In 1895, the rich and beautiful Consuelo Vanderbilt, summering on Rhode Island, declared her engagement to the rich and eligible Winthrop Rutherfurd. Her mother was appalled. The Vanderbilt millions deserved nothing short of a dukedom and there was only one suitable source. Mrs Vanderbilt had ensured that the 24-year-old Duke of Marlborough was in town, his estates much embarrassed by the agricultural depression. She would not be balked.

When Consuelo stuck to her decision, her mother collapsed in hysterics and summoned a doctor. He told the girl that her mother’s heart was weak and would not survive such a severe shock. Indeed Mrs Vanderbilt was so upset she talked of having Rutherfurd murdered. Consuelo relented and married the duke, who made $2.5m on the deal. The couple later separated.

By the 1890s, nobility was the one product that Britain could still offer its former colony. Over the next half century, 104 British peers married American heiresses. Critics were outraged, accusing the American girls of weakening the national stock by their forward manners and use of birth control. But not since the Virginia plantation has so much American gold passed back over the Atlantic. For four centuries, relations between Britain and America were governed by rebellion, snobbery, greed, glamour and money, mostly money. The chief conclusion to draw from Kathleen Burk’s huge narrative is: how amazing that, with the exception of the revolutionary war and a squalid episode in 1814 when the British set fire to Washington, the two sides never came to more serious blows.

The United States was founded by Britons escaping successive bouts of repression and intolerance at home, Catholics in Maryland, Quakers in Pennsylvania and Dissenters in Massachusetts. It was a land of adventure and refuge, a fact that British governments never appreciated, seeing Americans as colonials fit only for exploitation. When America revolted, as over the Boston tea duties, Britain hardly took it seriously. Nor did anyone else. The French commander who helped the American rebels win independence at Yorktown invited the defeated governor, Cornwallis, to dinner but not the Americans. When the latter protested, the Frenchman said he preferred “to dine with men of good upbringing and courtesy”.

As the new nation prospered, its inhabitants remained paranoid, convinced that Europeans would seize them back. A third of immigrants in the first half of the 19th century were Britons (mostly Irish and Scots) who resented being pursued by British capital even as they thrived on the resulting canals, railways and heavy industry. They resented British intervention in the slave trade and the civil war. They craved to be taken seriously. As de Tocqueville noted, America “incessantly demanded praise for itself, its institutions, its people, its habits, its future”.

Modern Britons find it hard to realise that America was institutionally anti-British through almost all its history. Congress sided with the French and then the Boers against Britain. It opposed every manifestation of Empire, politically and commercially. At the start of the first world war, Woodrow Wilson told Germany that “it was in the interest of America that neither of the combatants should gain a decisive victory”. Even when Wilson eventually took sides, the first American soldiers did not arrive in France until the spring of 1918.

Between the wars, American politicians wavered between isolationism and appeasement of German revival. Oddly, Burk omits to mention Joseph Kennedy, the pro-Hitler American ambassador to London, but is more open in acknowledging Roosevelt’s deference to Stalin as his equal in the new world order. With Britain bankrupt in the depths of 1941, Congress was prepared to back the Lend-Lease loans only as the lesser of evils (forestalling a fascist Britain) and with savage commercial strings attached.

America’s subsequent insistence that it “saved Britain from Hitler” ignored the fact that it did not enter the war until Pearl Harbor, and only then to resist the threat to its Pacific interests. Churchill had to race across the Atlantic to plead with Roosevelt not to forget the European theatre. Roosevelt demanded of a furious Churchill the winding down of the Empire. Not until the founding of Nato was the concept of a firm transatlantic alliance entrenched.

Burk is generous to both sides in what she sees as a remarkably fractious marriage. Her standpoint is that of a political and economic historian, rightly so in a relationship dominated by security and trade. But she can detect the ironies, remarking on how rare it is “for a predominant great power to hand this position straight to another power without a war being fought between them”. This was bound to mean tension, continuing through Suez and Vietnam to the Falklands (which Washington thought Britain would lose) and America’s belligerent and inept reaction to 9/11. Each partner wanted something that the other resented or was disinclined to give.

But the roots were always deep, as they were not in the relationships either partner had with France or Germany or Spain. The marriage held. Apart from Washington’s brief flirtation with the new Germany in the 1990s, Britain remains America’s “unsinkable aircraft carrier” moored off the coast of Europe. British prime ministers “hug close” to American presidents, leading to such crucial friendships as Roosevelt and Churchill, Kennedy and Macmillan, Reagan and Thatcher. Far more Britons have married Americans than they do other Europeans. Hyde Park, the week before D-Day, was reported to “resemble a battlefield of sex”.

Burk mentions but gives too little emphasis to the bond of language that underpins transatlantic exchange. Huckleberry Finn and Moby Dick were first celebrated by London critics, as Dickens and Kipling were lionised in New York. Britain became a prime consumer of Hollywood’s output. American and British academics, publishers, playwrights and journalists nowadays operate in virtually one market. London and New York mirror each other’s lifestyle. For all the talk of two nations “divided by a common language”, no other international bond has the same cultural depth. When, after 9/11, the Guards played the Star-Spangled Banner outside Buckingham Palace, all America wept. Whatever the hostility to the Iraq war, it seemed natural for Britain to be by America’s side.

Burk’s book is overlong and reads sometimes like a stitched-together PhD thesis. But it recalls an astonishing story of a bond that has brought incomparable benefits to the world. The affair is not, as she suggests, a love/hate relationship. For all the arguments, blood has proved thicker than ocean. Love has triumphed.

Stricken by panic

Paul Revere’s celebrated engraving of the Boston Massacre of 1770 shows a group of Bostonians being shot down by British troopers, with an officer giving the order to fire. The truth was different: a mob had pinned one Captain Thomas Preston and a small contingent of soldiers against the customs house. A stick flew out of the darkness, striking the gun barrel of a trooper. He stepped back or slipped, and fired. Panicked, his fellows did the same, killing five, wounding six. It was a cock-up, not a conspiracy: days later, British troops pulled out of Boston completely. But Revere’s print helped create an image of British tyranny and American innocence that shapes our memory of the event to this day.

OLD WORLD, NEW WORLD: The Story of Britain and America by Kathleen Burk
Little, Brown £25 pp830

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