Here is same thing as I posted before but expounded. This was not written by me but I was too lazy to write all this up and this covers exactly what I wanted to say
There were four conditions that made a colony within the British Empire profitable:
1. low to modest settler populations
2. almost no secondary industries
3. high value commodities within that colony to export
4. defence/sovereignty issues that could be solved by either the Royal Navy or a proxy merchantilist company (ie The East India Company, the Hudson's Bay Company)
As soon as you started changing any of those conditions, the colony became less worth keeping. In the case of the colonies that became the US, all four of these conditions were severly compromised by the time of the revolution. There was plenty of settlers with their own autonomous society; there was industry there to produce clothes, books, tools, ships etc; there wasn't as much to export because the colony needed it for it's own use and what was worth shipping out (premium timber, tobbacco, cotton) was not high value stuff; and with the growth of the farming hinterland, threats from the French and the Indian nations, and huge policing needs, it wasn't enough to have a ship and few marines around anymore. They needed soldiers, and they needed a lot of them.
With all that said, look at what happened. Parliament started levying unfair taxes and suspending rights that had been part of the English tradition for hundreds of years because it was EASIER and it would make running the colonies CHEAPER. They started putting soldiers in people's houses cause it was CHEAPER. They started restricting settlement because it was EASIER to keep the Indian nations on side than it was to fight them.
Then the colonists rebelled....
All of a sudden you needed more soldiers. You needed to build barracks, you needed to fortify harbours, you needed to put more soldiers on the streets.
Then France got involved and the other European powers started tinkering with the situation as well...
Now those really expensive Royal Navy ships are under threat. Now the trade that is helping you pay for this very expensive war is threatened. Now the war is more expensive.
Winning, losing, coming to a draw. Who cares? The whole mess was bleeding them dry. They could shoot as many colonists as they wanted. More would show up next week to shoot. They could station troops in a town to keep it "loyal" and make some money. They were still getting robbed blind by the patriots.
And then that's when the colonists actually started winning battles!
Given that circumstance, would you have wanted to stay?
In comparison, look what happened to the relationship by the end of the War of 1812. When they signed the Treaty of Ghent, it had been made plainly obvious that Britain wasn't going to ever have the rebellious colonies back nor did they want them. It was obvious that they were not going to be able to keep the Americans out of the colonies they did have left in North America because the political will was not there to do so. On the American side however, there was a realization too that the British were not to be toyed with either. Sure you could take Canada from them whenever you wanted, but was it worth the Royal Navy levelling New York, or Boston, or Philadelphia, or Charleston, or Washington, or Baltimore or.....??? Instead they just let each other be and got the trade between themselves going again. In the process, the British had all the American tobbacco, cotton, timber, grain, furs, fish, etc they wanted without the paying to keep troops around some remote farming town on the Ohio or on the streets of New York. The US did that for themselves now.
Seems like a pretty smart decision to me.....
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