On the Fourth of July, the United States will celebrate the 250th anniversary of their separation from the British Crown. Plagued by institutional paralysis and cultural fracture, this is a fitting moment to ask a fundamental question: what if London had been endowed with the vision to grant independence within what would have become an imperial Commonwealth, as Thomas Jefferson envisaged?

What if, instead of the rigid obstinacy of Lord North, London had listened to the statecraft of Edmund Burke and William Pitt the Elder, and embraced the economic prophecy of Adam Smith? He predicted the rapidly growing American colonies would eventually make them the economic centre of gravity, necessitating a shift of the capital of the worldwide Empire from London to America.

A wise solution would have been to appoint a viceroy with the task of ensuring the colonies’ rightful place in the commonwealth. An ideal choice would have been the proven expert on the rights of ‘British America’, Thomas Jefferson, ennobled perhaps as the Marquess of Monticello.

Had London possessed that foresight, history would have been rewritten. It was only decades later, under ‘Radical Jack’ Lord Durham, that Britain finally stumbled upon the correct formula for advanced colonies: grant them self-government on the Westminster model. Had Durham’s proposal for Canada to be a self-governing ‘crowned republic’ been applied to America in 1774, not only would the fracture of the English-speaking world have been averted, but America would now have a superior Constitution.

While standard texts insist the revolution was an inevitable explosion over taxation, there were other issues. One was the 1763 Royal Proclamation protecting Indigenous lands by strictly forbidding settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains.

Another was the explosive impact of the 1772 Somerset’s Case where, in liberating the slave James Somerset, Lord Mansfield famously accepted an argument that the air of England was ‘too pure for a slave to breathe’. The resulting shockwaves reverberated across the Atlantic. While slavery was not an explicit casus belli, Mansfield’s ruling fundamentally eroded the Crown’s support in the South.

Based on a profound misunderstanding of the King’s role, a distortion amplified by forgotten verbiage after the magnificent opening to the Declaration of Independence, the Founders copied the British model for their Constitution, but inevitably made mistakes. By 1776, the British monarch was already effectively a constitutional sovereign operating through influence and cabinet. Aided by Montesquieu’s oversimplification, the Founders took their myth from propaganda about King George being an autocrat and codified it into an elected, fixed-term, powerful executive presidency.

The result is a deeply flawed system. The American imperial presidency works well when the nation is blessed with a truly great leader. But in the vast majority of cases, even in the case of a run-of-the-mill president, the system ties the country down in mediocre gridlock. A prime minister, accountable daily to parliament and, importantly, removable when confidence is lost, is a substantially superior model for stable democratic governance, one which can still accommodate great leaders such as Disraeli or Churchill.

Had this sensible path been taken, the economic and demographic expansion of the American continent would have accelerated a natural evolution into an imperial Commonwealth of Nations. Within a free-trading imperial framework, the American colonies would have outpaced Britain economically by the 1870s. This shifting centre of gravity would have necessitated an early version of the Statute of Westminster, granting full, independent power to a continental American parliament and government.

To reflect this new reality, the sovereign would have become a truly transatlantic figure, reigning for part of the year from a palace alongside the Potomac or in the rolling hills of Virginia, serving as the visible, living anchor of a global, linguistically unified Commonwealth operating by consensus.

Had America developed under this Westminster framework, it would have been spared endless foreign wars. For most of the British century, she had been remarkably selective, engaging in few major conflicts.

Britain’s intervention in the first world war with an expeditionary force, wisely resisted by a cabinet majority until Kitchener and Grey forced it through, unleashed a geopolitical disaster which ensured British decline. With the benefit of American counsel, London’s reaction to the invasion of Belgium would have definitely been limited at most to a blockade by the Royal Navy, then the world’s most powerful. Left to their own devices on land, the Germans would have again rapidly defeated France, who would have lost a colony or two and some gold, but as with  Napoleon, they would have been unable to defeat Russia.

Moreover, Europe would have been spared the civilisational collapse that followed. Without that, the Hohenzollerns and the Romanovs could still be wearing their imperial crowns today, and the twin totalitarians of communism and Nazism would never have emerged. Meanwhile, the primary influence of such an unbroken global Commonwealth would today be exercised from its American powerhouse. Geopolitically unassailable and culturally unified, this closer union would still be acting as the dominant pacifying shield over world events.

Simultaneously, the domestic standard of American governance would have been spared not only an imperial presidency, but also its greatest legalist affliction: a politically activist judiciary. In 1803, Chief Justice John Marshall engineered a judicial coup in Marbury v. Madison, inventing judicial review out of thin air. In a British Atlantic Dominion, under the orthodoxy of parliamentary supremacy, such a coup would have been impossible. Legal finality would have rested with traditional judicial restraint just as it had in the 257 American appeals heard in the King’s Privy Council. Without an activist Supreme Court, there would have been no Dred Scott decision – the catastrophic 1857 judicial overreach that attempted to nationalise slavery and which many believe triggered the American Civil War. We would have been spared the modern spectacle of politically inclined, unelected judges acting as an unpredictable supreme legislature, changing the fabric of the nation by judicial decree.

As Americans light their fireworks this July, we are left to contemplate the ultimate tragedy of 1775. A visionary British government could have preserved the unity of the English-speaking peoples. The world today would not be teetering on the edge of multi-polar chaos; it could be anchored by an unassailable, tranquil, and deeply traditional democratic English-speaking Commonwealth.