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Soccer would be football and football would be ??? oh God - No superbowl!
Would we have the right to Bear Arms?
Would we have had Hulk Hogan?
Those are just quick observations - but I still always do wonder How in the world did the Colonists defeat the vaunted Red Coats?? Still is mind boggling...
One word - France.
It was those damned Froggies that let you get away, never bloody could trust them
I think the most biggest consequence of a lost revolution would have to be a very serious reduction in advances in dentistry
A country that sought French culture, American know-how and British government and ended up with American culture, French government and British know-how.
None of us would be here reading or contributing posts to this thread.
The major logical flaw in all counter factual or alternative histories is that by necessity, it must overlook the extraordinary fragility of specific life. In reality, altering even a small event of the past would ultimately alter everything.
First consider the astonishing odds of any of us even being born. We begin as but one among millions of sperms cells competing to fertilize an egg. It would require but a tiny alteration of any sort to cause you to lose rather than win that race. Had any of our parents waited a minute more before having sex, had not the climax and ejaculation taken place at exactly the second that it did, then one of those other sperm cells....not you....would have prevailed and you would never have existed.
So...all that is required to initiate a snowball of total change, would be an alteration of a few seconds in the order in which people went about matters.
And of course a British victory in the Revolution would not have been some tiny change, it would have been massive. All sorts of folks who died in the war, now would not, and all sorts of folks who survived, now would not. All of the geographic relocations which were a consequence of the American victory would be changed, throwing off the timing of nearly everything, and leading to a completely different set of people being born.
Further, even for those people who were born in reality, and also born in the alternative reality the British victory would have established, there is still massive change in store. What we are is in part a product of experiences, the environment in which we were raised, the people who surrounded us, the rewards or calamities which come our way as a consequence of the actions of those around us. So even if you were still you in a physical sense, you would grow up having very different experiences and interacting with completely different people, thus shaping you differently. That you would meet your mate, marry and have reproductive sex exactly as you would have done had America won the war, is an impossibility. All those fragile chains required to eventually produce us...would be broken.
So, the notion that you could alter a point or event from history, and have everything else remain more or less in place, is preposterous. It is an absurdity to ask "If the British had won the Revolutionary War, would Lincoln have still been a great man?" because the reality is that Lincoln would not even have been born.
Your point is correctly taken at the level of the individual man or moth or maple leaf. But those who would not have come into existence will be replaced by very similar ones, who will collectively act pretty much the same.
Irrespective of the outcome of the Revolutionary War, the Missouri River would still be there, and men like Lewis and Clark would still have been driven to explore it when the time had the same ripeness, and their exploration would still yield the same opportunities for others, possessing similar energies and aspirations, and very similar events would have followed once the needle was set back into that groove. Inertia is not that easy to foil.
Your snowball, regardless of which molecules comprise it, is still a snowball and will still sail the same trajectory toward the tophat that inspires it to be thrown.
That's a blunderbuss thesis there, jtur...that any group of people will behave more or less the same as any other group of people. You cannot assume a replacement set of Lewis/Clark to have sprung up with the same consequences flowing from their explorations as did from the actual ones. Maybe the alternative reality Lewis and Clark, Clewis and Lark, would be more aggressive and less diplomatic with the natives, getting themselves killed and setting back western exploration for a decade out of fear of hostiles. Maybe the Russians move in during that lag and make the NW theirs.
Both Britain and America would have been worse. The Revolution wound up making Britain more democratic, and would later lead to Britain granting Canada and Australia independence to avoid a situation like the Revolution. The power of King and Church would have not been questioned.
Actually, without the Revolution, Australia probably wouldn't have been British at all. Convicts would have continued to be transported to the American South, and there would have been no need for an alternative. Most likely the French or Spanish would've gotten Australia. The southwestern US would have stayed in Spanish hands and the Pacific Northwest might've been divided between Britain, Russia, and perhaps Japan.
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