Union between Britain and British North America?

I was thinking of a scenario earlier in which the American War of Independence either fails or is averted completely, could the United Kingdom restructure or reform to include British North America as an integral part of the country? I'm thinking of the "United Kingdom of Great Britain, Ireland, and North America" or just a more flavourful "Empire of the Britons" (Colonial Americans were white and spoke english, so close enough).
 
There were pamphlets published back then which proposed just this, and Americans intellectuals didn't like it much. They just wanted to be left alone to do their own thing and colonize NA in peace. The entire reason they revolted was because the British started bothering them and actually enforcing the power of the central government. This is just more of that. They will not appreciate being forced to pay taxes to a government they barely interact with, they will not appreciate being governed from London and they will certainly not appreciate being expected to fight and die in imperialist British wars which don't benefit them in the slightest. The more the colonies get to just take care of their own business without British interference, the more loyal they'll remain.
 
1. Taxes in Britain would be much higher than those in the colonies. I doubt even political equality would tempt the colonies to join such a union.

2. There is no way that political or social doctrine allowed the British (of all levels of society) to accept colonists as equals. They were COLONISTS, they existed to serve the mother country. Parliamentarians no less than blacksmiths took this as fact. Only an eight year war ended this line of thinking.

IN 1776, the coloniest made up about 1/7th the population of Great Britain and Ireland. In 1812, it was 1/3rd. By the 1850's and 1860's, the colonies would outnumber the mother country despite Britain's demographic explosion.

It would be utterly unacceptable for Britain to be outnumbered in Parliament. Note that Britain in OTL spent the next five decades reaching an equitable distribution of Parliamentary representation within Britain. Outside of it would be impossible.

The Political will for such a unification simply did not exist anywhere at this time.

At best, Britain would allow "Home Rule" that would evolve over decades though even this was unlikely.
 
There were pamphlets published back then which proposed just this, and Americans intellectuals didn't like it much. They just wanted to be left alone to do their own thing and colonize NA in peace. The entire reason they revolted was because the British started bothering them and actually enforcing the power of the central government. This is just more of that. They will not appreciate being forced to pay taxes to a government they barely interact with, they will not appreciate being governed from London and they will certainly not appreciate being expected to fight and die in imperialist British wars which don't benefit them in the slightest. The more the colonies get to just take care of their own business without British interference, the more loyal they'll remain.

The reason they revolted was because the British behaved in unfair and arbitrary ways via the Intolerable Acts. People thought the proposed new taxes were unfair and illegitimate, but they only had boycotts and civil disobedience over it. Revolt happened when the British closed down an entire city because of a dozen or so vandals, when they abolished representative assemblies, and several other highly coercive policies. This gets misunderstood again and again by populist history, but is crucial to truly understand the topic. There is simply no way the hardliners would have rallied the general population to revolt over taxation unless there are cases of extreme coercion involved.

There is no way that political or social doctrine allowed the British (of all levels of society) to accept colonists as equals. They were COLONISTS, they existed to serve the mother country. Parliamentarians no less than blacksmiths took this as fact. Only an eight year war ended this line of thinking.

Again, this is just not correct. There were certainly chunks of government (including George III and Lord North) who thought the colonies were there to serve the mother country. However, they did not think the individual colonists were lesser as a people than Englishmen. If a colonist moved to the UK he would not have been treated as inferior and unworthy of rights because he grew up in Boston or New York rather than Liverpool or Bristol. And even then, this mindset was not unanimous among the British elite. The Pittites and the Rockinghamites believed in providing rights in the colonies, so to pretend there is "no way" that this mindset could have been in government is without merit.
 
I was thinking of a scenario earlier in which the American War of Independence either fails or is averted completely, could the United Kingdom restructure or reform to include British North America as an integral part of the country? I'm thinking of the "United Kingdom of Great Britain, Ireland, and North America" or just a more flavourful "Empire of the Britons" (Colonial Americans were white and spoke english, so close enough).

If you're talking about union along the lines of the 1707 or 1801 acts for Scotland and Ireland, than no. The colonies had long built up local structures for representative governance and would be unprepared to lose these for unification in a single parliament, as happened in the cases of Ireland and Scotland. Even if you set aside concerns about the colonists being overruled by the larger population in Britain, the logistics simply wouldn't work for day to day governance of the colonies. It took about three months to get a ship back and forth across the Atlantic, so it would be a very unresponsive government even on the most basic of matters that do not require deliberation.

What is potentially possible is some form of representation in an imperial parliament at Westminster, on top of the colonial assemblies. While the colonists would have accepted theoretical sovereignty lying with the imperial parliament, there would have to be de facto recognition by the British that colonial assemblies would handle most matters. In return, the assemblies would have to pay for the common defence, but would require more voice on these matters in the long term for this to be a lasting settlement.

All of this would be contingent on getting a different government at Westminster, and probably a different King, to the one we had in our timeline.
 
Yet he was including Ireland which would soon or already had MPs.

Even with Ireland his math isn't right. Ireland would have to have 10 million people for the combined GB/Ireland population to be seven times the American population. It actually had about four million people.

The combined GB/Ireland population was about 4.5 times the size of the American population in 1776.
 
Even with Ireland his math isn't right. Ireland would have to have 10 million people for the combined GB/Ireland population to be seven times the American population. It actually had about four million people.

The combined GB/Ireland population was about 4.5 times the size of the American population in 1776.

I was using Populstat's data for 1800. This had GB and Ireland at about 15 million combined. GB data wasn't available before.

Five to one is probably more accurate.

Key point is that the population was growing exponentially in the colonies. Within three generations, North America would dominate any British joint Parliament (Again, no one in Britain would accept such an idea).
 
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