Book review: Friends and foes... troubled relationship of two empires

It's complicated. Britain's relations with the United States in the Age of Empires was ambiguous, shifting, contradictory. America was, for most of the 20th Century, and much of the 19th, both Britain's closest ally and at the same time her greatest rival.

According to Kathleen Burk, Professor Emerita of Modern and Contemporary History, University College, London, even after the 1942 Atlantic Charter united Britain and America in war against the Nazis, Franklin D. Roosevelt was highly suspicious of British war aims. He suspected that Winston Churchill was more interested in protecting the British Empire than in defeating Germany.

Of course, the United States was born in struggle against the British Empire, so you might expect the relationship to be troubled. However, hardly had post-revolutionary America become independent in the late 18th Century, than it found itself allying, not with post-revolutionary France, but with the old country, Britain, during the Napoleonic Wars. This had as much to do with enduring financial entanglements between the US and UK as it did language and common history.

That alliance was short lived. Britain and America went to war again in 1812, largely over US expansionism in the North of America. Under the emerging doctrine of “Manifest Destiny”, the United States saw itself as morally entitled to colonise the entire North American continent. Britain believed the US had designs on Canada, with its rich fur trade. This was almost certainly the case, as Burk makes clear.

Which brings us to one of the more surprising aspects of British Imperial history: its defence of the indigenous peoples of North America. Many Native Americans fought with the British in the War of Independence, and this alliance endured for nearly half a century. In the early 19th Century, the British provided weapons and support to the First Nationals fighting against US expansion in areas like Ohio, Indiana, Michigan and Illinois. The US called them “savages” and launched what was effectively a war of annihilation.

The British then offered the embattled tribes an autonomous Confederacy of Indigenous Nations – effectively a United States of Native America – in the old North West. It was in pursuit of this dream that the great Shawnee warrior chief Tecumseh united the disparate tribes to fight for Britain in 1812. His death after the Battle of Thames in 1813 led ultimately to the collapse of the First Nation alliance. The old Northwest was gradually ceded to the USA as Britain lost interest. Had he succeeded, though, the history of the native peoples of America, who were effectively wiped out in the 19th Century, might have been very different.

Of course, this alliance between Britain and Native Americans wasn't entirely altruistic. The British clearly hoped that an independent Native Indian state would be a buffer between the expansionist USA and British-controlled Canada. It also underlined the difference between early American imperialism and British imperial practice. As in India, the Brits tended to govern, not through genocide, but through co-opting local ethnic leaders. This was how the British Empire ruled a quarter of the planet in the 19th Century, while spending little more on defence, 2.5% of GDP, than Britain spends today.

The British Empire rarely relied on boots on the ground. What it did rely on was ships on the sea, and this provided another area of conflict between the British Empire and the emerging imperial United States. As America became a leading industrial power in the early 20th Century - growing much as China is today – it resented Britain's dominance of global navigation and the policy of “imperial preference”, which gave countries in the British Empire reduced or non-existent trade tariffs. America saw this as protectionist – much as some Brexiteers regard the European Union as a protectionist bloc.

America finally supplanted Britain as the global imperial power shortly after the Second World War. Indeed, the way Burk tells it, the wartime policies of the Atlantic Charter and Lend Lease were largely designed to dismantle the British Empire. Roosevelt demanded “freedom of the seas”, self-determination for colonised countries and an end to the Sterling Zone as preconditions for financing Britain's war effort.

However, according to Burk, almost as soon as Britain's Empire collapsed, the United States started regretting its absence. This was because, by the late 1940s, America had entered a deadly race for global supremacy with its former ally: the Soviet Union. The US opposed Britain's attempt to use military force against Egypt's Abdul Nasser, after he nationalised the Suez Canal in 1956. But the US was furious at Britain's subsequent withdrawal from its military bases East of Suez. It was even more furious when Harold Wilson refused to support America during the Vietnam War in the 60s. Unlike Tony Blair over Iraq, the Labour Prime Minister declined requests to send even a token presence to America's disastrous conflict in South East Asia.

This is a fascinating, scholarly account of a troubled relationship between two empires divided, as George Bernard Shaw put it, by a common language. It is also a critique of United States' global hypocrisy. Burk has no qualms about describing America today as an imperial power, albeit a non-colonial one. At the close of the 20th Century the US had 750 military installations in 130 countries. However, post Iraq, she is clearly in doubt about whether this empire can long endure into the 21st.