Also, how is it taught in schools? I’ve recently begun to wonder about this. Things tend to be taught and percieved differently on different sides.
I was never taught about the war of Indipendence, I had a choice between Geography and History, I chose the former. I suspect the people who chose the latter learned mostly about World War 1 and 2.
Before we had the choice we learned about Kings and Queens and medieval Britain.
I never paid one ounce of attention, so maybe we did learn about AWI without my conscious knowledge.
Since it was such a long time ago, I doubt there is any need to insert bias into the teaching of it.
I am not a Brit, but…
When I was young I watched the Schoolhouse Rock series. It was one of my favourite Saturday morning cartoons. There was one about the American Revolution that cast King George in a very bad light. When I took an American History class in college, I heard a different spin. England was spending a lot of money to maintain the Colonies. In their view, the Colonists needed to help with the expenses – to pay their fair share. In this history class I began to think that maybe the Colonists weren’t really being treated so poorly and that they were just being greedy. There was also the suggestion that the British did not particularly want to win the war, or at least they didn’t think the Colonies were worth all it would take to hold them. England and France were ever the adversaries, and the Colonies apparently were expensive to maintain.
It’s been a while, so I don’t know how accurate my memory is on this subject; but unlike when I was a child, I can see that there were two sides to the disagreement.
Good riddance to bad rubbish? I’m kidding. I had a class with an American history class with a student who’d been raised in England and this subject did come up. Basically, he pointed out that they taught that there were a few inaccuracies in our view of the whole matter, but basically glossed over a lot of the issues by saying that it was politically expedient to allow the US to win.
While in England, I asked a British man on a train about this. He shrugged and said that it basically boiled down to “Colonies come, and colonies go,” without any particular emphasis.
I don’t think people think about it much. After all India was the focus of the empire, and its struggle for independence was much more painful and recent. In an average day in Britain you meet far more people from India / Pakistan / Bangladesh than you do Americans, and you are challenged to think about what we were doing there. Political differences with other white people 220 years ago aren’t really in the same league.
“Well done, chaps” is how I see it.
We were taught about it at school, though not in great detail. It’s a very long time ago, and nobody’s particularly sore about it. We lost an entire empire over the course of two centuries, and the US was simply the first to go.
The head of my College here in the UK was discussing history with me, and (perhaps just to get a rise out of me) referred to the American Revolution as “that insignificant uprising of the Western Colonies.” I’d never heard the States called the Western Colonies before, so I got quite a kick out of that.
*How is the American Revolution taught in schools? *
The short answer is that the American Revolution isn’t much taught in British schools. If C18[sup]th[/sup] and early C19[sup]th[/sup] history is covered it is much more likely to concentrate on the Napoleonic Wars and the behaviour of the Georgian monarchs than Britain’s relationship with the nascent USA. If the Empire is being studied it’s much more likely to be a study of Britain’s relationship with India and the African colonies.
There are options in Key Stage 3 of the National Curriculum for History (scroll down to items 10 and 12), but those are only options and they have to compete with other elements of the course. The National Curriculum attempts to teach kids how to study history as much as it teaches a list of events.
When I was at primary school in the ’70s, we made a study of the slave trade, but that’s because my home town was heavily involved in it. We barely touched on the American Revolution and it didn’t get more coverage than, say, the French Revolution.
The trouble with history is that they keep making more of it every day and kids can’t be expected to learn it all. The American Revolution also played much less of a role in creating the country I live in than in creating the country the OP lives in, so you’d have to expect a contrast in emphasis.
*What do British people think about it? *
It always comes as a surprise to me when an American I meet IRL assumes the Revolution would be fresh in my mind or that British attitudes to the USA today might be coloured by regret, shame or resentment that we lost a war against you two centuries ago. We’ve had a lot of wars.
The only time I’d expect the American Revolution to be mentioned at all it would be when the subject is raised by an American and then there’d probably be some jokes along the lines of “good riddance” or “you’ve never been the same since we left”, with no offence intended. Most British people feel it made sense under the prevailing circumstances and that if we’d been living on the west side of the Atlantic we’d have been fully in favour of it.
The 4[sup]th[/sup] of July is another excuse to have a beer and a barbecue, not a day of national recrimination.
Odd. From what I recall of elementary school, the focus on the Revolution, at least the opening phase of it, focused on some atrocities commited (or alleged to have been commited) by British Army troops against civilians, such as the Boston Massacre and the incident in Concord.
There was also some attention payed to the fact that King George sort of snubbed any political attempts made by the nascent Americans to solve the issues.
It’s always interesting to see the other side of things.
Like Johnny LA, I was taught as a child the very basic: Brits are evil, Colonies good and nothing more. But when I got into high school and college, I also began to see the Colonies as a bunch of whiners.
I was once taught that the Boston Massacre was provoked by the Colonists, and that the British had no choice but to shoot because the crowd in Boston were throwing bricks and other heavy objects. It’s called the Boston Massacre because of propaganda on the side of the Colonies to prove how bad the British were.
Yes. I think it’s already been mentioned in another thread that Britain had military involvement in several parts of the world between 1770 and 1815 and it was felt that the best forces couldn’t be spared for the Revolutionary Wars while the French Empire was a growing threat.
The Boston Massacre; the incident in Concord
As far as atrocities being committed by British troops against civilians are concerned, sadly it wouldn’t be the first or last time. The same can be said for any standing army – the British at Amritsar, for example, or Bloody Sunday in Ireland. Or the Americans at My Lai or the accusations made against servicemen in Japan in recent years, and many, many more incidents. Maybe the al-Shulaa market massacre will be added to the depressing list?
It’s interesting and healthy that people are able to see these incidents from more than one viewpoint though. That’s always easier with the passing of time of course, but it’s also connected to what I was saying that the National Curriculum teaches how to study history, which should not be just rote absorption/regurgitation of what a teacher reads out from a text book.
We never studied it at school. Before O-level (exams you studied for in the equivalent of 9th & 10th grades), we ploughed through time from Stone Age up until the Tudors. Maybe we ran out of time, as at O-level we studied 1789 - 1914. (1789 = start of French Revolution). Mind you, I don’t recall the War of 1812 getting a mention either - it was pretty trivial stuff compared to that Napoleon guy. In fact, I didn’t know the Wo1812 had even happened until I came to live in the US.
As other posters have stated, I have never come across any strong feelings in British people about the American Revolution - it was one of many colonies getting their independence and it happened a long time ago. In fact, I can’t think of resentment against any country for leaving the empire, whether peacably or through war. It was a phase in our history. It happened. It’s done.
In my Histoire du Québec et du Canada course, we mostly learned about its effect on Canadian nationbuilding - loyalists, American attempts to get Canada to revolt as well, et.seq.
My own research dug up the interesting notion that one of the American grievances was that Quebec had been allowed to keep its language, religion, seigneurial system and civil laws after it was conquered.
The interesting thing about this is that the British troops fired, in self-defense, only after they had been pelted by rocks and hunks of ice by a motley rabble. The soldiers in question were duly tried, defended and acquitted. The rest is propaganda.
To put the American colonies’ uprising in perspective, try the very readable The First Salute by Barbara Tuchman.
I am a loyal American, but a lot of the simplified and watered-down “history” we get taught in school does not give a true picture. Once you put it in global perspective, the version our British cousins are reporting here is probably more accurate.
Frankly, I think the Brits have a lot more history to go over than we do.
Interestingly, many British people, when they hear I am from Boston, will make a reference to the Boston Tea Party, always in a friendly way, of course.
IANA Brit either, but I’ve lived in the UK for a while, and thus heard all the “Good riddance” jokes. However, I’m not sure one should expect a comprehensive analysis of a major geo-political event within the confines of one catchy '70’s pop tune.**
You’re right in saying that the Colonists weren’t really being treated as badly as some accounts make out. What Americans tend to forget is that what was pissing off the Colonists was not that they were being taxed, but that they were being taxed without having any say in the matter (“Taxation without Representation”, remember?).
I don’t know how much the Brits did or didn’t want the Colonies, but they certainly wanted it enough to hire a lot of Prussians to fight for them. I’ve also had occasion to read through some Parliamentary bills from the period (don’t ask – I was looking something else up in the British Library) and came across one in which it was proposed that perhaps if the American Colonies were granted some tax relief they might abandon their “Insurrection”. The fact that it took them until 1778 to notice that the the Colonists were a little miffed about something suggests that Parliament hasn’t changed much in the intervening years. 
I remember doing the American War of Independence in school- I would have been about ten or eleven at the time (first person to say “So it was practically current affairs then?” gets a virtual poke in the eye.) As I recall, there was no particular blame-laying on either side, just a (fairly superficial) discussion of the “taxation without representation” issue. It certainly isn’t anything the average Briton in the street is going to get worked up about.
(jr8, IIRC, actually the specific tax burdens complained of were mostly revoked before the Revolution broke out. By the time of the Boston Tea Party, I think tea was the only commodity that was still being specially taxed … But by that point, the whole taxation issue had become a point of principle that the colonies weren’t going to back down on.)
I think you will find more Brits still irked about the Normans, especially up around here, where the ‘harrying of the north’ is only very slightly skimmed over and leads many Britons to believe that UK history is very biased toward matters concerning the south of the country and tends to ignore serious events elsewhere.(a point that the Welsh would largely agree with too)