DBAHC all the British North American colonies become independent in the 18th century

What are some scenarios where all of Britain's North American colonies separate from the mother country in the 18th century, not just the ones in New England?

I am excluding the islands, and I guess you can exclude Canada on the grounds that it was not really English, but at least get independence for Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, and some of the others.
 
What are some scenarios where all of Britain's North American colonies separate from the mother country in the 18th century, not just the ones in New England?

I am excluding the islands, and I guess you can exclude Canada on the grounds that it was not really English, but at least get independence for Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, and some of the others.

Interesting question. Lots of things to think about, for sure, but one thing really stands out to me: could slavery have ended earlier in N. America? IOTL, it didn't end until 1892, and the abolition movement suffered a pretty notable series of setbacks after the American Rebellion failed in the other Seaboard Colonies.....
 
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I actually think this is pretty plausible. While these days we think of there being huge differences between the agrarian economy of the South and the New England merchants, the Eastern Seaboard colonies were actually pretty united, culturally and politically, going back to before the Seven Years' War. There was even a plan by colonists to set up a single government for all the colonies in 1754; if you're looking for assets for a TL, there's a political cartoon from some guy at the time saying the colonies must "JOIN, or DIE," which even though it was referring to defending against the natives could be reworked to be a bit of pan-colonial revolutionary propaganda.

I think you just need Britain to really mismanage the Colonial Crisis. There was plenty of unrest in Virginia, too, and the British were pretty desperate to raise funds for a while there; a couple more really bad taxation acts that affected people outside of New England, combined with a general sense of colonial unity, could tip Virginia and/or New York to the Bostonian side, and the rest would follow. It would still be a bit of a New England-wank to watch all the other colonies nobly come to the defense of what would still mainly be a Massachusetts problem, but stranger things have happened, and I'm personally partial to New England-wanks.

It's not until the invention of the cotton gin that the South would really start drifting away from New England. Then slavery would become a real issue; I can't imagine a bunch of Boston abolitionists being fine with the Southern half of their country built on slavery, which would dominate the economy of the whole new nation. Maybe they rebel again!
 
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I actually think this is pretty plausible. While these days we think of there being huge differences between the agrarian economy of the South and the New England merchants, the Eastern Seaboard colonies were actually pretty united, culturally and politically, going back to before the Seven Years' War. There was even a plan by colonists to set up a single government for all the colonies in 1754; if you're looking for assets for a TL, there's a political cartoon from some guy at the time saying the colonies must "JOIN, or DIE," which even though it was referring to defending against the natives could be reworked to be a bit of pan-colonial revolutionary propaganda.

And, as I recall, there actually was such a reworking done for the classic alt-history novel The American Revolution in 1976-I don't remember at the moment if any reproductions of said piece exist on the WorldNet, though.

I think you just need Britain to really mismanage the Colonial Crisis. There was plenty of unrest in Virginia, too, and the British were pretty desperate to raise funds for a while there; a couple more really bad taxation acts that affected people outside of New England, combined with a general sense of colonial unity, could tip Virginia and/or New York to the Bostonian side, and the rest would follow. It would still be a bit of a New England-wank to watch all the other colonies nobly come to the defense of what would still mainly be a Massachusetts problem, but stranger things have happened, and I'm personally partial to New England-wanks.

Yeah, generally true that the Southern colonies were rather closer to Britain than the Northern ones(despite some revisionists from a particularly peculiar school of thought having insisted otherwise in recent years).

It's not until the invention of the cotton gin that the South would really start drifting away from New England. Then slavery would become a real issue; I can't imagine a bunch of Boston abolitionists being fine with the Southern half of their country built on slavery, which would dominate the economy of the whole new nation. Maybe they rebel again!

Well, I don't doubt they could try, at least. But even our British(and later Dominion of, then Commonwealth of) North America's economy wasn't totally dominated by slavery, even if it did expand a fair bit north of the Ohio(and just north of the Missouri River) for a while prior to the late 1860s.
 
Maybe if the British conquer French North America? This would remove the major threat to the New England colonies at least and, feeling more secure, they might more openly chaff against British control (they had, pretty much, been chaffing for the last century either - especially after the establishment of the united New England colony - it shouldn't take too much more to push them over the edge in this situation).
 
Even if this was to happen, I doubt they would unify together. They are just too different for that to succeed beyond a loose economic union, like with the German states.
 
Even if this was to happen, I doubt they would unify together. They are just too different for that to succeed beyond a loose economic union, like with the German states.

Well, they kinda did IOTL. Granted, the original Dominion of North America had to be fairly decentralized at first, but it still counted as a union. and, btw, I should also add that, apart from slavery in the southern colonies, they weren't really quite so significantly different between each other as, say, the constituent areas of the Austrian Empire.....which collapsed because of massive amounts of ethnic tensions turning into outright fighting(which included a few attempts at mass ethnic cleansing on the part of the Austrian government, sadly), much as what happened to the Ottomans only a decade later in the late 1910s(whom also proceeded to do the same; the Roma people fared particularly poorly, as did the Assyrians & Chaldeans, amongst certain others).

I'd say the German Empire applies a little better to our situation; yes, true, Germany also fell apart, but only after years of misrule by Wilhelm III and the devastation of the Second Great War ultimately breaking Germany's back. (Of course, it didn't help Austria that Franz Josef II would become even more authoritarian than his father, or that the last Sultan of the Ottoman Empire was himself prone to all sorts of paranoia, which made him easy prey for racist elements who wanted most of the minorities gone.....and for Turkey to retake Greece at any cost. But their problems were, overall, rather more structurally based than Germany's.)
 
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