4th of July

Happy Hip Hip Hooray we’re free of the Colonies Day Great Britain! :evil:

@Private:

Happy Hip Hip Hooray we’re free of the Colonies Day Great Britain!

Many years ago, during a visit to Boston, I took a tour of a “Boston Tea Party” ship exhibit.  At one point, the tour guide gathered everyone on the deck and announced that we were going to do some historical role-playing: she said that she would take the role of a patriot who would make a speech, while we were to take the role of Boston citizens whose job was to cheer her speech according to the cues she would give us.  She got up on a box, faced us and asked in a passionate voice: “Are we not tired of paying these oppressive taxes?” Cheers of agreement from the crowd.  “Do we not love our tea?”  More cheers of agreement from the crowd.  “Are we not loyal British subjects?”  Confused looks from the crowd (and me trying very hard not to laugh, since I seemed to be the only one in the group who’d gotten the joke).  The tour guide added helpfully, “We were at the time, you know.”  There was an “Oh” reaction from the crowd, followed by belated cheers of agreement in response to her third question.  It was hilarious.  This was followed by the crowd being invited to re-enact the event by throwing tea crates (made of styrofoam painted to look like wood) into the harbour (from which they were later hauled back up by means of ropes that were already attached to the crates, in a bit of dramatic licence).

My American friends like to forget that the War of Independence was driven by merchants wanting to pay less tax rather than a deeper yearning for liberty. Furthermore, that those taxes were levied to recoup the cost of protecting the colonialists from Indian tribes who were less than happy at their land being stolen and way of life being threatened.

Britain did learn from the loss of the Colonies though and Canada and other Dominions benefitted accordingly.

@Private:

My American friends like to forget that the War of Independence was driven by merchants wanting to pay less tax rather than a deeper yearning for liberty. Furthermore, that those taxes were levied to recoup the cost of protecting the colonialists from Indian tribes who were less than happy at their land being stolen and way of life being threatened.

Britain did learn from the loss of the Colonies though and Canada and other Dominions benefitted accordingly.

My understanding of the general situation was the Britain – or at least George III – belived that the primary function of the American colonies was to serve Britain’s commercial and financial interests, and that this view was (to put it mildly) not shared by the colonists in question.  Whether or not Britain learned from the American Revolution is a question that could probably be debated at great length (particularly in the parts of the British Empire that chafed under British rule long into the twentienth century), and I don’t really know what the answer would be, but it should be noted that the first true Dominion, Canada, was given that status almost a hundred years after the American Revolution, and that it was only in 1907 that the term found broader application to territories like Australia and New Zealand.

That is true. Britain believed the colonies to be at the service of their mother country. Hardly surprising. But not sustainable in the face of a hardening definition by any overseas territory of itself as separate to the mother country.

The lesson Britain did learn was to loosen the leash as the dominions gathered momentum. Generally the dominions did not feel the need to launch a revolution to gain control of their own affairs, nor to attain independence. Instead a gradual process of self-determination and separate nationhood lead to the same outcome. From Wikipedia:

Dominions were semi-independent polities under the British Crown, constituting the British Empire, beginning with Canadian Confederation in 1867.[1][2] They included Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Newfoundland, South Africa, and the Irish Free State, and then from the late 1940s also India, Pakistan, and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). The Balfour Declaration of 1926 recognised the Dominions as “autonomous Communities within the British Empire”, and the 1931 Statute of Westminster granted them full legislative independence.

Of course India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Ireland can all point at an independence struggle - none of which attained the status of revolution.

The same is not true to the non-dominions within the British Empire and it is to these I think you are primarily referring Marc. Wars (or emergencies) in Palestine, Kenya, Malaya and elsewhere. However, even in the non-dominions the BE conducted a largely orderly retreat in a very short time frame - about 30 years to move from ruling one quarter of the globe to merely a few residual island protectorates - and in most cases without the countries concerned needing to fight to gain independence.

America was founded by a bunch of slave owners who wanted to be free… not the first time America confused the world, nor will it be the last.