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Or the printing press which allows heretics to attack the honor of the holy Catholic Church. Let's pray this doesn't cause schisms and violence.
The Founding Fathers used hand-cranked printing presses and never anticipated there would someday be fully automatic assault presses.
I'm a patriotic American, but I think the Revolutionary War was a mistake and history would have been a lot better if the US had stayed British. So the printing presses used by the Founding Fathers did a lot of harm even without being "automatic assault presses".
Why? Without the American Revolution, we'd not have gotten first amendment speech protections (even if Mills had still existed on this timeline), and without those, it would have taken a lot longer to dispel the popular falsehoods of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The British abolished slavery without a Civil War! If the US had been militarily part of the UK you don't get WW I and II (probably) and as a bonus no communism.
Slaveowners were a tiny portion of the British population. They were powerful disproportionately to their numbers, but they would never have been able to resist abolition by force like the American South could.
If the Revolution has failed/never happened, the British slave owning population would have been much larger and more widespread -- remember, most Northern states abolished in response to the ideology of the Revolution.
But the South's strategy for winning the Civil War relied on the UK Navy not allowing the South to be blockaded. The UK + North American North would have easily beaten the South and so could have forced the South to end slavery without a Civil War.
Or alternatively everyone in North America might have grown to see the "peculiar institution" as a defining trait that set them off from the Brits and when the British moved to crackdown on slavery in the 1800s the combined North American colonies might have steamrolled them with superior Yankee industry and Southern military leadership, resulting in a hundred more years of chattel slavery across the entire Anglosphere!
I find your hypothetical more reasonable than mine. But something one doesn't understand until one reads letters from the time period is how much Northern will to fight the South was motivated by (checks notes) antipathy towards Europe, not slavery per se. (On average I'd say Northerners didn't like slavery but they didn't like black people either.) The Northerners saw the Southerners as oligarchs after the European feudal model, and that was a large part of what they had a problem with. Splitting the Union was unacceptable to them because it meant that the grand Republican experiment had "failed" (read: made them look bad to the Europeans.) Or at least that's what I recall being struck by when I did some primary source readings. Perhaps my memory and/or coursework was selective.
That's not to say that there weren't a very vocal and dedicated group that saw slavery itself as unacceptable and campaigned specifically to get rid of it, even at the cost of war. But (and this is my point) culture works in funny ways and in an alternative history where the Revolution never happened over self-government+taxes it might have happened later over "self-government+slavery." Never underestimate how crotchety people will get over being told what to do.
Just as a technical note, the South wanted the UK to intervene badly, but I don't think that was their best or only chance of winning, and they actively pursued strategies to unilaterally break the blockade themselves. Ultimately I think they lost because they got bled white, not because they were blockaded. Southern casualties were extraordinarily high as a percentage of the population compared to any other American war, and although they had trouble with heavy industry (you know, cannons) they were able to produce basic necessities like gunpowder to the end. In fact, IIRC, their soldiers were better off for powder than they were for food.
You could be right about the South. My only somewhat informed view is that the Civil War was a war of choice for the South, and not going to war would not have caused them to have to give up slavery. Unless they were crazy (which they might have been) the war only made sense if they thought they could win easily and that needed the UK to not let the North blockade the South.
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