Here the real-life experience of British loyalists in the colonies following the British defeat at Yorktown is instructive. British surrender forced many of those families to forfeit their land and businesses; finding the newly-independent colonies an extremely unwelcoming place for those who had supported the losing side, many fled to British-controlled Canada to avoid further persecution.
Had the British defeated the colonists during a more conciliatory phase, it seems likely that their treatment of most of the Patriots would have been substantially more generous. Because failure to abide by those promises could have been politically disastrous for the British, it is plausible to imagine much more forgiving terms at particular junctures in the war. Speculating as to the long-term results of a British victory in the War of Independence is necessarily even more vague.
It is somewhat difficult to imagine the British ruling the expanding colonies indefinitely; as Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense , the notion of a relatively tiny island ruling a land so great in both territory and population in perpetuity was a difficult one to reconcile. But it's worth taking a second to praise a less important but still significant consequence of the US sticking with Britain: we would've, in all likelihood, become a parliamentary democracy rather than a presidential one.
And parliamentary democracies are a lot, lot better than presidential ones. They're significantly less likely to collapse into dictatorship because they don't lead to irresolvable conflicts between, say, the president and the legislature.
They lead to much less gridlock. In the US, activists wanting to put a price on carbon emissions spent years trying to put together a coalition to make it happen, mobilizing sympathetic businesses and philanthropists and attempting to make bipartisan coalition — and they still failed to pass cap and trade, after millions of dollars and man hours.
In the UK, the Conservative government decided it wanted a carbon tax. So there was a carbon tax , and the coal sector has taken a beating. Just like that. Passing big, necessary legislation — in this case, legislation that's literally necessary to save the planet — is a whole lot easier with parliaments than with presidential systems. It was the introduction of another unnecessary decisionmaking entity, very common in the veto point-heavy US system, that created the crisis in the first place.
This is no trivial matter. Efficient passage of legislation has huge humanitarian consequences. It makes measures of planetary importance, like carbon taxes, easier to get through; they still face political pushback, of course — Australia's tax got repealed, after all — but they can be enacted in the first place, which is far harder in the US system.
And the efficiency of parliamentary systems enables larger social welfare programs that reduce inequality and improve life for poor citizens. Government spending in parliamentary countries is about 5 percent of GDP higher , after controlling for other factors, than in presidential countries. If you believe in redistribution, that's very good news indeed. The Westminister system of parliamentary democracy also benefits from weaker upper houses.
The US is saddled with a Senate that gives Wyoming the same power as California, which has more than 66 times as many people. Worse, the Senate is equal in power to the lower, more representative house. Most countries following the British system have upper houses — only New Zealand was wise enough to abolish it — but they're far, far weaker than their lower houses. The Canadian Senate and the House of Lords affect legislation only in rare cases.
At most, they can hold things up a bit or force minor tweaks. They aren't capable of obstruction anywhere near the level of the US Senate. Finally, we'd still likely be a monarchy, under the rule of Elizabeth II, and constitutional monarchy is the best system of government known to man.
Generally speaking, in a parliamentary system, you need a head of state who is not the prime minister to serve as a disinterested arbiter when there are disputes about how to form a government — say, if the largest party should be allowed to form a minority government or if smaller parties should be allowed to form a coalition, to name a recent example from Canada.
That head of state is usually a figurehead president elected by the parliament Germany, Italy or the people Ireland, Finland , or a monarch. And monarchs are better. Monarchs are more effective than presidents precisely because they lack any semblance of legitimacy. Indeed, when the governor-general of Australia did so in it set off a constitutional crisis that made it clear such behavior would not be tolerated.
But figurehead presidents have some degree of democratic legitimacy and are typically former politicians. That enables a greater rate of shenanigans — like when Italian President Giorgio Napolitano schemed, successfully, to remove Silvio Berlusconi as prime minister due at least in part to German Chancellor Angela Merkel's entreaties to do so. Napolitano is the rule, rather than the exception.
Oxford political scientists Petra Schleiter and Edward Morgan-Jones have found that presidents, whether elected indirectly by parliament or directly by the people, are likelier to allow governments to change without new elections than monarchs are. Though the conditions on these prison ships weren't necessarily that much worse that any conditions the redcoats endured as prisoners of war, the number of dead was extraordinary: Eleven thousand prisoners perished there from diseases like yellow fever and dysentery [source: Caliendo ].
What might the British have done to the , or so Americans who had dared to take up arms against the crown [source: U. Had the British been victorious, it seems likely that King George III would have come through on the promise he made in to "bring to condign punishment the authors, perpetrators and abetters of such traitorous designs" [source: Britannia. The British had executed the leaders of a failed Scottish rebellion in , and it seems likely that they would have marched George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and other American revolutionaries to the gallows as well [source: Chadwick ].
One of the reasons for the rebellion was the colonists' fear that the British government would increase their taxes. That was ironic because after adopting the U. Constitution , the Americans went on to tax themselves at much higher rates than the one percent or so of colonial economic output that the British took by imposing the Navigation Acts [source: Baack ]. So, postwar colonial America might have been a pretty hungry, impoverished place, with food crops being sold off or shipped to England.
The result might have been widespread famine, akin to what occurred in Ireland in the s. Additionally, the British might have punished American rebels by seizing their personal land and homes, just as they seized the estates of Scottish nobles who'd supported a rebellion against British rule [source: Sankey ]. That would have radically altered the power structure in American society. Some of that land might have gone to the Hessian mercenaries the British imported from Germany to help them in the war.
In one proclamation, the British promised each Hessian captain who brought 40 men an acre estate, and each individual soldier would receive another 50 acres [source: The New York Times ]. For all of the British Empire's other cruelties and callous acts, British antislavery activists won the debate in their own country without having to fire a shot in the late s and early s. In , Parliament abolished the slave trade, and in , it banned the owning of slaves in most of its colonial territories, with the exception of some areas of south Asia controlled by the British East India Company.
Between and , the British Navy even waged an aggressive campaign to seize other nations' slave ships, which resulted in the freeing of about , captive Africans. If the colonists had lost the war, would slavery have been abolished sooner on American soil -- and without the need for a nasty Civil War? If the colonists had lost the war, there probably wouldn't be a United States of America, period.
A British victory in the Revolution probably would have prevented the colonists from settling into what is now the U.
In the peace treaty that ended the Seven Years' War in , the French conceded to England control of all contested lands to the banks of the Mississippi River. The book is set in the s in an alternate United States that is far from united. In fact, the states, having failed to ratify a constitution following the American Revolution, are separate countries that oscillate between cooperating and warring with one another, as in Europe. The little ones wanted each state to have one vote no matter how many people it had.
They were too stubborn to split the difference. Turtledove told me that it was Richard Dreyfuss, the actor, who first gave him the idea of the American Revolution as a subject for alternate history. The two collaborated on a novel, The Two Georges , that is set in the s and based on the premise that the Revolutionary War never happened. The artist Thomas Gainsborough commemorated the deal in a painting, The Two Georges , that is emblazoned on money and made ubiquitous as a symbol of the felicitous "union between Great Britain and her American dominions.
The novel, which contains some delightfully bewildering passages "The British Empire and the Franco-Spanish Holy Alliance were officially at peace, so skirmishes between the North American Union and Nueva Espana seldom made the newspapers or the wireless" , includes a description of the painting :. Bowing before the king, George Washington was made to appear shorter than his sovereign. The blue coat that proclaimed his colonial colonelcy was of wool like that of George III, but of a coarser weave speaking of homespun.
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