Would a world without the USA a worse world?

Would a world without the USA a worse world?

  • Yes

    Votes: 126 53.6%
  • No

    Votes: 109 46.4%

  • Total voters
    235

Thomas1195

Banned
Let's say the ARW failed and Britain held on to the Thirteen Colonies.

How would the world look like? Would it become worse than OTL, especially ITTL, the French Revolution could be butterflied away?
 
Um... yes, yes it would be.
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All Hail Britannia...
 
Constitutional democracy woul have one model less, especially if radical ideas of the French Rev never developed, we might be stuck with aristocratic structures longer. Not good.

In the long run, hard to determine, though.

For Native Americans, things could hardly have gone worse, though. Continuing british-French rivalry might buy some tribes a bit more time, and the westward expansion may have been decidedly slowed down. Good for the indigenous groups, probably bad for settler living standards.
 
It depends on your definition of worse. A world without the USA probably butterflies Hitler away. That saves 6 million Jews and 30 million Russians, which is not at all worse.

Taking the question in the spirit that it was offered however:
A failed Revolutionary War is only going to make the French fiasco worse. France was virtually bankrupted by its commitment in OTL, extending that will only cause the country to descend further into chaos, leading to more extreme movements than Napoleon. If those movements start spurting out messages of "freedom" and "liberation", they will catch on in other countries, probably leading to more violence. Will a Napoleonic War analogue happen? Probably not.

However, if you take out the Napoleonic Wars, you take out the Congress of Vienna, which was the first (and only successful until 1945) time when the European Great Powers all sat down together and decided not to fight each other, lasting for almost a century, with only the Crimean War, Bismarck's wars and the various Russian-Ottoman fights breaking out. A removal of that will most likely mean the trend of the eighteenth century continues into the nineteenth, and that was major great-power wars every generation or two. Which, with nineteenth century technology, is going to be ugly.

- BNC
 

B-29_Bomber

Banned
For Native Americans, things could hardly have gone worse, though. Continuing british-French rivalry might buy some tribes a bit more time, and the westward expansion may have been decidedly slowed down. Good for the indigenous groups, probably bad for settler living standards.

Honestly this is unlikely. It was never particularly practical for Britain to stop or even slow down westward expansion, nor was it even their goal. The main cause of the Proclamation Line(s) was the financial troubles of the British government post 7 years war. Once Britain recover financially London isn't going to care one iota about the Natives.
 
Honestly this is unlikely. It was never particularly practical for Britain to stop or even slow down westward expansion, nor was it even their goal. The main cause of the Proclamation Line(s) was the financial troubles of the British government post 7 years war. Once Britain recover financially London isn't going to care one iota about the Natives.
It won`t care, but it`ll have Nouvelle France in its Westward way. If that isn`t going away - and if French colonial policies which involve much less settlement continue - then half the continent remains somewhat blocked, doesn`t it? Throughout the 19th century, divergences would become greater and greater from OTL.
 
That's not stated in the OP. Just that the ARW fails.
But the OP states that the French Revolution may be butterflied away. If that is the case, then I would assume the Louisiana Purchase is also butterflied. Which leaves the Thirteen Colonies hemmed in by Nouvelle France.
 
But the OP states that the French Revolution may be butterflied away. If that is the case, then I would assume the Louisiana Purchase is also butterflied. Which leaves the Thirteen Colonies hemmed in by Nouvelle France.

I think you mean Luisiana.

To my lights, there's a good chance most of that ends up inhabited by people whose grandparents were born in, or passed through, Pennsylvania or Virginia. That being said, it'd probably take a war to change hands, and wars.... even the most inevitable-seeming of wars.... are contingent.
 
It's very hard to say. We can go full Holy Britannian Empire dystopia as mentioned above, or we can go the reverse of that.

For Native Americans, things could hardly have gone worse, though. Continuing british-French rivalry might buy some tribes a bit more time, and the westward expansion may have been decidedly slowed down. Good for the indigenous groups, probably bad for settler living standards.

In many places that just changes who's doing the killing, since the Franco-British rivalry was stoking massive warfare across half the continent. Not to mention we have Australia, Canada, and South Africa as examples of what the British Empire thought of indigenous people in their settler colonies, not to mention British imperialism in general.
 
Impossible to say would world be better or worse if ARW would fail. History can go to several different directions. For me role of USA on developing more democratic world is pretty exaggerated. UK was already going towards parliamentary monarchy and there was already several thinkers around and surely democratic ideas would eventually develope. And modern USA even is not most democratic nation in the world.
 
A world without the USA is unlikely to mean continued British rule over an unwilling and expensive North America. An interesting alternative is for the thirteen colonies to become independent but as a number of independent countries.
 
A world without the USA is unlikely to mean continued British rule over an unwilling and expensive North America. An interesting alternative is for the thirteen colonies to become independent but as a number of independent countries.

Or then there is Greater Canada :p.
 
Let's say the ARW failed and Britain held on to the Thirteen Colonies.

How would the world look like? Would it become worse than OTL, especially ITTL, the French Revolution could be butterflied away?

Depends very much on how and when the ARW fails. Choose your own adventure: Does it fail because of military successes? (Go to page For Want of a Nail, by Robert Sobell.) Because different parts of the colonies were treated differently? (Go to page The Dominion of Southern America.) Because revolution was preempted by top-down reform of the colonial government? (Look to the West.) Does it fail because of better Parliamentary leadership? (See The March of Folly, by Barbara Tuchman for clues.) Because of contrived circumstances? (The Two Georges, Harry Turtledove.) Because revolution was preempted by reform bringing colonial reps into Parliament? Okay, that one I don't know, but you get the idea.

Even with that established, it could plausibly go either way - history is complicated.

Just to riff on Achaemenid Rome's point, most of those PODs stick Britain with a lot of entrenched slave interests. It also eliminates the revolutionary emancipations that set New England on a course towards being free territory, and might delay or avert Pennsylvania's Quaker-influenced gradual emancipation, the model for the rest of the north of America. Combined, that could lead the continent and Britain's empire down some very dark paths.

But if slavery is our qualifier, we also have to look at Look to the West, which tells how North America and the other colonies could end slavery earlier (in most spots). IMHO it's not the most likely outcome of the starting premises, but it's clearly a plausible one.

And that's just one factor, within just a couple political units, without even straying out of the 19th century!

BiteNibbleChomp points out the aversion of the Holocaust, but how do we know the French or Russians won't commit an equivalent to the Holocaust? How do we know a First World War in the 1930s won't kill more than our WWI and WWII combined?

I hate to go there, but what if OTL's cold war balance between two left-ish, progressive-ish, western-ish alliances.... what if that was the most stable arrangement possible? For all we know there's no safer way to ride out a protracted superpower conflict without a major war. A timeline that looks great into the 1970s takes on a different tone if North and South Chinese warlords let loose on each other with nuclear missiles, and their Russian and Commonwealth Allies are drawn in.
 
If the British held onto the Thirteen Colonies, the British Empire would likely remain a pro-slavery empire for decades longer than OTL. So it would very likely be worse.

I disagree with this substantially. The Revolution maybe accelerated the British abolitionist movement by ten years, but it was already in incubation so it was coming. Plus a British Empire that abolishes slavey in the early 1840s still saves 25 years of slavery in North America.
 
Constitutional democracy woul have one model less, especially if radical ideas of the French Rev never developed, we might be stuck with aristocratic structures longer. Not good.

In the long run, hard to determine, though.

For Native Americans, things could hardly have gone worse, though. Continuing british-French rivalry might buy some tribes a bit more time, and the westward expansion may have been decidedly slowed down. Good for the indigenous groups, probably bad for settler living standards.

Constitutional republicanism, but not constitutional democracy. The early US was not a democracy and did not claim to be. It did democratise among white males faster, although it was substantially slower to democratise among people of color. And that denial of rights wasn't just limited to voting rights, but also basic civil protections until the 1960s, which the British poor had centuries earlier. I would argue the extremism seen in US conservative politics to this day is due to the reverberations of becoming a true democracy.
 
A world without the USA is unlikely to mean continued British rule over an unwilling and expensive North America. An interesting alternative is for the thirteen colonies to become independent but as a number of independent countries.

Which is almost the worst result in terms of losing a Western power capable of standing up against any totalitarian rising power.
 
Which is almost the worst result in terms of losing a Western power capable of standing up against any totalitarian rising power.

From a wider perspective, of course, yes. But a number of different constitutional approaches from the different independent states would be fascinating.
 

kernals12

Banned
The American revolution has inspired many fights for liberty all over the world. A defeat in the ARW would set back the cause of democracy for decades.
 
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