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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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The Louisiana Purchase would probably look quite different if we were still a British subject. Does that put a damper on any industrial snowball? No doubt Napoleon still does Napoleonic things, so I expect we end up with it eventually, unless Britain springs for a separate colony.

Assuming that the French Revolution and ensuing Anglo-French wars happen on schedule, North America is a theatre in the same way it was in all the previous Anglo-French wars. The War of 1812 equivalent in that timeline is a "British" invasion of Louisiana (presumably with local troops led by Jackson and a modicum of Royal Naval support). Given that the UK and allies win the Napoleonic wars, I suspect British North America incorporates the Louisiana Purchase by conquest.

But the biggest question about a "No American War of Independence" timeline is how the French Revolution is affected. As @ToaKraka points out below, the natural assumption from a US-centric perspective is that with the radical ideas of e.g. Thomas Paine discredited and the French spending less money helping the Americans, the French Revolution doesn't happen. And essentially everything in non-US political history is downstream of the French Revolution - and possibly more American history than you think is too given that the main "real issue" in the First Party System was which side the new US should take in the Napoleonic Wars. I could defend the proposition that no French Revolution means no drive to universal white male suffrage in the US. But this depends on whether we are in a timeline where the Americans were defeated or one where a deal was done - if the Galloway plan happens then Thomas Paine is a prominent British statesman by 1789 and proto-democratic Whiggery is the dominant politics of the British Empire.

But from a non-US-centric perspective, the US as of 1776 is too small to determine the fate of France. Something like the Anglo-French War of 1778 happens roughly on schedule because the British and the French have unfinished business, and the British can still run the bill up until the French cry uncle. (The British cope for losing the American War of Independence is that we took a tactical drop in what we wrongly believed was the least important theatre of a three-ocean war against France - the larger Anglo-French war was a true World War).

If I do an alt-history timeline, it would be one where Cecil Rhodes makes a miraculous recovery from his chronic disease, returns to the UK triumphant after his victories in Africa, and enters UK politics as a Liberal Imperialist. He was born in 1853 so you can easily have him in the cabinet through WW1 and alive as an elder statesman into WW2. I agree with you that the "successful Galloway plan" timeline would be a lot of fun too.