Kathleen Burk, Professor of History at University College, London, has written a magisterial overview of Anglo/American relations from 1497, when John and Sebastian Cabot, in Hakluyt’s words, ‘discovered that land which no men before that time had attempted’, until the modern age. Old World, New World is a remarkable achievement, based as it is upon massive and wide-ranging scholarship. It will undoubtedly become the first port of call for anyone seeking to understand this vast subject.
But Professor Burk is, in Isaiah Berlin’s terms, a fox who knows many things rather than a hedgehog who knows one big thing. Her survey lacks a conclusion, and, in a sense, lacks also an overarching theme. Unlike her former teacher, A. J. P. Taylor, she is a pointillist, a Seurat not a David or a Géricault.
Her conclusion, such as it is, is that there is ‘a love-hate Anglo-American special relationship’ — but perhaps most special relationships are rather like that. She is more comfortable analysing the hard realities of military and economic power than the ideological underpinning of the relationship. That leads her perhaps to underplay those deep-seated sentiments of solidarity which persist even during periods of conflict. ‘We support you because you are British,’ an American senator declared during the Falklands crisis in the 1980s. ‘We were with you at the first. We will stay with you to the last’, insisted Tony Blair after 9/11.
In 1911, during the Agadir crisis, ex-president Theodore Roosevelt had analysed the Anglo/American relationship in explicitly power-political terms:
As long as England succeeds in keeping up the ‘balance of power’ in Europe, not only in principle but reality, well and good; should she however for some reason or other fail in doing so, the United States would be obliged to step in at least temporarily, in order to re-establish the balance of power in Europe, never mind against which country.
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