What if from the very start, English colonies in America are incorporated into England and send MPs to parliament? This would butterfly a lot of the impetus for the American revolution because the colonists could not cry foul that they were being taxed without representation. Additionally, the tax acts would not be have been as "harsh" in the 1st place as the colonists would have had MPs to argue their case for them. Presumably then, the taxes would have been milder and so there would not have been as strong an outburst against them in the colonies. With a milder political climate, we also might not see the Coercive Acts get passed.
Taxation with Representation
- Thread starter Emperor Palpatine
- Start date
This has a lot of butterflies.
Would the early colonies have MP at the time of the War of the Three Kingdoms, for example? To what effect? Would it be done later, say at the time of the Glorious Revolution or the Act of Union (the latter might actually make a lot of sense).
Even here, these additional MP would influence the political equilibrium of Britain, make the needs of the colonies heard stronger and earlier in the metropole, and therefore affect British policy, in the Americas and elsewhere. Stronger Whigs against Tories, I would imagine.
A conduct of the wars with France in North America that is more focused, in general, an particularly more focused on getting and keeping territory there (as opposed to using it as a bargaining chip). A different policy toward the natives.
Say, Louisburg would be likely retained at Aix-la-Chapelle ITTL (if earlier butterflies do not prevent even there being a Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle having to discuss the Louisburg issue).
Also, would this lead to established North American peerages? I feel it's likely.
A quite possible endgame is British North America existing to this day (darn big space-filling Anglosphere rules the world!
).
Would the early colonies have MP at the time of the War of the Three Kingdoms, for example? To what effect? Would it be done later, say at the time of the Glorious Revolution or the Act of Union (the latter might actually make a lot of sense).
Even here, these additional MP would influence the political equilibrium of Britain, make the needs of the colonies heard stronger and earlier in the metropole, and therefore affect British policy, in the Americas and elsewhere. Stronger Whigs against Tories, I would imagine.
A conduct of the wars with France in North America that is more focused, in general, an particularly more focused on getting and keeping territory there (as opposed to using it as a bargaining chip). A different policy toward the natives.
Say, Louisburg would be likely retained at Aix-la-Chapelle ITTL (if earlier butterflies do not prevent even there being a Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle having to discuss the Louisburg issue).
Also, would this lead to established North American peerages? I feel it's likely.
A quite possible endgame is British North America existing to this day (darn big space-filling Anglosphere rules the world!
).
Penny for The Guy
Banned
Definitely Act of Union
I like the idea of the Act of Union being the POD for the American MPs. It also beings up the possibility of other areas of the Empire sending representatives to London to sit on an equal footing with the Brits.
This could be a possible precursor to a world parliament also.
If you do a TL, please find some way to work in the Duke of Paducah. (There was an old comedian who billed himself as that, and the euphony of the name has always charmed me.)
I like the idea of the Act of Union being the POD for the American MPs. It also beings up the possibility of other areas of the Empire sending representatives to London to sit on an equal footing with the Brits.
This could be a possible precursor to a world parliament also.
If you do a TL, please find some way to work in the Duke of Paducah. (There was an old comedian who billed himself as that, and the euphony of the name has always charmed me.)
The only other place that has a reasonable chance to get MPs at that point were the Caribbean colonies I guess (I think I read somewhere that some would actually have MPs at some point later on I think, although perhaps that was about people owning estates there being elected in metropolitan boroughs). The rest of the British Empire would be, for a long time, distinctly not enough "British" for that (that is, insufficently white, or insufficiently Protestant, etc.) not to mention that historically much of it was run by means of chartered companies.
But in the future, who knows.
Cryostorm
Monthly Donor
Well he was not wrong, the American colonies were already about a fifth of the empire's population by the late 1700s.
The idea of Imperial Federation, the only way that the British Empire could of really survived. There were politicians who supported something like that. It would of took the wind out of the sails of any revolution with a chance of succeeding. At that point most americans were proud to be british.
Well it's going to be tricky considering that IIRC a number of major industrial cities on the British mainland didn't have representation in Parliament whilst rotten/pocket boroughs provided it for some tiny villages. Any representation for far away colonies is going to anger those that are denied it back home and have serious knock-on effects for British politics and its development. You've also got the problem of large travel times and associated communication latency - what happens when Parliament is dissolved and new elections called? For the length of time it would take for news of the dissolution to reach the Americas, an election to take place, and the candidate travel to London you could see that constituency being unrepresented for some time whilst Parliament has reformed and started working again.
Well parliament could pass a law that colonial mp's continue serving the next parliament for the time communication elections and transportation takes for the new colonial mp's to arrive. So, there is a work around but it would be a little complicated and unprecedented. Yeah, it might of caused local trouble. The Imperial Federation was more viable with the second british empire, but not impossible with the first.
Okay, so here's the first TL I ever worked out (and even wrote like a page and a half of bad modern-era conversation taking place in it):
Sometime in the 1770s, Britain gives the colonists representation. The exact date was left unspecified; I was riffing off a not-great RPG in which the precise POD involved Edmund Burke becoming prime minister. Let's say 1773 for butterfly purposes. The representation Britain gives the colonists is sort of proportional to population in the 1770s, but this opens an entire can of worms of apportionment, since the American population is growing much faster. The status of the American provincial legislatures remains murky - it's unclear how much authority they really have.
In America, there's a growing democratic and republican movement, calling for a written constitution, regular censuses and apportionment, the abolition of the Appalachian settlement boundary, and a federal structure with recognized provincial legislatures. France undergoes revolution on schedule, and the more radical elements in this movement also call for supporting the French revolution. This movement takes over the Whig Party, and by 1801 propels Thomas Jefferson to the prime minister post, where he manages to push through the bigger changes, including regular apportionment. As in OTL, the areas west of the Appalachians get carved into new provinces rather than going to any of the original 13. Britain is treated as a quasi-province - it doesn't have a separate parliament, much like England today in OTL, but rules like "each province gets to choose its own voter qualifications" treat it as a province.
Jefferson himself gets kicked out in 1806 because he's perceived as not supportive enough of the wars against Napoleon. The UK wins them on schedule, but faces so much opposition from the Americans (especially west of the Appalachians, an area that's somewhat of a reverse Vendee) that it deliberately lets France keep Louisiana, rather than giving territory that would be settled by republicans. The bit about Louisiana remaining French is from the TL I was cribbing this from (the point of that RPG was to have European power struggles in North America); the history is mine.
By the 1830s, things settle into a new constitutional arrangement - essentially, American population growth has reduced England's power enough that it's okay to treat Britain as a province more formally.
The American provinces, which always had lax voter qualifications (in OTL's late 18c, around half of white men in the US were enfranchised, which took Britain until the 1884 Reform Act to achieve), drag the metropole into universal male franchise; Britain drags America into abolishing slavery in 1831. A sharescropping system in the South and the Caribbean, plus a lot of settlement encouragement for whites, is established to ensure black people don't politically dominate any province. The Native Americans are not ethnically cleansed or killed off, except in Florida, but all the gold in the Cherokee reservation still ends up under the control of white magnates; the magnitude of the dispossession is more like OTL's postwar urban renewal than like the Trail of Tears. Giving the reservations the same autonomy and power as real provinces is unthinkable. Ireland is still controlled by English interests, in the same way black-majority provinces like South Carolina are still controlled by whites; there's mass emigration from Ireland, but no famine, and no depopulation - Ireland ends up with 10 or 12 million people rather than OTL's 6.
Western settlement is much slower. There's no Britain-US competition to get to the Pacific first. There's competition with France, except France has not settled much north of Arkansas, with St. Louis as a northern outpost. Eventually Britain buys or annexes land in OTL's Montana to build railroads, but it takes until the end of the 19c - the initial railroads go Chicago-*Winnipeg-*Alberta-Vancouver. From Vancouver, British settlement goes south, to somewhere undecided between the Columbia and the 42nd parallel; as Louisiana remains essentially a buffer state, there's not much conflict with Mexico, which like the rest of Latin America goes independent about on schedule because of fallout from the Napoleonic Wars. Mexico ends up wanked - there's no cession, and all the oil of California and Texas makes it a much bigger exporter than in OTL. By the 2000s it has about 33% higher population and 50% higher GDP per capita than in OTL.
Australia and New Zealand are shoehorned into this system, much more easily because by the late 19c, steamships exist. They treat their indigenous people the same as in OTL - indigenous Australians are subjected to widespread cultural genocide, Maori manage to keep their culture and demographically recover in the 20c. When I worked on this TL, I kept going back and forth on what would happen to South Africa. I also thought England would get divided into regions in 1801, but nowadays I think it's unlikely, and instead Britain would be carved back into England, Scotland, and Wales probably around 1900.
Sometime in the 1770s, Britain gives the colonists representation. The exact date was left unspecified; I was riffing off a not-great RPG in which the precise POD involved Edmund Burke becoming prime minister. Let's say 1773 for butterfly purposes. The representation Britain gives the colonists is sort of proportional to population in the 1770s, but this opens an entire can of worms of apportionment, since the American population is growing much faster. The status of the American provincial legislatures remains murky - it's unclear how much authority they really have.
In America, there's a growing democratic and republican movement, calling for a written constitution, regular censuses and apportionment, the abolition of the Appalachian settlement boundary, and a federal structure with recognized provincial legislatures. France undergoes revolution on schedule, and the more radical elements in this movement also call for supporting the French revolution. This movement takes over the Whig Party, and by 1801 propels Thomas Jefferson to the prime minister post, where he manages to push through the bigger changes, including regular apportionment. As in OTL, the areas west of the Appalachians get carved into new provinces rather than going to any of the original 13. Britain is treated as a quasi-province - it doesn't have a separate parliament, much like England today in OTL, but rules like "each province gets to choose its own voter qualifications" treat it as a province.
Jefferson himself gets kicked out in 1806 because he's perceived as not supportive enough of the wars against Napoleon. The UK wins them on schedule, but faces so much opposition from the Americans (especially west of the Appalachians, an area that's somewhat of a reverse Vendee) that it deliberately lets France keep Louisiana, rather than giving territory that would be settled by republicans. The bit about Louisiana remaining French is from the TL I was cribbing this from (the point of that RPG was to have European power struggles in North America); the history is mine.
By the 1830s, things settle into a new constitutional arrangement - essentially, American population growth has reduced England's power enough that it's okay to treat Britain as a province more formally.
The American provinces, which always had lax voter qualifications (in OTL's late 18c, around half of white men in the US were enfranchised, which took Britain until the 1884 Reform Act to achieve), drag the metropole into universal male franchise; Britain drags America into abolishing slavery in 1831. A sharescropping system in the South and the Caribbean, plus a lot of settlement encouragement for whites, is established to ensure black people don't politically dominate any province. The Native Americans are not ethnically cleansed or killed off, except in Florida, but all the gold in the Cherokee reservation still ends up under the control of white magnates; the magnitude of the dispossession is more like OTL's postwar urban renewal than like the Trail of Tears. Giving the reservations the same autonomy and power as real provinces is unthinkable. Ireland is still controlled by English interests, in the same way black-majority provinces like South Carolina are still controlled by whites; there's mass emigration from Ireland, but no famine, and no depopulation - Ireland ends up with 10 or 12 million people rather than OTL's 6.
Western settlement is much slower. There's no Britain-US competition to get to the Pacific first. There's competition with France, except France has not settled much north of Arkansas, with St. Louis as a northern outpost. Eventually Britain buys or annexes land in OTL's Montana to build railroads, but it takes until the end of the 19c - the initial railroads go Chicago-*Winnipeg-*Alberta-Vancouver. From Vancouver, British settlement goes south, to somewhere undecided between the Columbia and the 42nd parallel; as Louisiana remains essentially a buffer state, there's not much conflict with Mexico, which like the rest of Latin America goes independent about on schedule because of fallout from the Napoleonic Wars. Mexico ends up wanked - there's no cession, and all the oil of California and Texas makes it a much bigger exporter than in OTL. By the 2000s it has about 33% higher population and 50% higher GDP per capita than in OTL.
Australia and New Zealand are shoehorned into this system, much more easily because by the late 19c, steamships exist. They treat their indigenous people the same as in OTL - indigenous Australians are subjected to widespread cultural genocide, Maori manage to keep their culture and demographically recover in the 20c. When I worked on this TL, I kept going back and forth on what would happen to South Africa. I also thought England would get divided into regions in 1801, but nowadays I think it's unlikely, and instead Britain would be carved back into England, Scotland, and Wales probably around 1900.
If i was in england's position in your timeline and am being slowly marginalized, I would:
Decolonize
Or come up with away to keep the center of power.
The only way I can think of is actually go for written constitution that formalizes the relationships of the dominions and kingdoms under the empire. Put in a few perks just for the old kingdom, and hope for the best.
London is the capital forever, or it might eventually get moved to New York.
I'm sure there are other little things that could be sneaked in, that could continue to make the british isles a center for power into the 21st century.
Decolonize
Or come up with away to keep the center of power.
The only way I can think of is actually go for written constitution that formalizes the relationships of the dominions and kingdoms under the empire. Put in a few perks just for the old kingdom, and hope for the best.
London is the capital forever, or it might eventually get moved to New York.
I'm sure there are other little things that could be sneaked in, that could continue to make the british isles a center for power into the 21st century.
Link?
By the way, just to showcase how the TL I described above differs demographically from OTL, assuming South Africa is not in the UK:
Total population: 320 million. OTL UK+IE+US+CA+AU+NZ+Caribbean Anglosphere: 460; more than 100% of the difference is in North America. In 1900, this was 120 million, vs. 125 million in OTL.
Population by region: 75 million Britain (OTL 60), 10 million Ireland (OTL 6), 26 million Australia (OTL 25), 4 million New Zealand (OTL 4), 4 million Caribbean (OTL 5), 191 million North America (OTL 355) of which 25 are north of the Great Lakes/49th parallel (OTL 35) and 166 are south (OTL 320).
GDP per capita: £9,000. £1 = $5 in OTL 2015 PPP rates, so the average is a hair lower than in OTL.
Black population: 30 million. OTL: about 48 million. The big difference in population in North America comes from not having a long mid-20c baby boom, rather than from different migration patterns, so it would also affect the African-American population. Blacks are somewhat wanked in the sense that the income gap with whites is smaller than in OTL, and the early history of the police was more influenced by the metropole and less by slave catchers, resulting in less police brutality in than OTL.
Francophone population: 8 million. OTL: 7 million in Canada. With no American Revolution, Anglophones didn't settle the north shore of Lake Ontario to block French expansion.
Native American population: 10 million. OTL: 4 million between the US and Canada. US indigenous birth rates are much lower than those of any other US racial group, so between the much less genocidal policy in the ATL and the lack of a white and black baby boom, the indigenous proportion would be a bit higher than in OTL's Canada.
Hispanic population: 25 million identifying as having Spanish ancestry. OTL: 50 million. Mexico only borders the UK briefly, near the Pacific, and is also much richer. (In OTL, net migration from Mexico to the US turned negative this year, because of the strong Mexican economy.)
Asian population: 27 million. OTL: 30 million. Asian migration to the Anglosphere is recent, so the numbers are similar. They're a bit lower since British North America has much less of the Pacific coast.
Arab population: 5 million. OTL: 3 million. A smaller, more British North America consumes less oil than in OTL in the second half of the 20c. Mexico, which was a big exporter in the early 20c, is still richer than in OTL, but the Arab Gulf states are poorer than in OTL, so more Arabs emigrate to the UK.
Major metropolitan areas:
London 20 million. OTL 14 - in this TL, London is the political, financial, and cultural capital of a larger country.
New York 16 million. OTL 23 including New Haven and Allentown. New York got to export slave-farmed cotton for 30 fewer years, and is the financial and cultural capital of English North America but not of the UK.
Philadelphia 14 million. OTL 6.5. OTL's Philadelphia lost British investment in the late 18c since it was viewed as a center of revolution, unlike Loyalist-controlled New York. In the ATL, Philadelphia remained larger than New York for longer, so a few of New York's largest-city functions stayed there.
Boston 13 million. OTL 7, including Providence and Worcester. OTL's Boston was viewed as a center of revolution, like Philadelphia. The ATL's Boston also benefits more from being closer to Britain than in OTL.
Chicago 10 million. OTL 9.5. The Midwest is a bit smaller, but there are no major competitors on the Mississippi - St. Louis is French, Minneapolis is small, Kansas City doesn't exist.
Detroit 8 million. OTL 5.5. Detroit is this TL's Silicon Valley.
Atlanta 7 million. OTL 6. No major changes; it's a mid-19c outpost in the South build to help it industrialize. It's a bit bigger because the South has a bit more people.
Vancouver 6 million. OTL 2.5. Vancouver is the main gateway to the Pacific, taking in the role of Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
Liverpool-Manchester 6 million. OTL 4.5, but these are really two separate regions in OTL. Liverpool gains more than in OTL from being closer to Ireland and to North America.
Cleveland 5 million. OTL 3. Much more a screw than a wank - Cleveland is Ohio's capital, and the main center of the auto industry, with all the post-industrial decline that characterizes OTL's Cleveland, Detroit, Manchester, and Birmingham.
Montreal 5 million. OTL 3.5. It's the capital of a larger province - the Quebec-Huron (*Ontario) boundary is much further west.
Sydney 5 million. OTL 5. The major difference is that Australia got less immigration in the 19c (more of North America was available for British emigrants) and more in the second half of the 20c (no UK membership in the European Community means the metropole's tariffs still protect Australia and New Zealand's farm exports).
Melbourne 4 million. OTL 4. See above on Sydney.
New Birmingham 4 million. OTL 1. New Birmingham was founded at the same time as Atlanta, so it was a bit bigger than in OTL in the late 19c; in the 20c, it grew at the same pace as Atlanta, because the racist politics that doomed it in OTL's second half of the 20c did not really happen.
Dublin 4 million. OTL 2. Capital of an Ireland with almost twice OTL's population and a kinder history, with earlier industrialization.
Birmingham 4 million. OTL 3.5. Slightly more immigration into Britain's larger cities - a large portion of the difference with OTL is black Caribbean.
Notable screws: Toronto does not exist. Washington does not exist, but Georgetown became a metro area of 2 million. Miami is a city of 2.5 million. *Seattle is a city of 2 million, and exists as a cheaper alternative to Vancouver. Minneapolis has 1 million people (the UK bought the west side of the Upper Mississippi from France to facilitate railroad construction).
Napoleonrules
Banned
You're talking about waiting 2 years (6 months to travel there and 6 months back makes one year just on travel) and elections weren't one day quick events like today with instant results; you need time for the elected people to get their stuff together, and good lord if you're at war with France it could be longer to get a ship and it would be dangerous! You could lose one, all, or just some of your members on their way to London just from a storm, pirates, or an enemy.
With that type of representation you'll see Hancock and Samuel Adams still wanting to break away because it's not "local" enough. Look at our modern day conservatives who think representation with taxation from Washington is too intrusive and not "local enough" and would rather have "states rights". You're going to see that as the big push "colonial parliament rights", similar to the recent push to have Scotland's parliament take on more control and rights. The US Revolution might have different slogans and reasons, and be delayed, and history won't repeat itself, but it will rhyme. The US Revolution will occur.
Why 6 months? The Mayflower left Plymouth September 6th and anchored at Cape Cod November 11th.
Except that Scotland has not had any such revolution; the independence referendum was amicable. Neither have Canada and Australia. Even in Quebec, the independence referendums were amicable in that both sides pledged to abide by the result. The Francophones had their "on doit parler de 'nous'" shitshow, but they did not start blowing up places in Anglophone areas. The IRA and ETA have engaged in terrorism, but lost, in the sense that the Basque Country is part of Spain and Northern Ireland is part of the UK.
The rest of Ireland of course isn't, and when I first thought up the TL I described in the last two posts I did go back and forth on what the result would've been. Nowadays I'm leaning toward keeping Ireland in - independence happened after decades of failed attempts at allowing home rule on the same model as Canada and Australia.
And since we're discussing a TL in which late-18c Britain would've ended up granting some kind of home rule to the American colonies... you see where this is going.
Napoleonrules
Banned
4-6 months was often the amount of time it took John Adams and Abigail Adams letters to go back and forth, the ones that actually got delivered. One can assume Parliament will have a single dedicated person personally carrying the message of dissolving and needing elections I suppose which can speed along the message. Even in perfect conditions of getting there from London to... where? A different message to each colony? A message to Boston (66 days per Mayflower), then how long to get it to the other colonies? And within colonies. Set up elections. Have the elections. Count the results. Get those people ready to sail. Send them on right away, or do you have to announce the results to London first, wait for a reply, and THEN the people can go to London to take their seats? Again, wars with France are inevitable, this isn't butterflying them away or Napoleon away, he's going to be a great general in any French army regardless of politics. Your ships will be delayed, seized, sunk, whether carrying news of new elections needing to be held or carrying the MPs to London.
Much more realistic and doable would be a "confederation" of sorts, local parliament in the Americas taking care of local things. Only parliament in London can do diplomatic and military, but taxation and "local law" etc is Americas, no American representation in London though. Maybe observers, and a governor-general from the crown sent to... Philadelphia probably? Centrally located and largest city, no reason to make a "neutral" new city a la Washington, DC. PoD- Dominion of New England is not a failure, Leisler's Rebellion doesn't happen; having New Engand, New Jersey, and New York already in one colony with one governor makes it easier to unite the rest of the colonies because you now have instead of 12, 13, or 14 (depending on if you count Delaware and Vermont) you now have 7 or 8 (depending again on Delaware).
By the way, at risk of hijacking this thread even more than I already have: a major technological feature of the TL I described above is that supersonic travel is more widespread. The reason is both demand and supply.
With Britain and North America as constituents of the same state, there's more travel demand between London and New York/Philadelphia/Boston, including business travel, so it's easier to find rich businessmen who will pay premium fare for speed. In general, it's a fact that transportation demand is higher within the same country than between two different countries: see a blog post of mine for some data. This happens even when the two countries speak the same language. Obviously, figuring London-New York traffic in a TL with no American Revolution is an extrapolation, but there is evidence it'd be higher, from comparing New York-Toronto with similar city pairs within the US.
The more speculative reason is that in OTL, there was some trade war element to the US rejection of supersonic travel. Concorde was an Anglo-French project, and the US government had some contributing role in anti-supersonic NIMBYism. For one, Concorde was quieter on the ground than subsonic planes (in the same way high-speed trains are quieter at low speed than low-speed trains), but the Kennedy administration still talked about supersonic planes' noise emissions. NIMBYs are not what ultimately killed supersonic travel (that was the 1973 oil crisis), but they played an important role. In this TL, supersonic travel is developed in the UK, and if anything the government promotes it, because members of Parliament representing North American constituencies could travel back home in half the time. This is similar to how even anti-Amtrak Republicans in Congress keep alive plans for high-speed rail between New York and Washington.
Finally, with a smaller North America, following a more British transportation policy, oil consumption is much lower. In OTL, Britain taxed fuel heavily starting in the 1920s; in the US, motorists put lockbox laws requiring that all fuel tax revenues be spent on roads, but in the UK, the principle of absolute Parliamentary authority allowed the government to put fuel taxes into the general revenue, and most likely a pluricontinental UK would follow OTL's British and not American system, even with a written constitution. In OTL, the US was around a quarter of world oil consumption throughout the last third of the 20c. Cut US population in half, and cut its oil consumption to British levels (about half per capita), and that's about one sixth less oil consumption in the world, which means much lower oil prices.
I'll note that this could easily go either way, even in a TL where the UK is pluricontinental. Supersonic travel does not feature in my Anglo-French TL, which, like this older TL I'm describing, has no American Revolution, and therefore North America remains part of France (and most of it is Anglophone, though Francophone America is larger than in OTL); said TL's North American transportation policy is also more European, with lower car ownership in the biggest cities, as in OTL's London and Paris, and high-speed rail linking the major corridors, as in OTL's France. That said, my Anglo-French TL has 305 million people in French North America (vs. 355 in the US and Canada in OTL), whereas the TL I'm describing in this thread has just 191, and the difference is concentrated not in the largest cities but in small cities and the rural and semiurban Deep South.
I bring this up because usually, the TLs in this forum focus on geopolitics, e.g. alt history maps, and secondarily on social relations, e.g. race relations and political parties, but less on technology.
EDIT:
I bring up the Mayflower because it implies a two-month latency for MP travel from Parliament back home. Of note, both the currents and the winds go west to east in the North Atlantic, so travel to Parliament would be faster.
To put things in perspective, in 1830, on the eve of the opening of the first railroads, it took four weeks to go between the East Coast and the northwestern parts of Illinois (link) - and that was after the Erie Canal opened. In 1800, the already-admitted state capital of Knoxville was 4 weeks from New York, and a little closer to Washington, while the western parts of Tennessee were 5 weeks away. For a late 18c East Coaster, traveling to London would mean about twice the travel time that OTL's US expected of legislators from its western margins; for legislators from the western margins of British North America, make it three times. It's not nothing, but it's also not the order of magnitude of difference that you're thinking of, between trans-Atlantic travel time and travel time from London to Scotland.
Of course wars with France are inevitable, but Britain has a far better navy.
With Britain and North America as constituents of the same state, there's more travel demand between London and New York/Philadelphia/Boston, including business travel, so it's easier to find rich businessmen who will pay premium fare for speed. In general, it's a fact that transportation demand is higher within the same country than between two different countries: see a blog post of mine for some data. This happens even when the two countries speak the same language. Obviously, figuring London-New York traffic in a TL with no American Revolution is an extrapolation, but there is evidence it'd be higher, from comparing New York-Toronto with similar city pairs within the US.
The more speculative reason is that in OTL, there was some trade war element to the US rejection of supersonic travel. Concorde was an Anglo-French project, and the US government had some contributing role in anti-supersonic NIMBYism. For one, Concorde was quieter on the ground than subsonic planes (in the same way high-speed trains are quieter at low speed than low-speed trains), but the Kennedy administration still talked about supersonic planes' noise emissions. NIMBYs are not what ultimately killed supersonic travel (that was the 1973 oil crisis), but they played an important role. In this TL, supersonic travel is developed in the UK, and if anything the government promotes it, because members of Parliament representing North American constituencies could travel back home in half the time. This is similar to how even anti-Amtrak Republicans in Congress keep alive plans for high-speed rail between New York and Washington.
Finally, with a smaller North America, following a more British transportation policy, oil consumption is much lower. In OTL, Britain taxed fuel heavily starting in the 1920s; in the US, motorists put lockbox laws requiring that all fuel tax revenues be spent on roads, but in the UK, the principle of absolute Parliamentary authority allowed the government to put fuel taxes into the general revenue, and most likely a pluricontinental UK would follow OTL's British and not American system, even with a written constitution. In OTL, the US was around a quarter of world oil consumption throughout the last third of the 20c. Cut US population in half, and cut its oil consumption to British levels (about half per capita), and that's about one sixth less oil consumption in the world, which means much lower oil prices.
I'll note that this could easily go either way, even in a TL where the UK is pluricontinental. Supersonic travel does not feature in my Anglo-French TL, which, like this older TL I'm describing, has no American Revolution, and therefore North America remains part of France (and most of it is Anglophone, though Francophone America is larger than in OTL); said TL's North American transportation policy is also more European, with lower car ownership in the biggest cities, as in OTL's London and Paris, and high-speed rail linking the major corridors, as in OTL's France. That said, my Anglo-French TL has 305 million people in French North America (vs. 355 in the US and Canada in OTL), whereas the TL I'm describing in this thread has just 191, and the difference is concentrated not in the largest cities but in small cities and the rural and semiurban Deep South.
I bring this up because usually, the TLs in this forum focus on geopolitics, e.g. alt history maps, and secondarily on social relations, e.g. race relations and political parties, but less on technology.
EDIT:
I bring up the Mayflower because it implies a two-month latency for MP travel from Parliament back home. Of note, both the currents and the winds go west to east in the North Atlantic, so travel to Parliament would be faster.
To put things in perspective, in 1830, on the eve of the opening of the first railroads, it took four weeks to go between the East Coast and the northwestern parts of Illinois (link) - and that was after the Erie Canal opened. In 1800, the already-admitted state capital of Knoxville was 4 weeks from New York, and a little closer to Washington, while the western parts of Tennessee were 5 weeks away. For a late 18c East Coaster, traveling to London would mean about twice the travel time that OTL's US expected of legislators from its western margins; for legislators from the western margins of British North America, make it three times. It's not nothing, but it's also not the order of magnitude of difference that you're thinking of, between trans-Atlantic travel time and travel time from London to Scotland.
Of course wars with France are inevitable, but Britain has a far better navy.
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Napoleonrules
Banned
Um... to get to the point of supersonic travel you have to get through 200 years of NO supersonic travel. Please solve the problem of logistics of keeping the American East Coast as part of the British parliament in the 1770s before you jump to the 1960s. You have realism problems to solve first. Otherwise there's no way your British central control will survive to reach the supersonic age, I'd like to see HOW you've managed to hold on to the East Coast as British without a Revolution. Frankly, so far, your scenario doesn't cut it and the Revolution is delayed, but not denied. History will rhyme.
Britain managed to keep control of French Catholic Quebec. As it is, it took some true cock-up for it to lose just enough battles in the US Revolutionary War for France to step in and save the American colonists. It really could go either way.