What if we lost revolutionary war

Mobile Newsletter chat subscribe. Science Vs. What If. What if America had lost the Revolution? There were 25, colonist casualties during the American Revolution. See more pictures of the Revolutionary War. Life in Colonial America If the British had thwarted the American Revolution , the consequences for America might have been terrifyingly harsh.

The Question of Slavery. Reimagining a Map of America " ". The first major event was British General Cornwallis' surrender at Yorktown on October 19, , which marked the unofficial end to the war. The second one was the Treaty of Paris, which officially ended the war on September 3, What influenced the American Revolution? The ideas of French Enlightenment Philosophers were a major influence for the American Revolutionaries. Their ideas revolved around the ideals of the Declaration of Independence: liberty, equality and justice.

How did the Revolutionary War start and end? The Revolutionary War, also known as the U. War of Independence was the insurrection fought to impede the British government from exercising greater control over American colonies.

Who fought in the Revolutionary War and who won? The American Revolution War was fought between 13 of Great Britain's North American colonies and the colonial government headed by the British rule.

The colonies fought together and were victorious when the British General Cornwallis surrendered and signed the Treaty of Paris. Is Africa the cradle of humanity? What happened to the two other men on Paul Revere's ride? Are there alternate universes? Did a U. President rewrite the Bible? Sources Baack, Ben. March 5, The American Revolution, which had begun as a civil conflict between Britain and its colonies, had become a world war. The battle effectively ended in a draw, as the Americans held their ground, but Clinton was able to get his army and supplies safely to New York.

A joint attack on the British at Newport, Rhode Island , in late July failed, and for the most part the war settled into a stalemate phase in the North. The Americans suffered a number of setbacks from to , including the defection of General Benedict Arnold to the British and the first serious mutinies within the Continental Army. Supported by a French army commanded by General Jean Baptiste de Rochambeau, Washington moved against Yorktown with a total of around 14, soldiers, while a fleet of 36 French warships offshore prevented British reinforcement or evacuation.

Trapped and overpowered, Cornwallis was forced to surrender his entire army on October Though the movement for American independence effectively triumphed at the Battle of Yorktown , contemporary observers did not see that as the decisive victory yet. British forces remained stationed around Charleston, and the powerful main army still resided in New York.

Though neither side would take decisive action over the better part of the next two years, the British removal of their troops from Charleston and Savannah in late finally pointed to the end of the conflict. British and American negotiators in Paris signed preliminary peace terms in Paris late that November, and on September 3, , Great Britain formally recognized the independence of the United States in the Treaty of Paris. At the same time, Britain signed separate peace treaties with France and Spain which had entered the conflict in , bringing the American Revolution to a close after eight long years.

Start your free trial today. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. As a political activist and state legislator, he spoke out against British efforts to tax the colonists, and pressured merchants to boycott British products.

He also He was a gifted orator and major figure in the American Revolution. His rousing speeches—which included a speech to the Virginia legislature in which he famously declared, American Revolution leader John Hancock was a signer of the Declaration of Independence in and a governor of Massachusetts.

The colonial Massachusetts native was raised by his uncle, a wealthy Boston merchant. When his uncle died, Hancock inherited his lucrative Committees of correspondence were emergency provisional governments set up in the 13 American colonies in response to British policies leading up to the Revolutionary War also known as the American Revolution.

The exchange of ideas, information and debate between different But they were Mexican citizens. The US refused to make them American citizens for a century. And then, of course, it violently forced them into reservations, killing many in the process. American Indians would have still, in all likelihood, faced violence and oppression absent American independence, just as First Nations people in Canada did. But American-scale ethnic cleansing wouldn't have occurred. And like America's slaves, American Indians knew this.

Most tribes sided with the British or stayed neutral; only a small minority backed the rebels. Generally speaking, when a cause is opposed by the two most vulnerable groups in a society, it's probably a bad idea. So it is with the cause of American independence.

Honestly, I think earlier abolition alone is enough to make the case against the revolution, and it combined with less-horrible treatment of American Indians is more than enough. But it's worth taking a second to praise a less important but still significant consequence of the US sticking with Britain: we would've, in all likelihood, become a parliamentary democracy rather than a presidential one. And parliamentary democracies are a lot, lot better than presidential ones.

They're significantly less likely to collapse into dictatorship because they don't lead to irresolvable conflicts between, say, the president and the legislature. They lead to much less gridlock. In the US, activists wanting to put a price on carbon emissions spent years trying to put together a coalition to make it happen, mobilizing sympathetic businesses and philanthropists and attempting to make bipartisan coalition — and they still failed to pass cap and trade, after millions of dollars and man hours.

In the UK, the Conservative government decided it wanted a carbon tax. So there was a carbon tax , and the coal sector has taken a beating. Just like that. Passing big, necessary legislation — in this case, legislation that's literally necessary to save the planet — is a whole lot easier with parliaments than with presidential systems.

It was the introduction of another unnecessary decisionmaking entity, very common in the veto point-heavy US system, that created the crisis in the first place. This is no trivial matter. Efficient passage of legislation has huge humanitarian consequences. It makes measures of planetary importance, like carbon taxes, easier to get through; they still face political pushback, of course — Australia's tax got repealed, after all — but they can be enacted in the first place, which is far harder in the US system.

And the efficiency of parliamentary systems enables larger social welfare programs that reduce inequality and improve life for poor citizens. Government spending in parliamentary countries is about 5 percent of GDP higher , after controlling for other factors, than in presidential countries. If you believe in redistribution, that's very good news indeed.

The Westminister system of parliamentary democracy also benefits from weaker upper houses. The US is saddled with a Senate that gives Wyoming the same power as California, which has more than 66 times as many people. Worse, the Senate is equal in power to the lower, more representative house. Most countries following the British system have upper houses — only New Zealand was wise enough to abolish it — but they're far, far weaker than their lower houses.

The Canadian Senate and the House of Lords affect legislation only in rare cases. At most, they can hold things up a bit or force minor tweaks.

They aren't capable of obstruction anywhere near the level of the US Senate. Finally, we'd still likely be a monarchy, under the rule of Elizabeth II, and constitutional monarchy is the best system of government known to man. Generally speaking, in a parliamentary system, you need a head of state who is not the prime minister to serve as a disinterested arbiter when there are disputes about how to form a government — say, if the largest party should be allowed to form a minority government or if smaller parties should be allowed to form a coalition, to name a recent example from Canada.

That head of state is usually a figurehead president elected by the parliament Germany, Italy or the people Ireland, Finland , or a monarch. And monarchs are better. Monarchs are more effective than presidents precisely because they lack any semblance of legitimacy.

Indeed, when the governor-general of Australia did so in it set off a constitutional crisis that made it clear such behavior would not be tolerated. But figurehead presidents have some degree of democratic legitimacy and are typically former politicians. That enables a greater rate of shenanigans — like when Italian President Giorgio Napolitano schemed, successfully, to remove Silvio Berlusconi as prime minister due at least in part to German Chancellor Angela Merkel's entreaties to do so.

Napolitano is the rule, rather than the exception. Oxford political scientists Petra Schleiter and Edward Morgan-Jones have found that presidents, whether elected indirectly by parliament or directly by the people, are likelier to allow governments to change without new elections than monarchs are. In other words, they're likelier to change the government without any democratic input at all.