"We Could Be Canadians" Topic

"No War? On the Fourth of July, Santa Barbara unfurled the Stars and Stripes, burned hot dogs, swigged beer, and celebrated July 4 at the top of our patriotic lungs, but just think:

What if there were no Independence Day?

Not because we lost the Revolutionary War, but because there wasn't one.

As Adam Gopnik writes in The New Yorker ("We Could Have Been Canada"), instead of a bloody, brutal, eight-year war, there could have been an evolution from Britain, and slavery might have ended more peacefully and sooner, as in the rest of the British Empire.

Without slavery, presto, no horrible Civil War. "The Revolution, this argument might run, was a needless and brutal bit of slaveholders' panic mixed with Enlightenment [nonsense], producing a country that was always marked for violence and disruption and demagogy…"
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Amicalement
Armand

Would they have had the same drive to extended the colonies further West to the Mississippi and beyond? Would the monarchy have supported or encouraged that?

And if they ever did, would they have found a France and Spain so agreeable to sell or give up all their claims as easily in this alternate timeline?

Or if England had embraced its own version of a Manifest Destiny of settlement in the Americas, how much of the Caribbean and South America could have been brought into the empire? Would the empire have even bothered colonizing distant Australia? Would some part of the Americas been its "Australia" in some ways? How much further could the empire have extended before "imploding" in some way under all that weight?

Would the 19th Century have started off with a figure like Napoleon in France no matter what? Or in Germany?

How much would Russia have ventured into the North American continent?

Fast forward … would the Germans have taken England during the Great War in a year or so? If so, what are the chances that the psycho Hitler would have found it so easy to rise to any level?

In this reality, could England have spawned a "Lenin" there instead and could the Russian people have been the ones to find a less "revolutionary" solution to their monarchy situation, perhaps with a constitutional monarchy of its own?

Dan

Hard to say. One reason why Canada was allowed by Britain to evolve into independence gradually and peacefully was that they had learned the lessons of the American War of Independence and did not want to repeat the mistakes that led to war. Canada became a testing ground for self-government within the British Empire of the so-called "white Dominions". Would that have happened so smoothly without the example of the AWI?
Also, perhaps the power of the Southern slave owning colonies within the British Empire would have delayed the abolition of slavery for decades?

Why so? The much richer slave-owning plantations of the West Indies didn't.

Who knows?

Perhaps the slavery of one race would have eventually morphed into a Late Roman or Russian-style serfdom condition for not only that one race but for almost everyone else in the population as well. Well, at least until a British equivalent of a Lenin rose up and made everyone a slave to a Marxist State instead of to the nobles.

Dan

Interesting questions Dan!.

Amicalement
Armand

Oh my God--you mean we might all have to be polite and orderly! But seriously, much of the above nonsense just reflects what decades of liberal dominance of the educational system has produced. It seems to have escaped all of you that the Revolution started in Massachusetts, not South Carolina, and had very little to do with slavery because the British were not pushing to abolish it at that time. I might add that the economic importance of slavery was then in relative decline within the future United States. The cotton gin had not been invented, so cotton production was not a very big deal yet. And growing tobacco rapidly exhausts soil, in the absence of synthetic fertilizers, so production was declining in the traditional plantation areas. Where slavery had an influence was in the compromise that produced the U.S. Constitution, years later, not in relation to the American Revolution.

Why, there would be hockey teams in Florida!
Oh. Never mind.

I am so tired of the everlasting liberal conviction that if only the mean, nasty United States would just vanish, the entire history of the world would be just as they want.

OK, Gropnik, have it your way. British taxes--heavier on newspaper than anything in Britain, by the way, specifically to discourage them--and restrictions on North American commerce and industry go into effect without a word of protest. The British do the obvious thing and load the place up with placeholders, the same way they already had Ireland. They may or may not abolish the slave trade and later slavery, because they now have a larger bloc of slave-holders bribing Parliament. But they certainly do what they can to maintain the system under which the colonies provide raw materials for British home industries. When World War I breaks out, there is no US industrial base to provide the Allies with ammunition. If they somehow dodge that bullet, when World War II breaks out, there there are no North American foundries and shipyards, much less aircraft factories. Hitler wins, democracy is discredited, and the Nazi model of government is adopted over much of the world.

Are you happy now, Mr. Gropnik?

There is nothing inevitable in History… before it happens. Counterfactuals are entertaining speculations, although when well done they can be very helpful to understand why it happened what it happened.

Taking the idea of no AWI seriously we need to address, first of all, the "why it didn't happen", before speculating what consequences it had. We need to imagine plausible scenarios. Perhaps that after the Boston Tea Party affair, His Majesty Government decided to address colonists' grievances? Maybe guaranteeing them some kind of self-government? If that would have been the case, and the bullet of a war in America would have been dodged, then what? Would have France avoided the Revolution? Or the financial crisis brought up by the expenses taken for financing the war in America was not that relevant a factor in the revolutionary uprising and it would have happened regardless the developments in America?

You can build the alternative timeline you wish. We don't know -we can't know- if the USA would have become Canada. It could have gone a separate way later on, maybe during some war between Britain and France American colonists would have decided to rebel and establish their own separated nation. Perhaps even as part a global struggle between Britain and, assuming the French Revolution happened as it did, Napoleonic France.

The Stamp Act had pretty well hardened the lines already. Not just the tax itself, nor the imposition of the tax by Parliament (rather than Colonial Assemblies). But the completely idiotic provision that the stamps had to be paid for in hard money, and British hard money at that.

Hard money was uncommon in the colonies, and most of what was available was NOT British. In fact, the most common coin was the Maria Theresa thaler (because that was what the Indian subsidies were paid in). Second most common was Spanish coinage, followed by Dutch and French.

Most trade in the various Colonies was carried on by barter or with paper, issued either by Colonial governments or banks. The average Colonial might live out his entire life without coming into possession of British currency. And only rarely would he see any other kind.

Hard money traded at a significant premium, and the introduction of the Stamp Act pushed the premium for British coinage even higher. While it does not seem that it was Parliament's intention to bankrupt the Colonial middle and working classes, it sure looked that way to the victims.

People like Gropnik either overlook or are ignorant of the fact that the Revolution did not start out aimed at the King, but against Parliamentary interference in Colonial governance.

Rmaker

You are right, but the nature of what ifs is looking after the turning points and analyzing the alternatives. In your scenario, for instance, what if the Parliament would have chosen to accept local currency as payment, instead forcing the colonists to use British currency? Would have sparked the revolt against Britain? Or would have the events follow less violent paths? I am not totally convinced that would have been the case. After all, even after the Stamp Act was repealed, the unrest in the colonies continued to shimmer under the surface of apparent calm. What the Stamp Act did was to show the colonists the strength of they had when acting in concert; from there to think in the creation of independent country it wasn't such a stretch of imagination.