(April 6, 2010 at 9:19 pm)padraic Wrote: I enjoy the entirely pointless speculation of alternative history.
One of my favourites is: What if England had won the US war of Independence? They actually came close. What if they had arrested the major signaturies to the Declaration of Independence?
A few issues spring to mind: American expansionism;The Spanish American War,Texas, California, the Louisiana purchase, Alaska, Hawaii.
As part of The British Commonwealth, the US would have entered WW1 in 1914 and WW2 in 1939.
My perception is the loss America as an unmitigated disaster for Britain at the very least.
They did come close and whenever they did get close they did something astonishingly stupid like threaten to free the slaves in the south or unleash the Indians in the north to scare the moderates back to the rebel camp.
I doubt it would have ended had they crushed Washington in 1776. More likely, it would have broken out as small scale guerilla actions which the British would have had difficulty suppressing and then, when the French Revolution broke out and later Napoleon, the whole thing would have exploded again. The British would have been forced to maintain an army in North America to protect the Crown and the Tories and those troops would have been sitting ducks. Moreover, given the penchant for taxing the Colonials that Parliament had, they would have enacted more levies to pay for that army which would have simply stoked up the fires again. There are some ideas whose time has simply come.
It's a great question though.
