What If? Britain had the US as a colony in WW1 & 2?

Great Debates
1

The recent few threads about the world wars has gotten me wondering what the world would look like if Britain had given Colonies seats in Parliament (to placate them and they didn’t rebel). The only difference in this universe, is that King George supported Colonial seats in Parliament, for whatever reason.

Would North America have populated in the way it did?
(Also, what about political/colonial boundaries? The States are shaped significantly different than Canadian territories.)

Would the colonies have rebelled anyway when the UK banned slavery?

And I think more interestingly, how would the UK have played their hand with more power (or would they have utilized it at all?) in Europe?

I think this is way more plausible than the UK not going bankrupt post-ww2.

2

By then, the greater population of the U.S. would have meant they were running the Empire, or there would have had to be unfair representation to prevent it and another revolution.

3

Chances are the US and Canada would be a Dominion and not a colony. A Dominion was mainly self regulating and grew out of “responsible government” and was not necessarily at the beck and call of Britain.

4

WWI and WWII would, for the US, have started in 1914 and 1939.

5

I believe that the ‘US’ would have encompassed a much smaller territory…really, just the eastern sea board. So, we would have been much less helpful to the Brits, assuming we actually stayed within their sphere of influence following the British policy of outlawing slavery. My guess, though, is that the southern ‘states’ or territories would have still attempted to secede from the Dominion (from Grey’s post) over the slavery issue, and that might have sparked a completely different independence movement (if the sheer profits from slavery in the South wouldn’t have encouraged the Brits to hold onto slavery longer than they did in our universe).

-XT

6

A compromise settlement might be:

George III takes two new titles, “Emperor of the British Empire” and “King of British America.”

All British possessions in the Western Hemisphere, from Newfoundland to Barbados, are formed into a new Kingdom of British America, constitutionally separate from the UK, with its own American Parliament meeting in (probably) New York, and with a Viceroy there representing the King-Emperor – possibly one of his brothers or sons. The individual colonies’ established governments would continue; they would simply become provinces of British America.

A new Imperial Parliament and Imperial Government are established. The Imperial Parliament is supreme and sovereign over all kingdoms’ parliaments including the Westminster Parliament; it has representative members from all kingdoms and crown possessions of the Empire, including the UK, Ireland (still a constitutionally separate kingdom before 1800), British America, and the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands. The Imperial Government is responsible for all matters of commerce between the kingdoms, all foreign relations, all military matters (the Royal Navy and the British Army become the Imperial Navy and the Imperial Army – and are specifically directed to start recruiting men and commissioning officers from America), and administration of all colonies or possessions without kingdom status. Everything else is left to the kingdoms – but not on an “enumerated powers” basis as in the U.S. Constitution; simply as the way things are done, for practical purposes. Constitutionally speaking, there is to be no question that the Imperial Parliament has plenary sovereignty – including the abolition of slavery throughout the Empire, once that comes up.

That would have left the colonies with enough self-government to satisfy them, while still binding them firmly to the Empire – which, as a political unit, is limited enough in role that the Americans eventually effectively “running” the Empire would not be such a hard thing for the British – in this timeline, probably called the Old British – to swallow.

Having that autonomy, I expect America would experience – that is, the Americans would insist upon – the same manifest-destiny push to the west as in our timeline. Of course, it might mitigate that slightly – only slightly – if part of the settlement were that the Indian nations in British America get their own representatives in the American Parliament.

As for slavery, there would be abolitionists in the Imperial Parliament – from the UK and from the northern provinces of British America – and there would also be resistant members from the West Indies and the southern mainland provinces of BA. Once an abolitionist majority is reached – I do not expect the slaveholding provinces would even talk of secession, as there would have been no American Revolution to establish the legitimacy of the idea, no U.S. Constitution on which some theory of the right of secession could be argued, so secession would be purely and simply treason for the sake of slaveholding. Hard to defend.

In this timeline, Australia and New Zealand eventually would be added as kingdoms. Canada would always be part of British America.

The really interesting question would be how this constitutional arrangement would effect the Empire’s subsequent colonization of parts of the world such as Africa and India – for which autonomy or kingdom status would be off the table from the start, because, you know, there are already a lot of people there and they’re not white or Christian. Maybe 20th-Century nationalism there would take the form of demands, not for independence, but for kingdom status and representation.

Of course, it’s also debatable whether a British Empire-including-America would colonize Africa or India; the leaders might decide they have their hands entirely full with developing America.

7

I don’t see how that would work out. The crown was definitely opposed to western expansion in America. Plus, I seriously doubt the other European powers (especially France) would have been as inclined to let a British American colony expand (or even sell them land) the same way they let the nascent US American state do so.

Plus, what do you suppose would have been the result of the Napoleonic Wars on a US that was a British colony? I doubt Napoleon would have sold the LT to the Brits, which meant we’d have been hemmed in to the south and west, and probably had to fight the French here at some point.

The trouble I see with this is that the empire would have had much more of a stake in the slave trade had they retained America as a colony/Dominion. Even with us as a separate country they struggled with slavery and the south due to their heavy imports of cotton. Such a stake would almost surely have pushed back the abolitionist movement in the empire, since more powerful people would have had much larger stakes in seeing the trade continue.

As for not being able to secede, that’s probably true…but then it was true for the American colonies before the revolution too. :stuck_out_tongue: It’s possible that there would still have been a north/south split, but that might not have happened either, since it’s possible with more capital that the north would have been even more wedded to cotton and manufacturing, and so have their own larger stake in the slave trade.

-XT

8

Without American independence, slavery would have persisted longer in the northern colonies. Probably abolition in the North and South of America would have occurred simultaneously with the rest of the British Empire, with compensation for owners.

9

Napoleon would not have happened. No American Revolution, no French Revolution, at least, not in 1789. The French Revolution was precipitated by the Crown’s financial straits due to giving aid and troops to the American Revolution – that was why Louis XVI felt pressed to call the first Estates-General since 1614, and then things got out of hand, where they have remained ever since.

Yes, the British Crown was opposed to westward expansion in America – but the constitutional settlement I described, or any other settlement that might have forestalled the Revolution, would have left the Americans with enough autonomy – and enough of their own voice in the Empire’s government – to do it anyway. The population pressure was there, and an autonomous America would have insisted on developing its own economy, not playing the role any more of a captive market for the UK in a mercantilist system; all that would have resulted in a push to the west, as it did in our timeline. France could not have prevented it – France had recently been booted out of North America, a feat of which the Americans were particularly proud. Louisiana was held by the Spanish after 1762, and, wild as it was, I believe they would have had few troops north of New Orleans. If the Americans had pushed up against it – well, they might have precipitated a war in which the British Empire would have felt obliged to join, and with no possible outcome but British-American victory. Or they might have acquired Louisiana by negotiation and payment. But they would have acquired it, and everything west and north.

Here’s another thought to chew on: What would a British American society have been like? In OTL, some historians see the American Revolution as a not only a political revolution but a social revolution, eroding the prescriptive authority of the upper classes; see The American Revolution as a Successful Revolution, by Irving Kristol. The United Empire Loyalists had to flee to Canada, forming that country’s “hearth culture” (I’ve seen the Canadian health-care system explained as a form of “Tory paternalism”), and subtracting their influence from the nascent American political culture. If none of that had happened, American society might bear a closer relationship to Britain’s, with authority and social hierarchy accepted as essential elements of the order of things – still much more libertarian and egalitarian than the UK, no doubt, but less so than America is now, or was following the Revolution.

In the The Two Georges, Richard Dreyfuss and Harry Turtledove portray an America that resolved its differences with the Crown by sending a delegation to London, headed by George Washington. The “North American Union” got its own national government, but remained subordinate to the British Crown and the Westminster Parliament, in which America got no representation. The NAU of the 1990s is a sort of Greater Canada, with more-British ways, a slow pace of life, with no peerage but with knights and a recognized and deferred-to class of “gentlemen,” and a population that, except for Indians, is almost entirely derived from the British Isles. I don’t buy that part – I think Dreyfuss and Turtledove wrote it that way because in OTL British colonies were open only to British immigration. But I don’t think an autonomous America could have been persuaded, at least not in the 19th Century, to keep the foreigners out; their labor – sorry, labour – still would have been needed.