Why the Commonwealth Did Not Chose Independence

After last night's presentation (to a packed room of mostly C'town residents -- this place does love history, as the history collection in the public library will tell you in about two seconds -- it's as large as the fiction section -- I came away from the discussions with, among other things, the conviction that I framed my question wrong side out in the entry below. The question should not have been posed as why didn't the lower 13 Colonies take the route of Commonwealth, but why the Commonwealth members did not take the route of Independence as the 13 did.

One of the ways Jasanoff frames this is that the Brits were "good losers." They learned a great deal about how to effectively administer their soon-to-be, post-Napoleon, global imperium from their failures with the lower North American 13 colonies. (Gads, this woman is incredible -- and she thus gets to do incredible things. Not only is she one of the most popular professors on the Harvard campus -- a historian! -- she gets to do research in various archival collections in England.)

Among their conclusions was that they'd given those 13 colonies far too much autonomy from the get go -- rather than too little -- and this is why they rebelled. This was enforced by the Loyalist evacuees, of whatever class or skin color, wherever they went: they agitated for more civil rights (yes, a contemporary term, and used by the former black slaves who were transported out of NYC to Nova Scotia, then to England, and then to Sierra Leone, where they founded Freetown), less taxation and more services and compensations from the British government -- just like their Patriot rebel brethren back in the lower 13!  In many places, their demands from the government were nearly the same as the Bill of Rights. Because of their experience with the lower 13 and then the evacuee Loyalists, the soon-to-be British global empire emphasised patriarchal responsibility with greater home, central, authority to which all were subordinate, even the Viceroys and Governors, military and otherwise

I am pleased that the conclusions I reached as to the primary underlying causes of the Declaration of Independence, as itemized in the response comments I made to the entry below, are confirmed by others: the nexus of Indian lands and slavery. It didn't work that way further north, where the slave-labor cash crops didn't grow. And in the Caribbean, there was no room for infinite expansion, which is why the Southern Loyalists, who went there with their slaves, mostly soon moved on. There was no land there for them to claim.

I am going to miss these regular intimate history round tables with the best historians of our time most of all things here, I think.