Do Americans feel their country has developed into a better place because of independence?
Posted by Duke_Tristan@reddit | AskAnAmerican | View on Reddit | 26 comments
My friend and I were talking about this due to the King's visit. If the US had stayed a colony, then it would likely have developed into a Dominion and then gained independence in the end anyway like Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.
Would we likely see big differences in the US today?
Maybe a political system where the elected head has less executive power like the prime ministers of commonwealth countries? No civil war as the slave trade would have been banned already by Britain in 1807? No constitution means no gun culture perhaps? Some kind of universal healthcare?
On the other hand, perhaps the US doesn't expand beyond the original east coast colonies, and therefore doesn't become a global superpower?
What do you guys think?
JimBones31@reddit
Do you think the United Kingdom developed into a better place because of the American War of Independence and the following decades of rivalry and then partnership?
vamoosedmoose@reddit
Americans certainly FEEL that independence was necessary to becoming a leader in science and industry, but we have no way of knowing if that’s true. Certainly keeping our resources here instead of shipping a bunch of value back to the crown helped since we could sell it on our own terms. You could also argue that the individualism tied to American identity was also a driving force for innovation. Independence was probably inevitable though, if it didn’t happen in 1776 it was going to happen later
Duke_Tristan@reddit (OP)
That's a good point. I think that American culture and the economic environment would have helped with fostering innovation. Mind you, the UK also had a ton of inventors and scientists across those years (eg industrial revolution). Maybe America had more fertile ground to capitalise on those ideas?
Muppet-Ball@reddit
The UK was the beneficiary of decades upon decades of resource extraction from colonial subjects. One of the drivers of the revolution was basically the US finding itself on the other side of that equation. Instead, ethics of this aside, it got to be its own colonial power. Plenty of countries out there might've been much more prosperous if not for colonialism.
Primary_Excuse_7183@reddit
It’s a vastly larger land area and obviously now has multiple times the population. So i think that increasingly added to the potential.
The_Menu_Guy@reddit
Yes. We don’t want anything to do with the Royal class.
We have our problems like any other country. However, here you really are not limited by the class into which you’re born. You can become anything.
Altruistic_Role_9329@reddit
The American colonies set the example for independence, so I don’t believe there is any guarantee that they would have gained independence anyway. It seems to me that Britain’s missed opportunity was in not pulling the colonies in closer by giving them seats in Parliament. By 1750 Philadelphia was the second largest city in the British Empire. There was really no good justification for denying it representation in Parliament, but even in the aftermath of the American Revolution the British Empire preferred to lose control over its colonies vs including them in the Empire’s central government. I believe places like India would have gained independence anyway because the native population was in the majority, but the UK, US, Canada and Australia could relatively easily be one country even today.
I agree that slavery would have ended without a war if the American Revolution had never happened. The northern states alone didn’t have enough leverage to convince the southern states to give it up. Also, the US constitution had enshrined slavery in a way that was harder to undo peacefully.
edgarjwatson@reddit
The American Revolution was inevitable. The British could not afford the kind of attention that the American Colonies demanded as British citizens. Anti-royalist feeling had been growing for yeare.
eyetracker@reddit
The US has Alaska because Russia was pissed off at Britain/Canada. Not sure what would've happened in this alternate scenario but sounds bloody.
diffidentblockhead@reddit
The question of what kind of federation and executive came up before independence had even been considered.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albany_Congress
LifeConsideration981@reddit
If the alternative to independence is being Canada, then absolutely.
That said, the rest of the world would look entirely different, as social programs are currently largely possible because the US subsidizes the defense of most of Europe and North America. Almost no one would have universal healthcare unless Britain was the one subsidizing everyone else’s defense (and having no budget for the NHS itself).
If America remained part of the empire, what would likely eventually happen is America would dominate it, much as Brazil might have with Portugal. America is way too resource rich and geographically protected to not.
By the way, Britain had an enormous gun culture until the 20th century. That would likely remain unchanged in the US.
tetlee@reddit
I doubt that "British America" wouldn't have continued to expand. The British are kind of famous for that
flp_ndrox@reddit
One of the main reasons for the Revolution was that the Americans were banned from going to the other side of the Appalachians. The British wanted to protect the fur trade while the Americans wanted to buy, sell, and farm it.
tetlee@reddit
I think that was only ever supposed to be temporary while Britain finished and recovered from the 7 year war with France.
flp_ndrox@reddit
I think they were willing to make adjustments to the border, esp. south of the Ohio. But the fact they were holding onto their forts in the Midwest and arming the various tribes in hopes of maintaining an Indian controlled buffer zone in the Old Northwest until finally having to leave after the War of 1812 makes me skeptical.
albertnormandy@reddit
Considering we are the richest and most powerful of the Anglophone nations, yes. I do not look at the current state of the UK and wish we had followed the same path.
rnoyfb@reddit
I don't know why you'd assume that if the US hadn't become independent in the 18th century, that the British would still have spent the 20th century decolonizing. That seems like a fantastical assumption especially since so much of the early independence movement in Canada was explicitly a reaction to the US
Also Britain banned the slave trade in 1807 because the US Constitution explicitly prohibited Congress from banning it prior to 1808. The Slave Trade Act of 1794 already prohibited American vessels from participating in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The trend was already in that direction. Only a generation before the American Revolution, the British Parliament introduced slavery into Georgia, where its original charter didn't allow it.
Loyalists with slaves at the end of the war for independence moved to other British colonies with their slaves. It was a few generations later that they prohibited it. There was no expectation at the time that they would not be able to keep their slaves.
American independence and British abolitionism did not each exist in a vacuum. Without American independence (or a comparable development), the UK would have had no Reform Act 1832. There would effectively be no representative democracy in the United Kingdom, no Catholic emancipation, no Irish independence, no Commonwealth of Nations. There would be no French Revolution and the main competitor state to the United Kingdom would be an absolute monarchy on the Continent
Also don't forget that the United Kingdom built ships for the Confederacy. The claim for damages from that was essentially the beginning of public international law. Without that, there would be no precedent establishing authority for the Nuremberg trials or whatever the parallel would have been in this alternative universe.
It is not true that British prime ministers have less executive power than a US president. They have more. Executive power is vested in the Crown but is exercised by advice of the prime minister, someone who already has a mandate and control of the legislative branch. The fact that King George exercised executive power in the Thirteen Colonies with no counterpart was one of the grievances in the Declaration of Independence. That he might do so in the United Kingdom was already considered unthinkable even though Parliament at the time was not representative.
The Second Amendment is downstream from frontier gun culture, it didn't rise from a vacuum, either.
With all of these changes, it's more likely no country would have universal healthcare than that the US would
This is just r/AmericaBad with no historical context
miketugboat@reddit
Slave trade was banned in 1807, not slavery. Slavery wasn't banned throughout the empire until 1833, and I imagine the indentured servants from India for the next century would describe their experience as slavery despite the name change.
If american slavery provided cheap cotton to the empire, they would have justified it in one way or another. De facto slavery would have persisted far far longer without American independence. Empires have been shown to not care too much about atrocities being done in their territories.
America was an expensive and unproductive colony relative to the rest of the British colonies. It was far too expensive to maintain and defend relative to what they got from it. They would not have invested into it to develop it, and without the American dream and the immigrant influence I don't see the states becoming nearly as rich or powerful as it is today. So much of modern American power/influence comes from their industrial growth during WWII, but the colony wouldn't have had the industrial base to grow to what it did.
I do think you are right about gun culture, healthcare, plus we would probably have waterproof monopoly money with the queen on it.
MegansettLife@reddit
Maybe other colonies would not have become independent at all, if the US didn't fight for ours.
No French Revolution, no domino effect of self-rule throughout Europe. And then again, no self-rule from European colonial aggression throughout the world.
High school History classes would very different.
OptatusCleary@reddit
All of the subsequent history took place in a world where the United States had gained independence. How things would have gone without that is impossible to say.
A bunch of questions apply to the situation:
-first, is this a world where the rebellion simply never happened (or was very small and never really gained steam)? Or one where it was crushed? Those might lead to different subsequent outcomes.
-if there was a rebellion, did other countries (like Spain and France) support the rebellion? Or did they stay out of it or even help Britain? It could develop eventually into a sort of anti-Monroe doctrine, where all European powers agree to oppose colonial independence movements (which in turn could lead to further centralization of power.) On the other hand, if they supported it and failed, where did that leave them? How long did it go on, and how much did it sap their resources?
-what interest groups play what role in the continued British establishment? A world where the loyalist government is mostly northern businessmen will be different from one where it’s mostly southern plantation owners. This scenario could actually extend slavery in the British empire rather than eliminating it.
-Do Australia and New Zealand and even Canada get settled the same way? Or does Britain put more effort into the thirteen colonies and the land to their west? If the British aren’t as interested in those places, does someone else take an interest in them? What wars and treaties come from those incidents?
-several of your points are things that happened fairly recently, and which would be impossible to predict with this point of divergence. The development of universal healthcare and restrictions on gun ownership are not at all inevitable in a world that will be as changed as the one we’re imagining here.
Content-Dealers@reddit
Id probably own less guns.
Matban09@reddit
This is really complicated. I'm grateful for our European heritage, but I think independence is a net positive. And I'm glad to be an American 🎵 where at least I know I'm free! 🎵 😂
KartFacedThaoDien@reddit
Britain would've had a much harder time banning slavery. America had around 1 million slaves in 1810. That is a massive pill to swallow for the British Empire. And unlike the Carribean white werent a massive minority. Or at least in the case of say Georgia or Mississippi territory it wasnt anywhere near as lopsided.
The slave trade banned happened about the same time as the US. And let's say the British Empire did try and ban slavery in North American colonies. I'm genuinely curious as to if there would've been a backlash.
Or if they wouldve settled on deportation or something else. Because it was apparent that almost no white people in North America wanted to live in the same country with free black people that were formerly slaves.
No one really knows in your outcome because it changes so many things for Canada, the US & the British Empire. It also changes things for New France, Florida and especially Mexico. No one really knows because American independence was kind of a big fucking deal.
Especially considering it was a VERY large country at independence compared to European countries. And they went straight to a somewhat democratic form of government. And part of why the US kept getting territory (excluding the southwest & hawaii, PH, PR). Was because countries wanted to piss off the British.
A non independent America changes everything and the demographics also make it a lot different than Australia and Canada. New Zealand is a head scratcher too but they were colonized much later and they were the least fucked in terms of slavery genocide. It also changes the demographics of European immigration too.
Duke_Tristan@reddit (OP)
Good point about the complexities regarding slavery.
Polardragon44@reddit
I feel like this almost would be better as an ask historians question. To compare the trajectory of the US to possibly Canada or Australia. They are hard to compare due to population size.
But what fueled that population the industry etc was obviously not losing their wealth to another country.
AutoModerator@reddit
This subreddit is for civil discussion; political threads are not exempt from this. As a reminder:
Do not report comments because they disagree with your point of view.
Do not insult other users. Personal attacks are not permitted.
Do not use hate speech. You will be banned, permanently.
Comments made with the intent to push an agenda, push misinformation, soapbox, sealion, or argue in bad faith are not acceptable. If you can’t discuss a topic in good faith and in a respectful manner, do not comment. Political disagreement does not constitute pushing an agenda.
If you see any comments that violate the rules, please report it and move on!
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.