Andrew Roberts makes a point, endorsed by Maddy, that I agree with: It’s not for Americans to demand that the British apologize for colonialism.
“Roberts took issue,” Maddy writes, with remarks of MSNBC’s Ali Velshi, who had criticized colonialism. Roberts countered that the British “abolished [slavery] 32 years before you did, and we didn’t have to kill 600,000 people in a civil war over it.”
But at other times Roberts has wanted to go farther, suggesting that the world would be better if the American Revolution had never happened. Here you can read Robert G. Ingraham quoting from Roberts’s most recent book, a biography of King George III, as he reviews it in NR. Roberts imagines “a world in which the American Revolution never took place” and concludes that “British and Canadian Liberals joining with Northern abolitionists might have voted to abolish slavery in the 1830s or 1840s, sparing the United States its Civil War.”
Maybe, but that’s some “might.” We should always be modest in our claims about alternative history, but if we do want to try to imagine a world without the Revolution, we should take into account the demographic difference between American slavery and slavery in British colonies in the West Indies. As the Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History summarizes it:
In the West Indies, slaves constituted 80 to 90 percent of the population, while in the South only about a third of the population was enslaved. Plantation size also differed widely. In the Caribbean, slaves were held on much larger units, with many plantations holding 150 slaves or more. In the American South, in contrast, only one slaveholder held as many as a thousand slaves, and just 125 had over 250 slaves. Half of all slaves in the United States worked on units of twenty or fewer slaves; three-quarters had fewer than fifty.
One can easily imagine that slaveholders in the American South would have been more inclined to rebel than their British-colonial counterparts whether the American Revolution had happened or not: Their cause would not have required overcoming, on their own territory and without assistance from a higher level of government, an insurmountable numerical disadvantage. Rather, as was not so in the West Indies, the broad culture of the numerically dominant race defined itself as superior to and entitled to enslave the minority race. (At the time of the Civil War, Mississippi and South Carolina were the only states in which slaves were a majority of the population, and in both cases they constituted less than 60 percent of the total; see Table 3 from the Economic History Association here. Note in Tables 2 and 3 that the general trend in the South from 1790 to 1860 was toward a smaller proportion of slaves as a share of the general population. This was largely due to the western expansion of slavery, as Smithsonian Magazine explains.)
It’s very hard for me to think that, if British and Canadian Liberals had joined with Northern abolitionists in voting to abolish slavery, the South would have accepted that result peaceably.
So perhaps it would be best if neither Ali Velshi nor Andrew Roberts did too much judging of others’ history in ways that tacitly assume the contingencies of their own.