The English Revoluion: liberty, equality and brotherhood.
- Thread starter l-101
- Start date
Dirk_Pitt
Banned
The English already had one: The English Civil War. It even had a Robespierre: Oliver Cromwell. They just failed to have a Reign of Terror and a Napoleon analogue.
JSmith
Banned
Was this possible at the time, after the American Revolution or during or after the French Revolution ?
Last edited:
I knew that but my OP was asking something else and the civil war's reasons and historical consequences were a bit different.
Britain could well have descended into revolution, but it just doesn't seem likely before the Napoleonic Wars. At least, that's the impression I get from trawling through all previous threads on this topic. It's a shame, really.
Most scenarios normally involve the Duke of Wellington and/or Ernst Augustus blocking reform and basically subverting what little existed of the democratic process in Britain.
It's an interesting scenario which could be developed into one epic of a timeline... so it makes little sense that nobody has any great ideas on it.
Perhaps it is something to do with the fact that there is no huge POD to set off the revolution: a combination/sequence of medium-sized PODs really only seem the viable way to set off the revolution.
Most scenarios normally involve the Duke of Wellington and/or Ernst Augustus blocking reform and basically subverting what little existed of the democratic process in Britain.
It's an interesting scenario which could be developed into one epic of a timeline... so it makes little sense that nobody has any great ideas on it.
Perhaps it is something to do with the fact that there is no huge POD to set off the revolution: a combination/sequence of medium-sized PODs really only seem the viable way to set off the revolution.
I don't think even a very repressive British government could cause a French Revolution style revolt in the Americas. The difficulty is that:
1. low population and lots of opportunities means labor is scarce in the thirteen colonies. If you want to keep workers you need to treat and pay them well or they'll leave.
2. It's nearly impossible to keep people from leaving even if you wanted to. There's an entire continent to police with a few tens of thousands soldiers at most. Too many redcoats in Massachusetts, go to Georgia. The new British governor of Virginia raises taxes, head west to Tennessee or over the mountains to the Ohio Valley where you're 200 miles from the nearest outpost and you see strangers maybe once a year.
I think you'd need a bigger POD to cause repression for the English at home. Their strong parliament and general public apathy/sympathy for the American's revolt makes a more repressive stand unlikely. Any big push for repression by the monarchy is likely to just accelerate the decline of the monarchy's power and the rise of Parliament.
1. low population and lots of opportunities means labor is scarce in the thirteen colonies. If you want to keep workers you need to treat and pay them well or they'll leave.
2. It's nearly impossible to keep people from leaving even if you wanted to. There's an entire continent to police with a few tens of thousands soldiers at most. Too many redcoats in Massachusetts, go to Georgia. The new British governor of Virginia raises taxes, head west to Tennessee or over the mountains to the Ohio Valley where you're 200 miles from the nearest outpost and you see strangers maybe once a year.
I think you'd need a bigger POD to cause repression for the English at home. Their strong parliament and general public apathy/sympathy for the American's revolt makes a more repressive stand unlikely. Any big push for repression by the monarchy is likely to just accelerate the decline of the monarchy's power and the rise of Parliament.
The sort of things that caused the Americans to rebel—being denied representation in Parliament, being denied the opportunity to expand at the Native Americans' expense (the Proclamation Line), being the victim of British mercantilist policies (the Tea Party)—didn't happen in Great Britain. The British, of course, did have representation in the Parliament of Great Britain; the Native American situation doesn't apply; and the mercantilist policies were tailor-made to benefit British interests.
It's noteworthy that one of the phrases used by Americans in the era leading up to the American Revolution was "rights as Englishmen" that they felt were being denied to them: that is, they felt that the British had traditional rights that the Americans ought to have but weren't permitted to have (due to George III taking direct control over the American aristocracy).
Things were far from perfect, of course, but the situation in Great Britain (with a democratically elected government, albeit with poor levels of suffrage and plenty of corruption) was very different to the kind of situation in the Kingdom of France. When presented with some degree of democracy, I think the first instinct is usually to work with it rather than to immediately seek out conflict, whereas in Bourbon France there was essentially nothing to work with and it was clear that any concessions were coming against the firm opposition of the established order; and even Revolutionary France remained a constitutional monarchy for quite some time before Louis XVI continued trying to roll back the Revolution and eventually they got rid of him. And there's no way George III or any other British monarch in this era would go repressive on what Britons considered their rights; the present British royal family is in power as a direct result of the then-very-recent Glorious Revolution (in 1688-1689), where a British king (James II of the House of Stuart, strictly speaking King of England and Scotland separately) had tried to make himself rather than Parliament the supreme force of the state and, as a result, his royal line, even though it had been governing Great Britain since the century-old personal union that had essentially made British unification a concept by putting England and Scotland together under one monarchy, had been deposed by force.
The interesting thing is that it wasn't the monarchy that was initially seen as oppressing the Americans, it was the Parliament of Great Britain, which was taking upon itself rights of governance that had previously been held by the monarchy and devolved to American colonial assemblies. When King George III proclaimed the Patriots (many of whom were claiming to be loyal to the King and merely enemies of some of his subjects, the British, who were unjustly being tyrants over others of his subjects, the Americans) to be traitors, it was, arguably, an act of royal submission to Parliament's wishes: it was certainly the denial of the idea that one could be loyal to the King personally without being loyal to the British government as represented by Parliament, an idea that would be reinstated with the concept of Dominion status.
So, in conclusion, in this time-period Great Britain didn't have the conditions where either an American-style revolution or a French-style revolution was realistically possible there. That's not to say that a British revolution was impossible at all points in history (there have been multiple very famous English revolutions in history, so that would be an obvious fallacy) but I think it was so in this time-period, for the reasons highlighted above.
It's noteworthy that one of the phrases used by Americans in the era leading up to the American Revolution was "rights as Englishmen" that they felt were being denied to them: that is, they felt that the British had traditional rights that the Americans ought to have but weren't permitted to have (due to George III taking direct control over the American aristocracy).
Things were far from perfect, of course, but the situation in Great Britain (with a democratically elected government, albeit with poor levels of suffrage and plenty of corruption) was very different to the kind of situation in the Kingdom of France. When presented with some degree of democracy, I think the first instinct is usually to work with it rather than to immediately seek out conflict, whereas in Bourbon France there was essentially nothing to work with and it was clear that any concessions were coming against the firm opposition of the established order; and even Revolutionary France remained a constitutional monarchy for quite some time before Louis XVI continued trying to roll back the Revolution and eventually they got rid of him. And there's no way George III or any other British monarch in this era would go repressive on what Britons considered their rights; the present British royal family is in power as a direct result of the then-very-recent Glorious Revolution (in 1688-1689), where a British king (James II of the House of Stuart, strictly speaking King of England and Scotland separately) had tried to make himself rather than Parliament the supreme force of the state and, as a result, his royal line, even though it had been governing Great Britain since the century-old personal union that had essentially made British unification a concept by putting England and Scotland together under one monarchy, had been deposed by force.
The interesting thing is that it wasn't the monarchy that was initially seen as oppressing the Americans, it was the Parliament of Great Britain, which was taking upon itself rights of governance that had previously been held by the monarchy and devolved to American colonial assemblies. When King George III proclaimed the Patriots (many of whom were claiming to be loyal to the King and merely enemies of some of his subjects, the British, who were unjustly being tyrants over others of his subjects, the Americans) to be traitors, it was, arguably, an act of royal submission to Parliament's wishes: it was certainly the denial of the idea that one could be loyal to the King personally without being loyal to the British government as represented by Parliament, an idea that would be reinstated with the concept of Dominion status.
So, in conclusion, in this time-period Great Britain didn't have the conditions where either an American-style revolution or a French-style revolution was realistically possible there. That's not to say that a British revolution was impossible at all points in history (there have been multiple very famous English revolutions in history, so that would be an obvious fallacy) but I think it was so in this time-period, for the reasons highlighted above.
I was aware the France is more likely to fall in a revolution but I thought that the repression of a revolt like the american one would have a great impact on the british policy, however your arguments are sound. Everyone agree about the implausibility of it?