The unintended consequences of the American Revolution

What, ultimately, was the American Revolution? What was it all about? What caused it? Did it succeed? What were its long-term effects?

For many decades the answers to these questions seemed self-evident; but no longer. Answers now look rather different at a moment when the United States is seeking to re-introduce a mercantilist world trading order (which is what the British Empire had been before 1776) and in which the US president has been shown to possess extensive powers (far greater than George III ever dreamed of). Press comment today reflects on ‘the end of the American empire’; American demonstrators now carry placards reading ‘no kings’. How could all this happen?

History is often written backwards, in the light of how things eventually turned out; and a US history culminating in presidents Kennedy or Obama may look very different from one culminating in President Trump. One must now ask: what, then, was the Revolution for? Modern Americans like to depict what they still call ‘the Founding’ in terms of a few inspiring generalisations; but, from the outside, despite that country’s resplendent myth of origins, polished anew in 2026, the purposes of the complex and confused events of 1775-83 now look as diverse as the participants. Do revolutions have simple ‘meanings’? It is not clear that they do.

Just as every picture tells a story, so every label contains an interpretation. Or several. So, it is here, for the title of this episode contains three doubtful claims: ‘The’, ‘American’, and ‘Revolution’. ‘The’ implies, first, that the episode was reified from the start, turned from a word into a unitary thing. But one distinguished American historian has argued that it was a confluence of four wars, in the northern, central and southern colonies, and in the backcountry. The inhabitants of the 13 Colonies differed, as did the inhabitants of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales from which those colonists were often drawn.

Second, the title announces that ‘it’ was essentially American; but, seen from Britain, the paradox of the ‘American’ Revolution was that it happened in America. Rather, it was the British Isles that had for centuries seen repeated armed strife, and in which a major social conflict was more likely. Colonists were alike heirs to an anglophone political tradition asserting ‘the rights of Englishmen’. On both sides of the Atlantic, opinion in 1776 was distributed on a bell curve, some individuals favouring armed resistance, some armed repression, most in the middle.

A shared vocabulary on both sides of the Atlantic prioritised liberties and laws, privileges and property, but also expressed older discourses of politicised religious sectarianism, fading in England but alive and well in backward New England. Hence the war became a civil war between two sides, each of which asserted similar secular values. But less similar religious ones, for the balance of denominations in the middle and northern colonies was heavily weighted towards Nonconformists. Even here, however, colonial dissenters drew their unfounded fears of the tyranny of George III from their co-religionists in Britain.

Third, the usual label suggests that these events were a ‘revolution’ in the sense devised by 20th-century political scientists to fit their new social-structural analyses. At the time, the conflict that broke out with Lexington and Concord in 1775 was initially almost always called, as it was experienced by both sides, a ‘War’; only after a few years of fighting did it come to be widely called a ‘Revolution’, and then in the sense of the word used in Britain of the events of 1688-89: a dynastic change.

In his classic tract Common Sense, England’s greatest revolutionary, Thomas Paine, pointed out how improbable it was that a continent would go on consenting to being governed by an island. So obvious did this general conclusion seem that he ignored the more obvious question: was it commonsensical that independence should be sought by negotiation and compromise (as was to be Canada’s course) rather than by civil war? Yet Canada is not being mentioned in current American debates on the anniversary of 1776. It is British historians who have drawn attention to the new American republic’s repeated military invasions of its northern neighbour and their repeated sanguinary failures. On American maps, Canada is now a blank. But that will not make Canada’s history go away: it is the United States’ counterfactual.

The military victory of the 13 Colonies in 1783 is conventionally ascribed to American virtues. Virtues there were, and the colonial militia undoubtedly played an important part in the war. But the larger part was played by French regular forces, both army and navy. Why, then, did France win the war? The largest answers were geopolitical. The outbreak of armed rebellions in 13 of Britain’s 26 American colonies is not difficult to explain: political violence was commonplace, and American rebellions against the new government in Washington happened even after 1783. The puzzle was why colonial resistance was so successful, and why its primary determinants were not American.

Rather, they were a delayed strategic consequence of the War of the Spanish Succession. Whatever Marlborough’s celebrated victories in northern Europe, the result of that war was decided in Spain. There, the Battle of Almansa (1707) ensured that the Spanish throne would thereafter be occupied by the French claimant of the House of Bourbon. In later wars, a Franco-Spanish alliance was therefore either an actuality or a probability; and if the second navy in Europe (the French) were added to the third (the Spanish) they might be larger than the first (the British). In 1781, in the American theatre of war, the British navy lost command of the sea off Yorktown; Cornwallis’ army was forced to surrender to opposing land forces, mostly French; and the tide of battle could never be reversed.

The colonial victors were consequently able to praise, and explain, the outcome in their own terms rather than transatlantic ones. Paine, an émigré in the militantly evangelical United States, was stigmatised as an ‘infidel’ (he was actually a Deist); his contribution to American independence was belittled. The idea universally invoked to praise the events of 1775-83 was, and is, ‘freedom’. But freedom to do what? Two things especially, which had been increasingly resented by the white settlers of the 13 Colonies as threats to their interests.

First, the freedom to expand ever westward across the continent, at the price of the expropriation and genocide of the Native Americans. Had independence not happened, it is unrealistic to think that peaceful amity would have guaranteed happy co-existence: conflicts between natives and settlers would have continued. But they might have been at least moderated by the policy of the London government to restrain the land grab and to minimise armed massacres.

Second, the freedom to continue to practice chattel slavery. The imperial constitution provided, in brief, that the legislature of each colony had authority to legislate for matters within its boundaries, provided that its laws did not contradict imperial legislation (if they did, colonial bills would have been struck down in London). Here, the sensational court case of Somerset v. Stewart (1772) threatened the future of this colonial practice, since the Lord Chief Justice himself handed down the judgement that the English common law recognised no such status as slave: far from providing for gradual amelioration, Lord Mansfield had ruled that, in England at least, slavery did not exist.

Colonial slave-owners could only wonder when this principle would be applied by the London government to their colonies. The anti-slavery movement was taking shape both in Britain and the 13 Colonies before 1775; it was greatly delayed by the outbreak of the war in 1775, and again by the war that France declared on Britain in 1793. But for these overriding disasters, it is reasonable to ask if slavery in a still-unified British Empire would have been abolished sooner than it was and without a second civil war. The price of co-operation between the northern and southern of the 13 Colonies was that the abolition of slavery was sidestepped.

Additionally, the principled disagreements between the metropolitan government and the colonial elites over the constitutional powers of centre and periphery were not solved in the 1760s, or in 1775-83, or with the drafting of the federal constitution of the new United States. The Founders did not go into the conflict begun in 1775 with any widely shared, carefully worked out plan for a republic, for its governance (let alone for democracy), for its powers, for its finances, or for its values. These weighty and complex matters had to be addressed at a subsequent Convention, meeting in Philadelphia in 1787.

Its drafters did their best; the eventual document had its merits and its demerits, but it did not solve some of the largest problems. The separation of powers, a fashionable mistake of 18th-century political science, had the unintended consequence of the development of a much more powerful executive. The relation between the Federal government and the States was not fully resolved. So, the new republic witnessed a series of cases in its Supreme Court that led inexorably to a second civil war in 1861-65, a conflict which the survival of the practice of chattel slavery, and the great increase in the number of slaves since the 1770s, now made catastrophic. The demographic destruction wrought by that civil war is being steadily revised upwards by US historians.

War destroys wealth. Present-day American economic historians have tracked the steadily increasing Gross Domestic Product per head of the 13 Colonies in the decades before 1776. With armed conflict on their territories, and with their maritime trade blockaded by the Royal Navy, American wealth per capita fell dramatically; not until the 1810s did it recover to its prewar levels. Economic growth resumed once more after 1865. But compound interest meant that the gap between the GDP actually achieved after 1783 and 1865, and the trend line of GDP in pre-1776 decades projected forwards, would have steadily widened. Without armed conflict in 1776-83, the present inhabitants of the US and the UK might have been far richer than they are.

So would the inhabitants of Europe, thanks to the wider transatlantic effects of the American war. The law of unintended consequences is often at its most destructive in the realm of international affairs. Historians debate whether the French troops who fought alongside Washington returned home inspired by the cause of liberty to such a degree that they thereby launched the Revolution of 1789 in their home country: this uplifting story is probably greatly overstated. What cannot be denied is that France’s participation in the American war proved so ruinously expensive that it effectively bankrupted the French monarchy. Louis XVI was induced to recall the Estates General, which had last met in 1614, to sanction a reform large enough to rescue the national finances; from there, revolution spiralled out of the control of the moderates. The whole of Europe was plunged into an era of world war, lasting until 1815.

Nor did the economic ruin end there. Without the mass reaction against French revolutionary principles, articulated in the new ideology of nationalism, it may be questioned whether the whole history of the next century, culminating disastrously in 1914, might have been different. But unintended consequences operated at home also: the 13 Colonies had each sought separate independence in 1776, but their co-operation was gradually rephrased to describe a unitary state in the decades following the generalised constitution of 1783. It was given a notional sovereign entitled ‘we the people’, but was ruled in practice by an elective dictatorship; it was an immensely strong state from which the departure of any constituent part was not permitted, and which recognised no right of resistance among its citizens.

Did Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, or their talented contemporaries, intend these outcomes? Of course they did not. Did their actions, at once both idealistic and self-interested, help to bring these conclusions about? Of course they did.