What If America Had Remained British?
An English historian's very different perspective on America's 250th anniversary.
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by Andrew Roberts
July 4, 2026
Sometimes it is possible to win just too well. The First British Empire’s victory over France in the Seven Years’ War — known in America as the French and Indian War — was so total in every theatre of that global engagement that by the Treaty of Paris of 1763 no French forces remained on the American continent.
The result was that King George III’s 13 American colonies, which had been British for 150 years, spotted their opportunity to become independent. Despite the fact that they were amongst the freest societies in the world – making almost all their own laws, taxed incredibly lightly and enjoying total freedom of speech and assembly – they threw off a British connection that seemed distant and which they deemed no longer in their own best interests.
With a population of 3 million (three-quarters of whom were not enslaved), 5 percent year-on-year economic growth, more bookshops in Philadelphia than any other city of the Empire besides London, Americans recognised that July 4, 1776 was the perfect time to demand their independence. The complete removal of the French strategic threat also gave them their opportunity to rise in revolt.
Tragically, a disastrous paucity of British statecraft meant that George III had no one to argue the case for Americans to remain as part of a wider British family of nations. Of the King’s 14 prime ministers only two were great men: William Pitt the Elder, who was forced to relinquish the premiership through gout in 1768, seven years before the American Revolution broke out, and his son William Pitt the Younger who did not become prime minister until 1783, a few months after the Americans had won.
Mistake after mistake was made politically by successive British premiers in the decade between the First Stamp Act Congress and the Boston Tea Party. Primary amongst them was not to devolve even more power to the Americans, as was latterly done for Canada in 1867 and Australia in 1900.
In retrospect, had British statesmen recognised what America could become, given it representation in the Westminster Parliament, and eventually, once its population justified it in the reign of Queen Victoria, moved the capital of the Empire to New York, the Anglosphere could have stayed together as a single political entity.
Had that happened, and Britain and America had managed to stay united in a condominium of some kind, with the Revolution avoided, there would have been fewer and fewer British MPs sitting in the great imperial parliament in New York, and more and more American ones.
The Hanoverians could easily have moved to America — after all, they had only been in Britain for 60 years since coming over from Hanover in 1714. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, much of the West Indies, parts of South America and Southern Africa, eventually Hawaii and Alaska, would have formed part of a vast Anglo-American-run English-speaking empire upon which the sun would not have set, either in the meteorological or metaphysical sense.
Although slavery was illegal in Britain itself, it of course still practised the slave trade until 1807 and slavery itself was abolished throughout the British Empire in 1833. There was no hope of slavery being abolished in America as early as 1776, but if the 13 self-governing colonies had remained within the Empire it is inconceivable that it would have lasted until 1865.
With the British and northern states managing the abolition of slavery in the 1830s and 1840s, probably on the same compensatory basis as in the West Indies, there would have been no need for over 700,000 Americans to die in a brutal and bloody civil war.
Furthermore, if we had stayed together as one political entity for the next century and a half, then Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Germany would never have dared to invade Belgium in August 1914. He only did so in the knowledge that America was isolationist, which it would not have been if a quarter or so of its population was living in Britain, and were strategically threatened by Germany crushing France and dominating the European Continent.
Had there been no First World War, there would have been no Russian Revolution, no Stalin, no gulags and no Communism. Absent the First World War and there would have been no Second World War, no Hitler, no Holocaust. The world would have lived under a Pax Britannica, and been a far, far happier place, especially in the 20th century.
We must celebrate our great ally’s 250th anniversary, of course, but we should also mourn what might have been.
— Lord Roberts of Belgravia is an historian and Conservative peer. He is the author of The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III. This essay originally appeared on America’s semiquincentennial in The Telegraph.
I recently finished reading Eric Metaxas book Revolution. Based on what he wrote and what I know the British had become very secular and corrupt and immoral by 1776, while at the same time, the colonies had become very Christian and moral. They saw it as their destiny to create in the United States, a new covenant nation dedicated to living under God‘s law.
Therefore, the revolution was inevitable.
Interesting, though of course one must add the requisite caveat that there are no correct alternate histories, only plausible ones.
Left unaddressed is the vexing question of democratization: in the absence of a successful popularly-based independence in "the colonies," how long and to what extent would it have taken for the British Empire have relinquished its oligarchical, soft-authoritarian mode of government?
Additional thought: I took Warner Schilling's class in American foreign relations when I was at Columbia, and his argument was that the Revolution was a product of the British success in eliminating the French threat in North America. Once the colonies were no longer needful of the British defensive umbrella, it changed from being a necessity to a burden.
Of course this was not helped by the bizarre British policies of forcing the colonies to pay for their defense after the war was over, without giving them much of a say in how such policies were to be executed.