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Not exactly. Remember, they were doing a lot of the lifting in terms of frontier security and the like on their own. And when you had officers come over from Britain, they were often completely clueless about life on this side of the Atlantic, which made attempts at defense go very poorly...

First thing, I generally agree with your point about how badly the British screwed the pooch on this but a couple clarifications: When I said “informal” colonial legislatures, what I meant was that they had no real legal standing in terms of what they could force the British government to do...

Well, Morocco wasn’t selling slaves to the U.S.; though there were some problems the U.S. had with Maghrebi pirates, the Moroccans acted as a protecting power to the U.S.

It wasn’t just “hey we need the colonists to pay for this” but also a case of the British actively getting involved in governance after largely leaving the colonies to their own devices for something like 120 years or more. While they had the legal authority to do that, they didn’t take into...