Has anyone ever done a time line where there's a revolution in the colonies and in Britain. Basically a civil war between Republican and Royalist forces on a Empire wide scale?
Fight and Be Right along with being one of the best tl's on the board is exactly that.
Nobody's done it, but I can actually see it. As I've argued elsewhere, england during the French Revolutionary Wars was closer to a revolution than we like to think nowadays. If the pressures worsened in the aftermath of a victory during the American Revolution...
What kind of pressures are you talking about? The rise of industrialization, literacy and the wealth of the middle class without a corresponding rise in political power?
Well for one even if the continental army were to surrender the leaders of the Continental Congress would become martyrs and Great Britain would be facing an Iraq-style insurgency.
Well for one even if the continental army were to surrender the leaders of the Continental Congress would become martyrs and Great Britain would be facing an Iraq-style insurgency.
I think you're falling for the mythology of the time a bit too much. Roughly a third of the population were patriots, a third were loyalists and a third didn't care much either way. There's clearly going to be trouble makers in the future, and continued grievances, and I think it's more likely than not there will be another (minority-supported) revolt, but "Iraq-style insurgency" is a bit ridiculous.
True, but in Iraq the most common sentiment regarding the insurgents and the Americans was something along the lines of "a plague o' both of your houses," as well. The patriots wouldn't have quit after it's done., and the British army wouldn't make itself any friends by the way it handles the patriots, gaining them fresh recruits. Certainly your average person wouldn't take too kindly to soldier quartered in their house, which likely would happen. In short, most of the grievances listed in the Declaration of Independence would be extended across the colonies, rather than just mainly in New England. Thus you have a costly occupation that the public on both sides of the Atlantic will tire of. And the execution of the continental congress would kill off a decent number of fairly well-known people in the colonies, alienating a segment of the population. Finally there is the influence of British soldiers returning from the colonies, now exposed to such ideas as direct rather than virtual representation, and the idea (in theory, at least,) of universal (male) suffrage. Not to mention the influence of the fact that they were forced to spend months or years thousands of miles from home in an area where it was unsafe to walk the streets alone.