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.