When The US Didn't Matter...
1776-1917 book excerpt part 2
Hello all! I’ve been in Northern Michigan much of this past week, sailing, over-eating and de-weeding patios. When I’ve been able to work I’ve been working on the book I’ve been writing. So I owe you guys the next excerpt. Last week I provided the introduction to American Empire: The First 100 Years.
Today, I’m publishing the first excerpt from the first chapter of the book. It explains why I’m dispensing with the first 141 years of US history with a single (long) chapter, and lays out why & how US independence didn’t end up fully establishing independence from the British. Let me know what you think!
Chapter 1: A Continental Preliminary (1776-1917)
In 1763 the British made a mistake. In that year they won a world war so conclusively that they found themselves on the way to running the planet. The only historical victory that is comparable is the position of the United States after World War II in the mid-20th century. The British mistake was that they didn’t just demolish their enemies in the Seven Year’s war (1756-1763), they screwed over all of their friends too. Continental European allies like the Dutch, the Prussians & sundry other German states, most of whom had lost vastly more soldiers, got nothing, while Britain sucked up territories in the Americas, India, Africa, and various points in between.
The British were doing so well in 1763, that even they wanted to impose limits on the growth of their empire. With the not very inventively named Proclamation of 1763, London forbade their American colonists from settling West of the Appalachian mountains, hoping to avert costly conflict with the native Americans. The British colonists felt betrayed. They had assumed that the war they had just helped win gave them free reign over the whole continent, no matter who already lived there.
The British were in such a good position after 1763, that all of Europe and the Americas, traditional friends and enemies alike, had to team up to impose any kind of setback. And with the War of American Independence, between 1776 and 1782, that’s exactly what three continents did.
The traditionally British aligned Prussians sat it out, and even the Dutch, Protestant near co-religionists to the British, came in on the American side. For one of the only times in their centuries long cross-channel rivalry, the French were able to focus resources on their Navy instead of fighting off British allies on the European continent. It didn’t go well for England. The British went into triage mode and prioritized saving their much more lucrative territories in the Mediterranean and Caribbean. And that’s how the United States became an independent country.
As is often the case with world hegemony (this is definitely foreshadowing), the British had so much momentum that the setback of American independence worked out really well for them (for the first 141 years or so). The British were no longer responsible for defending the far-flung borders of the 13 North American colonies. US independence was a calamity for the Native Americans, who were now subjected to the reckless land lust of the former colonists, but it was perfect for the British. They lost the cost of defending a domain that went on to massively expand... creating more demand for British manufactures.
What was even better is that the British could now use stopping the slave trade as a justification for expanding their control of the world’s sea lanes. The British government could do this while British elites continued to benefit from slavery! The Americans took the moral burden, while London continued to take a significant slice of the profits of slavery’s expansion across North America. British banks financed the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, as well as the development of that vast new US territory, which would eventually be broken up into 15 US states. Some of the worst people in US history, the owners of the Southern slave camps, were fully funded by British bankers. “Their debts to London middle-men, [were] …inherited for generations…”[1]
Britain Owned The 1800s
In a stunning ten-year period, from 1853-1863, the British outright conquered both India and China, while humiliating the Russians in a war on Russian-owned territory. There were other empires during the 19th century, but they were not competitors to the British, no matter how badly the British policy makers of the time (and snooty British historians down to this day) worked to convince people of it. The French, the Russians, and later the Japanese, the Germans and the Americans are better characterized as mini-empires or “wannabe” empires compared to the British one. The other 19th century empires may have been impressive examples of imperial prowess in earlier centuries, but they were living in a world with a very different kind of beast, a true world hegemon.
During this same 1850-1860 period, the British also managed, as an afterthought, to squash a US attempt to conquer Nicaragua, making a mockery of The Monroe Doctrine. US policymakers like to tell ourselves that we have controlled the Americas since the beginning of the 19th century, but it’s only in the early 20th that we took over from the British. Some historians argue that the US sphere of influence didn’t really make it out of the Caribbean and down to South America until the 1940s.[2]
The Monroe Doctrine itself, laid out by President Monroe in December 1823, wasn’t even the US’s idea. By 1823, most of the Americas had won their independence from Spain. Britain had proposed that the US and Britain issue a joint declaration forbidding other European powers from getting involved in the hemisphere. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams decided we should boldly make that declaration on our own, despite not actually having the power to do so.[3] Britain was amused, and content to let us make our speeches, and only occasionally rubbed our nose in how little they meant. The Monroe Doctrine and its more violent corollaries are a very harsh reality today, but its functional existence is only a century old, not two.
The US Civil War (1861-1865) did provide a bit of a wake-up call to the British Empire. The horrific scale, and nearly industrial nature of the bloodletting made it clear that we were not the pushovers we once were. There would be no repeat of the humiliating capture of Washington, DC and the burning of the White House the British pulled off during the War of 1812. In the 1860s, Britain seriously considered siding with the Southern side of the US Civil War, until the emerging details of the conflict dissuaded them. The British like to imagine it was the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation that convinced them of the moral case for the North. I suspect it had more to do with the scale of destruction and a suspicion that a pro-slavery intervention wouldn’t go their way.
The US had become formidable on our own territory, but we posed no threat to British hegemony anywhere outside of US territory. It was a situation quite similar to that of the Chinese today. For over a decade now most honest commentators have acknowledged that modern missile technology makes the surface ships of the US Navy completely useless in defending Taiwan. Up to 200 miles from its shores, China is sovereign. That doesn’t yet mean much beyond the South China Sea, however. Similarly, Britain’s post 1860s reluctance to fight the US in the Americas did not mean that Britain didn’t run the world.
This book is not interested in the first century or so of US history, because back then we lacked one of the most crucial aspects of US empire: world control. Heck, we didn’t even control Central America. Prior to 1917, the United States is best understood as being part of the “informal” British Empire. We didn’t have a world-beating navy. We didn’t have a world reserve currency. We didn’t even have a central bank for most of the time before 1913. We were a very dispensable nation. We did not matter to most of the world.
A Continental Empire
We did matter to Native Americans, however…
That’s it for this week’s excerpt. I hope you enjoyed it! Let me know what you think…
[1] P. 80 Williams, William Appleman Contours of American Democracy
[2] P. 239 Eakin, Marshall C. The History of Latin America St. Martin’s Griffin, 2007
[3] P. 47 Kaufman, Joyce P. A Concise History of US Foreign Policy Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group 2021
The comparison between modern China and 19th century USA is very good and not something I had considered.
America I would say had 3 phases of the empire,so the first one when it was expanding demographically together with the empire, literally using every km of new land for its people so conquest was basically useful and to get richer and better off
Second when it probably was a net positive for the world,more debatable for themselves, which is second world war and cold war.
Third post cold war the empire has more downsides then positives for both america and the world