Turtledove explained that he's toyed with the concept of the American Revolution in other works as well, including The United States of Atlantis , a book, as he described it, "set in a world where the eastern quarter of North America rifted away from the rest of the continent 85,, years ago and got shoved into the middle of the Atlantic by plate tectonics different from the real ones.
Turtledove also pointed out that he isn't the only author to experiment with this genre. He cited the science-fiction writer H. One flummoxed lieutenant exclaims that Bathurst spoke of the North American colonists defeating Great Britain and establishing a republic:. Well, you can imagine, that gave me a start.
All the world knows that the American patriots lost their war of independence from England; that their army was shattered, that their leaders were either killed or driven into exile. We made a good bargain when we got Benedict Arnold to turn his coat, but we didn't do it soon enough. If he hadn't been on the field that day, Burgoyne would have gone through [American General Horatio] Gates' army like a hot knife through butter.
But Arnold hadn't been at Saratoga. I know; I have read much of the American War. Arnold was shot dead on New Year's Day of , during the storming of Quebec.
A British minister marvels at a separate report from Bathurst:. The United States of America, you will recall, was the style by which the rebellious colonies referred to themselves, in the Declaration of Philadelphia.
The James Madison who is mentioned as the current President of the United States is now living, in exile, in Switzerland. His alleged predecessor in office, Thomas Jefferson, was the author of the rebel Declaration; after the defeat of the rebels, he escaped to Havana, and died, several years ago, in the Principality of Lichtenstein. I asked Turtledove what the world might have looked like in if Britain had won the Revolutionary War, or if the war had never been fought in the first place.
He noted that "alternate history is often better at asking questions than answering them. On the other hand, we would also have missed out on the kick in the pants wars give to technology and medicine.
We might have had as many deaths that could have been prevented in our own world by medical advances as we've lost in our big wars.
He's not sure. Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. That would be the equivalent of a modern war claiming more than 3 million U.
Indeed, modern historians have speculated that if the colonists hadn't caught a few breaks, the rebellion might have been crushed, and the American colonies would have remained under the rule of King George III. What would have happened to the defeated 13 colonies? Unless we're someday able to venture into an alternate universe where Cornwallis accepts Washington's surrender instead of vice versa, we'll never be able to conclusively answer that question.
Nevertheless, based on available historical facts, it's possible to engage in what scholars call counterfactual history and speculate how a British victory might have altered the events that followed [source: Bunzl ]. What might have happened to America if it wasn't for providence and the bravery, resilience and resourcefulness of a good many true heroes? If the British had thwarted the American Revolution , the consequences for America might have been terrifyingly harsh.
After all, during the war, the British Army demonstrated a penchant for brutality. When a small force of colonial rebels waved the white flag and tried to surrender at Waxhaws, S.
In New York, which remained under Loyalist control, the Brits jammed American captives into the holds of prison ships, where they were given nothing but British sailors' discarded table scraps to eat and were denied access to sunshine or fresh air. Though the conditions on these prison ships weren't necessarily that much worse that any conditions the redcoats endured as prisoners of war, the number of dead was extraordinary: Eleven thousand prisoners perished there from diseases like yellow fever and dysentery [source: Caliendo ].
What might the British have done to the , or so Americans who had dared to take up arms against the crown [source: U. Had the British been victorious, it seems likely that King George III would have come through on the promise he made in to "bring to condign punishment the authors, perpetrators and abetters of such traitorous designs" [source: Britannia.
The British had executed the leaders of a failed Scottish rebellion in , and it seems likely that they would have marched George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and other American revolutionaries to the gallows as well [source: Chadwick ]. One of the reasons for the rebellion was the colonists' fear that the British government would increase their taxes.
That was ironic because after adopting the U. Constitution , the Americans went on to tax themselves at much higher rates than the one percent or so of colonial economic output that the British took by imposing the Navigation Acts [source: Baack ]. So, postwar colonial America might have been a pretty hungry, impoverished place, with food crops being sold off or shipped to England. The result might have been widespread famine, akin to what occurred in Ireland in the s.
Additionally, the British might have punished American rebels by seizing their personal land and homes, just as they seized the estates of Scottish nobles who'd supported a rebellion against British rule [source: Sankey ]. That would have radically altered the power structure in American society. Some of that land might have gone to the Hessian mercenaries the British imported from Germany to help them in the war. In one proclamation, the British promised each Hessian captain who brought 40 men an acre estate, and each individual soldier would receive another 50 acres [source: The New York Times ].
For all of the British Empire's other cruelties and callous acts, British antislavery activists won the debate in their own country without having to fire a shot in the late s and early s. In , Parliament abolished the slave trade, and in , it banned the owning of slaves in most of its colonial territories, with the exception of some areas of south Asia controlled by the British East India Company.
Between and , the British Navy even waged an aggressive campaign to seize other nations' slave ships, which resulted in the freeing of about , captive Africans. If the colonists had lost the war, would slavery have been abolished sooner on American soil -- and without the need for a nasty Civil War? If the colonists had lost the war, there probably wouldn't be a United States of America, period.
A British victory in the Revolution probably would have prevented the colonists from settling into what is now the U. In the peace treaty that ended the Seven Years' War in , the French conceded to England control of all contested lands to the banks of the Mississippi River. The British government wanted to keep that region wild and unsettled, so it could collect revenues from the lucrative fur trade that the French had developed, and issued a proclamation that year closing the frontier to settlers.
If the Revolution hadn't eliminated that barrier, there might never have been an Ohio or Minnesota as we know them [source: Baack ]. But if the 13 colonies had not won independence, the map of the continent might have been altered in other ways as well. Without a powerful federal government, the interior of North America and the western coast might be separate nations today. Additionally, there wouldn't have been a U. So, that nation might have retained Texas, Arizona and other parts of the Southwest, and become vastly richer and more influential as a world power.
And without a rapid westward expansion in the 19th century, another beneficiary might have been the Comanche Empire that dominated the Great Plains in the early s by developing cavalry and using firearms , which some historians say actually eclipsed some European nations in power and prestige.
Had they not been conquered in the s by the United States, it's conceivable that they might have grown even more formidable and might even have their own sovereign nation today [source: Hamalainen ]. Sign up for our Newsletter! Mobile Newsletter banner close.
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