Tyler’s post below reminded me of an observation I once heard when talking about something similar: At some point, a British Empire that included America would have become majority American. After all, the U.S. now has five times the population of the U.K., and while the immigration patterns would have been different had America remained British, I suspect that there still would have been plenty of immigration.
And unlike with India, this would have been a part of the Empire that would have been populated by people who, one way or another, would have ended up being seen as Englishmen (even if many were of other ethnic extraction). I suspect the Americans’ complaints about lack of political representation would have been resolved somehow, so the extra population would have meant extra political power. It surely would have meant extra economic power; the economic and cultural center of gravity of the Empire might not have shifted as quickly to the Western Hemisphere, but such a shift would likely have happened eventually.
Moreover, the extra volume of immigration — which would have been inevitable given America’s size, the economic opportunity it represented, and the value of immigration as a means to resist encroachments from the French and the Spanish — would likely have changed the culture of the aggregate British Empire. Perhaps, as Tyler suggests, the Empire might not have liberalized enough to embrace such a change, and the cultural change might have even undermined liberalization (“How can we give those people more of a say in Imperial councils, when they aren’t even real Englishmen, but just the dregs of Europe?”). But I doubt that it could have done so for long.
One possible outcome would have been a peaceful de facto separation a century later, though with de jure rule by the monarch, as happened with Canada, Australia, New Zealand., and, less happily, South Africa But would such a separation have been acceptable to London, had there not been a precedent set with the departure of the American Colonies?
The other outcome, I suspect, would have been a truly bicontinental nation, with the capital still in London but the economic, intellectual, and cultural activity increasingly coming from America — and the wealthy classes being increasingly ethnically mixed, with the mixture slowly leaking into the political classes as well (remember Disraeli).
Incidentally, one more consequence: A bicontinental British Empire would likely have been a much stronger player in European affairs than England alone was. Think of it as an alliance of the sort we saw in World War II, but permanent. (Naturally, of course, the added value of America would have been less in the 1800s; query, for instance, how valuable America would have been in the Napoleonic Wars, even if it had fought with Britain rather than against it.)
There doubtless would have been some friction when London called on the Americans to help in European wars, but much less than when the two were separate countries. And this suggests that Britain might have been more aggressive in its foreign policy, both in the Europe and elsewhere, with American might added to its own. As is always the case with alternate history, the potential changes quickly snowball.
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