American History Hit - Revolutionary War: What If the British Won?

Episode Date: July 10, 2025

Today we're heading back 250 years to the end of the Revolutionary War - but this time, we're asking what might have happened if the British had won.How would the revolutionaries have been punished? How might the colonies of North America have developed differently? And would independence have been achieved anyway?Don once again welcomes Major Jonathan Bratten and Dan Snow to the podcast. Check out last week's episode 'Revolutionary War: When Was the Turning Point?' for more from Don, Dan and Jonathan.Edited by Aidan Lonergan, produced by Sophie Gee. The Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Local time is 3.20 p.m. For your safety, please remain seated with your seatbelt fastened and keep the aisles clear until we reach the gate. Looks like a nice sunny day out there. Temperatures around 30 degrees Celsius with a light breeze. Thanks for flying with us. You have a great day. And with that, despite the captain's gracious request, we the passengers on this eight-hour flight just arrived from London, unclip our belts, loosen our limbs, and sore muscles.

Doors are open, we collect our belongings and take that long walk to baggage claim with a cursory stop at passport control. That part's easy. It just takes a brief moment. After all, we're among our own here under the same proud red, white and blue banner, the Union Jack. Hey, could have happened if the British had won the Revolutionary War, way back when those colonies could have remained under the British thumb. And just imagine the possibilities. Hello, everyone, it's Don Wildman, and this is American History Hit. I am joined today, again, by Jonathan Bratton and Dan Snow, my good friends.

You can listen to Dan, Jonathan, and me exploring the American victory in a previous episode linked in the show notes. The upshot is the colonies win the American Revolution, which, no, that was never a sure thing. This all got us thinking, how might the world have looked had the colonies lost the Revolutionary War in the late 18th century? Before we jump into the hypotheticals or counterfactual history, let's first think about when in the war the outcome might have gone the other way. Jonathan, in your mind, are there key moments during that eight-year conflict called the American Revolution, where you think the colonies really were inches from defeat? Yeah, that's a great question. And there's so many examples. So I'll pick the key ones.

I think the one that is going to jump to everyone's mind first is, of course, the times that tried men's souls. as Thomas Paine said, which is the fall winter 1776 into 7077, with the crushing American defeats around New York, you know, following this season of optimism after expelling the British from Boston, these crushing defeats. And Washington has been pushed out of not just New York, but New Jersey and down into Pennsylvania. And people wondering, can this army survive? And of course, he brings that out with a series of amazing victories at Trenton Princeton. you have honestly every winter encampment. Everyone thinks about Valley Forge 1777 to 1778,

but a winter encampment is essentially creating a city in the countryside out of nothing. And really trying to, you have to have a good logistic system. The great thing that the British have is that they have a Royal Navy, they have a lifelong, yes, it's long and it's stressed, but it is reliable and it will show up with salt pork and salt beef and hard bread. And this is not a thing that the Americans have. And so every winter, they are starving. They're enduring privations.

They're enduring mass desertions. And there is this question of, will we have an army come springtime? I mean, the famous ones are Valley Forge. There are two major winter encampments there. But then there's also Morristown. There's also a New Jersey one, which goes very badly. It does. But they manage to survive these, and they get a lot better at it post-1778.

But you have these constant moments of wondering, will there be an army in the field for the next campaign season. Yeah. Very touch and go. A moment very early on in this war that escapes people's notice, many people, Dan, is the Canadian invasion that the Americans launch won Benedict Arnold, taking soldiers through the woods of Northern Maine today and attacking Canada. A death stroke at the early part of the war does not go our way. No, I mean, it's funny how these attempts to take over Canada can backfire on it.

It's a strange, strange thing. But yeah, I mean, this is a disaster for the American forces, but because it's an offensive operation rather than some of the ones that Jonathan's just been mentioning, perhaps it isn't quite in the same category. It's not an existential threat. But that's a disaster. It shows how hard it is to launch offensive operations with the troops, with their money, with the equipment, with the food they had at the time.

This is not easy. Yeah, they hack their way through the main wilderness. And they do pretty well. I mean, the extraordinary thing in this 1775 invasion fall 75 is they do. A force captures Montreal, and then the British commander in Montreal disguises himself as a kind of farmer and runs away to Quebec. Quebec's one of the last major strongholds in British held Canada to hold out, so it's all going to come down. The iron dice will be rolled before the walls of Quebec, like they were in 1759 with General Wolf. This time it's the English-speaking Americans and Brits who are going to fight out for who actually gets to own Canada.

and by the skin of their teeth, the British hold on, General Richard Montgomery, who's marched up, he's the guy that's taken Montreal, he's killed in the outskirts, in the suburbs, basically, at the gate of Quebec. Benedict Donald is wounded, the attack is repulsive. The snow's falling. It's the 31st December. It's brutal. And so that's how close the high tide mark comes in Canada. And it's weird to think that the Americans might have destroyed British North America, even in that early stage. But yeah, the American has ended up retreating back south.

It's amazing how long that campaign goes. I think of it just as in the fall when he's sailing down the Lake Champlain and getting away. But it really had taken over a year all of that. Yeah, I mean, well, it takes months. It takes months. It's a lot of ground to cover. And there are plans later in 1736 as well to spread the revolution to Canada. I'm still trying.

So we've talked a bit about what the colonies did wrong. What do the British do right that could have turned the tables? And I'm thinking later in the war where the colonies had taken the upper hand, but the British made a push and for a while took back a little bit of control in the Southern Campaign of 1780. Talk to me about those British successes. Well, there's a quick one in 76. The British take New York. They have every opportunity. Well, they have an opportunity to destroy George Washington and the Continental Army, the U.S. Army as it becomes at that point in that campaign. They wriggle out of Long Island.

They get across the East River. They get back into Manhattan. They escape from Manhattan. They'll retreat up the river. They'll retreat through New Jersey. They build a big chain, famously, at West Point that arguably does help to... Several of them. They build several.

You're right. So there are chances there in 76 to destroy... I'm not sure it's going to destroy the American Republic, but to certainly destroy their main field army. And then, yeah, you're right. They have a number of successes on paper, if you like. They have a number of successes in the southern colonies. They capture back Savannah, George.

in 78, late 78. So that's another big base, like New York, another big solid base where the Brits are able to keep supplied from the water by their Navy. So they're going to be pretty hard to get out of there. They're going to be pretty hard to dislodge from there. In fact, the Americans and the French do try later than all and fail.

They capture, same kind of thing, Charleston, South Carolina. Same kind of thing. They do actually capture a very large number of American troops with that one as well. So you're biting off these kind of toeholds on the coast in particular. And then from Charleston, they launched this interesting campaign

just charging up through the Carolinas. I've been at an excavation on the battlefield of Camden, which was bought there in August 1780, just a disastrous battle for the American. The kind of battle that the Brits hope would be replicated all through the war. The Americans just take one or two volleys and then just crumble. Some of the professionals fight a bit harder,

but it's just a disaster in the Red Co. It's dominant and the MP. This is the Brits thinking out, this is how we thought this would come. We're going to bring these European tactics and sort of training to. to these American battlefields. But they don't get anything,

they win these battles, they don't seem to get anything for them because wherever they march through, the stars and stripes are raised in their wake. You know, it's very hard to hold down and contain these huge chunks of territory. You'd really have to do what you're doing in Charleston, do it in Canada, do it do it.

You'd have to it all over the country. You'd have to send a regiment, a couple companies, to every single village and town right across the whole thing, just as the Americans, just as you find in counter-insurgency. the home turf advantage.

If you're going to occupy a country, it takes a lot of manpower to do that. And the British don't have that at a time. Jonathan, it's no coincidence. We don't hear much about that Southern campaign. That doesn't make it through to the textbooks very often. Yeah, I mean, it's not a cool, great story of Americans. I mean, the best you'll get out of it is it absolutely, or I suppose the most you'll get out of it. Definitely not the best is the utterly debacle of a movie called The Patriot, which is one of Dan's favorites, I know.

I happen to like that movie myself. One of the big challenges, certainly for Washington, but his underling as well, is managing this army, which is constantly in a fractured state, right? I mean, it's really difficult to organize this and pay people. And, you know, all the internal management is overlooked by history. It is. And so what you have really, you know, how these losses impact the revolutionary forces, it's hitting at the cohesion of the colonies is the biggest thing.

It's not even just the armies in the field. You've got leaders in the continental. army resigning. You've got leaders in fighting. You've got one leader who decides that his fate is better off with the British. That stings, Bennett's turn. Daniel Morgan, prior to his victory at the Cowpen, battle Cowpen's, he's going to, he's going to just retire. He and Arnold actually have very interesting career paths. They've both been sort of treated poorly by their governments after putting out, literally leaving everything on the field, spending all of their own private money. Arnold will go to the enemy. Morgan will try to retire, comes out of retirement

begrudgingly to win a great victory in the Carolina's out of the cowpens. You have massive congressional infighting where states cannot agree with each other. You can't get Congress to actually pass bills to pay the army. The army will go unpaid until largely until the French show up with actual specie in 1780, 1781. This army is fighting without wages for the duration of of the war. And that is going to have a massive effect on manpower. Where are you going to get these people to continue fighting? And so eventually, each colony, each state, as they will become, has to institute a draft law, has to institute laws to force people into service. That's not exactly, you know, the narrative that we're taught as, oh, these patriotic Americans all just

jumping up and serving for love of country. But this is what these British victories are doing. It's threatening to undo the very delicate cohesion that is American unity at this point. So I want to propose a counterfactual. Very simply, what if the colonists had lost? What if the British had won? What would have been the results of that? Would the colonies have launched another war afterwards? What do you think, Dan?

Wow. It's just, it's mind-boggling to think of the challenges that would have faced the British if they had won that war. They would have had to militarily oxenacted. occupy a very, an enormous stretch of ground. We're talking pretty much Florida up to the modern Canadian board of the Great Lakes, through to the Mississippi, with a bunch of people that harbor grudges, people like the man who will become President Jackson,

you know, men who have been abused, men who have behold grudges, men looking for an opportunity, and men with a big, huge hinterland to disappear into. You know, what's to say that these people wouldn't have, headed over the Appalachians, headed elsewhere, headed south and west, and developed strongholds far from the British government's grip. You know, the British government, what is it? Manning forts all the way Britain has a tiny army in peacetime. It's just not set up.

Britain is not, the British state is not set up. And British taxpayers are certainly not set up to pay for this kind of monstrous military establishment that'd be required. It's Britain, to be honest with you guys, Britain struggles to garrison Island in this period. Yeah. Island is a fraction of the size. it's a be careful what you ask for situation where you have this British Army. Basically, their strategy was this has to crumble very easily because we don't even have the desire and the wherewithal to do what needs to happen after the fact to secure this land.

They would have had to have an entirely different strategy to do this. I think Britain would have had to become a very different state. And some of the opponents of the war were saying this, you know, there's no way to really maintain the British parliamentary tradition, the way in which the Crown gets money from people. there's almost no way to retain that if you have to transform yourself into a sort of military superpower with hundreds of thousands of boots on the ground in a distant place like North America.

I mean, it's challenging for the whole British way of life back home in the UK. It was based on the belief of why in the world would they not want to be British? Yes, that's right. The whole thing, that early British empire was sort of held together

by the assumption that everyone wanted to be English. You know, why would you not want to me? You're protected by the freedoms of Magna Carta. It's great. It's great business. So Britain doesn't have a tradition other than in, for example, in Ireland has to impose its rule by force, Britain in the Highlands of Scotland. And that comes close to exhausting the British Army.

In the Highlands of Scotland, which is very thinly populated, it's tiny by American standards. Britain fights a complex counterinsurgency, and it burns crops and it removes cattle, and it rounds up troublemakers and sends them abroad. It fights an old-school insurgency. And that's a big effort for the Brits. So the idea you're going to do it across the whole of Eastern North America is crazy. Jonathan, there would have been vast punishment. We can only imagine.

I mean, it's the Nuremberg trials of the colonial times. Washington would have hung, right? Well, so this is the interesting piece because Dan mentioned the vast experience that the British have had with attempting to subdue protectorates. And this is a thing that every revolutionary was aware of. They were very aware of what had happened to the Jacobi in Scotland, they are incredibly aware of Ireland. In fact, that is one of the reasons for pushing for more representation in Parliament because they firmly believe the British are trying

to turn us into Ireland. It wasn't so much, hey, they're trying to tax us. It's literally, they're going to turn us into Ireland. It will be a possession. We will have no representation. They will force us to maintain an army that we have to pay for to subdue ourselves. And so this, this is very, every, every part of this is drilled into these guys' minds. So when you have people not just taking up arms, but looking down a musket at a British soldier or leading troops against the Union Jack, their colors, their own colors, this is what they're thinking of. When they're signing the Declaration of Independence, you know, Benjamin Franklin, the great somewhat humorous quote, but also very real, gentlemen, we must all hang together, else we shall surely hang separately. That they are very aware of that.

And as the British prosecute the war in North America, they are going to immediately begin with a hard war. We talked about Howesley, you know, some people talk about William Howes leniency in the, in the New York campaign. Remember, this is also, they've already burnt, by the end of 1775, they've already burnt Charlestown in Massachusetts. They've burnt Falbeth, now Portland, Maine. they have torched communities up and down the coast.

This is not an easy, an easy, oh, well, when their hearts and minds back, this is, they go in hard from the outset. And that is how they prosecute the war. In 7046, 7, in Highlands, they are, the British Army is savage. And ringleaders are rounded up and executed. Lord Lovett, the old fox is the last man to be beheaded with a sword on Tower Hill in London, in the Tower of London. So I think it's true.

Anyone who puts their name on that declaration of independent, Penance, that traitorous document. I think they would have probably faced treason charges and, and I guess, senior commanders as well. And probably hard labor camps, et cetera. Yes. And then as you see, whether it's in some of the wars of the 17th century and indeed in the Scottish uprising I've mentioned, you see people put on ships and sent elsewhere. So the British are happy and have done in quite large numbers. There are many, many people alive today who are the descendants of indentured laborers who were sent to what is now the U.S., but Canada and the U.S., for example, as defeated when they were defeated in the Scottish Army at Dunbar in the 17th

century, for example, where you can trace that group of prisoners all the way of to the American colonies. And you can imagine those Americans being sent a long way from home to very difficult places. The other thing, and there's a more recent example as well, which is the French settlers were uprooted from what is now New Brunswick and dispersed a ground across North America. So the British state can be pretty tough. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. So it's not as simple as to say, well, we'd be Canada today.

That's all there is to it. No. There would have been an enormous spasm of violence. A huge amount of prisoners would be taken. They would have remade the land, basically, had to. Yeah, and there would have been part of that victory. The Royal Governor of Virginia, for example, said any self-emancipated, formerly enslaved people, so African-Americans, if you can get away from your plantation,

you're at your servitude, and if you can join our colors, you'll be free. So there have been huge issues around slavery and around the legacies of those kind of promises the British government had made. Well, they would have actually had to hold to those because most of those were not done out of an idea of, oh, we should abolish slavery. It was, let's undercut our enemy's strength. For sure, for sure. And so that would have forced a reckoning that would have been a potential for even more

violence. And we must remember that the revolution comes out of a spate of violence of the British being unable to control the Western frontier of the Americas in Pontiac's Rebellion, 1763 to 1766. This is where so many of those grievances come about. And simply because of being unable to control violence, we can only imagine what would have happened if you had the frontier going up in absolute flames with everybody moving west. Yes. Yeah, exactly.

Everyone moving west. And I think basically the British government had broken itself, winning this war. they are going to look to make the American lands pay for them. Oh, absolutely. And that shows up in the domestic life as well. I mean, never mind your military leaderships, those guys are going to be hanging. But as far as the average American colonists, they're going to be paying through their nose for this stuff. I mean, whatever the taxes before this, it's going to be worse.

I think there's no question. This is the classic, what if we have absolutely no idea. Jonathan, it begs the speculation if we'd lost. Could there have been another effort to launch a new war? Would we have tried again? It's not even a counterfactual because we did. They wore of 1812. Yeah, if you look at how the Treaty of Paris ends up, and also the split of the massive movement of peoples, loyalists, we forget about this. We forget that Nova Scotia, that New Brunswick

was once just Nova Scotia. It had to split into two colonies in 1783, 84, simply because the population of the area quadrupled in size because of loyalists coming from the southern colonies. These are going to be individuals who, in a generation, are going to be defending their homes against their old neighbors in New York, in upstate, what is now Ohio, Michigan, areas like this. So you have, essentially, with the Treaty of Paris, you have the British, almost as Dan, sort of alluded, winning the war because they come out of it incredibly strong. And they immediately reinforce their success by establishing excellent trade relations with America, thereby undercutting the American alliance with the French, causing all this dissension inside the country.

America's economy is absolutely trashed. It is going to take a very long time to bring that out. And you still have the British occupying the forts along the frontier really preventing a lot of settlement. So I don't even know that it's a hypothetical. So many people call the War of 1812, the Second War for Independence. And this is also a war that is fought by a divided country. New England sits that war out. They go, yeah, we don't want to fight. So essentially, that war is fought by the middle colonies and specifically the southern colonies, the western colonies, those who want more expansion. And we see that it is really,

you know, if we were to look at it in a cold light of day, it is a sort of draw. America definitely benefits from the fact that Britain has to focus on Napoleon and another world war. So if we look at, they have recovered? Yes. I think they could have, especially if you look, if we are still considering that Napoleon is good, the French Revolution will happen, Napoleon will rise. But of course, if the American Revolution fails, is there a French Revolution? Exactly. I think that's a big subplot is, you know, what's the counterfactual on the French Revolution happening if they haven't bankrupted themselves fighting the American Revolution? It's amazing. One of the episodes that's really important about the Treaty of Paris is the gaining of so much land as a result, leading

up to, not including the Louisiana purchase, which comes in 1803, but as a result of the treaty that stops this war, the American landmass goes all the way to the Mississippi River. It begs the question of what happens for the British. If they'd won, and here we are, they never get the Louisiana purchase from the French, or it comes to them some other way entirely. So no, I mean, listen, we're now entering the Dan Snow Feverdream territory where we'll live in one joyful, happy family, from the Rio Grande up to Hudson Bay and across to Canterbury and Kent.

What's not to like about that seat? And if Henry V had washed his goddamn hands during the siege, that country would extend all the way to southern France as well. But yeah, no, I think there's a world where, yeah, British, North America, Canada, and what is now the US, end up as a huge colonial possession. But I think, like the Canadians in the 19th century, pretty early on, we're like, okay, I think we're done here, guys.

What the American colonists are saying through the 17, 16, 1770s, we don't need you anymore. They're saying that the Brits don't quite hear that, but I think that would have happened, even if you win the American Revolutionary War, you've still got very sophisticated societies. You've got world cities like Boston, Philadelphia, New York, Montreal, with publishing traditions and memories of their freedoms as guaranteed by Magna Carta and all their English tradition. eventually they're going to say again, hey guys, by the way, we don't need you anymore. We can do this nicely or we can do this. But at some stages, look at Canada. Canada, there's a slow process of just breaking away until the point we've reached now where the ties between us are kind of notional.

Did the British believe in manifest destiny? Was that their idea? Well, that was, Jonathan will correct me here. But I mean, this is part of the problem. This one of the disagreements is you've got people in, if you're in Virginia or you are in, you know, Western Pennsylvania, you're like, my believe in manifest destiny, because I want land strategy. If you're in Britain, that just looks like a headache.

In fact, this is so true of the British Empire in the 19th century, colonial actors on the frontier are the ones driving the empire. There's no plan in Whitehall. The foreign office is like, oh, look at these crazy missionaries trying to convert Africans. What are these idiots doing? But then one of those missionaries gets himself killed. The tabloid media goes bonkers. And this minister goes, all right, we'll send the red coats to some place I've never even heard of.

So that's a purely American idea. Well, I'm sure it's a British tradition. I mean, what Dan's describing is exactly the same thing that's happening in the U.S. in the 19th century as well. The United States government inherits the British headache of the American people. Yeah. That is the biggest problem. And immediately the first thing that becomes a problem is that Western frontier, which

remains a problem. The American, the U.S. government is equally, you know, as soon as it inherits the problem, of the ministerial forces of how do we keep the peace between native peoples and our settlers who just will not stop causing trouble. Those are our first few wars, but we have this great comment from a British official in the 1840s in the Oregon territory who says, you Americans don't need an army. You just have settlers. One night they're not there. The next day, they've completely occupied a valley. They have a newspaper.

They have a mill. They're essentially, they formed a government. We can't do anything. And this, I think, would be the problem if Britain continued ruling in the United States portion of North America is this problem of how do you keep people from flooding West. So the same problem that the Americans had and the same problem that we'll confront the British again in the 1840s. And the Spanish have in Mexico, right?

Texas and Mexico. But it's quite possible that all those future states, states actually become nations of their own. I mean, Texas tried to and was for a bit. You could say the same could happen with New Mexico and all that California area. And of course, the Native American populations could have organized themselves if indeed the American government wasn't there with the pressures that they brought. If the British were a little more light-handed about it all, all of that could be a whole different world out there of geography. Yeah, the Comanchee. I mean, it's just, that's the wonderful thing. Trading with the Apaches, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's the main thing

about history. I mean, these, the modern world just looks so, you know, it's impossible to imagine a world today without that big old line. That border from the Great Lakes out to Vancouver and it looks so solid and it's always there on the maps we've grown up with. Yeah. But that's just, that's just luck. Yeah. There are a thousand differences, you know, a thousand different ways, a million different ways that could have worked out. That's what's so incredible. Especially if you look at how great power competition used territory in this age, who we might have been traded the British might have traded the United States to the French or Spanish for, you know, a piece of India or a piece of Africa or some other part of the scramble for better terrain out there. That's exactly one of the things that happened, you know, after the colonists captured Lureberg in the 1740s, then the crown gave it back to the French and all the New Englanders were all pissed off because they said, we organized this.

We demonstrated our proficiency at fighting and then you just gave this away. And yeah, I could imagine portions of the present-day United States being traded off to another power for some advantage elsewhere. And so you might have some very strange configurations. And I think, as Dan says, it's absolutely fascinating to consider that, yes, there could have been sort of an Indian portion, as in the nation of India, you know, traded, hey, we're going to give you Maryland in exchange for, you know, this portion or trade rights or what have you. The big takeaway here, I think more of a philosophical one, is how much of an engine of American identity is the idea that we rebelled and we won. Without that core experience and that's at that central mythology, perhaps, I mean, well, it's a fact. But I mean, it really builds into the American character, this idea that we are always fighting against the odds. That was unlikely that we were here in the first place.

And yet here we are and watch us. that whole bold endeavor is central to the idea of being American. It is, but it's also so confusing. We call this the American Revolution, and so many historians and commenters and sociologists, political scientists have said, that's not a revolution. You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means. It is sort of a rebellion, but it is a revolution in sort of this political idea of self-governance.

And honestly, it is almost, I don't want to say that. it creates a culture where the United States is always at odds with others. We are at odds with our ideas of ourselves. I mean, that is embodied in the Declaration of Independence. I mean, we have this opening statement that is just this absolute crazy, this nonsense of the 18th century of all men are created equal and are endowed by certain inalienable rights. That's mad. No, that's crazy.

You know, that's going to launch millions of people over the next, you know, few centuries for a drive for self-determination. People who, you know, the United States will end up fighting, such as, you know, looking at Mao in China, looking at Hoshi Min in Vietnam. Cuba. Cuba, this is, we are going, we're sowing the seeds of our future adversaries, but in that, I think there's this paradox in the American statement of the American Revolution that is, we are constantly in motion. It is a revolution as in it is a constant revolving. What does it mean?

What is all men mean? What rights? What does that mean? What are the definitions of these things that we so blithely, well, not really blithely, as we talked about. They could have paid for it, but they're next and we're fully prepared to. What do those things mean? And this is that great American paradox where we need there to be a rebellion,

it or a fight against, striving against something. There's a great historian on the Korean War who makes a statement in the opening book at the opening of the book that says, Americans cannot go to war unless there is a crusade involved. There has to be this greater idea, which is interesting when you look at 1775, because the idea is we're not sure. And 1776 gives you the idea, and that's shaped. And I and many scholars, much smarter scholars than myself, would argue that the American Revolution

is an ongoing event. It is an ongoing process as we figure out exactly who we are, where we fit into these revolutionary ideals and where to go for the future. It's the American experiment, the control of which is we could have been British. You could have been British, and it's your last guys. I mean, cricket is one of the great joys. And you're missing out on that. And all that protection.

for your American football is just embarrassing. Well, thankfully, we all came back together in the end. Well, we did. But the hot take, my hot take is that we should listen to Ben Franklin, move the capital of this joint British and American project, smash into New York, big imperial capital, rebuild it all as a transatlantic state where they actually think about how this could work.

You cannot run America once it becomes bigger and more populous and richer than the home country. You cannot think you're going to run it all from Westminster. Doesn't work, guys. It doesn't work. Move the capital west. The Empire of Transatlantia. Yeah.

Stick King, Georgia, New York, and maybe we'd give this a go. My great guest today, as has been on three episodes now, Major Jonathan D. Bratton, an engineer officer and historian. It's been a great honor to talk to you, Jonathan. I hope this is not the last time. I hope not. This has been an absolute pleasure and a honor to be able to debate and have conjecture about what the future might have

looked like. And of course, Dan Snow, star of Dan Snow's history hit. I'm also the only person on my podcast, so yes, I'm the star. Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you. Thank you. Hey, thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays, all kinds of content from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode. By hitting like and follow. You help us out, which is great. But you'll also be reminded when our shows are on.

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