Great Britain, Relations with

GREAT BRITAIN, RELATIONS WITH

GREAT BRITAIN, RELATIONS WITH. The United Kingdom and the United States have shared a faith in commercial and geographic expansion and in rights guaranteed by written laws, commonalities of religion and language, and a belief that each was a chosen people destined to rule whole continents. Commercial competition and conflicting aspirations for the Western Hemisphere made the two frequent rivals throughout the nineteenth century. It took opposition to common adversaries through two world wars and the Cold War to develop the special relationship with which they entered the twenty-first century.

In 1776, 90 percent of white colonists traced their roots to Protestant immigrants from Britain. After the French and Indian War (1754–1763), however, London damaged these bonds by limiting westward expansion and through heavy taxation. Armed with predictions that their population would double in every generation, revolutionaries such as Benjamin Franklin preached that demography held the key to independence and to eventual continental dominance.

More than 30 percent of Americans remained loyal to the British Crown throughout the Revolution (1775–1783), and rebel leaders justified their revolt as a defense of rights guaranteed to free Britons. Theirs was not a fratricidal attempt to sever ties with the British people, Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, it was instead a war waged solely against Britain's tyrannical King George III. This intermingling of loyalties and war aims has led many historians to consider the conflict more a transatlantic British civil war than a traditional revolution.

America's 1778 accord with France, Britain's traditional enemy, marked the diplomatic turning point of the war. French money and naval power enabled George Washington's continental armies to win a decisive victory at Yorktown in 1781. London soon sued for peace, and American diplomats agreed to terms on 30 November 1782, breaking their promise to France that they would not sign a separate accord. Franklin and his fellow diplomats believed their country needed British trade to prosper and an accessible frontier to grow, and the 1783 Peace of Paris promised both. It gave Americans access to valuable Newfoundland fishing grounds and a western boundary of the Mississippi River in exchange for guarantees protecting loyalists and British debts. With peace in hand, a bitter Parliament moved immediately to contain future Yankee expansion, by refusing to relinquish forts on the American side of the Canadian border, and by closing the lucrative West Indies to American traders.

Peace only reinforced the new country's position as Britain's economic vassal, as Americans purchased three times what they sold to Britain in 1783 alone. A postwar depression brought on in part by Parliament's punitive measures invigorated investment in domestic manufacturing and spurred the search for alternative markets, however, while also aiding proponents of a federal government powerful enough to regulate foreign trade. By 1795, the percentage of American imports originating in Britain had declined from nearly 90 percent to a more manageable 35 percent (where it remained until the 1850s), accounting for nearly 20 percent of Britain's overall trade. Across the Atlantic, the embarrassing defeat in North America prompted Parliament to implement naval and financial reforms, and helped reorient London's imperial aspirations toward India and Asia, changes that enabled Britain's eventual triumph over Napoleonic France. The defeat at Yorktown, therefore, paradoxically sewed the seeds of victory at Waterloo, just as British economic efforts to weaken and divide its former colonies after 1783 helped spawn the more cohesive federal constitution.

Relations with the New Nation

Dependence on Atlantic trade soon brought Europe's troubles to America. The 1789 French Revolution sparked a series of bloody wars that ravaged Europe for a generation. Many Americans initially saw opportunity in the Old World's woes, but dreams of political isolation vanished as French and British raiders preyed on American vessels. Britain seized 250 American ships in 1793 alone, risking war and disrupting the tariff fees considered vital to Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton's national financial program. President George Washington dispatched Chief Justice John Jay to London in search of a peaceful solution, but Britain refused to cease badgering American ships or to halt the hated impressment of American crews into the Royal Navy. Jay did win trade concessions in India and procured another British pledge to relinquish its Canadian strongholds. His work was harshly criticized at home for his failure to secure neutral shipping rights, but Jay's Treaty solidified American claims to the Ohio Valley and opened commercial routes so lucrative that American vessels carried 70 percent of India's trade by 1801.

The Napoleonic Wars drew America deeper into the European conflict, and French and American ships waged an undeclared war by 1799. British warships temporarily convoyed Yankee vessels filled with grain for British soldiers fighting in Spain, but this Anglo-American rapprochement was short-lived. Britain embargoed European ports controlled by Napoleon in 1807, in counter to France's 1806 embargo on British trade. Trapped between two European juggernauts, the United States could do little to protect its vessels against a British fleet that possessed three ships for every American cannon. President Thomas Jefferson responded with an embargo of his own on European trade in 1807, but when sanctions failed and British naval impressment continued to rise, a sharply divided Congress declared war in 1812.

The War of 1812 solved little, but, although British marines burned Washington, D.C., the United States proved its permanence. Britain could not conquer it, nor would Americans forsake their claims to Maine and the Northwest. Freed from the fear of European invasion after hostilities ended with the 1814 Treaty of Ghent, the United States could finally turn its attention fully toward development and expansion. By 1820, more people lived in states formed after 1789 than had lived in the entire country in 1776. The focus of Anglo-American relations moved west as well. Settlers from both countries poured into new territories as distant as Oregon, aided by boundary settlements such as the 1817 Rush-Bagot Pact, which demilitarized the Great Lakes and the United States–Canadian border in the East, and the Anglo-American Convention of 1818 that established the forty-ninth parallel as the border to the Rocky Mountains in the West. These were mutually advantageous pacts: stability allowed Britain to save money and troops for more daunting imperial trouble spots, while Americans believed their demographic advantages ensured eventual dominance over any accessible land.

British officials hoped to counter Washington's territorial gains with growing commercial power throughout the Western Hemisphere. In 1823, Britain's foreign minister, George Canning, offered President James Monroe a joint declaration forbidding further European colonization in the New World in exchange for a promise that neither country would annex more Latin American territory. Monroe refused. He longed for Texas and Cuba, and realized that London would prevent further French, Spanish, or Russian expansion into potential British markets no matter what America promised. Monroe therefore unilaterally declared the New World off limits, a policy later called the Monroe Doctrine.

Anglo-American expansion into Oregon Territory, a landmass larger than France, Germany, and Hungary combined, brought the two countries close to war in the 1840s. London could not stem the tide of American settlers, and American hawks urged President James Polk to claim the entire region, Canadian areas included, but he blinked first when London mobilized its fleet for war. The ensuing 1846 Oregon Treaty peacefully extended the Canadian-American border along the forty-ninth parallel to the Pacific, providing the United States with the Columbia River and Puget Sound, while Britain retained Vancouver Island. Growing British and American interests in Latin America prompted the 1850 Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, whereby each nation promised equal access to any future isthmian canal. When coupled with the Monroe Doctrine, this accord highlights each nation's willingness to work together rather than see a third power gain influence in the New World.

The American Civil War and the Path to Partnership

America's bloody Civil War (1861–1865) nearly extinguished the trend toward Anglo-American cooperation. Britain had banned slavery in 1833, and pervasive abolitionism made Britons overwhelmingly supportive of the Union cause. Yet Confederate statesmen presumed Britain's ravenous appetite for cotton (more than 80 percent of which came from the South) would bring London to their aid. They were terribly mistaken. London's recognition of the Confederacy as a warring belligerent infuriated the North, however, and British officials vigorously protested the Union's seizure of two Southern diplomats from the British ship Trent in 1862. President Abraham Lincoln's release of the men defused the crisis, though not before Britain had dispatched troops to protect Canada.

Following the war, friendly diplomacy ruled Anglo-American relations for thirty years. Diplomatic lethargy did nothing to halt growing Anglo-American ties, including the fashionable trend of intermarriages between America's nouveau riche and the upper crust of British society that produced the prime ministers Winston Churchill and Harold Macmillan, among others. Anglo-American culture fused during this period as at no time since the Revolution. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson were read as frequently as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and John Greenleaf Whittier in both countries, and actors from London and New York plied their trade equally in each. It was not until 1896 that a crisis threatened these amiable relations, when Washington flexed its growing might in Latin America by demanding arbitration for a boundary dispute between British Guinea and Venezuela. London eventually conceded to Washington's demands, a symbolic concession that America had become the hemisphere's dominant power.

The Venezuela crisis marked the last instance Britain and America threatened each other with war. In all, arbitration diffused 126 Anglo-American disputes before 1900, and the twentieth century began with talk of "Anglo-Saxonism" and of shared Anglo-American strategic interests. In 1898, Secretary of State John Hay termed friendly Anglo-American relations the "one indispensable feature of our foreign policy." British leaders wholly agreed with Hay's assessment, ceding control of the Western Hemisphere to the United States in the 1900s (after gaining access to America's future isthmian canal through the 1901 Hay-Pauncefote Treaties) by removing their last troops from Canada and the West Indies in 1906. Britain's support of Hay's 1899 call for an "open door" in China for foreign investment symbolized London's growing willingness to follow Washington's international lead, and British and American troops fought side-by-side to suppress China's 1901 Boxer Rebellion.

Allies of a Kind

Europe plunged once more into war in 1914, and President Woodrow Wilson declared his country neutral, "in thought as well as in action." Most Americans, however, sided with the Allied cause. Germany threatened American interests in Latin America and the Pacific, and whereas the Allied blockade of the Central Powers (mildly) hindered American trade, Germany's submarine (U-boat) assaults on transatlantic shipping risked American lives and livelihoods. When Berlin began unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917, the United States entered the conflict.

Anglo-American financial ties made American intervention inevitable. Britain engaged $3.5 billion in American loans to finance the war, and American exports to the Allies doubled in every year of the conflict, reaching $4 billion by 1917. The Central Powers received less than one-tenth that amount. These fruits of America's industrial might, and the service of more than one million American infantrymen in France (where some 50,000 lost their lives) helped secure the Allied victory, while the conflict transformed the United States from a net debtor to a net creditor. America's share of world trade rose from 12.5 percent in 1914 to 25 percent in 1920, while Britain's share tumbled from 15.4 percent to 11.8 percent. This financial reversal highlights the war's most significant affect on Anglo-American relations, as the United States finally became unquestionably the stronger power.

Victory revealed Anglo-American divisions and the limits of American power. Wilson rejected the imperialist war aims of Britain and France, and called America their wartime "associate" rather than their ally. He considered the devastating war an opportunity to reform Europe's devious diplomatic style in favor of a more democratic international system, though he was not above using America's newfound financial might to get his way. Armed with Fourteen Points with which to remake the world, Wilson's idealism ran headlong into European pragmatists, chief among them Britain's prime minister, Lloyd George. His constituents demanded spoils for their victory, George said. They had suffered three million dead and wounded, while in America "not a shack" had been destroyed. He rejected Wilson's demands for a lenient German peace settlement and for decolonization, leaving the British Empire intact and the president without a treaty acceptable to his Senate.

Despite isolationist claims to the contrary, Americans in the 1920s engaged the world as never before. New York replaced London as the world's financial center and the globe's leading investor, and the number of American visitors to Europe leaped from 15,000 in 1912 to 251,000 in 1929. These newcomers were not always welcomed, especially after Washington refused to cancel London's war debt. British critics considered their spilled blood to be payment enough, and they railed against the commercial "invasion" from across the Atlantic. They complained that 95 percent of movies shown on British screens in 1925 came from Hollywood, and rebuffed visiting Yankee executives preaching "efficiency" and "standardization" as replacements for traditional production techniques. "Americanization" itself became a profane word in many British circles, though America's commercial and cultural influence seemed omnipresent.

These economic tensions did not preclude Anglo-American cooperation, and the two nations led the charge for naval disarmament throughout the 1920s. Yet, ham-strung by the Great Depression and by America's failure to join the League of Nations, the two countries refused to coordinate in punishing Japan's invasion of Manchuria in 1931, or to enforce German compliance with postwar treaties. By the mid-1930s, London and Washington had each erected restrictive trade barriers in self-defeating efforts to combat the global economic contagion. Convinced that trade had pulled their country into Europe's past wars, Congress passed a series of Neutrality Acts limiting future American financial ties to warring nations. Americans could therefore only watch as Europe moved once more toward war.

The Special Relationship

Unlike Wilson a generation before, President Franklin Roosevelt rejected strict neutrality when war broke out in 1939. He considered Britain to be America's best defense against Germany, and he circumvented the Neutrality Acts by authorizing "cash and carry" sales, whereby London paid up front for goods and transported them on British ships. Roosevelt went even further a year later, directing the transfer of fifty aging destroyers to the Royal Navy in exchange for British bases. Such aid proved insufficient. "The moment approaches when we shall no longer be able to pay," Prime Minister Winston Churchill secretly cabled Roosevelt in 1940, who responded with the lend-lease program, which ultimately provided nearly $21 billion in wartime aid.

The two countries were de facto allies long before the United States entered the war. They had coordinated military policy since 1938, especially for protection against a new generation of U-boats, and they shared war aims published as the Atlantic Charter four months before the Pearl Harbor attack. They promised victory would bring worldwide self-determination, freedom of the seas, freedom from want and fear, and unfettered access to global resources, each of these attacks against fascism but also against colonialism. A sworn imperialist, Churchill's need for American aid forced him to accept Washington's leadership in defining these goals, and this pattern of American dominance continued throughout the war. An American, Dwight D. Eisenhower, commanded Allied troops in Europe, while Washington controlled the war in the Pacific and the eventual occupation of Japan. Britain left the war in financial ruin; America left the war as the world's most powerful state.

American diplomats again hoped to remake the world in their image. They began with Britain, and demanded that London open its empire to American goods as the price of postwar aid. Just as in 1918, Washington proved uninterested in absolving British war debts as payment for wartime sacrifices, and Britain reluctantly negotiated a further $3.5 billion in much-needed American reconstruction aid in 1945. Three years later, their funds exhausted, British diplomats led the way in seeking Marshall Plan aid for Europe as a whole. In atomic weapons, too, Britain gave way, this time to an American monopoly, despite their collaborative wartime effort to split the atom, and despite American assurances that atomic energy would be a collaborative affair at war's end.

The Cold War gave London and Washington little recourse but to work together against global communism, and indeed the story of their Cold War relationship is one of long-term mutual dependence trumping short-term disagreements. They jointly broke the Soviet Union's blockade of Berlin in 1948–1949; they led the United Nations effort in the Korean War (1950–1953); and they

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helped charter the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), designed to thwart Soviet advances in Europe. Although publicly allied at nearly every turn, America's dominance and seemingly excessive anticommunism rankled British policymakers. Successive Whitehall governments strove to decrease their economic dependence on Washington by developing their own atomic bomb in the 1950s; by diminishing their reliance on American aid; by refusing to support American anticommunist trade restrictions, particularly Washington's complete embargo of communist China; and by pursuing a European solution to the troubled Middle East. This last effort ended in failure, after Gamal Nasser's 1956 nationalization of the Suez Canal imperiled Europe's access to Middle Eastern oil. London moved to retake the canal by force, but it never coordinated these moves with Washington, where furious policymakers criticized Britain's old-fashioned imperialism, which mocked America's anticolonial rhetoric. President Eisenhower's brief refusal to support the faltering pound ended Britain's involvement in the debacle, proving once more London's dependence on the United States.

America's Cold War plans equally relied on British political and strategic support. Britain's economy ranked third largest in the world (behind the United States and the USSR), and only Washington contributed more to the free world's defense. President John F. Kennedy consulted with Prime Minister Harold Macmillan every night of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, for example, and successive British leaders took seriously their responsibility to temper American power with London's long global experience. In truth, each power needed the other. Their mutual interests in expanding democracy and trade overshadowed their divergent anticommunist approaches, even when British support for the Vietnam War never matched American expectations.

Britons gained a measure of cultural revenge for Hollywood and Coca-Cola in the early 1960s, when an unceasing stream of rock-and-roll bands (the British invasion) flooded American airwaves, beginning with the Beatles in 1964. The pound was never as strong as this musical influence, however, and American policymakers repeatedly propped up the faltering currency throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The two nations extended the breadth of their diplomatic relationship when London supported President Jimmy Carter's innovative emphasis on human rights diplomacy in the late 1970s. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan, two like-minded conservatives, reinvigorated the special relationship in the 1980s: Reagan supported Thatcher's decision to defend the Falkland Islands from Argentina in 1982, and the prime minister's 1984 advice to trust the Soviet Union's Mikhail Gorbachev helped move the United States toward a new détente. The end of the Cold War did little to change this perception. British and American forces led the Allied effort in the 1991 Gulf War, and jointly struck Iraq's military throughout the ensuing decade. Indeed, the two countries moved seemingly in unison from the conservatism of Reagan-Thatcher to the new liberalism of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, arguably the closest pair of Anglo-American leaders ever, their personal alliance symbolic of two nations whose financial and cultural development was, in the end, separated only by distance rather than ideology. Indeed, as final proof of Anglo-American intimacy, when terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center towers in September 2001, Britain lost more citizens than any other foreign nation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Allen, H. C. Great Britain and the United States: A History of Anglo-American Relations, 1783–1952. New York: St. Martin's, 1955.

Collier, Basil. The Lion and the Eagle: British and Anglo-American Strategy, 1900–1950. New York: Putnam, 1972.

Dobson, Alan P. The Politics of the Anglo-American Economic Special Relationship, 1940–1987. New York: St. Martin's, 1988.

Dunning, William A. The British Empire and the United States: A Review of Their Relations during the Century of Peace following the Treaty of Ghent. New York: Scribners, 1914.

Kunz, Diane B. The Economic Crisis of the Suez Crisis. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.

Ovendale, Ritchie. Anglo-American Relations in the Twentieth Century. New York: St. Martin's, 1998.

Jeffrey A. Engel

See also British Debts ; Colonial Policy, British ; Ghent, Treaty of ; Neutrality ; Revolution, American ; World War I War Debts ; and vol. 9: Address to President Lincoln by the Working-Men of Manchester, England ; Madison's War Message .