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Florida law forbids ordinances, deed restrictions, covenants, or similar binding agreements from prohibiting solar equipment use. Under this law, a homeowner may not be denied by "any entity granted the power or right in any deed restriction, covenant or similar binding agreement to approve, forbid, control, or direct alteration of property..." permission to install a solar collector, clothesline, or other energy device using renewable resources.While a homeowner cannot be prevented from installing a solar energy system, certain restrictions may be imposed without violating the law. However, those restrictions must be reasonable, not arbitrary, and uniformly imposed on homeowners in a subdivision. The restrictions cannot act to impair the performance of a solar system or it may be seen as "effectively" prohibiting solar.The law specifically prohibits a homeowner association from preventing the installation of solar collectors on the roof. Although the association may determine where on the roof the collectors may be installed, so long as the installation is within the area required for its effective operation, that is, south, east or west of due south.The association is, thereby, limited in imposing requirements which would effectively restrict the system's operating efficiency or increase the system installation cost. As such, requirements for screening the system from view, whether by trees or fences, ground mounting, or limiting installation to an area not visible from the street, are contrary to the spirit and letter of the law, if the association change impairs the efficiency of the system. Requiring the system to conform to a certain color (i.e., blending with the color of the roof) is also prohibited by the statute, since the collector surface must be black to effectively absorb the sun's heat (and, in fact, is the only available material on the market).There has been some litigation with respect to the applicability of Section 163.04. (See Florida Statute Section 163.04 below.) However, most cases have been resolved through mediation.One such case involved the installation of a solar pool heater on the roof of a home. In this case, the association filed an injunction requesting removal of the rooftop system and instead required that the system be ground-mounted. This change would have impaired the system's operating efficiency, and the yard space was insufficient to allow ground-mounting. The parties settled, with the homeowner prevailing on the issue of roof mounting. The collectors were relocated to a less conspicuous area on the roof, and more panels were added to compensate for the loss of system efficiency.Another case dealt with the installation of a pool heating system on a residence which had been originally denied by the homeowners association board. The case was decided in favor of the association based on the sole issue of whether 163.04 applied to homeowner associations. The court held that the law did not apply to homeowner associations. Consequently, the law was amended to specifically include actions taken by homeowner associations.Another case dealt with the installation of a garage door screen. This case was resolved in the favor of the homeowner because it was determined that the screen provided a means of cooling the residence, and as such, constituted a passive solar measure.It is important to seek the approval of a homeowners association prior to the installation of a solar system. The law protecting the installation of solar does not waive the need for association approval if it is required by the governing documents. However, the Legislature has made successive amendments to Section 163.04 to better state its intent and to protect the rights of all solar consumers. This section applies to all actions taken with respect to approval or denial of a solar system, regardless of when the subdivision was instituted or when the association bylaws may have been adopted.Listed below is the text of the Florida Statute Section 163.04.Florida Statute, Section 163.04Energy devices based on renewable resources.-(1) Notwithstanding any provision of this chapter or other provision of general or special law, the adoption of an ordinance by a governing body, as those terms are defined in this chapter, which prohibits or has the effect of prohibiting the installation of solar collectors, clotheslines, or other energy devices based on renewable resources is expressly prohibited.(2) No deed restrictions, covenants, or similar binding agreements running with the land shall prohibit or have the effect of prohibiting solar collectors, clotheslines, or other energy devices based on renewable resources from being installed on buildings erected on the lots or parcels covered by the deed restrictions, covenants, or binding agreements. A property owner may not be denied permission to install solar collectors or other energy devices based on renewable resources by any entity granted the power or right in any deed restriction, covenant, or similar binding agreement to approve, forbid, control, or direct alteration of property with respect to residential dwellings not exceeding three stories in height. For purposes of this subsection, such entity may determine the specific location where solar collectors may be installed on the roof within an orientation to the south or within 45 ° east or west of due south provided that such determination does not impair the effective operation of the solar collectors.(3) In any litigation arising under the provisions of this section, the prevailing party shall be entitled to costs and reasonable attorney's fees.(4) The legislative intent in enacting these provisions is to protect the public health, safety, and welfare by encouraging the development and use of renewable resources in order to conserve and protect the value of land, buildings, and resources by preventing the adoption of measures which will have the ultimate effect, however unintended, of driving the costs of owning and operating commercial or residential property beyond the capacity of private owners to maintain. This section shall not apply to patio railings in condominiums, cooperatives, or apartments.

It’s a horrible idea for a constitution, but a great idea for an amendment.To someone who believes in the power of science to find objective truths, this is a very enticing vision. Who wouldn’t want a country where, as he argues, “data gathering, careful observations, and experimentation would be happening all the time, influencing practically every aspect of our modern lives” or where “everyone would be trained from an early age how to obtain and analyze evidence”? Who wouldn’t want to “lead the world in discovery, because discovery would be built into the DNA of how the government operates, and how its citizens think”?But I’m not the first person to note that this idea is entirely unworkable. It’s based on mistaking the nature of both politics and science.Politics is the way we resolve competing interests; it’s never settled, because there are always at least two valid sides to most questions. Take, for example, a political debate from history: the free silver movement, with William Jennings Bryan’s famous “Cross of Gold” speech. One side wanted the right to have metal minted into legal tender to apply to gold alone; the other side wanted silver to be included as well. From the perspective of most economists today, they were both wrong; the money supply should not be based on how much shiny metal people happen to find underground. But even if you go back to the understandings at the time, the debate was never about whether silver money was or wasn’t “real”; it was between a tighter monetary policy which benefitted certain sectors, and a looser one which would have benefitted others. Science can sometimes answer questions about truth — in this case, what those benefits are—but it can never decide about values—in this case, which benefit we should prefer.And even when it comes to establishing truth, scientific progress is often tentative. As Hume pointed out, you can never fully prove a universal law, only find or fail to find counterexamples. That’s why even in physics, where theories tend to be pretty clear-cut in their predictions, long-standing, well-established theories sometimes need to be revised or qualified. But in social sciences, where tendencies are weak and often mediated by contingent factors, the fact is we’ll never have enough clear scientific understanding to fully determine every government policy.So, is the idea of Rationalia useless then? Not at all. Imagine that, instead of a one-line constitution, we use his idea as a two-line¹ amendment:All policy shall be consistent with the weight of evidence. Any law shall state its purpose(s), and if the nation’s scientists make a finding that there is or are a strictly better alternative way or ways to meet those purposes, the legislature shall have a reasonable period of not more than a year to choose among those ways and replace the law.Essentially, this would make science into a fourth branch of government, with a role similar to that of the Supreme Court.Unlike NDT’s version, this would allow policy to exist before the science is settled. The industry of climate denial shows the dangers of a false “skepticism” that always has the self-interested goal of putting off a decision until the next study. But then once the science is settled (as the basics of climate science now surely are), there would be no way for status quo interests to simply foment gridlock and keep anti-scientific policy in place.How would this work in practice? I have two examples that I think clarify things.My first example is ethanol subsidies and mandates. These were initially proposed as a way to reduce net CO₂ emissions by encouraging renewable fuels. Many environmentalists supported biofuels as being a good idea. However, recent studies show that if you include the entire production process, ethanol does not decrease net emissions and may actually increase them. Nonetheless, corn industry lobbyists, who are especially powerful in the key presidential primary state of Iowa, have managed to keep many of the subsidies and mandates on the books. Despite opposition from both the left and the right, they simply care more about this issue than anyone else, so they are going to keep their “pork” for as long as possible. Under this amendment, the public interest could override this special interest.My second example is more radical; it goes straight to the root of democracy, the voting system itself. The primary purpose of voting is to ensure that the people creating and executing laws do so representing the will of “we, the people”.² But modern science shows that the voting system we use (the British call it “First Past the Post”, or FPTP) does a particularly poor job of fulfilling that purpose. “Duverger’s law” states that it tends to lead to a two-party monopoly, even though a majority of Americans want more options. Spoiled elections like Florida in 2000 or Maine’s governor; mudslinging negative campaigns; rancorous debates between would-be allies over “lesser evil” strategic voting; gerrymandered, uncompetitive districts leading to polarized, gridlocked politics; and even, to some extent, the outsized role of money in politics; all of these can be traced directly to FPTP’s flaws. And modern voting theorists know that alternatives are available: approval voting for single-winner races, and proportional representation for legislative bodies. Without the “Rationalia” amendment, organizations working on this issue, such as electology.org, have a tough job to convince legislators to change the very system that brought them into power. But with the amendment, there would be no excuse not to bring the systems of democracy more in line with the principle of the popular will.So no, Dr. Tyson: I don’t want to replace the Constitution with your Rationalia. But I’d love to add it to the constitution.Let’s keep writing the ConstitutionFootnotes:¹I’ve suggested a “two-line” amendment, but of course I realize that in practice there would be many details to work out. For instance: how would the scientific community make and announce a finding; how could legislators vet new proposed policies for consistency with science; if the way forward was clear and not ideologically fraught, could elected legislatures simply hand the job of fixing a law over to “legislative engineers”; how could we ensure research was adequately funded; etc.²Some might argue that voting has a secondary purpose, too: to establish the legitimacy of government, and thus allow outlets for disagreement which don’t lead to destructive civil wars. My arguments above still hold.

They actually did indeed try that very thing! But you might not have heard much about that particular conflict. Well, at least that aspect of it.Their effort is called the War of American Independence or “The American War” as it was known in Europe back in the day.The sentiment supporting that war:“The idea… prevails at large through Europe, that we are proud, full of our own importance, and that it will not be amiss if we are brought a little more upon a level with our neighbours” — Sir Joseph Yorke, British Ambassador to The Hague (Netherlands), July 13, 1779.That full war to bring Great Britain down a level, including its global theaters & side-conflicts, lasted from 1775 to 1784.The war had two main stages:Stage 1 - 1775–1777: Continental Congress/USA rebels officially alone versus Great Britain.Stage 2 -1778–1784: USA + several European powers + Mysore in India versus Great Britain.…. which second period included:1780–83: The League of Armed Neutrality (a formally neutral, but de facto anti-British, coalition of most leading European powers)The League’s Members: Russia, Prussia, Austria, Sweden, Denmark, Ottoman Turkey, Portugal, Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Basically all the remaining main powers of Europe.While not every European country, or even most, waged active warfare in the conflict to humble Great Britain, the countries of Europe (and elsewhere) presented a nearly united European and global front against what was widely seen as British arrogance and excess domination. A broad consensus emerged among the powers of the day that felt London’s position in the world needed to be rebalanced and brought down one or more degrees of magnitude.The American rebellion, beginning in 1775, proved a particularly opportune moment to try to achieve that very thing.Three of Europe’s major nations would engage in full-on official direct open warfare against Great Britain and its possessions as part of the War of American Independence.“Because England wants war against the whole world, they will have it!” — Frederick II (the Great) of Prussia in early 1781 (describing the expanding conflict & universal anti-British sentiment — though neither himself nor Prussia became direct belligerents in the conflict).—————————————————————1763 & Forward:The Gathering Storm: British Arrogance and World Reaction—————————————————————An unwelcome attitude of haughty supremacy was widely seen as emanating from London, especially after about 1763, more than a decade preceding the rebellion in British America’s 13 colonies.That perceived haughtiness had grown intolerable for a great many around the world — including former allies and current subjects of Great Britain. This appearance of excess superiority followed the latter’s victory in the Seven Years War (1756–1763).That conflict is also known in the USA as the “French & Indian War”, but it was more descriptively called, among the British at the time:“The Great War for Empire”.Great Britain had secured a position of “unipolar” global supremacy.Indeed, by that war’s end, King George’s army and navy sat as conquerors in Manila, Havana, Pondicherry, Quebec, and Senegal — among other places — especially after his and Parliament’s top-notch and enormous Royal Navy had bottled the French navy, its best opponent, inside France’s ports.Historians, probably inaccurately technically, often call the Seven Years War “the first world war. Given its scope and consequences, we can allow it.So the “second world war” after that is The American War under discussion here: Round-Two to the Seven Years War.—-The Seven Years War of 1756–1763 was arguably the defining war of modernity, until the conventionally known Second World War (1939–1945).That role arises from the fact that the Seven Years War established the British-dominated geopolitical world that defined modern history from the late 18th to the mid-20th centuries.And British attitudes and posture at the end of, and immediately following, the Seven Years War were soaring to their most aggressive and (over)confident to date.“Gunboat diplomacy” is a standard description of one British Ministry’s typical imperial foreign policy soon after the Seven Years War was finished (a Ministry whose colonial and fiscal policy also ticked off Britain’s American colonists).See: The Gunboat Diplomacy of the Government of George Grenville, 1764-1765: The Honduras, Turks Island and Gambian IncidentsA crisis over the Falklands Islands in 1770 saw a further intimidated and publicly humiliated France and Spain back off claims there. The American colonists meanwhile grew increasingly reactive to more intrusive measures by London into their finances, commerce, boundaries, and government. Those measures were typically responses to new post-Seven Years War conditions, especially Britain’s overhanging war debt and capture of much of North America.And those steps were working towards nurturing a stronger London-managed empire.——————————————-Opportunity Arises: France and Spain Wade In——————————————-In the subsequent American rebellion and independence conflict starting in the mid-1770s, the French, and later the Spanish, struck back hard, and with increasing directness, at British supremacy.First, they provided behind-the-scenes assistance to the Americans, then afterward waged open official war on Great Britain, bolstered particularly by a renewed preparatory naval buildup by the French aimed at rebalancing military power on the high seas.The geopolitical strategy of reducing the supremacy of Great Britain using American unrest was actually underway well before the Declaration of Independence of the American rebels in 1776.It was being readied even as news of the rebellion started to cross the Atlantic.“…The degree of exhaustion of the two parties [Britain & the American rebels] shall determine the [timing] of [our] striking the decisive blow which shall reduce England to a second-rate power....It is certain that if His Majesty [King Louis XVI] seizes [this] unique opportunity, which centuries may probably never reproduce, to contain…the dominating schemes of Great Britain, France would command peace [in Europe] for many a year.…Ambitious, covetous, unjust, and faithless … [Great Britain] respects only those who are able to make her fear.”— Charles Gravier [Comte] de Vergennes, Foreign Minister, Kingdom of France (from various memos to court & king 1775–76).The French in early 1778 formally allied themselves directly with the American rebels and committed France, publicly, to the Americans’ cause of independence. In the next year, the Spanish took on Great Britain by allying themselves directly with the French (via a dynastic agreement (“the Family Compact”) among the Bourbon family monarchs reigning in both Paris and Madrid).Spain, however, did not recognize or ally with the 13-colony North Americans formally during the war as the French had done. Their sole official target was not American Independence but the overreach of Great Britain.———————————————Europe United in Refusal: The Neutrals Resist Britain’s Interception of Trade & Try to Isolate It———————————————Portugal, normally a near permanent ally of the British, went shockingly neutral, suggesting how widespread resentment of Great Britain had become.The “neutrals” also included Prussia, a former British fighting ally in the previous war which now showed its hostility to that former ally by prohibiting transport of America-bound German (imprecisely called “Hessian”) contracted and allied troops through Prussia and on to Britain or America.Russia, under Empress Catherine, set up a League of Armed Neutrality during the American war to protest and hopefully block recurrent and aggressive British seizures of neutral vessels, even though Russia, like Prussia, had been a British ally at the end of the previous war. (“My children” was how Catherine described her nation’s maritime military and merchant vessels.)Additionally as early as 1775, Catherine had flatly turned down a direct request by King George for mercenary Russian troops to help suppress the rebellion in America. (Her initial delay in saying no may have had the effect of buying time for the American rebels in Boston and elsewhere to consolidate their positions and permit the rebellion to gain necessary traction.)The Baltic nations also joined in her later-established Neutrality League.So off-putting were British heavy-handed naval interception practices and attitudes that even Russia’s arch-rival Ottoman Turkey ultimately joined Catherine’s League!The League threatened armed resistance to British naval seizures during the American war and promised unified retaliation to armed captures of merchant vessels. (The League had started as more generally neutral, but France’s Foreign Minister Vergennes rather smartly persuaded Spain to back off seizing Russian and other neutral ships, realizing correctly that the main sentiment of the more powerful neutrals would then turn anti-British.)Austria and Prussia meanwhile aborted a major European war of their own, the War of the Bavarian Succession, partly because their patrons in the previous war, France and Britain respectively, couldn’t or wouldn’t support them. Those patrons were instead spending their all duking it out full throttle for European supremacy (with America as the immediate pretext and occasion of that conflict.)But both Austria and Prussia, despite their mutual enmity, were pretty much genuinely rooting against or positioned against the British, the latter nation especially so. As noted earlier, Prussia from the very beginning phases typically wouldn’t let German mercenaries pass through its territory to Britain. Prussian monarch Frederick the Great felt that the British Tory government had sold him out at the conclusion of the Seven Years War despite his alliance with them.Austria, in turn, was formally a standing French ally (though it undertook no direct belligerence in the American war). Emperor Joseph in Austria was also the brother of French King Louis’s wife Marie-Antoinette. Joseph additionally sought an anti-Turkish alliance with Russia’s Empress Catherine who was interested, but accordingly cracked her whip on him to stop the central European Bavarian war from being a distraction and a waste, even as Austria’s patron France refused to endorse it.So both Prussia and Austria joined Catherine’s de facto anti-British League of Armed Neutrality which, as noted, threatened combined retaliation for British seizures of ships and was a vehicle for isolating Great Britain as the broader war raged. (Also joining the League was the smaller but central Mediterranean state the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.)In actual practice, though, the League’s threat of armed neutrality was more bark than bite. The relative impotence of even armed merchant vessels against Royal Navy warships and armed British privateers was clear.But the League served to isolate Great Britain politically and was taken quite seriously by the British both in general and in particular cases, particularly as the claim of neutrality was a shield and conduit behind and through which Britain’s enemies — the Americans and French especially — traded or received supplies.Great Britain’s constant heavy-handed and unilateral interruption of global commerce in the hopes of cutting off rebel and other enemy supplies and trade fueled the pervasive resentment against Great Britain’s world-straddling supremacy among a great many of those who had been ordinarily or previously friendly. Or otherwise non-hostile.“We have no one friend or ally to assist us, on the contrary all those who ought to be our allies. . . act against us in supplying our enemies with the means of equipping their fleets.”— John Montagu, Earl of Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty, to King George III, early 1779.A world power all alone, and deserted.—————————————-——-An Isolated Britain Keeps Fighting & Turns Viciously on one Neutral____________________________________Still, Britain stuck to its guns despite the neutrals’ resistance and trade with the enemies. The pressure by the Royal Navy on neutral merchant shipping fell heavily especially in places (like the Baltic and the Netherlands) that served as starting and transit points for key military stores going to the enemy Allies.In fact, when Holland decided to join the Neutrality League at the end of 1780, it found itself and its possessions pounced upon in full fury by an angry Britain which declared an official and total war against the Netherlands.London was already furious over Dutch West Indian colonies (especially the ports and warehouses on St. Eustatius) serving as sympathetic and vital military supply transit points to the Americans, and Holland also serving as a military stores route to France from the Baltic. All this happened while the city of Amsterdam’s local government was discovered to have flirted directly with the rebels with plans for possibly recognizing American independence.Meanwhile, the Dutch in general very confrontationally defied repeated British imperious demands on Holland’s trade and diplomacy. Britain felt also that older treaty commitments by the Netherlands to aid Britain had been breached.Prussian ruler Frederick the Great had now turned so much against his former patron that he took the time to escalate the hostilities between Holland and Britain, writing a scolding rebuke to his niece in the Netherlands, before Holland was at war with Great Britain. (Frederick did not take up direct war himself, however.)“You have done too much for the English,” Frederick chided the Princess, who was married to the Dutch head of state, the Prince of Orange.“You permit them to pillage your vessels at their pleasure!”Friedrich Edler, the classic historian of the Dutch at this period argued that “Frederick the Great sought to influence the United Provinces [of Holland] against England, and there is no doubt that he…was responsible for their final attitude towards their former ally [Great Britain].”————————————————————————————-The Worldwide War of Everyone Against Great Britain——————————————————————The War of American Independence was thus a broader struggle involving Everyone Against Great Britain — in sentiment, orientation, posture, and diplomatic practice, if not in actual open warfare.Three European major powers came to engage in overt official direct war against Britain during the course of the American war, as others ignored traditional enmities to combine in a cold neutrality hostile to British naval activity and superiority.And in India, the British East India company was fighting on two fronts. In one direction, they fought against the French-aligned and assisted Mysoreans of the south. Mysore’s dynamic leader Hyder Ali — later to be honored by having the de facto allied American rebels name a ship for him— declared war in response to British East India Company movements against American-allied French possessions in India.Those areas were lying within Mysore’s declared sphere of influence.Separately but simultaneously, the British East India Company also fought the Marathas in the center of India, while the British naval forces’ might was additionally engaged against Dutch bases throughout both India and the Indian Ocean area after war between Britain and Holland opened up over 1780–81.In this conflict and in that theater of operations, European control over Sri Lanka went back and forth among different countries during the early 1780s.And so around the world, an anti-British warring coalition along wit armed neutrals all aimed towards their common effect:Bringing Britain Down a Notch, or Several Notches ……And that seemed to work……Initially, and for a period, at least.French/European Alliances and Participation Radically Reverse the American Rebellion’s Sagging Momentum,Combined French naval and land forces — joined by the main rebel American army at the Siege of Yorktown/Battle of the Capes in late 1781 — climaxed a series of coordinated land and sea operations in America that effectively dealt the death blow to Great Britain’s political and military efforts to defeat and recover its insurgent 13 colonies.A while earlier in 1778, the mere active threat of a French naval strike in the western Atlantic had caused the British to mass-evacuate Philadelphia and the Chesapeake region in semi-panic, as well as to redeploy very large numbers of troops away from North America to the newly arising Caribbean theater of war.The initial threat engendered by French North Atlantic naval operations turned the ground war momentum in America back over to the rebels who were famously thawing out and undergoing Prussian-officered basic training at Valley Forge.Britain now faced a rival strong adversary in warfare across a global hemisphere. The threat was much much bigger than an overseas rebellion.The object of the war being now changed and the contest in America being secondary consideration, our principal object must be distressing France and defending … His Majesty's [other] possessions." [Emphasis added]—John Montagu, Earl of Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty of Great Britain, to Admiral Lord Richard Howe, Cmdr-in-Chief, North American Station, 22 March 1778The Spanish joined in. Energetically led locally by governor Bernardo de Galvez in New Orleans, they encircled the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico, with Spanish troops taking southern North America up through West Florida and eventually the Bahamas as well, while the French took important British-held Antilles islands positions like St. Kitts, and Spanish forces in America menaced the British lumber operations around what is now Belize (British Honduras).Galvez also drove the British out of the Mississippi river basin, clearing a path to more directly supply to the American rebels through the back door, something he had already been long doing unofficially prior to formal Spanish entrance into the war in 1779.The island of Jamaica, the sugar-rich money-maker of the British Caribbean empire, was effectively isolated, surrounded, and seemingly doomed, a primary target of Spanish imperial and French military operations.A young Horatio Nelson, stationed there, began to study French in expectation of the island’s upcoming capture by a French fleet. Nelson had also led a disastrous expedition designed to defeat the Spanish in Central America.The British units there (in what is modern Nicaragua) suffered the worst casualty rate — largely from disease —- than from any other operation or engagement of the War of American Independence, including the dramatic defeats and hard-won victories in places like Boston, Saratoga, Minorca, Gibraltar, and Yorktown.The Europeans Take the War to the English Channel and Rattle Britain Internally———————————-During the war’s pendency, the British also nervously and realistically anticipated a Franco-Spanish invasion of England itself, thereby holding naval and other resources back from America, the Caribbean and other operational areas.What was feared almost came to pass early on in 1779.A combined fleet of the Bourbon allies — described by one historian as one of the largest fleets ever assembled in history — carrying thousands upon thousands of ground troops nearly landed on England’s southern coast that year in sort of a reverse D-Day.It was stopped only by internal Franco-Spanish operational factors — delay-induced and delay-inducing heavy shipboard disease, vessel erosion, and very poor operational coordination among the anti-British allies. (The British home island of Jersey was also twice invaded and nearly captured by the French during the war.)It was in conjunction with that grand intended invasion of the island of Great Britain itself that the famed American (and French supplied) seaman John Paul Jones performed his reputation-establishing attack on the Serapis.His celebrated operations were actually a small preliminary decoy effort in support of a Franco-Spanish combined fleet’s grand operation to invade the British homeland.Somewhat related public panic from the French-Spanish invasion fleet of 1779 may have helped tear the city of London apart in the next year, with levels of rioting and anarchy rarely seen in the capital city, before or since. The so-called Gordon riots in the next year 1780 were anti-Catholic in nature but possibly amplified in sentiment because it was the religion of the two main enemy belligerents, France and Spain. The riots were only ended when King George, on his personal authority, sent out security forces which gunned down citizens in the street in large numbers to clear the city of rioters.The more specific occasion of those 1780 riots, however, was a step directly engendered by the American war.The provocation to anti-Catholic sentiment arose from Parliamentary legislation reducing restrictions on Catholics, a move partly but explicitly inspired by a desire to recruit more British and Irish into fighting in the now-expanded American war, a war which came dangerously close to landing a huge number of enemy forces directly onto England’s shores.The Kingdom of Great Britain was additionally stressed internally as agitation against London for self-government in Ireland became dramatically accelerated by the American war, leading to a profound change of governance.France and Spain went so far as to dispatch agents to investigate the possibility of fomenting rebellion in Ireland. That failed in part due to successful British counter-intelligence, but nonetheless, the call-out of the volunteer militia in Ireland because of the invasion threat helped directly drive successful activism for a form of home rule (Grattan’s Parliament).____________________________________________________Erosion of & Threats to the Larger British Empire____________________________________________________The British strategic position in the Mediterranean was also battered badly by a successful Spanish-French amphibious assault on the British base on the west Mediterranean island Minorca about the same time as the 1781 Yorktown campaign in America, and involving a smaller but still large number of fighters on all sides.Soon after that, it became time for the climax in the Eastern Atlantic/West Mediterranean theaters: a final French and Spanish crushing attack to seize British-held Gibraltar!Gibraltar’s hoped-for capture, if successful, would mean the complete restoration of Bourbon control of the western Mediterranean and the end of the British presence on Spanish soil at the strategic western entry-chokepoint of the Mediterranean.A French fleet meanwhile intercepted and stopped a British attack force aimed at capturing Dutch South Africa, while French forces retook a key base in West Africa, reintroducing their presence in the region and restarting the rule there they would advance over the next centuries.————————————————————The Slow But Late Royal Navy’s Return: The Reassertion of British Global Power————————————————————But the winds of war started to shift………This thing called the British Royal Navy showed up more and more where it was supposed to, with its traditional ferocity and skill reasserting itself, and with faster more seaworthy ships. Factionalism in command-level decision-making, logistical problems in ship construction began to be fixed, while a new and useful ship-construction technology was being rapidly introduced in England.Boldly, the Royal Navy kept breaking through to Gibraltar keeping that strategic city’s small British garrison supplied as it held out heroically against a Spanish-French three year siege by land and sea. Finally, in September 1782, about a year after the Yorktown defeat across the waves, a massive combined land and sea attack on the town by the French and Spanish using specially-designed floating batteries not only failed to break the defense, but the Royal Navy-sustained British defenders destroyed each of the Spanish vaunted “hi-tech” (as we’d say today) attack vessels without the British defenders even sailing out from their land position on Gibraltar.So effective was the British defense there, centered on the use of “hot-shot” to set the attacking vessels on fire, that the trapped and heavily bombarded garrison on Gibraltar ended up sending out rescuers to save the burning and drowning attacking Spanish crewmembers!British Gibraltar held firm throughout the American war to its end in one of history’s most epic and successful siege resistances.Meanwhile, in April 1782, the very same French fleet that had won the day at Yorktown several months previously and was thereafter slated to join the Spanish in an attack on British-held Jamaica was intercepted by British Admiral George Rodney at a place called the Saintes in the West Indies near the island of Dominica.Rodney’s ships “broke the line [of battle]”, slicing through and across the procession of French vessels, inflicting a devastating & historic defeat on the French, perhaps one of the most important British naval victories of all time.They scattered the French fleet, capturing several ships including the French commander’s, thereby restoring Great Britain to supremacy in the strategically and economically vital Caribbean, if not, ultimately, the entire world.Suddenly the British Empire didn’t appear quite so much on the ropes any more.Britain’s naval strength had remained robust and formidable, and ultimately effectively supreme, though somewhat initially caught in literal or figurative drydock when the demand for the navy first soared when the American war went international.The Navy was the key to Britain’s strength, the sinews of its global muscle.The British Royal Navy had nearly as many usable line-of-battle warships as its three actively fighting European adversaries combined. (In fact, The War of American Independence may have contained the most fleet-to-fleet naval direct engagements in all of human history through to today. And certainly in Caribbean history).On board the ships were strong, experienced, and generally more meritocratically selected commanders and crews. (Swarms of authorized free-agent nautical “privateers” from Britain’s enormous merchant fleet —perhaps one-third of which were originally American built! — also supplemented the effort by seizing enemy trading and supply ships.)And new technology, ever more rapidly assimilated, played a key part.Increasingly, as the American war progressed, the British vessels were more and more incorporating a technique called copper-bottoming or copper-sheathing which enabled better and faster movement during longer periods at sea.An important primary result of the superior naval power was that the international trade of Great Britain, being protected by that Royal Navy, assured the existence of a superior economic base to pay directly for fighting sustained long wars, and for obtaining affordable financial credit towards that extended warfare.The failure of the nations and rebels arrayed against them to decisively destroy British trade, combined with that country’s relatively efficient and open tax collection and public budgeting system — fortified by a creditworthy debt-rollover practice using debt consolidation instruments called “consols” — meant that Great Britain could keep on waging war despite heavy setbacks.And the damage done by the Royal Navy and its supportive privateers to the trading of enemy belligerents, much less the angry neutrals, was enormous.A quick illustration:Over the year 1780, when still formally neutral, the Netherlands sent 2,050 commercial trading ships into the North Sea and the Baltic.In 1781, however, after Great Britain declared war on the Dutch, the total annual number of Dutch-Baltic trading ships was. . . . 11 !At one point also, it was noted that maybe only about 10–20% of French commercial ships returned home uncaptured.The widespread combined resistance to Great Britain thus began to take serious hits and run low on steam and fuel.It further unraveled as 1782 moved along.——————————————————————Britain’s Government Collapses While Division Hits The Enemy Allies——————————————————————In early 1782 as a response to fall of Yorktown near the end of the previous year, and also perhaps in response to the very early 1782 losses of Minorca and St. Kitts, control of the British Parliament changed parties.It fell to the dominance of a more pro-American party, the Whigs.Parliament voted to prohibit the further waging of offensive ground war in America against the rebels.This act of giving up was not a surrender, but more importantly, it did not mean Great Britain was in worse shape, when it came to its global enemies.Rather, the increasing compartmentalization of American continent objectives from the war with the European enemies, meant that Great Britain now had more — and increasingly better — resources to spare against its European enemies: the actively warring coalition of France, Spain and Holland. And the American rebels had less active need to continue the war.(The war in America itself didn’t fully end before a peace was signed in early 1783. Perimeter skirmishes around British-held cities in America continued, pro-British Native American conflicts with the rebels settlers continued, and the Royal Navy and British privateers continued to intercept ships trading with and supplying the Americans, as well as vice-versa. But major fighting was over.)Soon after Britain had thrown in the towel in America, to France’s chagrin and in violation of the spirit and likely the letter of the Franco-American alliance, the Americans began to separately negotiate behind the backs of their European ally with a much less unfriendly London (due, as noted above, to the relatively pro-American Whig faction’s takeover of Parliament after that body lost confidence in the ruling Tories’ abilities to wage war following Yorktown and other defeats).The interests of the allies were growing apart.France and Spain and Holland also began to pursue their own separate interests in negotiations as Catherine of Russia ramped up mediation services to the European belligerents. Mutually adverse horse-trading and peace proposals between and among same-side belligerents regarding strategic and wealth-producing possessions were floated behind the scenes, and would follow through into more formal negotiations.The anti-British coalition was unravelling.Britain’s still relatively strong global position was notable in the later stages of the war.Beginning in 1781, Holland was being rapidly and thoroughly emasculated as a European great power by the British Navy. Dutch possessions worldwide — in Sumatra, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Suriname, and key Caribbean islands — fell one after another to British assaults, as a helpless and blockaded Netherlands looked on. (And as noted earlier above, it required a French fleet, not a Dutch one, to intercept and stop a planned British conquest of Dutch South Africa while Dutch international trade fell over 99%.)In addition to the historic victory at the Saintes, the British navy also dueled a well-commanded French fleet to a tough but creditable draw in the Indian Ocean and around India itself. (Most historians agree that the French fleet under the very able commander Suffren were out-performing the British around India, but it remained more of a draw since no decisive victory on land or sea took place.)And the East India Company, with British government naval supply and assistance, came out about the same, a draw, with their local Indian enemies on land. (More wars with the same belligerents would happen over the next decades to decide who would rule where in India.)A proposal in late 1782 from within the Bourbon allies to revive the Franco-Spanish plan to take Jamaica in the Caribbean sputtered from lack of enthusiasm at the highest levels of an increasingly budget-pressed and trade-harassed France, which was also growing far more concerned about something else:Ominous developments were stirring in Eastern Europe, more disturbing than the American war.A new crisis was unfolding as Tsaritsa Catherine II decided to have Russia invade Crimea to pressure a Turkish-aligned government there experiencing a succession crisis.Alarmed, the French nervously pivoted eastward over 1782-83, deciding to finalize (without waiting for news from India or elsewhere) and close down the expensive and now frustrating American war, the aim of which — for the European enemies of Britain — had been to affordably cut Britain down to size: i.e., from superpower to merely one of several European great powers.But they had not really achieved that goal despite years of expensive hard-fought war and the defeat of Britain on the American continent.The mastermind of the whole global conflict, French Foreign Minister Charles Gravier de Vergennes, now thought his country might work best with the relatively friendly new British Whig PM Lord Shelburne in hopes of bringing him and Britain around to supporting Turkey against a greater fear than the French had of British power: the threat of a growing Russian expansion into Europe completely destroying a French-led balance of power on land.Vergennes envisioned a sort of Anglo-French entente to support the balance of power on the continent. The French viewed their traditional — but increasingly militarily impotent — ally, Turkey, as an important presence blocking Russian expansion into Europe and the Mediterranean. (A foreshadowing of the Crimean war of about 70 years later.)This attention was consistent with the French Royalist regime viewing itself as the rightful grand arbiter of continental Europe’s international order. And that overall vision of France as the proper arbiter of Europe’s order was the same driving vision of France’s status that had drawn them towards, and into, the anti-British American war in the first place.Contrary to what is often glibly stated, it was not just a desire for revenge for earlier losses in the Seven Years War that motivated France in the American War. It was more. It arose from a sense of national destiny, purpose, and self-image which held that a more just, honorable, and peaceful Europe, led properly by France, had been undermined and threatened by Britain’s arrogance and position after the Seven Years War (i.e., 1763 and forward).———————————————————————————Outcome: Britain Loses America But Remains Global Leader———————————————————————————At the end of the American war, with the Peace of Paris of 1783, the British had lost the 13 colonies (plus Florida and Minorca to Spain) but held on to or recovered most of their other key global bases and to their superior position on the seas and throughout most of the world.This occurred despite the near-uniform active and passive hostility in Europe and much of the world to London’s dominance during the previous years of war.The War of American Independence had expanded from a civil insurrection of rebellious colonies into a multi-Great-Power, multi-continent, and multi-ocean World War-to-Cut-Britain-Down-to-Size.But that war failed to achieve the larger international geopolitical aims of the Great Powers that intervened in it or cheered it on from a position of anti-British neutrality, even as the war very successfully secured the smaller more immediate one of rebel American independence.Only the Americans obtained a major unambiguous historic gain from the grand and world-wide investment and destruction of lives, bodies, and resources in the War of American Independence.Their rebellion, more by coincidence than design, was perfectly timed with an across-the-board European and global common desire to see Great Britain taken on . . . and taken down.France got hugely expanded debt on a very shaky Treasury and regime, though it did rebuild its Navy aggressively, which would be seen again in the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars. France also kept access to valuable fisheries off Canada which it had retained in the Seven Years War.Spain got Florida and Minorca but not its ideal prizes of Jamaica or Gibraltar.Holland, despite keeping overseas imperial possessions in the final agreement, got itself reduced by a decisive and brutally thorough British pummeling into a permanent second-rate, vulnerable, and temporarily internally unstable state inside Europe.Great Britain lost America’s 13 colonies (plus Florida) but broke even in Europe and the world (minus small Caribbean areas traded for others, and non-essential places like Minorca and one Senegalese port).But its beneficial economic and trading relationship with America did not fundamentally change in the long run, while a hoped-for (by France) better trade relationship between France and America did not takeoff afterwards.Rather soon after, as well, from both the American war and other later critical financial woes, France’s economy and finances drifted downwards towards a different revolution with destiny.Meanwhile, Great Britain still held most of North America’s raw land, with a strong continuing influence over Ohio valley Native Americans, while only conceding full defeat to another group of (now former) Englishmen.Because Great Britain had already been at the highest rank of European and world powers at the beginning of the war, “breaking even” simply means it remained a singular superpower after the American war, as it had been before, and despite the combined active and passive opposition of most other major European and more than one Indian subcontinent nation.This globally dominant a status was one that that nation would maintain — despite another extended close call in the next decades with a differently-governed France — through the next centuries.