How would the British Empire have developed if it had not lost the American colonies?

Great Debates
1

The Two Georges, by Harry Turtledove and Richard Dreyfuss, is set in an alternate history where the American colonial leaders worked out their differences with the British crown amicably. In 1999, the British Empire includes what are now the U.S. and Canada (except for Russian Alaska), plus Australia, New Zealand, India, much of Africa, etc.

I wonder if it would have worked out that way. I mean, with a whole continent to colonize, virgin and rich in resources and sparsely inhabited by (relatively) easily-defeated American Indians, would Britain have bothered with India or Africa or Oz? And would it have had the men and resources to spare for all that conquering?

(I have this image of Rudyard Kipling being born and raised somewhere west of St. Louis . . . imagine the novels and poetry he would’ve written!)

Also, how would inclusion in the Empire of the Americans, with all their radical ideas about “liberty,” have affected Britain’s political evolution?

2

I believe GB was already involved with India before the American Revolution. Not sure about OZ.

But if I recall, Oz was a dumping ground for GB’s malcontents, right? If the America’s (and India) were the “jewels” in GB’s colonial crown, they would still need their dumping ground. (After all, historically, GB didn’t dump those malcontents in India…)

That depends on the immigration policies GB has for it’s colonies. If they needed the manpower bad enough, they might have had liberal immigration policies, like the US historically had. (Land grants to settlers, etc.)

Ummm. I dunno enough about the development of British domestic policies and politics to give that a guess…

But with the Americans as a pool of manpower to draw on in 1800 or so, would Britain have been able to better handle Napoleon? Possibly. With Nappy out of the picture earlier, maybe the histories of Italy, Austria, and Germany been different.

3

You definately would have seen much slower settlement of Australia. One of the big reasons Australia was picked as a penal colony was because Georgia was no longer available.

As far as America’s “radical ideas about ‘liberty’”, they weren’t really all that radical. Most of the ideas in America were English in origin, and a lot of the ideas shouted about in Boston would have been echoed in London. Britain was probably the most liberal state in Europe. Most of the American anger was that they weren’t represented, and to hold on to America, the Americans probably would have to be given a Parliament, similar to the one Ireland had. If they had been, it’s likely a lot of the unrest would have died down.

4

Australia was fragmentally (very) explored by James Cook in 1770. The first colonization fleet sailed in 1787. Britain had gained control of India as a result of the Battle of Plassey in 1757. So they still would have been actively exploiting India no matter what happened in America. Oz, I’m not so sure of. Not a lot of readily-available resources there, not compared to the Indian sub-continent.

5

My usual thought on this subject is that the Third Reich wouldn’t have lasted as long; however, WWI would have been over much sooner, so there might not have been WWII in Europe.

6

For that matter, would the French Revolution even happened without the American Revolution, the French aid, Lafayette, etc. ? It defininitely wouldn’t have happened in 1789. Napoleon wouldn’t have had the patronage and opportunity to advance as fast as he did in a non-Revolutionary French Army. Without Napoleon, the German states wouldn’t have unified when they did (ditto Italy), thereby throwing WW1 into doubt.

7

OTOH, it took a very long time for the Brits to reapportion Parliament, repeal the Corn Laws, expand the franchise, break the landed gentry’s monopoly on political power, etc., etc. Might not American influence have affected that timeline? Sped it up a bit?

8

Britain might not have had a “whole continent to colonize”

I wonder if Louisiana and Florida and California (et al.) would necessarily be part of the American Continent as thier European owners traded teh lands among themselves. Further, to prevent aggravation with the French and Indians Britain was already restricting cross-Allegheny colonization - an irritant that helped lead to the Revolution in the first place …

I think the most logical scenerio would be that colonization might be slowed or even stopped by events in Europe as immigrants and available lands and indeed whole industries (later on) are put on/off the table. It would not be a good situation for development.

9

Slower settlement by the British perhaps. But the French were sniffing around Australia too. La Pérouse arrived in what was to become Sydney Harbour not long after Captain Phillip. Australia could well have ended up as a French colony.

10

Britain engaged in Parliamentary reform and expanded the franchise by reducing the property qualification by the Reform Act of 1832. It granted almost universal male suffrage with the Reform Act of 1867.

In the United States, most of the property requirements and tax requirements for suffrage had been abolished by 1821 (since each state set its own voting requirements, I can’t give a specific date in the US case). Universal white male suffrage existed in all states by 1860. Universal male suffrage was granted by the 15th amendment, ratified in 1870.

So, for voting rights, at least, the expansion of the franchise happened at about the same time in the United States and Great Britain. It was slightly faster in the United States, but that was due less, I think, to a greater amount of radicalism in the US than in the UK, than it was to the US being less centralized, which meant that it was easier to make reforms in areas that were reformist. A state like New Jersey, which had large numbers of reform elements, could expand its franchise without worrying about what a more conservative state like South Carolina felt.

And, in the matter of slavery, of course, Britain abolished it ahead of the United States, so that’s one case where Britain was more radical than the US.

As for the Corn Laws, assuming Parliament passed an act similar to the Canadian Corn Act of 1843 for America in general, a largely agricultural America that produced a lot of cereal grains and was able to ship it to Britain at inflated prices would probably have been pro-Corn Law. If something like the Canadian Corn Act hadn’t passed, then you’re right, the Americans would have been anti-Corn Laws.

11

Related question: How would being yoked in perpetuity to perfidious Albion have affected America’s political evolution? If Alexis de Tocqueville had visited British America in 1831, would he have written a different book?

12

I don’t think it would have made much difference in the early 1800s with Napolean, the USA was not really a source of men or anything else. It was just a large underpopulated land mass rather a long way away.

Canada and Australia rubbed along quite happily with us, perhaps the ‘them’ and ‘us’ stuff was less extreme - I’m not really sure.

The USA would definitely /not/ have had the Civil War, we abolished trafficking in slaves in 1807, and I can see that steam powered machinery for harvesting cotton etc would have been piling out of the UK. Incidentally I read that the USA was a nett importer of agricultural equipment in 1914 and a nett exporter in 1918 - presumably canny engineers migrated in droves.

The big difference would have been WWI - by then the USA would have been a really useful source of food, men and munitions - Wilhelm would have thought twice if /knew/ that he was taking on the USA.

Rudyard Kipling would not have been born in the USA, he was actually part Indian, he spent an astonishingly small part of his life in India, his story telling abilities probably came from his Indian Amah (nurse). She, or perhaps a Syce (groom) must have been very talented.

There is a massive difference between ‘colonies’ and ‘administrative regions’, India and most other British dominions were not colonies. India was a free enterprize operation where John Company hijacked a sub-continent, ran it rather badly so we had to nationalize it.

I think it is possible that we lost America because we sent out Prussian (or was it Hessian) mercenaries instead of British troops, I heard, but cannot cite, that it was a very real possibility that the official language of the USA could have been German. Perhaps someone knows more about that.

As a WAG, it is possible that the UK government might have migrated to America.

Immigration would have been the same, the UK has a long history of immigration and America was something of a vacuum.

I guess that if my and your British ancestors (which you probably have, regardless of family history) had been a bit smarter, America would have industrialized agriculture earlier, abolished slavery much earlier, the Civil War would not have happened, and WWI would not have happened - and that means that Hitler would have not been able to feed on the resentment of a defeated nation.

It is also likely that British administered areas like India, Egypt and swathes of Africa would not have seen their thinly spread administrators as representatives of a small, beleaguered nation that is barely visible on a map, but as the representatives of a monstrously large and culturally homogenous land mass that was worth keeping on good terms with.

I’ve not really thought this one over much before, but it looks as if there was a bit of a cockup.

13

I don’t believe the “Admiral of the Atalntic” ever thought twice about anything. :slight_smile:

14

He was lucky if he thought once about something.

15

The U.S. abolished the Slave Trade in 1808 via the Constitution adopted 1791

Britain abolished slavery in her all her colonies in 1838 (15 years before Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation).

But I think this analysis leaves out the benefits that accrued to Britain (and France) because of King Cotton and the slave system of the American South.
Britain imported virtually all her cotton from the American South - and it was this fact that made the leaders of the Confederacy to believe monied and in-charge Britain would come into the war on their side -the British “street” wouldn’t allow it of course - but it wasn’t an illogical fantasy .

From here
*Southern cotton accounted for 70 percent of the raw material fueling Britain’s industrial revolution, and British experts believed that Indian cotton could not replace it in quantity or quality. At least 16 percent of all Britons’ jobs depended on textile manufacturing, while cotton fabric made up half of Britain’s exports, and an estimated ten percent of Britain’s wealth was tied to cotton. The cotton economy had also contributed to the creation of scores of banks in Great Britain (including Barclays) and the formation of the Stock Exchange of London in 1773.
*
The effects in the American South and to Britain and French Industrialization if emancipation in the U.S. leads to the economic dislocation we saw in the West Indies - I don’t know - I can see Industrialization and development being retarded world-wide for decades.

Also my WAG is that without the Civil War, Britain never begins Egyptian and Indian Cotton production and there down time stream effects to that…

16

Do Dopers think that British America would maintain Texas as a buffer state between itself and Spanish Mexico, or would British America simply have expanded southwards until disease defeated it?

17

The East was where the money was at - people had been making a fortune from Indian and Chinese imports for a thousand years. You bet the British would have been all over it like a rash, irrespective of how many million square miles of timber and grass they controlled in North America.

18

It would not have been exactly ‘British America’, it would have been more like English educated scions of affluent American families running most of the show, with people like Cecil Rhodes pushing the boundaries.

Colonies are a bit tricky, the people who go out there and do well are alpha citizens of both states. You don’t compete with your colonies, because they are you.

I’m not sure what went wrong with America, possibly the UK administration was going through a particularly dick-headed phase.

19

I bunch of guys who didn’t want to pay their taxes, as I recall. :slight_smile:

20

No, they were perfectly willing to pay fair taxes. They just wanted representation in Parliament as well.

Without the American Revolution, there wouldn’t have been any Louisiana Purchase either. How the expansion to the west would have gone with both the French and Spanish actively opposing it is full of choices.