit was a bit rough around the edges, and the British spirit arguably more civilised. It is this sense of autonomy which has been fundamental to the character of the American experiment and all they have accomplished (or failed at) since then. Take away this sense of autonomy, and you lose the vitality of the American dream.
Additionally, democracies like Australia and Canada got to work out their own democratisation from the advantage of having witnessed America’s transformation. We don’t know if other democracies would have been so successful without the pioneering efforts of America to create their own. If America had been successfully subdued by the British, how do we know that they wouldn’t have extended their colonial imperialism even further and longer in their other colonies?
The articles make some interesting points, but they have one big problem: we don’t know what would have happened if things had happened differently. When I was doing some research for this blog post: http://melissamortensen.com/blog/org-chart-confusion-american-revolution/ I came across an interesting idea. Unfortunately I can’t remember where I read it (the post was originally written last year and posted on a blog that I have taken down), but the general idea is that the American colonies were part of the first British Empire and it was because of the American Revolution that many of the traits we currently associate with the UK came into being. The British learned from their mistakes and corrected them moving forward.
Another issue is that in the 1770s Parliamentary districts were in desperate need of redistricting. Wealthy men (often, but not always lords) controlled many of them to the point that they could basically choose who would fill “their” seat(s) in the House of Commons. This was justified on the idea that really all members of Parliament (Lords and Commons) really represented everyone in the entire empire, and would rise above petty local concerns. The Founding Fathers wanted representation in Parliament if Parliament was going to pass laws for them. If that was granted, a lot of very powerful men would be facing uncomfortable questions about why they were so opposed to redistricting (which eventually happened in the early 1800s).
The American Revolution introduced new ideas about the people’s ability to rule themselves rather than depend on the elite to make decisions for them – another argument that the European powers made at that time. Even with the U.S.’s current flaws I think that we would be looking at a very different world that I personally think would be worse in many ways if the American Revolution hadn’t happened.
P.S. I think that part of the issue is that many people don’t want to accept that flawed human beings like the American Founding Fathers, or for that matter, the Church’s early leaders, can accomplish great things and that a human’s flaws don’t necessarily cancel out the good that that person does.
Melissa has some very valid points I couldn’t help thinking about as I read the OP. It’s a great thought experiment, though. George Washington may have been a wealthy landowner, but make no mistake, he was not nobility. Had England not lost the Colonies, would they have landed where they are now? It seems unlikely. I also wondered if the retention of the Colonies would have resulted in earlier emancipation of the slaves or one of these two other outcomes:
1 – a delay of the Revolution until it came to a head over abolition OR
2 – a delay in emancipation in England who would have continued to benefit from the slavery extant in the Colonies.
Sorry, one other thing to mention, the plight of Native Americans. I don’t know the stats on such a thing, but it wasn’t just human acts of genocide that led to their greater demise in the US, but in a warmer climate and where there were larger populations, their vulnerability to the European diseases that decimated their communities would have had much worse effects than in the colder climate of Canada. Now, we all know that early germ warfare was also part of the inhumanity rained down on the Native Americans, but even without intentional harm, disease wiped out large populations and further isolated other ones. I’m not sure how tenable their position was given the role of disease.
Having lived in Canada I am struck that they accomplished everything the US has without revolution. And, in the process, they formed a democratic parliamentary system of government and maintained Commonwealth status which enables them to travel freely and young people to work throughout the Commonwealth.
It seems to me what the US has accomplished comes mostly from natural resources and the natural protection of 2 oceans. We might be a more cooperative, community-minded and less militaristic society if we had been patient and negotiated our independence.
alice,
Maybe Canada achieved everything it has <because of the United States?
Without the American Revolution, the French Revolution is likewise called into question, not that it was any great prize by comparison as revolutions go.
Yes, the American Revolution didn’t occur in a vacuum. The French Revolution is a direct result of the American Revolution. Do they have a parliamentary government like England? I don’t know the answer to that question. Furthermore, I do think that Canada’s form of government used the US as a model. If there was no US model, what would France and Canada look like today? It’s an impossible question to answer.
ji, congrats on a VERY American answer. No doubt India, Australia, Singapore,South Africa, etc (there are more than 50 of them) all owe their independence to the American Revolution too.
Canadian government is parliamentary. They do call the least effectual, largely ceremonial legislative branch the Senate, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is a parliamentary system in which the members of government are subject to the same laws, conditions and services as the people they govern.
Naturally, when we’re playing a “what if” game we set up conditions that have wide spread changes. Not unlike when George Bush set off to claim Iraq’s oil and destabilized the entire Middle East. We just don’t know what we set in motion. But having lived in the US and Canada, I have opinions about the US that are tempered by a more independent lens and I continue to think we would be better served by a more community-based and less aggressive approach.
What an interesting thought experiment, though I think the case against the revolution makes too many assumptions about the arc of history as it relates to the revolution and to early America. It’s quite possible that the lack of a revolution or it’s defeat would have led to an even worse alternate history for each three points.
1. Slavery. We must remember slavery was becoming unprofitable around the end of the 18th century. It could have died out anyway were it not for the clothing industry and the cotton gin. These developments spurred on the flagging institution. Had the British kept the colonies, they would have been tempted to keep slavery for the same reasons the US did (indeed there was talk in London to help the CSA protect slave supplied cotton). Even if they didn’t keep slavery, there is still a good chance they would have let the colonies institute some sort of apartheid as they allowed in South Africa.
2. Native Americans. Although the British and Canadians treated Native Americans better than the Americans did, if the British had a greater investment in American cotton industry and accompanying western expansion, they might have followed similar policies to the United States. Certainly the British engaged in aggressive colonial practices in Africa against natives where there was a greater economic stake (such as the Zulu Wars).
3. Parliamentary System. As has been mentioned already, the American Revolution was a global watershed moment for democracy. There is a good chance that aristocratic systems would have been emboldened by a Crown victory and would have been able to consolidate their positions in Britain, France, and the Americas. This could have set back any movement for democratic reforms by several decades.
Of course no one can know what would have happened in alternate history. But the revolution was a positive development for liberalism and the western world. A lot of the problems cited in the argument were historical forces would have had immense impact regardless.
the revolution was a positive development for liberalism and the western world
I agree. And as revolutions go, it was remarkably non-bloody and non-hateful and non-selfish. When I think of the people who participated in the revolution and through the writing of the Constitution, I am amazed — it is easy for me to conclude that God was at work in it. The whole world is better for it.
It is asinine to think that the world would be so much better today if the American Revolution had not occurred. Even Canada is better today than it would be if the revolution had never occurred.
The above article, written by an immigrant to the United States, might be of interest to those among whom “it is fashionable to disdain these occasions, and, in so doing, to treat the past as if it were wholly disconnected from the present.” It was written by an immigrant, not a born-and-bred American. The author (an immigrant) avers that the American Revolution changed to world forever and for the better.
Every governing system has its pros and cons.
It is unfortunate what happened to Native peoples all over the world when other races and cultures took over. To be fair, in other countries, the people fought with one another for power and did horrible things to their own. Some governments wiped out millions of their own, and it still happens today.
The British Empire did not outlaw slavery in some of its countries until the late 1880s – early 1900s.
African and Middle Eastern countries did not officially abolish slavery until the late 1990s into the 2000s. Why did African countries take so long to do so? Yet there are those that keep bashing the United States over slavery.
Every race and culture has been enslaved over the centuries. The Arabs were the most brutal enslavers.
Slavery is still ongoing to this day that no country is aggressively pursuing.
America was a beacon of hope, the only country where anyone could be anything. Now the traitors within government and their masters, along with useful idiot citizens, are hell bent on destroying this great country.
American citizens got too complacent and now we are paying for it.
/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/50008191/GettyImages-121321782.0.0_2.0.0.jpg)
Wheat & Tares 
Ol’ George Washington whooped that king,
And the eagle squalled, “Let freedom ring!”
Wouldn’t it have been better if the Visigoths never sacked Rome? Or if the Muslims never conquered Constantinople?
In my view, the world is far better because of the United States of America. I am not ashamed of our noble experiment, of government of the people, by the people, and for the people. I appreciate the United States’s friendship with Great Britain, but I don’t want to bow and scrape before a hereditary sovereign and a noble classes. May God bless America.
I’m a bit of a royalist by nature. I like many things about Parliamentary government and constitutional monarchy, and agree that a hypothetical America which had behaved more like Canada COULD have resulted in a somewhat more peaceful outcome.
But in the end, we have to judge the founding fathers from their own perspective. They were espousing noble and progressive ideals, ideals that would soon sweep over the world. Whether or not those ideals would have later swept over the world in a more peaceful way than the American way, is not a question we should use to judge the founding fathers. They wanted freedom for themselves, not just their children. It is fundamental to the American character to be at the forefront of change and transformation. We wanted the freedom to work out our OWN challenges, our OWN issues with racism, etc., not Britain’s. That is the important thing. The autonomy of the American spirit is what was important, even if the American spirit was a bit rough around the edges, and the British spirit arguably more civilised. It is this sense of autonomy which has been fundamental to the character of the American experiment and all they have accomplished (or failed at) since then. Take away this sense of autonomy, and you lose the vitality of the American dream.
Additionally, democracies like Australia and Canada got to work out their own democratisation from the advantage of having witnessed America’s transformation. We don’t know if other democracies would have been so successful without the pioneering efforts of America to create their own. If America had been successfully subdued by the British, how do we know that they wouldn’t have extended their colonial imperialism even further and longer in their other colonies?
The articles make some interesting points, but they have one big problem: we don’t know what would have happened if things had happened differently. When I was doing some research for this blog post: http://melissamortensen.com/blog/org-chart-confusion-american-revolution/ I came across an interesting idea. Unfortunately I can’t remember where I read it (the post was originally written last year and posted on a blog that I have taken down), but the general idea is that the American colonies were part of the first British Empire and it was because of the American Revolution that many of the traits we currently associate with the UK came into being. The British learned from their mistakes and corrected them moving forward.
Another issue is that in the 1770s Parliamentary districts were in desperate need of redistricting. Wealthy men (often, but not always lords) controlled many of them to the point that they could basically choose who would fill “their” seat(s) in the House of Commons. This was justified on the idea that really all members of Parliament (Lords and Commons) really represented everyone in the entire empire, and would rise above petty local concerns. The Founding Fathers wanted representation in Parliament if Parliament was going to pass laws for them. If that was granted, a lot of very powerful men would be facing uncomfortable questions about why they were so opposed to redistricting (which eventually happened in the early 1800s).
The American Revolution introduced new ideas about the people’s ability to rule themselves rather than depend on the elite to make decisions for them – another argument that the European powers made at that time. Even with the U.S.’s current flaws I think that we would be looking at a very different world that I personally think would be worse in many ways if the American Revolution hadn’t happened.
P.S. I think that part of the issue is that many people don’t want to accept that flawed human beings like the American Founding Fathers, or for that matter, the Church’s early leaders, can accomplish great things and that a human’s flaws don’t necessarily cancel out the good that that person does.
Melissa has some very valid points I couldn’t help thinking about as I read the OP. It’s a great thought experiment, though. George Washington may have been a wealthy landowner, but make no mistake, he was not nobility. Had England not lost the Colonies, would they have landed where they are now? It seems unlikely. I also wondered if the retention of the Colonies would have resulted in earlier emancipation of the slaves or one of these two other outcomes:
1 – a delay of the Revolution until it came to a head over abolition OR
2 – a delay in emancipation in England who would have continued to benefit from the slavery extant in the Colonies.
Sorry, one other thing to mention, the plight of Native Americans. I don’t know the stats on such a thing, but it wasn’t just human acts of genocide that led to their greater demise in the US, but in a warmer climate and where there were larger populations, their vulnerability to the European diseases that decimated their communities would have had much worse effects than in the colder climate of Canada. Now, we all know that early germ warfare was also part of the inhumanity rained down on the Native Americans, but even without intentional harm, disease wiped out large populations and further isolated other ones. I’m not sure how tenable their position was given the role of disease.
Having lived in Canada I am struck that they accomplished everything the US has without revolution. And, in the process, they formed a democratic parliamentary system of government and maintained Commonwealth status which enables them to travel freely and young people to work throughout the Commonwealth.
It seems to me what the US has accomplished comes mostly from natural resources and the natural protection of 2 oceans. We might be a more cooperative, community-minded and less militaristic society if we had been patient and negotiated our independence.
alice,
Maybe Canada achieved everything it has <because of the United States?
Without the American Revolution, the French Revolution is likewise called into question, not that it was any great prize by comparison as revolutions go.
Yes, the American Revolution didn’t occur in a vacuum. The French Revolution is a direct result of the American Revolution. Do they have a parliamentary government like England? I don’t know the answer to that question. Furthermore, I do think that Canada’s form of government used the US as a model. If there was no US model, what would France and Canada look like today? It’s an impossible question to answer.
ji, congrats on a VERY American answer. No doubt India, Australia, Singapore,South Africa, etc (there are more than 50 of them) all owe their independence to the American Revolution too.
Canadian government is parliamentary. They do call the least effectual, largely ceremonial legislative branch the Senate, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is a parliamentary system in which the members of government are subject to the same laws, conditions and services as the people they govern.
Naturally, when we’re playing a “what if” game we set up conditions that have wide spread changes. Not unlike when George Bush set off to claim Iraq’s oil and destabilized the entire Middle East. We just don’t know what we set in motion. But having lived in the US and Canada, I have opinions about the US that are tempered by a more independent lens and I continue to think we would be better served by a more community-based and less aggressive approach.
What an interesting thought experiment, though I think the case against the revolution makes too many assumptions about the arc of history as it relates to the revolution and to early America. It’s quite possible that the lack of a revolution or it’s defeat would have led to an even worse alternate history for each three points.
1. Slavery. We must remember slavery was becoming unprofitable around the end of the 18th century. It could have died out anyway were it not for the clothing industry and the cotton gin. These developments spurred on the flagging institution. Had the British kept the colonies, they would have been tempted to keep slavery for the same reasons the US did (indeed there was talk in London to help the CSA protect slave supplied cotton). Even if they didn’t keep slavery, there is still a good chance they would have let the colonies institute some sort of apartheid as they allowed in South Africa.
2. Native Americans. Although the British and Canadians treated Native Americans better than the Americans did, if the British had a greater investment in American cotton industry and accompanying western expansion, they might have followed similar policies to the United States. Certainly the British engaged in aggressive colonial practices in Africa against natives where there was a greater economic stake (such as the Zulu Wars).
3. Parliamentary System. As has been mentioned already, the American Revolution was a global watershed moment for democracy. There is a good chance that aristocratic systems would have been emboldened by a Crown victory and would have been able to consolidate their positions in Britain, France, and the Americas. This could have set back any movement for democratic reforms by several decades.
Of course no one can know what would have happened in alternate history. But the revolution was a positive development for liberalism and the western world. A lot of the problems cited in the argument were historical forces would have had immense impact regardless.
the revolution was a positive development for liberalism and the western world
I agree. And as revolutions go, it was remarkably non-bloody and non-hateful and non-selfish. When I think of the people who participated in the revolution and through the writing of the Constitution, I am amazed — it is easy for me to conclude that God was at work in it. The whole world is better for it.
It is asinine to think that the world would be so much better today if the American Revolution had not occurred. Even Canada is better today than it would be if the revolution had never occurred.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/437440/4th-of-july-america-founding-changed-history-forever
The above article, written by an immigrant to the United States, might be of interest to those among whom “it is fashionable to disdain these occasions, and, in so doing, to treat the past as if it were wholly disconnected from the present.” It was written by an immigrant, not a born-and-bred American. The author (an immigrant) avers that the American Revolution changed to world forever and for the better.
Every governing system has its pros and cons.
It is unfortunate what happened to Native peoples all over the world when other races and cultures took over. To be fair, in other countries, the people fought with one another for power and did horrible things to their own. Some governments wiped out millions of their own, and it still happens today.
The British Empire did not outlaw slavery in some of its countries until the late 1880s – early 1900s.
African and Middle Eastern countries did not officially abolish slavery until the late 1990s into the 2000s. Why did African countries take so long to do so? Yet there are those that keep bashing the United States over slavery.
Every race and culture has been enslaved over the centuries. The Arabs were the most brutal enslavers.
Slavery is still ongoing to this day that no country is aggressively pursuing.
America was a beacon of hope, the only country where anyone could be anything. Now the traitors within government and their masters, along with useful idiot citizens, are hell bent on destroying this great country.
American citizens got too complacent and now we are paying for it.