The United States and the British Empire: From Revolution to Special Relationship

The United States was both the product and the principal destroyer of the British Empire. The 1776 revolution stripped Britain of its first American empire; the 20th-century rise of the United States stripped it of the second. The arc between the two is the longest in the history of modern Anglo-American relations, and it remains, in the words of Wm. Roger Louis and Ronald Robinson, “the most important bilateral relationship in modern history.”

The American Revolution and the First Empire

The American Revolution of 1775–1783 was the first major territorial loss in the history of the British Empire, and it remains, in the British historical imagination, the founding trauma. The Thirteen Colonies had been the most economically valuable part of the first British Empire and the principal destination of British emigration. The loss of the American colonies forced a wholesale reorientation of British imperial strategy toward Asia, and it produced an enduring American self-conception as an anti-imperial republic. That self-conception, more than any strategic calculation, was the background to Washington’s later hostility to European colonial retention.

The 19th-Century Rivalry

The 19th century was an age of commercial and territorial friction. The War of 1812 ended in stalemate; the Oregon boundary was settled by compromise in 1846; the Alabama Claims, the damage done to American shipping by British-built Confederate raiders, were settled by arbitration in 1872 in Washington’s favour. The Spanish-American War of 1898 was the moment the United States joined the ranks of imperial powers, with the acquisition of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines — and, with it, a direct stake in the politics of European empire. Theodore Roosevelt’s 1904 Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine asserted American policing of the Western hemisphere, and the Venezuela crisis of 1902–03 had already shown how little patience Washington had for European gunboat diplomacy in its neighbourhood.

The World Wars and the Special Relationship

The two world wars produced the special relationship in its modern form. The British Empire in the First World War was sustained by colonial contingents, but the financial settlement left Britain a debtor to the United States. The 1941 Atlantic Conference produced the Atlantic Charter, and the wartime partnership was institutionalised in the Combined Chiefs of Staff, the Lend-Lease programme, and the Anglo-American intelligence cooperation that began with the 1943 BRUSA Agreement. By 1945, the United States was unambiguously the senior partner. The 1946 transfer of the Anglo-American nuclear relationship, the 1947 Truman Doctrine, and the 1949 NATO alliance confirmed the new geometry.

Suez: The Moment of Truth

The Suez Crisis of 1956 was the most dramatic moment of Anglo-American divergence. was the most dramatic moment of Anglo-American divergence. Eden, with French support, planned and executed the military intervention against Nasser over the objections of the State Department. Eisenhower and Dulles, preoccupied with the 1956 Hungarian revolt and the need to maintain Arab oil supplies and Cold War allies, refused to support the operation. The pound came under speculative attack, Britain ran out of dollar reserves within days, and the United States, far from supporting its closest ally, voted against Britain at the UN and threatened to crash the pound. Anthony Eden resigned in January 1957. For the British political class, Suez was the moment when the pretence of great-power independence was definitively laid down.

The United States and British Decolonisation

Washington’s pressure for decolonisation was applied, with varying intensity, throughout the post-war period. The 1947 Indian independence was welcomed as a stabilising move; the 1948 creation of Israel was followed by the 1956 Suez humiliation and the 1960 UN Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, which the United States supported. The 1962 Skybolt crisis — in which the Kennedy administration cancelled the missile system on which the British nuclear deterrent depended — produced the Nassau Agreement of December 1962, by which Britain received Polaris missiles in exchange for surrendering its independent nuclear capability below sea-launched systems. The 1982 Falklands War, supported materially and diplomatically by the Reagan administration, showed that the special relationship still had real meaning; the 2003 invasion of Iraq, into which the Blair government entered on American terms, showed that it had its limits.

Historiographical Note

The Anglo-American relationship is a graveyard of grand theory. The “special relationship” school, in the tradition of Winston Churchill and Harry Hopkins, treats the bond as a civilisational affinity that transcends strategic calculation. The “imperial continuity” school, in the tradition of Bernard Semmel and, more recently, the historians of “informal empire,” reads the United States as a successor imperial system, in which the dollar and the UN charter do the work that the gunboat and the treaty port once did. Wm. Roger Louis and Ronald Robinson, in their work on the “imperialism of free trade,” sought a middle position that took both views seriously. The most useful recent scholarship — including Frank Furedi’s The Silent War (2014) and the essays collected in The Neoliberal Empire — has stressed the extent to which the Anglo-American relationship was a project of management, sustained by shared assumptions about race, capital, and the legitimate exercise of force.

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