Old World, New World: The Story of Britain and America
by Kathleen Burk
830pp, Little, Brown, £25
"The American," said Ralph Waldo Emerson, startlingly, in 1857, "is only the continuation of the Englishman into new conditions, more or less propitious." From the settlement of Jamestown 400 years ago till shortly before the war of independence, American colonists were not just descendants of Englishmen, they were to all intents and purposes "Englishmen" themselves, enjoying "all liberties and immunities of free and natural Subjects ... as if born within the Realm of England". However, the firing in Lexington of "the shot heard round the world", which began the war of independence in 1774, put paid to that harmony, such as it was. Since then, Anglo-American discords have repeatedly taken on a deadly resonance, down to the "friendly fire" of today.
The story is a complex, bitter, fascinating, often shaming one, as Kathleen Burk magnificently demonstrates in her mindbogglingly ambitious account of what Winston Churchill optimistically called the "special relationship" between Britain and America. Indeed, this colourful, fascinating saga involves such hostilities, betrayals, humiliations and resentments, and ambivalences so violent, that few readers will dispute her conclusion that it's a "love-hate" attachment.
An American expatriate settled in England, Burk has a double allegiance - and often a double detachment - that allows her to look with an impartial eye on the rights and wrongs of the dealings between these transatlantic partners. Her background as an impressively wide-ranging military, economic and political historian of the 19th and 20th centuries gives authority and interest to her reflections, pitched though they are to the general reader. She is cannily unsentimental about her two homelands, showing over and over again that, as the diplomat Lord Gladwyn put it, "the great producer of union is ... fear".
In Burk's view, whatever issues of principle may be at stake, nations nearly always act in what they see as most favouring their own interests. A survey that stretches from the "discovery" of America to the joint venture in Iraq may appear dauntingly hefty, but it's immensely thought-provoking, both in the joining-up of so much history into a coherent narrative and in the quietly judicious commentary that throws open new perspectives.
Like "United Kingdom", the title "United States of America" protests too much, embodying a certain amount of wishful thinking. Burk salutarily reminds us that even before waves of German, Irish, Italian, Polish, Russian, Asian and other immigrants diluted the mix, the first English settlers of the New World were far from unified in their origins or unanimous in their aims and beliefs. The first successful English colony, at Jamestown, Virginia, was primarily mercantile. The second, the Pilgrim Fathers' at Plymouth, represented a zealous mission to "advance ye gospell of ye kingdom of Christ", while the third, founded in Boston in 1630 by the wealthier and better-connected Massachusetts Bay colonists, had a different character. The spectrum included Pennsylvania, founded by the Quaker William Penn as an experiment in religious freedom and commercial efficiency; New York, taken from the Dutch settlers by conquest; and Maryland, granted to the Catholic convert Lord Baltimore and set up on feudal lines.
Burk is especially good on differentiating ideologies, factions and interest groups. She stimulatingly charts the regional origins, classes, beliefs, even racial backgrounds of the various colonists through to the American civil war and beyond. Internal divisions of many kinds persist today, even at the highest levels (for instance between White House, State Department and Pentagon); indeed, their consequences have been bloodily visible in the conduct of the excursion to Iraq. She quotes Sir Nicholas Henderson, Britain's ambassador to the US from 1979-82, observing that "the nature of the American government makes it very difficult to have one clear-cut and comprehensive fount of policy" - though, as Henry Kissinger pointed out, this has permitted Britain to box, diplomatically speaking, above her weight. Britain's "way of retaining great-power status," he remarked, "was to be so integral a part of American decision-making that the idea of not consulting them seemed a violation of the natural order of things".
The lucid, enjoyably propulsive narrative of Old World, New World is studded with arresting incidents and images that bring home the richness - and darkness - of the Anglo-American past. There's James Callaghan finalising an agreement on Trident with Jimmy Carter, who was wearing only his underwear (it was nap-time); or, further back, the tough cookie Mrs Hannah Dustin being snatched by an Abenaki raiding party in Haverhill, Massachusetts in 1697, but managing one night to hatchet and (profitably) scalp her 12 sleeping captors.
It's good, too, to be reminded of strange incidents like the abortive American attempt to invade Canada in the so-called "forgotten war" of 1812 against Britain. They took York (now Toronto) for a week in 1813 and burned government buildings; but in reply the British took Washington DC in 1814 - President James Madison had discreetly scarpered - and burned down the White House. We see the ups and downs of the relationship, from the bitterly controversial visits of Dickens and Fanny Trollope to prickly mid-19th-century America, to the spate of marriages between English aristocrats and US heiresses as America grew rich and strong in the years leading up to the first world war.
It's in the past century or so, though, that the story really intensifies, and the great reversal in the balance of power becomes so striking. Burk's knowledge of recent economic history gives special power to her account of the post-1945 settlements, in which the flourishing US cut less slack to its exhausted ally than expected (US undersecretary of state Dean Acheson saw the snub to Britain of America's Atomic Energy Act as a criminally broken promise, while Eisenhower called it "one of the most deplorable episodes in American history, of which he personally felt ashamed"). Only the cold war, and fear of Russia, forced the US into more conciliatory postures - though they forced the ignominious climbdown over Suez that signalled the end of Britain's great-power standing. Relations remained bad during Vietnam, when Harold Wilson refused to send even a token force, and the tetchy US secretary of state Dean Rusk told a British journalist: "Well, don't expect us to save you again. They can invade Sussex, and we wouldn't do a damned thing about it."
In the context of such animus, and after the US-enforced IMF humiliation of 1976, Margaret Thatcher's friendship with Ronald Reagan and the American assistance that allowed Britain its moment of glory in the Falklands - called by Reagan "that little bunch of ice-cold land down there" - at least revived the appearance of parity. Subsequent wars, which put a premium on allies, have re-cemented Anglo-American bonds. Tony Blair's American apotheosis after September 11 2001, though - addressing Congress with Bush, being hailed as "our truest friend" to thunderous applause - has led Britain down a dubious road. As Burk puts it: "There can be a drawback to being best international friend, and this is a strong risk of being taken for granted."
· Philip Horne is a professor of English at University College London. He is the editor of Henry James: A Life in Letters (Penguin). To order Old World, New World for £23 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875.