How the American Revolution affected Britain

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Every country has its mythology, and it’s entirely possible that some country’s is a fair match for its reality, even if I can’t think of an example. Never mind. The standard myth in the U.S. is that the American Revolution was a world-shaking event. I grew up in the US, although I live in Britain, and I was taught to think of the revolution’s opening shot as the shot heard round the world.

It’s a nifty phrase. It sticks to the inside of your brain like mental bubble gum. But a few years ago, it occurred to me to ask Lord Google for a British perspective on the loss of its 13 colonies and I found next to nothing.

Now, I might’ve been asking the wrong questions, although I did try several, but I began to wonder if the British response to that world-shaking event wasn’t a giant shrug. Had Britain slept through the shot heard round the world?

Quite possibly. I recently read “The Shot Heard Round the World” by Daniel Immerwahr. It was in the New Yorker and unfortunately it’s behind a paywall, but I’m including the link to prove I’m drawing on something real.

Irrelevant photo: peony

A bit of background

As usual, we need to take a step back before we go forward. When I was a kid, my history textbook skimmed the surface of the French and Indian War. I learned that it involved the French and the Indians, along with the British and their colonists. That seemed to be enough. I had no idea what it was about or why it mattered, but I got good grades so who cared?

Well, it turns out that if you rest your fingertips on history’s screen and do that magic expanding gesture, you can zoom out and see that the French and Indian War was part of the Seven Years’ War.

The what? 

A war. That lasted seven years and involved Asia, Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean, and Europe. All the major European powers rolled the dice to see what they could win, or at least not lose. It could also be called the War of Great Powers Behaving Badly, but that wouldn’t distinguish it sharply enough from other wars, so we’ll stick with the Seven Years’ War. It involved a dizzying array of alliances and treaties and secrets, my favorite being le secret du roi: the French king Louis XV’s private network of diplomats, which was so private his foreign minister didn’t know about it. It pursued the king’s personal goals, which were often in opposition to the country’s official policies. 

That’s what I love about history. You can’t make this shit up. And even if you could, it’s a lot funnier knowing it’s real.

Sorry, we were talking about the Seven Years War. It ran from 1756 to 1763, which (depending on what months you start and end in and how your fingers work) may add up to eight years.  Never mind. The American part–the French and Indian War–started with a border dispute and a series of skirmishes between French and English colonists. It was sort of a sideshow in the bigger war. 

Everyone made peace in 1763–Britain, France, and Spain in one treaty and Saxony, Austria, and Prussia in a different one–and Britain ended up keeping a lot of the French and Spanish territories it had captured. 

I’ll get to the American Revolution eventually. Stay with me.

 

Tea and taxes

In the traditional telling, Britain also came out of the war broke, which led it to impose a new tax, the 1765 Stamp Act, a law that’s baffled many an American student. Stamps? we asked ourselves. Who gets upset over stamps? Because I (and I, of course, speak for all the country’s baffled students) grew up in the era of letters, which you sent by licking a stamp and gluing it to the corner. And that stamp cost money, although not much. Everything cost money. So paying for stamps? Why did the colonists get so exercised they threw tea in the harbor?

No one stopped to explain that the stamps in question weren’t the kind we knew. They were a mark acknowledging that the tax had been paid. And no one told us the thirteen colonies that became the U.S. weren’t the only ones who were upset about the new tax. Sure, their residents responded by hanging government officials in effigy, but on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts, forget effigies, they threatened to hang the tax collector in person, and when he fled to the neighboring island of Nevis, followed him and burned houses. 

It’s not relevant to the line of thought I’m pretending to follow, but since I mentioned the tea thrown into the Boston Harbor in the Boston Tea Party, let’s tell the rest of the story: The Boston Tea Party wasn’t a protest over the stamp tax. It was about the tax having been reduced to help out the East India Company, which undercut local smugglers and sellers, offending many a righteous Boston colonist. As one of the colony’s wealthiest residents put it, “We are not Sea Poys, nor Marattas, but British Subjects, who are born to Liberty.” 

Translation? You can go treat funny-looking furriners badly, but not us: we’re British, so show some respect, please. We don’t want to pay more in taxes but paying less doesn’t work for us either.

 

Which colonies rebelled and who didn’t

Lots of colonies were getting restive right about then. Britain had twenty-six in America. Thirteen rebelled and thirteen–including the most lucrative, Jamaica–didn’t, although the thirteen rebel colonies did court them. Benjamin Franklin’s list of the colonies he hoped would join the rebellion included not only Britain’s American and Caribbean holdings but also Ireland. 

Politically speaking I see his point, but geographically that was always going to be a problem.

It’s easy to see why the Caribbean colonies didn’t rebel: they were plantation economies, with a small number of whites (most or many of them slaveholders) and a large number of enslaved Blacks. The whites were in no position to overturn the system. They relied on the British military to keep the enslaved from staging their own rebellion.

Canada? They attacked a statue of George III before anyone in the thirteen colonies thought to, but they were split between Catholics and Protestants at a time when that mattered fiercely, and a 1775-76 invasion by the rebellious colonies didn’t make the rebels to their south many Canadian friends. 

When you look for reasons the American Revolution took place where it did, the economics are worth a glance. The rebel colonies were relatively well off. American settlers’ incomes were equal to or slightly higher than English ones, and in real terms bought more. Their residents didn’t suffer through the famines that devastated the Irish and Indian colonies. So we’re not talking about people driven by desperation.

What about liberty, then? The American colonists talked a lot about liberty, but they weren’t unique in that. The Irish and Scots–some of them–felt much the same way, and in the 1760s there was a massive slave rising in Jamaica, a Native American confederacy fighting the British from what’s now Michigan to Virginia, and in India wars against the British East India Company. Lots of people had an interest in liberty, although they wouldn’t have been unanimous in how they defined it.

As as the article I’m leaning on puts it, the people who led the American Revolution weren’t ”the wretched of the earth but the fortunate sons of Britain who, at a certain point, found it more advantageous to become sons of liberty.”

 

So how, finally, did Britain react to American independence?

Let’s go back to the Seven Years War. Yes, Britain needed money but certainly by comparison it came out in good shape. France was broke and it wasn’t long before the French Revolution tossed its monarchy into history’s overflowing trash can. Spain lost most of its empire. Britain kept its monarchy and its Caribbean colonies. It took control of India. And it hung onto its trade with the newly independent United States. As Henry Clay put it, the United States were “sort of independent colonies” of England. They were “politically free, commercially slaves.”

Which isn’t at all the way I learned the story  but it goes a long way towards explaining why I found so little on the American Revolution’s impact on Britain. The loss of thirteen colonies doesn’t seem to have registered as a painful loss. Or possibly as any sort of loss. 

But what about the American call to liberty: was it heard round the world?

Possibly not. Hannah Arendt wrote that the French Revolution “made world history” but the American was “of little more than local importance.” Dig around and you’ll find historians who agree. And inevitably others who don’t. I’m no historian, just somebody sitting on the couch, but I see Arendt’s point. Slavery meant the American call for liberty sounded ever so slightly off key. That French hero of the American Revolution the Marquis de Lafayette later said, “I would never have drawn my sword in the cause of America if I could have conceived that thereby I was founding a land of slavery!”

Independence of the thirteen former colonies put power in the hands of the local elite, and many of them, including eight of the first ten presidents, were slaveholders. They were free to run their own country. They were free to expand westward, appropriating land from the Native tribes, free to own slaves, who were not free to be free.

During the revolution, most Native and Black Americans fought against the rebels. 

33 thoughts on “How the American Revolution affected Britain”

      • A song I have played many times during shows when I worked as a musician on cruise ships, but absolutely true as the real reason for revolutions and civil wars. The British empire was taking too much money from the colonies so they revolted. My own Wetherill family history as an example. The US civil war was because the north wanted to end inhumane slavery and the south was dependent on slavery for cheap labor which was making the plantation owners filthy rich. The Star Trek future without money ended all wars on Earth!

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        • And here we are with the world’s first trillionnaire soaking up an amount of money beyond anything I can even begin to calculate. So much for the trickle-down theory or economics. Did anyone really believe that would work?

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          • Study The gilded Age in history that led into the roaring 20s. The years 1928 and early 1929 with a 90% rise in the stock markets, and you know what that lead to! I have a former music student who ended up with an economics degree during the Reagan years who still swears by trickle down economics! The 1% still do also because it has made them filth rich, just like the song from Cabaret!

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            • I grew up on tales of the Gilded Age and as a kid had trouble taking in what I was hearing. Ha. Silly me. That the 1% embraces the theory doesn’t surprise me. That even they believe it–that would.

              That still doesn’t account for your former student. Some things really do surpass human understanding.

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              • I have had many discussions about this with my former student and he cites a former professor from the Regan era who believed in trickle down economics. He is a Trump voter and will never admit he made a mistake about this or voting for Trump. This is the story of many MAGA supporters even though they are worse off during Trump they will never admit that they made a bad judgment decision by voting for him!

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                • There’ve been studies of cults that predict the end of the world on some specific date. When the date comes and goes and the world staggers on, un-ended, instead of saying, “Yup, we were wrong” and rethinking things, or just plain leaving, they tend to decide their calculations were wrong, not the whole damn idea, and together more tightly. And calculate a new end to the world. Sound like the MAGA base?

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  2. I understand that Native tribes who sided with the Brits during the seven years war to defeat the French were guaranteed that their lands were safe, so putting a stop to westward expansion of the colonies. This frustrated many colonial businessmen who had financial reasons why this guarantee should be removed.

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    • That would be news to me but it certainly would make sense. I don’t know about British treaties with or promises to the tribes, but I do know that US treaties were broken over and over. But then you probably know that as well.

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  3. Interesting take in this anniversary year, Ellen, thanks. A friend wrote a book some years ago on the way the West Indian colonies reacted to the revolution. Many were on the British side it seems, for their own, not necessarily noble, reasons.
    I recently read an article on the thirteenth and fourteenth amendments (about which I know hardly anything) and was surprised by the amount of political cynicism and betrayal evidenced in their framing. Perhaps I shouldn’t be, given the way the world is now. I can’t help but think that “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” is always with us.
    Jeannie

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    • Cynicism and betrayal seem to be the most powerful ongoing players in history and politics.

      Okay, I really don’t want to think that but I can’t, offhand, come up with a good argument against it. I’m not saying every player was soaked in both, but they come up over and over.

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  5. Good point . When we ex-colonists realize how little we know of the other wars that went on around the world – even in our part of the world – it is rather stunning. I consider myself a lover of American history, but I have very little knowledge of The French and Indian War, Shay’s Rebellion, and all those other incidents that lead us to where we are now. As I got deeper into learning about the (American) Civil War, I was lead to finding out what went to precipitate the Mexican War.
    Even in the skimming of World History one gets in school, it is pretty clear how the aftermath of WWI laid the groundwork for WWII.
    And how some of the current governmental racist attitudes lead back to — poor old Woodrow Wilson !! (whose wife was the first female president.)

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      • Wilson was incapacitated by a severe stroke…and it was pretty well hushed up. He was bed-ridden, and his wife was consulted on a good many of the nation’s policies. (There is a lot of dispute over this, saying that she really had no voice. but she was very protective of him and exerted quite a bit of control over the access to him.
        (https://smithsonianassociates.org/ticketing/programs/edith-wilsonl excellent books on this such as “Madam President: The Secret Presidency of Edith Wilson”)
        The snotty remark about the Civil War alludes to revelations that Wilson (a native Virginian) was quite a racist (also subject to layers of opinion.) He hosted a showing of DW Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation”, which was about “The War of Northern Aggression.” When Wilson was in his teens he actually saw Robert E. Lee and was suitably impressed. (Wilson was born in 1856 and Lee died in 1870, so Wilson would have been the ideal age to be submerged in idolization of the War and The Lost Cause) The irony usually cited is that for all his belief in the League of Nations, they had to be white male nations. *He was no fan or women’s suffrage either.)

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        • Thanks for all that. My reading’s barely skimmed the surface of Wilson’s presidency and can be summed up as he ran on the slogan “He kept us out of war” and then got the country into a war. Like I said, barely the surface. It sounds like fascinating stuff. Thanks again.

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      • Sorry, I am not in full command of this language – you mean I should explain more clearly what I mean ?

        One can not over-estimate the impact of the French Revolution (FR in short) in / for Europe, and in the res publica litteraria.
        The FR is a dynamic process that started in 1789 when those guys decided not to leave as the (not so absolute) King had demanded. It ended with the re-organisation of the whole of Europe at the Viennese Congresss in 1814/1815. (Europe seemingly falls every hundred years in convulsions, and needs a restart : 1648 ; then sometimes in the early 1700s (peace of Oliva – ? -, I am unsure, sorry) ; Vienna 1815 ; Versailles 1919 seq.) There is a clear “before” and a clear, and different, “after” the event.

        The FR is the revolution, the emancipation of the bourgeoisie that becomes fully powerful (“historisch wirkmächtig”), a defining factor in society, politics, not only in France, but elsewhere too.

        And this “elsewhere”, especially over the Rhine, is en passant turned upside down too : The Reich was by far not a strong fortress, but a mere skewed shed, and it was not a big effort for Napoleon (the true son of the FR, the self-crowned Emperor – cool eh ?!) to kick the shed to shreds – but he did it, and re-organised the whole land.
        In this process he brought the Code Napoleon, a Grundgesetz / basical law, defining the freedoms and obligations of the new citizens – not subjects any more. Sadly, as can be observed in his “model state” Westphalen, the people liked to be subjects, and refused to free themselves. Here, when the revolution was exported and became a top-down measure, it failed.
        Everyone who says (more or less proudly) “I am a citizen. I have rights, and I fulfill my duties against the state” depends on this “code”, a fruit of the FR.

        But the FR also sowed the seed of the dreaded nationalism (“La Grand Nation”) – a seed that finally came to fruit in 1914. (It is old, but always remarkable, the the two societies who were fashionable late in their “Staatswerdung”, Italy & Germany (1871), harboured fascism (I am still of the opinion that the NS is a form of fascism, but that’s academic prattle)).

        Besides political and societal impacts, the FR also influenced the respublica literaria, the “Gelehrtenrepublik”, the intellectual scene of the time – what later became “Geisteswissenschaft” (the begriff is nowadays out of fashion, can’t see that it was replaced with something meaningful ; yes, I become old and silly), different from these engineers who tinker in their laboratories and call that scientia, tah.

        The American Revolution was a revolt of money bags. The famous words “We da people” have it all in it : They mean themselves, white males of (preferably non-catholic, but nevertheless somehow) Christian belief, no Negro, no Indian, no women – all in all a very Greek definition of “da peopl”.
        The absolute idealistic motto of the FR “Liberte – Fraternite – Egalite” included all human beings, regardless of their skin, their belief, or their sex. Yes, it lacked a bit behind in becoming a reality (Olympe de Gouges was beheaded after all) , but the devil was out of the bottle.
        It’s too damn easy to criticise and condemn idealistic ideas – here some people had the guts to try. The pendulum was put in motion.

        So this is it over a cup of coffee – I am sure that there is already a library full of texts about the FR’s meaning / impact etc. from all possible aspects.

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        • Many thanks. I expect Toussaint L’Ouverture would’ve had a few words to say about how widely liberte, egalite, etc, were put into practice, but you’re right, it’s easy to criticize idealistic movements and to overlook the evil that less idealistic governments and movements do.

          Again, thank you.

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    • You’re right: we have, although to be fair I suspect that since WWI (or II–I’m not really sure) we genuinely have been that important. It wasn’t good for anyone, although there was money to be made.

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      • Sorry, I can not follow you on “it wasn’t good for anyone”. I think the pax Americana was a good thing, a robust world order was achieved, but after 1991 (when the SU ceased to exist) the US just lay back and snoozed on the laurel, happily ignoring that the world kept on turning.
        The “short” 20th century, as bloody & violent as none before, the years between the end of WWI (the “Urkatastrophe” that ended the order based on Vienna 1815) and the implosion of the SU, between 1919 and, yeah 1989 (when the Eastern block had basically no more chance but to crumble & collapse) – these roughly, give & take 70 or 80 years of world history were dominated by the former USofA, now Trumpistan.
        WWI was finally brought to an end on a “wave of American oil”, and those fresh faced “dough boys”, who better quickly learned how to fight in the trenches. Wilson, as “inconsistent” (I know no better word, sorry), let’s say as interesting as he was a person, nevertheless brought the idea of the “Völkerbund” to life. Again, one may critisise it, even shake one’s head – in hindsight this is arrogant. It was a groundbraking idea, and it was finally brought in form.
        WWII would have been a totally different thing without the US intervention. As German citizen I have to be thankful that the US liberated Germany (let’s not split hairs on this) : It is a fact that without the US this terrible war would have taken a different course.
        One of the results of 1945 was the forming of the two blocks, and the Western was lead by the US. It was a system of alliances, dependencies, goodwill, and yes : trust. This included not only Europe and Nato, but also the Middle East, the Far East too.
        All this crumbles before our eyes since this imbecile took over. He sends his son in law and his business chump for difficult negotiations, allows a blustering arsehole to be “Kriegsminister”, and then there is “little Marco”, who just does as he is told. And do not start me on the so called “Vice President”, a freshly converted Catholic (I do not believe one word this half-brain utters !), who feels the need to tell the POPE how it is done.
        All this is possible because there is no underlying idea, no plan, no long term strategy, holy shit Nixon was a better politician for Amurga and the world than these bunch of dilletanti !
        Look around and weep. What you see smoldering are the ruins of a once powerful superpower. Yes there is still military might, but it is baseless : The ruling scum has no values except short term gain. Committing the crimes of piracy and murder in the Carribean is not policy. Frivolously starting a war in the fragile Middle East (Kushner one said that he would not need “lessons in history”, yeah) without not the hint of an idea where it should lead to – that’s just a crime.
        Every political player in this region (and elsewhere) now sees that Trumpistan is not able to keep the Strait of Hormus open. It was the Carter doctrine (yes : The so badly ridiculed peanut farmer !) who formed this in 1980. Da big leader needed only a few days to show that it is not possible for Trumpistan, without any idea of the results of his dumbness. The gaping strategic hole will be filled by China, not crumbling Russia under Vlad the impaler.

        In short : When the USofA played a responsible role through the Cold War not “all was bad”. Things started to slide after the end of the arch enemy, the feeling of being the “Herren der Welt” took over. Da leader is in a way just a symptom, a kind of reagens, a pretty nasty “Katalysator”. The end is open. As always.
        Let us just hope that the reign of stupidity comes to an end soon, hopefully without more war : Trump showed that he is willing über Leichen zu gehen.

        Sorry. I climb down from my soap box now.

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        • I’ll keep this brief, which is another way of saying I won’t try to answer all your points. No argument that the US helped ended the horror of World War II and of the Nazis. And I agree that the world with two superpowers was–certainly in hindsight–stable. Again in hindsight, stability does look appealing. The problems I was referring to were little things like the Vietnam War, though, and an assortment of other interferences in other countries that, you know, had this silly idea that they might want to be self-governing in ways the US didn’t like.

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