Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

Interesting questions. Another one is: Would the French REvolution have occurred without the recent, previous example of the American one? Quite likely not, or at least not in the way it played out. How different might the history of the 19th century in Europe have been if Napolean had never had his opportunity at Toulon? And if no Napolean would there have been a Bismarck?
One question Brad: Which is the 2nd revolutionary war to which you are referring? The War of 1812, or perhaps the Civil War?

If we had lost BOTH the Revolutionary War AND the Civil War, We'd have a lot of nice "Canadian" fellow-citizens, and no Trent Lott types.

Don't tell Rush Limbaugh we're talking this way. We're being very very bad and we hate America.

The American Constitution's extremely strong protections of property rights vs. The State made the abolition of slavery much more difficult. In Brazil and Russia slavery and serfdom were abolished by fiat, which couldn't happen here.

The Emancipation Proclamation was probably illegal -- let's get the Volokhs to work on that one. (All those people asking for reparations might end up finding themselves repossessed, with the libertarians leading the charge.)

Some missing 'minuses' to the US revolution:

1. the Indian Wars and the depopulation of natives through hunger and disease (which the British Crown managed to avoid in Canada). The US revolution was motived by a US desire to overturn the Indian treaties that limited westward expansion

2. US Checks and Balances that makes it difficult for the majority will to prevail in US legislation and regulation (unlike parliamentary systems. Hence the US differs from Britain, Canada and Australia in terms of the degree of regulatory capture of govt agencies, the absence of universal health care, absence of gun regulation, absence of public funding of election campaigns etc. There are offsetting pluses in this regard as well, but a US social democrat should clearly prefer the British parliamentary system as it is today.

If the U.S. had remain part of England (ugh) what would have been the likelihood of the French and Russian land sales? Slim, I'd say.

Also, what's the likelihood that the U.S. would have done little more than supply resources to England for a much longer period? Good I'd say. And that leads to a much more backward country and a status more like India.

The British have good PR, especially in Europe. However, it is worth pointing out that there are some very, very important differences between the British and American political traditions, with the American traditions rooted in the American Revolution.

One that I like to point out, which always astonishes Europeans, is that Britain does not have a free press. In British law, truth was not, until fairly recently, a defense against libel, and libel law still favors the plaintiff. The Official Secrets Act allows the government to prohibit publication of documents in the physical possession of news organization, something which even the Bushies haven't yet attempted. Blasphemy and insults to the Crown can be prosecuted, and have been, even in the 20th century.

A second point is that the United States realized mass democracy long before Britain. Britain moved into the neighborhood of universal manhood suffrage only in 1867. Not coincidentally, dominion status was granted to Canada near the same time. Both events were influenced by the Civil War and the precedents set by the Great Republic, the "last, best hope" in Lincoln's phrase.

The United States and Britain have long had a special relationship, not completely unlike Britain's relationships with its dominions. Even in the 19th century, when Americans were nominally more hostile to Britain, the two countries tacitly cooperated, for example, in ending the international slave trade in 1808, in the Monroe Doctrine excluding European colonial powers from South America, in opening Japan and Korea to trade, etc.

But, American independence was also a critical ally and example for Whig forces in Britain, fighting the reactionary tendencies of the landed aristocracy and gentry, who dominated British politics up until the First World War. The callous cruelty of those British nobles was on full display during the Irish potato famine, as their lordships exported wheat from a land where 2 million people starved to death. The British escaped their clutches through the grace of the same Whiggish idealism, which guided the American Revolution to writing the Constitution. (Germany, by contrast, did not lose the Junkers, without outside intervention.) Britain's achievements are to be celebrated, but America's independent course has admirable features and desirable influences of its own.

One has to wonder if World War II would have had the same consequences for colonialism, if Winston Churchill did not have to compromise with FDR.

In re "One has to wonder if World War II would have had the same consequences for colonialism, if Winston Churchill did not have to compromise with FDR."

Depending on whether the US as part of North American Dominion was wealthy and well-populated through waves of immigration or not, the British Empire could probably have afforded to hold onto its colonies in Africa and Asia far longer.

"Some missing 'minuses' to the US revolution:
1. the Indian Wars and the depopulation of natives through hunger and disease (which the British Crown managed to avoid in Canada)"

Only sort of and sometimes. And dominion status certainly didn't guarantee good behavior with respect to indigenous peoples-- cf Australia.

No American Revolution, and no mass democratization/ universal white male suffrage so early, means no Andrew Jackson, and that's a good thing. It might mean no final expulsion of Indians from east of the Mississippi. But it does not change the tendency for a technologically advanced, population-exploding frontier settler society to commit lots of atrocities in its thirst for land, and to rationalize said atrocities with an ideology that then encourages further atrocities. In the long term the Proclamation would have exerted approximately as much effective force to check the bloody westward expansion as did the Supreme Court rulings in the Marshall Cherokee cases, i.e. none.

Brad, this is all pure speculation. As others point out, history might have taken an entirely different course. I'm doubtful, however, whether the larger patterns of social revolution and wars would have much changed. Maybe the specific wars and revolutions that happened wouldn't have (at the particular time and in that particular form), but others and similar ones would probably have.

Social development has large momentum and can build up a lot of "pressure" -- at certain times and in certain circumstances the situation becomes "ripe" for critical events; riots, revolutions, wars, and other major events typically "need" a trigger, but they are always the result of internal pressures. What will trigger them is hard to say; if a "potential" trigger does not happen, another one may come along eventually, or perhaps it won't and the pressure will be channeled elsewhere or simply die out. That holds at every scale of event and society, from families and neighborhoods to states.

BTW, Brazil abolished slavery even later than the U.S. Russia abolished serfdom (replacing legal enserfment with indebtedness for the serfs) only about two years before.

It's an interesting question whether the British could have abolished slavery for the U.S. as they did for themselves in the 1830s. On one hand, the American South + Britain's colonies had more slaves than the British colonies alone, so it would be expensive to buy them off. On the other hand, there would be a larger tax base. Would keeping the American colonies in Britain have accelerated the demise of slavery in the South, or delayed its demise in, say, Jamaica? Perhaps a mix of both, with abolition happening in, say, the 1850s or 1840s or something, earlier than the Americans independently, but later than the British without the South?

Did the American revolution "teach" Britain not to try to govern its settler dominions from London? Certainly, it's not as quick an inference as, say, that the Sepoy revolt "taught" Britain that the British East India Company was a poor tool for ruling India (though not, of course, that they oughtn't be ruling India at all). The American revolution CERTAINLY didn't dissuade Britain from colonialism generally speaking, since the great days of the British empire lay ahead.

Perhaps it's silly to speak of the American revolution without the context of the enlightenment-era political transformations of which it was a part, including the French revolution, the Corsican rebellion (easily forgotten, but perhaps the first of the revolutions of which the American and French are two), etc.

Now, for our next question: "what if Mexico had held onto Texas, New Mexico, California, etc?"

Or possibly, "where do centaurs keep their lungs?"

As a Canadian, I'm glad the American Revolution happened. The only reason Canada exists in its current state is because of the existence of the U.S.. We're a coalition of provinces and territories that can't seem to agree on anything except the fact that we don't want to be part of the U.S., no matter the similarities we share. I suppose a good way to put it is, we are to the United States as John McCain is to the Democrats :-)

Being a colony not so bad? Ask the Irish.

One can't play counter-factual history by skipping over 150 years of history and changing one thing--The American Revolution--and expect everything else to be the same. Without the Revolution there would have been no Louisana Purchase, thus no Mexican War and no Mexican Cession. The U.S. would still be a small country confined to eastern third of the continent and not the giant we became. So who then would have supplied the muscle and the backbone to overthrow Hitler and later Communism? Play counter factual history with that!

"1. the Indian Wars and the depopulation of natives through hunger and disease (which the British Crown managed to avoid in Canada)"

That had nothing to do with the U.S. Revolution. That was caused by the fact that Canada is so cold that only a loonie would live there. (No offense intended to loonie Canadians.)

I think Matthew's friend is wrong; England's North American colonies would probably have been treated very much like the Irish--impoverished and starved by mercantilist policies and bigotry. To a large extent, I'd say, the revolution was driven by the beginnings of such policies, which came to their ugly maturity growth throughout the rest of the British empire.

It seems to me that the British--all the Western European states, really--were very poor imperalists, and relied on policies that could not be maintained in the long run.

OK, I'll bite. The American Revolution is the flapping butterfly and the rise of Hitler is the typhoon it caused on the other side of the world. If we had it to do over again, should we have crushed the butterfly? I think it's a silly question because it's impossible to predict all the consequences.

The first thing you'd need to know is to what degree the American example contributed to the rise in democracy elsewhere. Maybe if the revolution had been attempted and quashed, it would have bolstered royalists everywhere. I.e., Britain might have become a very different country without the humiliation of losing the colonies. Was the American Revolution a shining example that inspired the world, or was it just a bunch of malcontents who lacked the patience of their good natured neighbors to the North?

Let's say you plan to go back in time and kidnap all the authors of the Declaration of Independence. You might also want to know how the (presumed) lack of a Civil War is going to set back the advancement of military technology and strategy by the time WWI rolls around (assuming it does). You would also want to figure out the outcome of WWI and whether it results in the onerous reparations of the Treaty of Versailles that according to conventional wisdom contributed to the rise of Nazism. You'd probaby want to know a lot more, but those are just what comes to my mind.

Wouldn't it just be easier to wait until after WWI is settled before fiddling with history? I.e., at least wait until the butterfly flapping has turned into a waterspout.

The UK was also hoping that the Republic of Ireland would declare war on Hitler's Germany. Never mind that many Irish on their own joined Britain's war against the Nazis - I guess Irish independence could be seen as a bad thing too by this logic.

IF we had lost the Revolution would America be the success it is today? The Empire could have or would have drained all of our raw materials, taken all of our beautiful women and left us all here to basically buy it all back at a higher price. Or we could have become what Australia later became, a location to ship criminals.

The Revolution allowed us to steer our own destiny and as a result to grow and thrive as well as we have. OK along the way we have made some mistakes, we elected Bush, but its only for 4 years, maybe - hopefully not - 8 years and then he is gone, but overall we have done very well

Surely an economist can do better counterfactuals than this. For the Americans to have no revolution or an unsuccessful one would have required a greater devotion of British resources to North America, such as might have driven the French out (see above under no French Revolution) and as might have precluded British consolidation of the Raj (remember, Cornwallis followed Yorktown ignominy with Governor-Generalship in India and military victories there). No, or less, Raj means a very different empire, probably one focused on the Americas -- and one torn by the question of slavery come the 1830s and 1840s. It's a happy, Fergusonian, Anglophile thought that this would mean peaceable abolition earlier; it might well have meant a civil war within the British empire over slavery. Which means... what? And if not so much India, probably not so much Africa, and probably not so much empire-of-free-trade....

You have to go many miles down the counterfactual road before you can even contemplate World Wars one and two. I think the Czech-Yglesias position needs work.

One country across the Atlantic was unstable and would have come apart eventually. Even the "loyalist " Canadians got there, a few generations later. If the "one country" didn't come apart, it would have soon developed a large North American majority; put that into your alternate histories and smoke it.
I occasionally wonder: Is the United States eligible to join the Commonwealth? Wouldn't that be interesting.

Indeed, SloLernr. How much help would the U.S. had been in 1914 had its industrial development been retarded by British restrictions on its industry and from being unprotected? And as raised above, what about the status of the terroriries of the Louisiana Purchase, Texas, and California, to which I add Florida, Alaska, and possessions in the Pacific? This contrafactual is too far from reality to be meaningful for WWI.

Ok, Brad? Honey? How, exactly, would the Southern slave-owners have been any more likely to give up their slaves to an imperial power 1,000 miles away than they were to changing political power in Washington? There would still have been a civil war, only it wouild have been the war for independance, probably with the North joining in (northern economic development undoubtedly having been stunted by Britain's imperial trade policies). Remember history: America was, especially after the cotton gin, a massive slave-power with a tiny trading annex called New England. While the native Americans and Southern slaves would certainly have been better off (Britain probably would have put a stop to that whole manifest destiny BS, and slaves would have had Spanish and French territory to seek refuge in), it's a little strange to think that America would look anything like the America of today (and been able to play anything like the role we did in WWsI and II)if we'd remained politically subordinate to London. Either we would have been truncated, or the strain would have gotten so great that we would have, well, declared independance!

The US didn't abolish slavery later than Russia and Brazil, but those two countries didn't have to fight civil wars to do it.

Lighten up, guys. Yeah, Brad's post was indeed a wee bit speculative.

A British friend of mine referred (probably not originally) to the American Revolution as "A regrettable incident in which the American colonials gave a rather deserved thumping to one of Britain's more forgettable German monarchs."

"Wilhelmine and Nazi generals would have had to have been seriously cookoo to ever engage in a two-front war... against a Britain whose strength included the Dominion of North America."

There was tremendous uncertainty on the eve of war over whether Britain would participate... an ambivalence fueled by British foreign policy. So assuming the US would have been as "aye-ready-aye" to step up to the slaughter as the rest of the Commonwealth was, I don't see why the enlargement of the British Empire would reasonably have affected the calculations of the German war planners....

Perhaps the lesson is that rational actor theories don't work as well in international politics as they do in economics.

The American Revolution is not a revolution at all. A revolution, in any clear sense, must include the natives, as in the native population rebelling against the state (like the French revolution).

This never happened.

The colonial settlers rebelled against those that sent them and actually escalated atrocities against the natives.

The American 'Revolution' is an invasion, the Europeans where settlers in a foreign nation, they decided to take over that nation and call it theirs.

The best analogy would be the Mob sending it's goons to rob a bank, the goons do rob the bank, but cut-out the mob-boss and make off with the cash, then later pretend they where the bank and it was their money all along, because they prevented the mob-boss from getting it.

Only a racist can consider the American Revolution a good thing.

However, history is full of bad things, so if American Revolution didn't happen some other bad things may have instead.

That the American Revolutionaries where evil, racist conquerors is clear, just like the British Monarchy. Wether better or worse things would have happend without it is unknowable.

"The American Revolution is not a revolution at all. A revolution, in any clear sense, must include the natives, as in the native population rebelling against the state (like the French revolution).

"This never happened.

"The colonial settlers rebelled against those that sent them and actually escalated atrocities against the natives"

Dmytri, by the time of the Revolution, the American colonies had been settled by Europeans for more than 150 years.

Jeez, was the French Revolution not really a revolution because there weren't enough Celts involved?

The folly of counterfactuals is that after the initial change, you can't forecast anything beyond 1-5 years with any sort of clarity or detail. If the American Revolution never happened or failed, history after 1800 becomes incomprehensible. Is there a French Revolution or Napoleon? If not, then what happens? In any event, the Czech's question becomes meaningless.

The only thing we can say is that Britain was not interested in expanding its North American domain. The Quebec Act basically stopped trans-Appalachian migration. The different desires of colonists and London over settlement in the Indian territories was a major reason for independence. In any case neither Spain nor France would be willing to give them such land. Britain's North American Dominion would end at the Mississippi. No Texas or California. The strategic goals of Washington, DC were not the same as that of London.

Considering the way Britain treated its colonies, it's also highly unlikely North America would develop its industrial capacity the way the US did. And half of the US would be subject to the corruption and poverty that doomed most of Latin America as part of New Spain (not even Mexico.)

When I saw Brad's (Matthew's) original piece, I thought the most interesting thing was that the position taken by the Pole is very Euro-(Polish)-centric. What matters most is the impact on Europe (and Poles). Very human, not very surprising. I didn't think the rest of the questions raised, all the alternate history stuff, was all that interesting. Having read through the responses, I feel just the same. This or that might have happened if this or that had turned out differently...but it didn't. Maybe it's just a matter of tast. I've never taken much of an interest in alternative history as literature, either.

I too support the America Revolution. Dymtri - what happened to the Native Americans would have happened (and was already happening) regardless of who ruled this continent.

Oops, make that Pole a Czech. Otherwise, the statement stands.

Rea, what a strange argument.

Put simply, the vast majority of the population, i.e. natives, *was not* considered a part of the so-called 'Revolution'?

The only ones who where included, where the Europeans, only a //tiny percentage// of whom had been there 150 years.

Are you suggesting that the French Revolution _excluded_ the Celts that still lived there????

Zach, would have, should have, etc are speculative, I am talking about what did happen: A bunch of racist took over a nation and did their best to commit genocide against the natives of that nation. There is no way around it, neither is saying the British where bad too an excuse.

That's not a 'Revolution,' and certainly not a 'good thing' if you want to be speculative you can make anything up, who knows if Hitler was successfull, perhaps apologists 300 years later would be saying that the Holocaust was a good thing. But in reality, Racist genocide is never a good thing. End of story.

All this counterfactual history discussion is fun. I just have to point out, however, that in Matt's original post "Independence Day" linked a site refering to the Will Smith film. Put's the "Czech's question" in a slightly different light, and maybe raises some interesting thoughts about America's place in the world today.

Some indigenous countries fought on the side of the Americans, some fought on the side of the British. Some were split (Iroqois Confederation, for instance) Most sided with the British, IIRC (though, of course, one of the first casualties of the revolution was Crispus Attucks).

As someone whose family of ancestors arrived from Ukraine, Poland, Byellorussia, and Sweden all around roughly 1900, I've been trying to figure out a historical "us," and it's confused the hell out of people I talk to. For example, I've tried to claim that the British, Spanish, French, etc, invaded "us" in the 1600s, since they were Europeans and we were Americans (at the time), and from then until 1776 was "the occupation." But then, in the seven years war, in my view, "we" won, since the British colonies more than the French colonies were to be the foundation of the U.S. Of course, you could say that there was no "we" between when we got invaded in the 1600s and when we declared independence in 1776, and the seven years war was a war between the occupying powers.

Whatever happens, I'm not going to learn enough Russian, Polish, or Swedish history to figure out what "we" were doing in 1780 based on what actual members of my ancestry were doing back then.

Dmytri doesn't realize it yet, but the Iroquois Confederacy failed to produce a flag. No flag, no country.
Also, the fluid dynamics of Native American factionalism vis a vis the three to five sides it was possible to take coupled with the impact of virgin soil epidemics on population numbers basically made the indigenous people more or less a toe stubbing, rather than a serious threat. Add to this the misapprehension by indigenous tribes of the highly elevated, playing for keeps genocidal intensity of the British, Dutch, German, Swedish, etc. settlers rulebook and it was a foregone conclusion. 1 counted coup does not equal 1 midnight horseback massacre with burned crops and stores. But I did hit him with the stick, we all saw it. Chump.

Could somebody explain what the hell 'E' is trying to say? His response starts with my name, is followed by a fallacy, them some random speculative mumbling, and in closing the word 'Chump'. Do you think he's posting Drunk?

All history hinges on Harold Hardrada's defeat at Stamford Bridge in 1066. The Anglo-Saxons caught them at an unguarded moment, and probably drunk. From their the Norman Conquest, and the eventual rise of the British Empire were a foregone conclusion. Had Hardrada won, the peoples of India would be doing their business in Norwegian.

See, it's fun! Lighten up guys.

The first Defenestration of Prague was the other major turning point of world history.

THE REAL VALUE OF AMERICA:

http://pep.typepad.com/public_enquiry_project/2004/07/prof_delongs_te.html

With all due respect to zizka / John Emerson, it is not *just* fun. Counterfactuals are serious business in historical analysis. And bad counterfactuals, along with bad understanding of counterfactuals (as here: http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/comment/story/0,9828,1187514,00.html ; Hunt is very wrong in this article) give this serious business a bad name.

Hunt's article didn't seem that bad to me. Counterfactual history seems to me to be intellectually interesting, in a philosophical or literary way, but highly conjectural. Especially in the particular case here, which is a spinoff of a spinoff.

In particular, I think that counterfactuals are more parlor-gamish the further back they go while still trying to connect themselves to the present-day world, which wouldn't exist as such under sounterfactual conditions.

The American Revolution would not have stopped the influx of white settlers that doomed Indian independence. It was a demographic wave that would have taken place. The only questions are where was the wave going to come from? And who was going to own what afterwards?

Remember that the fact that Texas was part of Mexico did nothing to prevent the Anglo settlement and confiscation of Texas. Or the introduction of slavery there.

OTOH, I think the example of American Independence and successful constitution making had a tremendous and mostly good influence on Europe. I am thinking of the state constitutions that preceded the US Constitution as well as the USC itself.

The idea that Americans under the British Crown would have ended up acting like Canadians do now doesn't strike me as realistic. (I am a Canadian from the US.) The present Canadian character was formed by a complicated interaction with the USA as it actually developed.

I am kind of taken by the idea that a later war of independence to preserve slavery might have taken place. But would all Americans have fought for slavery? I think not, simply because they had no institutional ties with each other before the actual revolution, and imposing them from outside would have caused a revolution! (You might even look at the actual revolution as a reaction against imperial moves in that direction!)

In any case, I think that the English-ruled colonies of NA would by the 1830s or so, if they were still under imperial rule, been a tail so big that it was beginning to wag the dog.

I think you have to be a bit carefull here, the cause of the American 'revolution' was not a demand for independence, it was a demand to enjoy the same rights that the British enjoied at home - political representation.

The right has done a great job pretending that the civil war was not about slavery and the real complaint in the revolutionary war was taxes. Neither is true, Revere, Hancock etc. all realized that the colonies taxes would rise dramatically if they were independent. The issue was control, in particular the immediate cause of the dispute was the Canada act which effectively prevented the colonies from expanding westward.

The US constitution is not as the myth makers claim a document that is unprecedented. It describes a highly idealized view of the UK constitution with reforms then being proposed by the liberal utilitarian tradition of Locke, Bentham etc. Again the political mythology is a real insult to the framers.

It is highly doubtful that history would have taken the course it did if Britain had managed to keep the colonies. It was the loss of the American colonies that made possible the occupation of India and much of Africa. Britain was able to ban the slave trade when it did because there were few domestic interests to keep it alive.

Nor is the experience of Britain wrt its American colonies unique. The South American colonies gained independence from Spain and Portugal in a similar way and for similar reasons.

The US could not have repeatedly gone to war against Spain to acquire territories (Texas, California, Cuba) if it had still been part of Britain.

The colonial rebellion was the defining disaster that made the later triumphs of the British empire possible. The idiocy of losing 13 colonies over a few boxes of tea was what made possible the later concessions such as the bizarely generous peace terms offered after the US was roundly defeated in the war of 1812. Britain could easily have forced the US to surrender territory in that settlement, Washington DC had been burned to the ground. The reason that Britain offered a settlement that was so generous that the US history books claim the 1812 was as a draw was that the foreign secretary realized that it simply was not in Britain's interest to create the grounds for future irridentist wars.

The other major effect of the colonial disaster was that by the time of Victoria the British monarchy is essentially powerless. The last attempt to seriously exercise royal power being under Queen Anne.

Robert Sobel wrote a very entertaining alternate history called For Want Of A Nail: If Burgoyne Had Won At Saratoga, which is still in print. I've long lost my copy, but as I recall the French Revolution doesn't happen, European politics remain dynastic, Mexico becomes the other superpower along with the Confederation of North America, both develop nuclear weapons and the book ends with the simile of two scorpions in a bottle.

Counterfactuals like this can be fun, but I retain my suspicion of counterfactuals when used in arguments. If you're allowed to make up the evidence, you can prove anything.

The idea that the 'British abolished slavery' or the 'Tsar abolished serfdom' is so wacky as to deserve a little comment.

If the British 'abolished' slavery, it was undoubtedly because they didn't own many slaves and wanted to wrong-foot an opponent who did. In reality, Wellington's soldiers and Nelson's sailors lived far worse than slaves and, like slaves, were frequently 'recruited' by kidnapping. Nor were the vast majority of Brits much better off, but they counted themselves lucky as at least they were not 'natives', the least considered and most oppressed in the British empire.

Like the British, the Tsar 'freed' the serfs. Whether this made any practical difference in their condition I leave to the historians; anecdotal evidence would suggest it did not.

So you can put away your birch rods and stop whipping yourselves; nobody other than the British attaches much importance to their lead in abolishing slavery. It was a distinction without much of a difference.

An interesting point: How did British colonial rule change as a result of the 13 colonies breaking away? Did it moderate and become more democratic? Canada seems to be quite happy as a member of the British Commonwealth, as does Australia, for example. Of course there's the counterexample of nations such as India that already had a substantial native population...

What a waste of time. Would you really rather play cricket over baseball? Come on now.

In reply to zizka / John Emerson (probably too late): Hunt's article is wrong because counterfactuals are not a right-wing project. Herbert Gutman and pretty much every other Marxist historian also used counterfactuals.

Counterfactuals are not a parlor game either; they are the necessary component to any serious historical argument. I say event x is important because it caused consequence 1. Can I convincingly argue that had event x not occurred that consequence 1 would not have occurred? If not, then I shouldn't argue the importance of event x. Even historians who do not know they're using counterfactuals are doing so; they're just implicit. It's better to make them explicit as they're essential to the argument.

So the question of whether the American Revolution was (as Sellar and Yeatman would say) a Good Thing is a good one. But to answer it you have to pose a responsible counterfactual: it's Good (or Bad) because if it had not occurred then....

The counterfactual of a Greater British North America in World War One is not a responsible one because it leapfrogs more than a century of history while assuming ceteris paribus. But the counterfactual of a Greater British presence in North America in the 1780s and 1790s, and the consequences for European politics and the future of the British empire from there, is a responsible one.

At some level, I think that counterfactuals are an interesting exercise. They still are pretty conjectural at best, but I agree that over a short time frame (definitely < 50 years, perhaps <30 years) they are useful (though they do merge into philosophy and literature, which, however, are among my interests). So the leapfrogging here was a lot of what I objected to.

I agree that not everything Hunt said was justified. "Not that bad" is not an unqualified endorsement.

Didn't the British mostly support the Confederacy in the US Civil War?

Tris Hunt is fighting an intra-disciplinary battle here between the new breed of populist historians in a vaguely Whig tradition, and the Niall Ferguson school of Virtual History, which itself feeds upon the New Historicist movement in literature.

I appreciate Ferguson's argument that counterfactual essays need to be driven by a number of hard rules: that the pivot has to be a decision or policy or action that was either seriously debated both ways, or could have credibly turned out one way or the other.

(JCD Clark's essay on 'British America' is an interesting read, but it's less about the American colonies than about 'Jacobite Britain', the favourite topic of Dr Clark.)

It is another thing to be a colony of a superpower ruled by a corrupt coterie of landlords.

Tell that to the Iraqis.

I agree with Mr. DeLong that the American Revolution was a good thing, but for a slightly different reason. His characterization of the UK in 1775 is flawed -- Britain was not a "corrupt monarchical oligarchy" but rather a parliamentary democracy whose further evolution was indeed foreordained, in my opinion. We can acknowledge the limited franchise, but all the rhetoric in those days about "the rights of Englishmen" in the debates over the various taxation measures indicates the direction in which the system was evolving. The King's ministers were deferential to their sovereign but made war to uphold the supremacy of Parliament, won at such a terrible price a century earlier. The Americans were revolting not against the King but against a Parliament in which they had no representation.

The American War of independence did affect the course of British political development over the next century - but not by offering an example of successful democracy. Rather, it affected British development by giving pause to oppressive elements, who reacted with a more cautious approach. It would have had this effect even if the good guys had won (though that would have meant less likelihood of British analogues of the Louisiana or Alaska purchases), if there had been a negotiated settlement, or if the lesson had been learned and acted on early enough to head off violence.

We can see this in part from the effects of Shea's and the Whiskey Rebellions (and in Jefferson's comments on them), which among other things gave a voice to their complaints and gave people like Gallatin a leg up. Or see the other side of the water, to understand how British society reacted to the presence of Chartists with reform, not revolution, and also see how the colonial effort functioned in part as a civil war in Britain and a change in British thought.

But democracy as a good example - no (in fact it was a bad example to European revolutionaries, horribly encouraging them away from reform). In fact the post-1860s constitutional developments in Canada took the US example as an awful warning, not a model (largely because it permitted such internecine warfare). Much of what earlier respondents look on as good effects - boosting Whiggery - miss the fact that it was precisely Whiggery with no ethical basis that was redeemed by Tory paternaliosm (which was better than no ethical basis at all). Things like starving Irish were more likely to emerge under abstract and inhuman ideologies with no ethical basis - just like the abuse of Indians in the USA. Democracy was a dirty word in British politics well into the 20th century for precisely this reason. To this day, the empirical tradition does not accept democracy as a legitimate end or as a source of values (though tradition has by now wrapped up values with it in the form of the American Dream and so on). But to people like me, the elevation of democracy into an end is an example of what theologians from St. Paul onward referred to, somewhat allegorically, as "idolatry" - the elevation of means into ends, displacing true values. This implicitly shows up in things like the Iraq adventure, if you want a modern awful warning.

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