perfidy

There you are, minding your own business. Sitting on the La-Z-Boy, drinking a gin and tonic, watching the news channel most suited to your ideological preferences. Bamf! you are magically transported into the past. It’s 1939. What do you do?

That’s pretty much a no-brainer, really. Western Democracies v. Genocidal Nazis? You sign up for the duration, you pitch in for the big win. You convince someone or other in the government or military that yes, you are from the future, and no, you’re not a loonytoon. There’s lots of contributions you could make. You could tell the Navy that their torpedoes don’t work, and that somewhere in early December ’41, Pearl is going to get shellacked. You could tell the Army that the Sherman tank needs something bigger than a 75mm gun if it’s going to go up against the best that Germany has to offer. Warnings about the invasions of Poland, France, Crete, the USSR.

Lots you could do to make a positive impact. Of course, we won the war anyway, so no big deal if you take a nap, either.

What if you went back further? Its 1861, and again, pretty much a no-brainer. The Great Emancipator v. Slavery. Same deal – things turned out pretty well in the long run. The Union was preserved, and the rednecks and peckerwoods got their slaves freed. You could shorten the war though, if you could convince Lincoln that Little Mac was a poncy coward, and you need a hard-fightin’ general like Sherman in charge.

And what if you went back still further? Your barcalounger appears in a field south of Alexandria and it’s 1774. Which side do you pick? Heavy-handed and arrogant British colonial masters, or whiny, prickly, sensitive proto-rebels? I was pondering this the other day in the car, and I find that this isn't a no-brainer.

I’m an American, and I like being an American, and I think my nation is kick-ass. Well and good. But I am aware that the British weren’t being that unreasonable in asking the colonists to pitch in some of the costs for their own defense. But the American colonists were a prickly bunch, and jealous of their rights. And so, while the British demands were not in themselves unreasonable – let’s just say that the British didn’t exactly go out of their way to accommodate American opinion on the matter.

And that’s the nub of it right there. The Americans said, no taxation without representation. The British King and government said, stop being children. It was very much like Dad telling his teenage son he doesn’t get a vote on where the family goes for vacation, and the son goes off and sulks for eight years when the fam doesn’t go to Cancun or wherever Brooke Burke went on Wild On; and instead goes someplace sensible and boring like Disney World. Except instead of a good, thorough sulk under black lights, it was eight years of war.

Once things had more or less gone past the point of no return, things naturally got a little heated. The Declaration of Independence makes Great Britain and King George sound like what a Berkeley professor thinks of the United States and our current president. And both are occasionally technically accurate, but really missing the point. In 1776, Great Britain was one of (being generous) three nations in the entire world that had some form of representative government. So, like the patchouli-dipped Berkeley Prof, the colonists were ripping on the one nation in the world that was least tyrannical, least despotic, and least arbitrary in its governance.

We know what happens. In the end, it turned out all right. The sulky, black clad teen moves out of the house, and into slum housing on campus. He becomes friends with everyone his dad warned him about. Like France. He continues to have desultory fights with Dad, but distance makes it a little less painful. Eventually, the teen grows up, gets a job, and with some indirect help from Dad (maybe Mom slipped him some cash now and then) finds himself prosperous and much less pissed off at Dad. After a century or so, Dad and Son are best friends, present a united front to the rest of the world, and really can’t remember why they hated each other once.

While not exactly a new thought, what if it didn’t happen that way?

What might happen if the American colonies stayed inside the Empire? First, there would have to be changes in the Empire. By the 1770s, the Americans were probably a little too pissed off to make things easy. Yet, there were those in Parliament who were sympathetic to the American position – Fox, Burke, and others. Sadly, Pitt was to ill to be of much help. And none of them were in power. Franklin spent most of the immediate pre-war period in London, and spent most of that time trying to reconcile the two sides. All of these efforts were wasted on the stubborn intransigence of the British administration.

What could change that? I don’t know. The incompetence of the British Leadership more or less guaranteed that the war would happen, and then that the British would lose. And lord, was the British Leadership incompetent. A demonstration of the immediate effects of his frankly idiotic policies might have had an effect on King George – early on, the colonists felt that George was their ally against the corrupt Parliament, when nothing could have been farther from the truth. The king had absolutely no sympathy for the Americans. But he was taught and surrounded by idiots. Up to the last minute though, efforts at reconciliation were proceeding on both sides – with the advantage of hindsight, these could certainly have been strengthened.

The result? The American colonists considered themselves to be true British subjects – with the same rights and duties as their kin on that island off France. What if the Americans got representation in Parliament? That would have kicked the legs out from under the biggest complaint the colonists had. The travel time between the colonies and the metropolis would have been a problem, sure, but not an insurmountable one. And travel times were reduced quickly over the next half century anyway.

Later on, Britain considered several proposals for federalizing the empire, and some might actually have worked. An early solution, integrating colonies directly, would have laid a precedent for future colonies – Canada, Australia, New Zealeand, South Africa would have been the most obvious beneficiaries. But the benefits might have spread to other less likely candidates like East Africa, China, India and even Ireland.

There was a window of opportunity there, in the late eighteenth century. Thumb-fingered leadership combined with an anomalous decline in the relative strength of the Royal Navy and the absence of a credible threat to the lives of the Americans happened just that once. Would the Americans have been able to bail in 1805, with Napoleon sending troops to the new world and Britain at risk? And by the end of the Napoleonic wars, the economies on both sides of the pond would have been well integrated. American troops would have fought in Wellington’s battles.

The only big question is that of slavery. Thing is, though, that the compromises embedded in the US constitution probably prolonged slavery long enough for the Civil War to happen – that, and the fact that for the first half of the Nineteenth Century, the North and the South were more or less evenly matched. Britain ended slavery earlier. And the South would not have been in a position to resist the entire rest of the Empire. Also, there would likely have been a more equitable solution – a phase out, buy out, or something. The Civil War might just be avoided altogether.

A federal empire might have been a more stable structure than the patchwork empire that Britain created over the Nineteenth century. And I don’t think that continued Union with Great Britain would have retarded, much, the eventual development of the industrial power of America. With that engine of production in their back pocket, England would have been able to bear the costs of Empire rather more easily.

Americans came late to the idea of Empire (aside from that whole manifest destiny thing) but that was because it didn’t suit our unique idiom. We were on the outside of Empire. On the inside, though – think of how the Scots helped, enthusiastically, create the British Empire. Would Americans have been different? Likely not. American missionaries, industrialists and soldiers of fortune working from inside the British Empire would be a substantial additional push.

With America on board, the Empire would have likely grown even more than it did over the course of the 19th century. Whereas American interventions in Central America and the Caribbean tended to be temporary, as a part of the British Empire, they might have been permanent. British interests in the Western Hemisphere would have been vastly greater. There might have been a Panama canal decades earlier. Panama, Honduras, Nicaragua, Cuba, and others could have fallen to the pink stain on the map. British presence in the Pacific would also likely have been greater.

On the flip side, those parts of the American Southwest that were taken from Mexico might not have – except for Texas. Though Texas might have remained independent. The Louisiana purchase wouldn’t have happened, but that territory would have been taken from the French over the course of the Napoleonic wars.

It would have been an interesting world at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. If I remember correctly, the United States and Britain had the two largest economies, with Germany a close third. If not, then something very similar to that. So, the combined Empire would be likely be on the order of twice as strong economically as its nearest competitor. A vast interior free trade market would encompass all of North America and Oceana, the Subcontinent, East and South Africa, the good bits of China, and of course the British Isles and a myriad tiny little places here and there.

WWI might have been a little different. Even more so if the Empire stayed on the sidelines while all the other powers wasted themselves.

On the pro-independence side, there is clearly much good, especially in the long term. The United States has been a powerful force for good in the world (yes, yes, despite many flaws – shut up) and it’s absence from the world scene over the last two centuries would lead to very large differences in the course of history. What would we miss? I think the most important would be the ideas in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution – and even more to the point, the very thought that documents like these matter. A written constitution, with enumerated rights for people and restrictions for government is a very powerful, and very good idea. The United States, with its ideal of tolerance and assimilation to an ideal rather than an ethnicity is another huge plus. Would North America as a British colony still be a melting pot? Probably not so much.

Still and all, just imagining Hamilton, Jefferson, Franklin, and the rest of the Founding Fathers throwing down in Parliament with Burke, Fox and Pitt is just delicious. I still don’t know which side I’d want to help – but I think if the easy chair landed in 1760, I’d have tried to make sure there weren’t two sides.