As I have said multiple times in this thread, it doesn’t particular surprise or concern me that the British gloss over the American Revolution.
It does surprise and concern me a bit more that as adults they don’t seem to think it’s of much interest either. In fact, until this thread, several posters seemed to be unaware of its connection to and philosophical influence on the French Revolution. Not the first time I’ve encountered this gap in learning on the SDMB.
As for what kids are taught, I think it’s telling that Nava’s teachers glossed over Spain’s loss of its own American colonies (even though that was an objectively important event in Spanish history). I suspect that most nations tend to approach their own history with a sort of triumphalism (or at least national pride) and episodes that interfere with that storyline tend to get de-emphasized.
The War of 1812 is a good example in the US. When I was a kid, that was taught as an American victory, with the Battle of New Orleans providing the exclamation point. As an adult, I am able to see that the outcome of that war was ambiguous at best. Obviously, the war is taught in Canada in a completely different way (and judging from the posts in this thread seems to be a big part of Canadian identity and national pride).
Yeah, the Jacobite cause was never really popular outside the Highlands. Plenty (the majority?) of Scots were pretty damned happy about the merger with England. The Darien Scheme, anybody?
Maybe I shouldn’t have brought up Scotland as an example. I had added it more or less as an afterthought.
And maybe I should learn some more about Canadian history, I subject I know little about (1867? Really? That early? I always assumed that Canada fought on the Allied side in WW1 because it was still part of the Empire, like Australia and New Zealand).
Still, I’m not sure that American independence was a given. Nationalism wasn’t really a factor on the world stage until the latter half of the 19th Century, and even then, if Britain had truly looked at the Americans as equals rather than as a resource, they might have held onto the colonies much, much longer.
(A war would certainly have broken out over slavery, though; probably the southern states against the rest of the Empire.)
I’m not so sure about that. The imbalance between the southern states and the rest of the empire would have been so great as to possibly dissuade such a rebellion (remembering that the southern states would have had to face, not only the northern states, but the rest of the empire; remembering again that the southern states were historically hoping for the Brits to come in on their side; also that they were, in part, inspired by the example of the Revolution).
Indeed, one of the points made by G.M. Frasier in his Flashman books was that the net result of the Revolution was to make the Civil War more likely; without it, the US would probably have become independant anyway, as did Canada, without war, less than a century later, complete with all of the civil and political rights and freedoms the Americans rightly hold dear; and slavery would have probably been abolished in the 1830s as it was throughout the empire, without a horrible and murderous Civil War.
In short, the Revolution was a bit of a mistake; it created a caged tiger - slavery - that could not simply be abolished with a decree, because the south and north were not so obviously mismatched as to deter the very thought of further “revolutions”.
Interesting argument. By the same token, you could wonder whether the French Revolution would have occurred without the American revolution to precede it.
Canada was still part of the Empire, holding Dominion status from 1867 (perhaps not for all the current provinces though, Newfoundland certainly did its own thing for a long time after). It really needs a Canadian to tease out the complexities.
Gut feeling says that it would have - the people of France really were getting shafted - but the American Revolution didn’t hurt at all as an inspiration, even if the circumstances were somewhat different.
Well, it’s a matter of definition. HM the Queen is still the Head of State of Canada. Canada “became independent” in 1867 in the sense that it was constituted as a nation-state, and began to be recognized as such by other governments.
Canada did not become legislatively independent until the Statute of Westminster (sometime in the interwar period), and did not gain absolute control of its own Constitution until the Canada Act of 1982.
Of course, the French Revolution wasn’t all that important; there were still three emperors and three and a half kings to get through before France actually became a democracy.
No, I don’t think that’s it in this case. I’m pretty certain that the main reason why British schools tend not to bother teaching much about the American Revolution is that they don’t tend to bother teaching much eighteenth-century military or political history of any sort. Even - or indeed especially - those events that lend themselves to jingoistic interpretation.
It’s not as if British schools are teaching the great ‘successes’ of eighteenth-century British imperialism (Chatham, the Seven Years’ War, Wolfe at Quebec, Clive in India), but then passing over the loss of America in embarassment. No, it’s that none of those subjects get much attention. And if they do, it’s often because some of the children will be descendants of those who were conquered, which also means that no one now tries teaching those episodes in simple triumphialist terms. Britain is too multicultural for its imperial history to be celebrated uncritically.
Of course, there was a time when the conventional British school-textbook view was that George III was indeed largely to blame. Defeat in America was required to turn the would-be tyrant into a reluctant constitutional monarch, making this something to be celebrated as a major step in the glorious rise of British democracy. Not that any serious historian has thought that in the past eighty years.
I don’t think multiculturalism has much to do with it. I was the only student at my prep school in Dorset who wasn’t lily-white, and we didn’t really cover Empire at all - not India, South Africa, the Americas or anywhere outside Europe, really. Hell, even in Europe we barely studied anything that happened after 1651.
I didn’t even know what the Crimea was until we did Charge of the Light Brigade in English some years later.
The French Revolution wasn’t important for making France a democracy. It was important because it brought a whole ton of new concepts and ideas into play. For example, the French citizen soldier pretty quickly made professional armies obsolete, forcing other countries change the nature of the relationship between individual and government. Similarly, the French Revolution’s ideology — not fully the same as the American one — was the dawn of ethnic nationalism as a political force. That type of nationalism soon dominated European politics, a position it kept until after World War II. The Reign of Terror is sometimes regarded as the father of totalitarianism.
IOW, the French Revolution was a watershed moment in European — hence, worldwide — politics.
PS. Yes, I know that these points are very much contestable. The point is just that the French Revolution was really important.
As has been said, RickJay was a bit imprecise here. We can’t really date Canada’s “independence” to 1867; both it and the construction of the Canadian national identity(ies) were an extended process. Canada fought on the Allied side in World War I because the UK was at the time still responsible for Canadian foreign policy, but by the time World War II happened Canada declared war on Germany by itself. On the other hand, in terms of domestic policy, Canada had legislative assemblies since 1791, actual home rule (responsible government) since 1848, while 1867 is the year when it became a federal state, which is still the current paradigm of separation of powers.
As for the Canadian national identity, it’s fair to say that at the time of the Conquest (1760) there was already an existing Canadian identity separate from the French identity. It took some time for British immigrants to Canada to develop a separate identity, but the Rebellions of 1837-1839 show that by then it certainly existed, at least among liberals. On the other hand, ask Muffin and he’ll tell you that when he was a kid, his parents still saw themselves as British first and foremost. So it’s hard to actually date the birth of Canada.
Indeed. And my history class (in Canada) only covered the American Revolutionary War as part of the various revolutions in the 18th and 19th centuries that gave rise to the modern nation-state – another very large topic.
As you pointed out, in part it occurred because the French king went broke paying for the American Revolution … But I suspect you mean ‘as inspired by’.
Which raises a whole new topic: why were the two revolutions so very different? The American Revolution was, in all, a very sedate affair; aside from some nasty anti-Loyalist stuff, lacking in the sort of terrors we come to associate with modern-day revolutions like the French - secret police, the Guillotine, mass executions, emergence of nasty dictators, etc.
I know Washington scoops a lot of the credit for this, but I think something rather more widespread was at work - the American Revolution was not really one which created class or ethnic hatreds; leaders of both sides thought of themselves, basically, as reasonably similar and believing in many of the same values; it was the apparent refusal of the Brits to accord the colonials this basic de facto equality de jure which was one of the main causes of the Revolution - the Revolution was not fought to change American society, but to gain for that society a recognition that it believed it merited, based on the concepts of rights that the Brits believed in (mostly) themselves. There were plenty of Brits at the time who sympathized with this ambition.
Also, America already had grass-root democratic institutions in place before the revolution, which evolved peacefully into a full national government. Whereas the French had the monarchy and nothing else; once they tore that down, they were left with a vaccum - and a vaccum bring chaos.
Oh, there’s no doubting that, of course. I don’t think anybody is saying it’s not important history, it’s whether it is relevant in comparison to every other world changing piece of history. I mean, imagine what the world would be like if Rome hadn’t adopted Christianity, or if Britain hadn’t bothered colonising America in the first place.
I’m not sure if there’s very much to gain from a British perspective in going in depth with the American revolutionary war, no more than anything else. At sixth form college (age 16-17) you may well study some of it. If I recall correctly you did study some USA history at A Level, so you may well go into that, at least as a precursor.
The simple truth is, there are far more relevant things to world history from a British perspective than the Revolutionary war. This well and truly may be quite impossible to appreciate from a USA-centric point of view. Which is fair enough.
No, no - I completely agree with what you’ve said - it’s not hard at all to appreciate. I think we’re on the same page. There just seem to be others who think it’s completely irrelevant. I’ve never advocated going in-depth (depending on how you define it) - my suggestion was 2 or 3 lectures, which I wouldn’t count as very in-depth and I think is quite reasonable. It’s similar to the amount of time we in the US would put into the Magna Carta’s history.
