Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Independence Day: The Second Domino

UK science fiction writer Charles Stross on the meaning of the Fourth of July:

Independence Day does carry some associated freight. It lies not the public holiday, but in the historic event it commemorates: the moment when the second major rupture between the English-speaking peoples and their government came to a head. (The first such moment, interestingly, doesn’t rate a public holiday either in the USA or the UK: it remains politically controversial to this day; but without this shocking precedent the political establishment of the New England colonies, never mind their progress towards independence, would have taken a very different course.)

And, glibly leap-frogging across thirty years of history, it can be argued that without the US War of Independence the French monarchy wouldn’t have mortgaged itself into a smoking hole in the ground; there would have been no revolutionary republic: no Emperor Napoleon: and the whole shape of politics and history throughout Europe (which in this context stretches from Lisbon to Vladivostok) would be unrecognizably different today.

So: Independence Day — an un-holiday — Declaration of Independence of the United States of America — the second domino in a chain that is still collapsing in thunder to this day, rattling through the annals of history.

Quick: Without going over to Charlie’s blog, can you identify the first domino, i.e., the “shocking precedent”?