What if no American Revolution?

Steve Sailer asks that question today, in celebration of the 4th of July.  If we hadn't become an independent country, what difference would it make? Steve's speculation is HERE. Do go read it.... Anyhow, it's interesting, but science-fiction writers and others have been going a lot deeper than that on the question for years.  It's not enough to compare the US to Canada or Mexico or some other place, because the very existence of the US has made other countries different than they would have been otherwise.  In my own opinion, if our revolution hadn't taken place, or had failed, it would have made for a quite different British Empire. For one thing, we'd have been a part of it, and all our talent could have served to make it all that much more powerful and dominant, and it might dominate the world today.  Or, it might have gotten really complacent and fallen to pieces a lot sooner than it did.

And, of course, our successful revolution is thought to have largely inspired the French revolution, hence Napoleon, and hence a lot of things.  Would there have been very little revolution anywhere without our example? Or would it have just taken longer to happen, and been more violent when it did?

In Robert Sobel's For Want of a Nail, the revolution fails when Burgoyne won at Saratoga, and many of our revolutionary leaders fled to Mexico, and we end up with a North America that looks like this:

All the green area is one country, which is sort of Canada-ish and well behaved and still politically connected with the UK.  All the red area is Mexico, which is like our timeline's Mexico plus a bunch of American redneck types, which is an expansive, aggressive country.  The book is written not as a novel, but as a history book, and is a fun read.

A less serious inquiry into the question is The Two Georges, by Turtledove and Dreyfuss.  In this story, the revolution didn't fail, but ended with a compromise between George Washington and George III (hence the name of the novel).  I can't find a copy of the map, but the "North American Union" consists basicially of what we know as the US and Canada, plus Baja California.  And the Union is part of the British Empire still, and is very Canadian, with gun control and well-behaved citizens all over the place.  It, too, is a fun read.  There's more stuff about those two books and some others HERE.

The truth is unknowable, of course, but in my opinion, the failure of the American revolution would have been a failure for the whole idea of freedom, and I don't know if anybody would ever have taken it that seriously again.