American Revolution

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by The Colonel

They didn't count on the huge volumes of fortification materials that the Great Powers could create and deliver to their own back yard, which meant that trench warfare could move from siege conditions to ubiquity and that your aggressive, lightly supported infantry might well be able to break one line of trenches, maybe two … but sooner or later you would run out of men. They also missed a lesson available (if not obvious) from the ACW: that the train could bring up men to close a breach faster than the attackers could exploit it.

The presence of unprecedented concentrations of machine guns and artillery, and the impact of such massed artillery on the contested terrain, probably didn't help the perspective either.

My impression is that the common knowledge of the 'trench stalemate' tends to gloss over the fact that while costly, the massed infantry attacks were in many cases successful in taking the enemy lines, but were prevented from making a decisive impact by the depth of the defense.

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

There was certainly sympathy in parts of Britain, but (a) So what? 18th century Britain wasn't exactly excessively democratic by modern standards, so even if some independent thinkers and wealthy industrialists sympathised with the general American position, Parliament could just ignore them, and (b) Liberal-minded middle-class Britons who were all in favour of Liberty! would periodically visit London, meet visiting Americans who turned out to be slave-owning plantation aristocrat wannabes who'd come over here to go to the theatre and get laid, and conclude that liberty for slave-owners wasn't a cause worth defending.

I suspect a friendly-compromise political solution would involve American diplomacy hitting cinematic levels of awesome...

The proof of how right you are lays in how Ben Franklin was treated when he came to England later in life to offer his services to the British government. Not only did he find out that all the credit for his scientific work been assigned to well-born non-entities in the Royal Society (every nation in Europe did something similar at the time) but he was as much as told that, as he had no patron, his talent, honesty, devotion, industry, education and other gifts, were a threat to the clients of important patrons.

For trying to defuse a crisis, Franklin was hauled in front of the House of Lords (a body so famous at the time for being a pack of useless lackwits as to be beyond satire) and publically humiliated. Franklin swore revenge, he got it.

[The Colonel]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

My impression is that the common knowledge of the 'trench stalemate' tends to gloss over the fact that while costly, the massed infantry attacks were in many cases successful in taking the enemy lines, but were prevented from making a decisive impact by the depth of the defense.

Absolutely - a "break in" was possible, and often achieved, but never a "break through" because at that time no element existed that was sufficiently mobile to exploit the gap in the enemy's lines before reinforcements could be brought up by rail to plug it. Also, the refusal to accept limited objectives attacks tended to mean that attacking forces were left overextended and exhausted in their gains, still trying to advance, when the counterattack came. And in both world wars, the Germans in particular were very good at counter-attacking.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

My impression is that the common knowledge of the 'trench stalemate' tends to gloss over the fact that while costly, the massed infantry attacks were in many cases successful in taking the enemy lines, but were prevented from making a decisive impact by the depth of the defense.

The Third Battle of Ypres/Battle of Passchendaele (31 July – 10 November 1917) showed that with the right tactics the allies could take and hold ground, and that the Germans had no answer to it. Accepting the attritional nature of the war, and that a decisive breakthrough would not be achieved was a key to that. Not long afterwards, the success of combined arms attacks with tanks led to a lot of people writing that lesson off.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

There was certainly sympathy in parts of Britain, but (a) So what? 18th century Britain wasn't exactly excessively democratic by modern standards, so even if some independent thinkers and wealthy industrialists sympathised with the general American position, Parliament could just ignore them, and (b) Liberal-minded middle-class Britons who were all in favour of Liberty! would periodically visit London, meet visiting Americans who turned out to be slave-owning plantation aristocrat wannabes who'd come over here to go to the theatre and get laid, and conclude that liberty for slave-owners wasn't a cause worth defending.

I suspect a friendly-compromise political solution would involve American diplomacy hitting cinematic levels of awesome...

Or an earlier departure point.

I said I thought a compromise outcome was possible, and I do, but I also think a time traveler trying to make it happen would need to make his intervention before the crisis really heated up. It was gradually building up for at least ten years before it turned violent, probably longer.

Our time traveler would also have to intervene on both sides of the Atlantic.

[dcarson]

An interesting alternative would be if Britain had granted titles in the new world so that there were a few seats in Parliament for the colonies. As the population grows add a few seats in the House of Commons. The friction and crisis then comes when the number of seats for the colonies start to get big enough that they are a voting bloc that actually matters.

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by dcarson

An interesting alternative would be if Britain had granted titles in the new world so that there were a few seats in Parliament for the colonies. As the population grows add a few seats in the House of Commons. The friction and crisis then comes when the number of seats for the colonies start to get big enough that they are a voting bloc that actually matters.

Read up on the background of the Reform Bill of 1832. The sensible solution is wildly unlikely in this context. Having watched British films and read British fiction, although I'm not making a claim of special expertise, I notice that people who use the word "democracy" as if it was a pejorative, were a recognized type into the 1970s. Now, a recognized type isn't the same as an actual cultural group, and types outlast the groups they represent, but there's plenty of evidence that Britain's elites always saw democracy as equal to social revolution well into the 20th century.

Your solution would have worked, but neither the Kings nor the parliaments would have tolerated your solution until the early 20th century.

[jason taylor]

One problem they still had to solve was reconciling each other's interests. As it was trouble on one side of the pond could spread without the other side's say-so. Problems in negotiations were similar: they were extremely angry at having to give back Louisberg after the War of the Austrian Succession (quite reasonably as it's possession by New France was a threat to security and the provincial forces had been to some work reducing it).

By way of contrast the main reason Britain got into the Seven Years War was originally disputes along the Western Frontiers.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

Read up on the background of the Reform Bill of 1832. The sensible solution is wildly unlikely in this context. Having watched British films and read British fiction, although I'm not making a claim of special expertise, I notice that people who use the word "democracy" as if it was a pejorative, were a recognized type into the 1970s. Now, a recognized type isn't the same as an actual cultural group, and types outlast the groups they represent, but there's plenty of evidence that Britain's elites always saw democracy as equal to social revolution well into the 20th century.

To be fair, they had the French Revolution as an example of how noble ideals could lead to things going seriously sour. So it wasn't just reactionary stubbornness.

Your solution would have worked, but neither the Kings nor the parliaments would have tolerated your solution until the early 20th century.

I don't know that it would have worked, actually.

One of the underlying things driving the crisis was the ~3000 mile oceanic gap. It took months to travel from London to any of the Colonial capitols, or vice versa, in the middle 18C, and information moved at the speed of travel.

The official British position was that Parliament was the legislature for the entire empire, and that all populations were 'virtually' represented there. The overseas territories saw this as nonsensical, there was no way their interests could be properly represented that way, plus the fact that Parliament was months away and could not be well-informed or reactive in reasonable time.

Adding American representatives to the chambers in reasonable numbers might have addressed the first issue, but it would do nothing for the travel/communication time problem. To function viably, a world-wide empire in the 18C pretty much had to be very loosely articulated, with most of the decision-making handled locally. Which in turn meant conflicts of interest in a big way.

One huge one was based in British economic policy of the time. The 'theory' behind mercantilist colonialism was that you established colonies, who provided raw materials to the newly-built industrial machine at home, who in turn provided finished products to the colonies in a closed system.

National/tribal loyalty might have made that work if the colonies were only days away from the metropole, but with months of gap, the colonies inevitably started thinking of themselves as somewhat separate units, and wanted to trade where it as convenient, or establish their own industries, and the economics of the situation favored that. (It makes a lot more sense for a settler in New York Colony to send iron ore to a local smith to make nails than it does to send ore across the ocean to get a nail back across the ocean.)

'Defusing' the American Revolution would have probably required the creation of a 'federal' empire. Which was in fact proposed, but nobody was able to get it past the vested interests.

[Prince Charon]

Another way to defuse it is less political, and more technological (or rather, the effect of technology on politics): Go Steampunk and speed up the development of steam-powered ships. A Frenchman had a primitive steam car in 1769 (and it had probably the first automobile accident in 1771), and he wasn't the first person to try. Accelerating the timeline of steam power just a little starting in the 17th or early 18th century, or just having one specific thing invented sooner (e.g. a faster advance in materials science, thus stronger pressure vessels), could potentially allow for practical steamships in the 1760s. It's a stretch, but not a huge one, and the greater speed permitted would allow for decisions to be made with more up-to-date information, and reinforcements delivered much faster when needed (which reduces the probability of revolution because the colonists would know that as well).

The gunpowder engine is an amusing alternative, but has enough problems that it requires a bit of handwaving to make it believable, especially as they kind of need the gunpowder for the guns. Much less plausible than faster development of steamships.



Another interesting option is from a timeline that I've forgotten the author or title of, that I think was on Alternatehistory.com: Issac Newton invents a radiotelegraph in the 17th century, allowing (once improvements are made) much faster communication between continents. It still means that the journey between Britain and the Colonies would take months, but they'd know what was going on when they left.