Asymmetrical Information

And of course, as one of Dan Drezner's commenters pointed out, most of you wouldn't be wherever you are, because if America had been a British colony, the Lousiana Purchase seems unlikely to have gone through.

I almost made that point myself, but then I remembered a minor scrap between Britain and France over the behavior of some guy from Corsica. How plausible the Louisiana Invasion would have been I don't know, and maybe we would have given it back to Louis XVIII, but it's not impossible we'd have gotten much of the west one way or another.

JG,

You would have been a "Tory" then, as you are now.

:^)

Thank God you're back, that's all I have to say.

Louisiana purchase would have still gone through, and UK would have kept the $15mil =). Britain and France were at war at the time, and after Trafalgar France would have no way of defending any of her Colonies.

There would have been a lot of differences: the English would have outlawed slavery rather sooner (1834) just as they tended to take the Indian Treaties a bit more seriously (England was trying to limit expansion west of the Appalachians to protect the tribes living in the wilderness).

A case can be made that among the reasons for the War Of Independence was a desire to have no restrictions in exterminating the natives and to maintain slavery for as long as possible.

Canada was a refuge for escaped slaves and overall treated its natives fairly better...

Dear Lady, your universal suffrage came rather late, did it not? 1960s for blacks, for instance. Late too for women.

It's also possible that history could have gone much the opposite to Blissex's suggestion. In our world, Britan continued to profit from slaveery up through the US Civil War by buying cheap Southern cotton. Had there been no revolution, there could have been much greater economic pressure for the UK to maintain slavery in the Americas, which would have obviated any efforts to suppress the slave trade elsewhere.

Also, one can argue that British resistance to expansion was out of a desire to protect the lucrative fur-trapping trade in the wilderness. The history of the French and Indian War does not indicate principled fidelity by the British to treaties with the natives or commitment to protecting them from outside intimidation. The British would likely have faced the same economic pressures favoring expansion in the early 1800s as the Americans did.

The "tax revolt" theory tends to get weaker the closer you look. Virginia and Massachusetts, the intellectual centers of the American Revolution, were the two colonies that raised their own internal taxes to meet British requests for financing in the French and Indian Wars. The cheapskate colonies, on the other hand, tended to have higher support for the British in the Revolution.

No, the root of the Revolution was social, not economic. American landowners saw themselves as the equals of the British landowning classes, the gentry and the yeomanry, and accordingly entitled to the same rights and privileges. And the right of the landed classes in Britain was to elect the people who had the power to levy taxes.

Accordingly, the British imposition of taxes-without-representation on Americans was a social snub, a statement that a colonial landowners were on the level of the landless laborers of London. Which, actually, was the opinion of the British landowning classes, and was a direct insult to the pride of the American planters and farmers. And remember, this was the era when insulted pride would often enough result in duel.

This was then supplemented by the Proclamation Line of 1763. Americans without land but who were socially ambitious lived, until that point, in a society where they could enter the landowning class by working up a stake and moving west. Now they were being told that they would never have that chance to socially better themselves, the land being reserved for the "savages". At best, they could move to the swamps of the new colonies of East and West Florida, where they could have land but none of the social rights—not even a colonial legislature would be permitted in these new colonies.

So, the British insulted the landowners and crushed the hopes of the ambitious—ticking off the very people with the will and ability to make the most trouble for British rule in America. It's hard to see how a revolt could have been avoided at that point.

But let's say the Americans swallowed their pride and went along; no revolution happens. In that there would have been no Canada-like evolution to independence. The two Florida colonies would have set a pattern of new colonies, when eventually created west of the Proclamation Line, being put under governors without legislatures. The existing colonial legislatures would then have undergone a pattern of weakening as Parliament passed more laws governing the American colonies and granting more power to the governors. The result would have been, effectively, a British Raj in America, probably strongly resented by the colonists.

The French Revolution becomes much less likely, and probably closer to a traditional European peasant revolt instead of the Rights of Man-themed action it was. The Chartist movement, with neither Revolution as an example, never gets off the ground in Britain. Representative democracy gets nowhere much.

As the commentor upthread pointed out, the Louisana Purchase would have happened anyway, minus the "purchase" part. The only reason Napolean sold in the first place is because he knew he couldn't hold on to it, and felt he might as well try to get something for it. If the Brits were still here in the late 1700s-early 1800s, they would have kicked out the French without any Jeffersonian bribe.

There's an interesting alt-history book by Richard Dreyfus (yes, that guy) and Harry Turtledove (who's one of the biggest names in alt-history) called The Two Georges wherein George Washington and King George III came to an agreement, and so most of what is the US is known as the North American Union, still part of the empire. The story features Royal American Mounted Policement who pursue a subversive group which has stolen a famous painting, a great symbol of Washington's allegiance to King George. As suggested above, the map is quite different-- there's a large friendly indian nation in the Great Lakes area, IIRC. Also, notably, the authors decided to subtract between 40 and 65 or so years from the level of modern technology and politics.

I don't quite follow the logic of why the gradual move away from central control wouldn't have happened in a British North America as it did in other settler colonies.

But surely the big pay off is that slavery gets abolished a generation earlier and without the civil war?

Why on earth do you supose that universal suffrage would be later? Blacks not getting to vote until the 60s? The late enfranchisement of women?

Geography influences politics. The Brits wouldn't have eradicated slavery any earlier; the dandies couldn't tolerate hard physical work in the hot southern climate. There being no hot climate in Canada, there was no geographically based need for slavery.

I'm a first gen British Canadian American, and I'm American by choice; I'm glad things worked out the way they did. Best country on earth and I've traveled enough to know.

I might not have been entirely clear - I meant that slavery gets abolished a generation earlier in the US - eg 1830s rather than 1860s and I still think it would have been despite a bunch of pro slavery types now being in the Empire rather than out of it. What is generally forgotten is how much the West Indies relied on slavery and how many slaves there were there. Didn't matter - slavery went because some blokes in London said it had to. The idea that it was abolished easily because it was just about Canada and there weren't any slaves there is not entirely correct.

As an aside, I've always wondered why Americans think it was alright for the 13 colonies to secede from the British Empire but not alright for the South to try and do the same.

kentuckyliz, you're forgetting all those British-held islands in the West Indies. British dandies weren't going to work those plantations, either. As it was, malaria and other tropical diseases did in many of the plantation owners along with the redcoats sent to protect them.

OTOH, it might have been easier for island plantation owners to keep a hired workforce. In the Southern states, any white laborer who didn't like his job could just walk west until he found an unclaimed piece of land and start farming and building a house on it. Slaves didn't have that option. Indentured servants (white temporary slaves by contract) didn't have that option legally either, but since photography hadn't been invented and portraits were very expensive, there was no practical way for police or private agents to pick out one plantation owner's runaway whites from all the other poor whites swarming west. OTOH, runaway blacks stood out, and blacks on their own were presumed to be runaway slaves unless they had papers to prove otherwise...

Island plantation owners had a much easier time with hired hands. They could quit, but unless they'd saved up their salary for years to buy passage elsewhere, they'd only get a similar job somewhere else. And so, as things worked out, when the Brits freed the slaves, they generally kept right on doing the same jobs. They got paid for the work now, but since the employers had no obligation to pay them when they weren't working in the off season, or sick or old, it's not clear that the owners were any worse off.

cac: they knew that seceding only works if the French army and navy win the conclusive battle for you.

The 'what would have happened about slavery' question is interesting, to their credit the British did outlaw slavery over the objections of their slave owning plantation owners in the sugar islands, so maybe they would have done so in the American South also. They probably could have made it stick rather easily before the cotton gin too. But maybe, if they tried, the Civil War would still have happened, it would have been called the Southern War for Independence instead.

As to 'taxation without representation' all those roundheads were tremendously ungrateful also fron the protection they got from Charles I from the payment of 'ship money' so this ungratefulness was impeccably English. Also, New Englanders were descended from 'proto' roundheads, who were just as ungrateful for the protection as their ancestors were in the 1640's.

Last but not least, the example of Ireland was quite present in the minds of those who might have let Westminster have untrammeled rights over their existence, absentee landords and all. Allowing Parliament to have this power wasn't 'prudent'.

As an aside, I've always wondered why Americans think it was alright for the 13 colonies to secede from the British Empire but not alright for the South to try and do the same.

cac: There's a line from 1776 that answers this nicely: "A rebellion is never illegal in the first person - 'our rebellion.' It's only in the third person - 'their rebellion' - that it becomes illegal." Americans today tend to see the war from the North's point of view; if the South had won, its history books would describe the war quite differently.

More seriously, the American colonies were not equal in status to English counties and boroughs (or whatever different voting districts they have over there) because they couldn't send representatives to Parliament. I agree with Warmongering that this was a major factor driving the war. The colonies held their first united congress (the Stamp Act Congress) in order to petition the king for these rights; rebellion came later.

The South's secession is a different animal because the Southern states were equal members in the American body politic. They all sent representatives to Congress, and many presidents and federal judges were from the South. The Southern states seceded because they saw the rising tide of abolitionism and knew they were outnumbered in Congress. The war was a failure of democracy.

And on a more basic level, one war hinged on representation in government, while the other hinged on preservation of slavery. The first is a much better reason for rebellion, no?

Cac: As a Southerner, I've wondered the same thing quite often. History is written by the winners.

markm: most analysis that I've seen shows that slave holding is MORE expensive than paying a salary. If you own slaves, you not only own them but their posessions, residences, implements, food... Higher upfront costs, more ongoing costs, and then you have large agency issues.

Paying a salary, the worker picks his clothes, house, food, etc. He's generally happier with them than when you were providing it directly, he's likely paying less for them than you would, and he's probably using lower quality of above. Plus he's maintaining them at his own pace and has an incentive to fix whatever annoys him rather than nursing a grudge against you.

Given the notoriously heavy levels of indebtedness of the plantation owners, it is rather surprising that they didn't transition to a wage economy earlier (at least on a numbers basis, cultural reasons above with regards to the difficulty of winning the war for talent make this decision less surprising). It just shows how ignorant people were (and continue to be) abvout economics and how hard it is to understand the actual economics of a situation rather than simply the appearance.

hey: I think you're correct that in general keeping slaves costs more than hiring workers, at least per unit of work performed. (Besides the factors you cited, I wouldn't be surprised to see 1 free worker replace 2 slaves.)

But that is assuming that you CAN hire and retain workers at just about a living wage. The issue in the earliest days of both the southern colonies and the West Indies was that white men who had the money to buy an Atlantic passage weren't going to use it to get to a low-paying job laboring under the sun in a hot climate. Few of them would take such jobs at any pay rate, so it's unlikely that even paying well and raising the price of their products would have filled the need for labor. That left two alternatives:

1) Find Europeans that were desperately poor and pay their passage in exchange for a contract requiring them to work for you until the passage was paid off. That kind of contract was called indentured servitude, and it amounted to selling yourself into temporary slavery. A lot of men and women did come over on such contracts.

2) Kidnap and enslave workers from somewhere that wasn't technologically advanced enough to resist effectively. The west African coast was the closest such area with a large population.

The first advantage of #2 to become obvious was that African blacks came from a tropical climate, and tending crops under a tropical sun was nothing new to them. By contrast, even among the non-working classes (owners, soldiers, and professionals), up to half of newly-arrived Europeans soon died of the heat and new diseases; you could wind up shovelling the majority of your investment in indentured servants into holes int the ground. Secondly, anyone poor and desperate enough to sell themselves into temporary slavery was probably a pretty poor specimen to start with, and if he or she survived wasn't likely to be a first class worker. An African grabbed at random might outwork them even when working as slow as possible...

And finally, on the mainland it was hard to keep white workers on your farm when free (more or less) land was beckoning a few miles to the west. Maybe your indentured servant would be honest enough to finish his commitment before taking off to homestead, but if he was worth anything he wouldn't stay a day longer. And if he ran away, all you had to do to get him back was find him among thousands of other poor whites (remember, passing out reward posters with an accurate picture wasn't a practical option), find a court (which probably didn't exist out where you caught him), prove to it that this person you'd caught was the person who signed that contract (without photos, fingerprints, or DNA tests), get a court order to drag him back to finish his contract, and actually drag him back.

OTOH, runaway blacks stood out and weren't welcome in the squatter communities.

Anyway, societies often have not followed what seems to us to be the obvious economically advantageous path. In particular, a society such as the Roman Republic may start using slaves simply because they captured a lot of men in war, don't want to release them to fight again, and aren't feeling mean enough to kill them in cold blood. The real problem is that once societies start using large numbers of slaves, they don't just go back to hiring free workers when the slaves die off, but instead go to great lengths to acquire more slaves. Slavery seems to drive out paid labor.

First, slaves are someone that even the lowest free persons in your society can look down upon. Initially, the unskilled workers will be upset that their jobs are being lost to slaves, but eventually they decide that those jobs are slave work, and as free men they are above them. So, Rome eventually wound up with hundreds of thousands of permanent welfare cases, even as their armies and purchasing agents were scouring the known world for more slave labor to keep the system running. Continue the process long enough, and skilled jobs that took hard work to learn also become the province of slaves...

The 'what would have happened about slavery' question is interesting, to their credit the British did outlaw slavery over the objections of their slave owning plantation owners in the sugar islands, so maybe they would have done so in the American South also

On the other hand, they allowed their Middle Eastern possessions to continue practicing slavery far into the 20th century.

Plus, what reason is there to think that outlawing slavery would have *worked*? The civil war got started over a secession based minor restrictions on the practice of slavery and fears that it *might* be restricted. In the early 19th century the North wouldn't have been able to win a war with the South, and it is doubtful that the Crown would have sent a sizable army just to stamp out slavery.

"On the other hand, they allowed their Middle Eastern possessions to continue practicing slavery far into the 20th century."

Getting way off topic here but I'm not sure this is correct. I assume that the Middle Eastern possessions here were the Trucial States, Oman and the Aden Protectorate - the last of which my Dad worked in as an "adviser" on behalf of the British Government. He is actually one of the few people around who has freed a slave. The deal was that anyone who came into the adviser's residence and clasped his hand around the British flagpole was freed and a couple did as late as the 50s. Admittedly this testifies to the fact that there were still slaves to be freed but this was a sort of hereditary domestic servitude rather than industrial slavery and anyone unhappy enough with their lot could get freedom from the British by asking for it.

These possessions were more or less free to run their own affairs, subject to 3 red lines:
- no invading your neighbours
- no trading in slaves
- not violating human rights too severely, obviously vague but if something made the London papers then there was a problem.

Officially, the adviser was there to do just that but the treaties with the British obliged the rulers to accept advice, including to abdicate. If they proved reluctant then a company of the Royal Marines tended to turn up accidentally and camp outside the palace for a few days to remind them who actually held the power.

As I said, well off topic but despite all the very real flaws in the British Empire including some downright atrocities, on slavery it was pretty consistent and quite often enforced against the best interests of the Empire. In the 1860s for instance, half the budget of the Royal Navy was devoted to anti slavery patrols.

I think Thomas Paine, in "Common Sense," addressed the idea that America needed Britain to protect it from the French by arguing that it was the very fact that Britain owned the colonies that created the French threat in the first place. That is, the ancient cross-Channel rivalry invariably caused hostilities to spill across the Atlantic, when the French and English colonists might otherwise have been content to leave each other alone.

He may or may not have had a point. It's possible that even without imperial rivalries, the local populations would have been drawn into conflict over the Ohio country, with the French coureurs du bois wanting it for themselves (and their Indian allies) as a game preserve, and the fast-multiplying English colonists wanting it as an outlet for settlement.

On the other hand, given how the colonists did against the British, I doubt the French would have had too much luck against the colonists, even if they were on their own, in the long run. I mean, if you can beat the Brits, polishing off les crapauds shouldn't be too much trouble.

The British levied very high taxes against the Americans by enforcing sales of food and purchases of manufactured goods and tropical products at disadvantageous terms. American smugglers were always a pain in the ass to the Brits before and after the revolution.
The Brits also freed the slaves in the West Indies because of the development of sugar beets and crop rotation in Europe and the crash of sugar prices that resulted.

if the South had won, its history books would describe the war quite differently.

According to a teacher friend of mine, the books used in the South often DO describe the war differently. Even some similar editions by the same publisher.

And on a more basic level, one war hinged on representation in government, while the other hinged on preservation of slavery. The first is a much better reason for rebellion, no?

The notion that the Morill tariff, and a federal government which favored the North generally, was also a reason has waxed and waned in favor over the years.

The Boston Tea Party was a response to a reduction (to near zero) of the tax on tea. The guys who made a living smuggling tea were really awfully miffed, hence their stunt. As economic historians rarely tire of pointing out, the American colonies were probably the most lightly taxed civilisation in history. In a hypothetical, how the French would have done against the colonists would presumably depend on whether the British intruded on behalf of the colonists: after all, it needed the French victory at Yorktown before the British washed their hands of the war. Speculation on how hard the British would have found it to free the slaves seems to be overlooking how they pulled it off in the Empire: they paid a compensation to the slave-owners. That's a good deal cheaper than fighting an American civil war.

to their credit the British did outlaw slavery over the objections of their slave owning plantation owners in the sugar islands, so maybe they would have done so in the American South also

This is unlikely. The British economy was hugely dependent upon American cotton; sugar played no such pivotal role. For all the good they did in stamping out the slave trade, the British never had any qualms about buying slave-harvested cotton, which kept slavery alive in the US throughout the 19th Century.

"People who think it would be neat if we were like Canada should take note: if we were like Canada, most of your asses wouldn't be here, because Canada did not experience the massive non-UK immigration that the United States enjoyed in the 19th & early 20th centuries."

I don't know how true this is. Certainly there was plenty of Dutch and German immigration to Ontario (Berlin, Ontario, changed its Kitchener during the First World War), and lot of East European (notably Ukrainian) immigration to the Prairie - which had to be settled toute suite lest you-know-who cast their greedy eyes northward. Also there was a lot of post-war immigration, at a time when U.S. immigration was fairly low. (The typical Italian-Canadian family would have arrived in the 1950s or 60s, while their American equivalents would have come over - when? 1910s?)

That being said, yes, the British Isles contingent were relatively more important in Canada than in the State at least up to the mid-1960s, and immigration to Canada were likely somewhat lower during the great American immigration boom - when Canada's main problem was outmigration to the south.

This is all off the top of my head, so if y'all want to nitpick, go ahead; I won't be hurt.

Comments are Closed.