Part of BRLSI Democracy Under Threat Series:

This talk examines the ways in which British and American political paths diverged in the decades following American independence.

The War of Independence was a civil war, fought between countries which largely shared political values, both highly critical of ‘democracy’, as it was then understood. In the following decades, as their political institutions, practices and values diverged, both joined other countries across Europe and the Americas in re-evaluating ‘democracy’. But their re-evaluations also took different paths, laying the groundwork for some differences that persist today.