WARNING: this is not a troll.
I was watching a TV program last night called 'Empire' about the rise of the British empire and its history. It dealt with the founding of the American colonies, the American Revolution and the consequences for the Empire, Britain etc. A lot of it was new to me and challenged mis-conceptions I had - you might already know much, if not all of this.
Firstly, the orginal settlers who settled in Virginia couldn't have picked a worse spot to set up a colony - right next to a malaria infested swamp that killed 50% of the settlers that ever landed there.
It then talked about the Mayflower - the Puritans who set sail thought that the Protestantism that had become Britain's state religion wasn't been taken far enough, and they saw America's wilderness as an ideal place to practise their faith. It also said that a large proportion of those aboard the Mayflower had no concern over religious matters at all - they were economic migrants and wanted to find their fortune within a new frontier of the Empire.
The Mayflower missed Virginia because of poor navigation by 200 miles and the rest is history. The American colonies flourished. By the 1770s, a New England land owner would be considered one of the richest citizens of the Empire - owning more land, wealth and slaves than anyone else. Around this point, the Empire, once considered a very free society by standards back then developed an insatiable apetitite for slaves.
Now onto the revolution. It's a misconception (still perpetuated today, looking at the film of tour guides etc) that taxation of the colonists was high and caused them to rebel. For instance the Boston tea party was not a demonstration by your ordinary citizen, it was by smugglers who were unhappy at the prospect of losing trade because the government had cut duties on tea - legitimate tea would be cheaper and they would be redundant. Yet the colonists, wanted at least some self-government, but this was refused and hence the revolution started.
Many in London thought the Americas weren't worth fighting for. Indeed, the value of the trade from Jamaica alone was 5 times more than that produced by the 13 American colonies. Secondly, with the French posing a sea-born threat to mainland Britain, an all out war was out of the question, given the huge distance over which troops etc would have to carried.
On surrender of the colonies, some 100,000 loyalists felt strongly enough to leave everything behind and go to Canada. This goes some way to explaining why Canada would retain that loyalty for so long.
At Yorktown, as Cornwallis surrendered, the American bandsman played 'And the world turned upside down' (or something like that). This couldn't be further from the truth, in terms of the Empire; even though it lost the Americas, it had expanded greatly on the other side of the world in Australia and Africa.
While the Declaration of Independance is a breath-taking document in its historical context (taken for granted these days), it wasn't entirely honest. The freedoms described and the assertion concerning the equality of all men were fine as long as you weren't black slave working the plantations. Indeed, the Empire outlawed the slave trade (1807) and slavery (1833) long before the US.
Australia would be a major turning point in the Empire's history. For one thing, the genocide of the Aborigenees was an horrific thing. However, this was very much a local phenomenon - farmers taking it into their own hands to 'clear' their land. If Australia had achieved independence, it would have been a lot worse - state sanctioned ethnic cleansing (as we would now call it) could be seen happening in the US.
Fortunately, around this time, after unrest in Canada (in Quebec), Lord Durham wrote his "Report on the Affairs of British North America." Durham stated that to retain its colonies Britain should grant them a large measure of internal self-government.
"The British North America Act of 1867 inaugurated a pattern of devolution followed in most of the European-settled colonies by which Parliament gradually surrendered its direct governing powers; thus Australia and New Zealand followed Canada in becoming self-governing dominions. On the other hand, the British assumed greater responsibility in Africa and in India, where the Indian Mutiny had resulted (1858) in the final transfer of power from the East India Company to the British government. To govern territories with large indigenous populations, the crown colony system was developed. Such colonies, of which one of the most enduring was Hong Kong, were ruled by a British governor and consultative councils composed primarily of the governor's nominees; these, in turn, often delegated considerable powers of local government to local rulers.So the question is (a long winded run up I know
): if Lord Durham's report had been written before 1776, and self-determination partially transferred to the American colonies, do you think America would have remained part of the Empire, like Canada and Australia?
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1) I am not a communist
2) I am not anti-American
3) I don't like Bin Laden
4) I am not a Muslim fundamentalist
5) I am not crazy
