No United States?

[NomadicSky]

I'm not sure what it would be called or anything and I'm sure it's been done before, but what would North America be like with out the United States as it is...
What I'm asking is if the American Revolution had been avoided.

What would the "nation" here today would it be independant?
And what would it's internal borders be like?

 

[David S Poepoe]

I think its pretty evident that the internal borders of those states/colonies east of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers would be the same - with the exception of Alabama and Mississippi. Florida is questionable, either as one or two entities.

An interesting problem would be that with there being no American Revolution, one could include the Maritime provinces and other portions of Canada and Quebec into the equation.

 

[ShadowCommunist2009]

There might even bee some sovereign Native American states further in. I would love to see what the Navajo and other tribes could have evolved into. Marx wouldn't have needed to speculate what utopian communism is--he'd have done a case study of the Natives!

 

[HelloLegend]

I'm not sure what it would be called or anything and I'm sure it's been done before, but what would North America be like with out the United States as it is...
What I'm asking is if the American Revolution had been avoided.

What would the "nation" here today would it be independant?
And what would it's internal borders be like?

Someone called America... "Atlantis" is rather fitting.

 

[Max Sinister]

There are many possibilities - North America might be divided into many nations (if the "state rights" side wins after ARW), or even between many different nations (instead of an all-Anglo-NA). Can you specify it a bit?

 

[NapoleonXIV]

The consequences of the American Revolution were worldwide. Without America you very likely might not get a French Revolution, (as the American Revolution had gone a long way to bankrupting the French) and without that you might not see the rise of nation-states.

Possibly you get "Dominions", huge agglomerations something like the British, but composed of both continental empires and large swaths of colonies. I see four main ones. British, French, Austrian and Russian, in an ascending/ descending order of ratios of continental empire to colonial, respectively. (Britain has no colonial empire but many large colonies, Russia has a huge continental expanse, but no colonies to speak of)

 

[Homer]

If the 13 colonies stay british, they'd get dominion status some years later. Probably, as they've done in Canada, the British would grant this status only to a union of states. Maybe not all colonies will join this union - Newfoundland wasn't part of Canada from the start. Maybe the British will form several unions.
The first difference would be, that some of the 13 colonies would expand to the west, as they had land rights, and some wouldn't.
The second difference would be that Britain wouldn't be so eager to expand within Spanish territories only in favour of some colonies. So expansion to the West could be delayed. Although there would be dynamics within British North America that could force the British to react.
The third difference would be, that slavery was forbidden quite early within the British empire. So a war of secession could occur between British and Southerners, New England on the British side.

 

[Nicole]

I don't think the British would force a union of states- quite the opposite, I'd say... Canada was forced to unite by the presence of the USA.

There was no united identity between the Thirteen Colonies OTL, I think it would remain that way...

 

[Dave Howery]

whatever nations/group of nations would be where the US is today, the population would be lower... it's doubtful the UK would allow the mass immigration and handouts of free land across the west that the US did...

 

[David S Poepoe]

whatever nations/group of nations would be where the US is today, the population would be lower... it's doubtful the UK would allow the mass immigration and handouts of free land across the west that the US did...

There was no free land offered. One had to work it and eventually pay for it. The Old Northwest was opened up and sold for settlement in order to pay for war debts.

 

[Dave Howery]

There was no free land offered. One had to work it and eventually pay for it. The Old Northwest was opened up and sold for settlement in order to pay for war debts.

IIRC, a lot of land in the west was essentially given away in the Homestead Act, where you had to physically settle the land and build on it....

 

[Ilta]

You're both right:

The Homestead Act of 1862 was a United States federal law that gave one quarter of a section of a township (160 acres, or about 65 hectares) of undeveloped land in the American West to any family head or person who was at least 21 years of age, provided he lived on it for five years and built a house of a minimum of 12 by 14 feet, or allowed the family head to buy it for $1.25 per acre ($0.48/km²) after six months.

-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_Act

Britain would have eventually Dominion...ized (?) the colonies, as they did with Canada, but it certainly would have been much, much later than IOTL, as the Dominion in 1867 was in no small part prompted by the American Civil War and Britain's desire to avoid maintaining its own troops abroad.

I think it likely that if the colonies had become Dominions, they would have done so in groups -- the New England colonies forming one government, the Southern colonies another, and the Mid-Atlantic colonies in between a third. Not sure of the order: the South always had the most loyalists, but New England housed the most agitated and outspoken revolutionaries. It probably depends on the details of the POD.