Il declino dell’impero americano
THE LONG GOODBYE
But whatever the apparent similarities, the circumstances are not really the same. Britain was a strange superpower. Historians have written hundreds of books explaining how London could have adopted certain foreign policies to change its fortunes. If only it had avoided the Boer War, say some. If only it had stayed out of Africa, say others. The historian Niall Ferguson provocatively suggests that had Britain stayed out of World War I (and there might not have been a world war without British participation), it might have managed to preserve its great-power position. There is some truth to this line of reasoning (World War I did bankrupt Britain), but to put things properly in historical context, it is worth looking at this history from another angle. Britain’s immense empire was the product of unique circumstances. The wonder is not that it declined but that its dominance lasted as long as it did. Understanding how Britain played its hand — one that got weaker over time — can help illuminate the United States’ path forward.
Britain has been a rich country for centuries (and was a great power for most of that time), but it was an economic superpower for little more than a generation. Observers often make the mistake of dating its apogee by great imperial events such as the Diamond Jubilee. In fact, by 1897, Britain’s best years were already behind it. Its true apogee was a generation earlier, from 1845 to 1870. At the time, it was producing more than 30 percent of global GDP. Its energy consumption was five times that of the United States and 155 times that of Russia. It accounted for one-fifth of the world’s trade and two-fifths of its manufacturing trade. And all this was accomplished with just two percent of the world’s population.
By the late 1870s, the United States had equaled Britain on most industrial measures, and by the early 1880s it had actually surpassed it, as Germany would about 15 years later. By World War I, the United States’ economy was twice the size of Britain’s, and together France’s and Russia’s were larger as well. In 1860, Britain had produced 53 percent of the world’s iron (then a sign of supreme industrial strength); by 1914, it was making less than 10 percent.
Of course, politically, London was still the capital of the world at the time of World War I, and its writ was unequaled and largely unchallenged across much of the globe. Britain had acquired an empire in a period before the onset of nationalism, and so there were few obstacles to creating and maintaining control in far-flung places. Its sea power was unrivaled, and it remained dominant in banking, shipping, insurance, and investment. London was still the center of global finance, and the pound still the reserve currency of the world. Even in 1914, Britain invested twice as much capital abroad as its closest competitor, France, and five times as much as the United States. The economic returns of these investments and other “invisible trades” in some ways masked Britain’s decline.
In fact, the British economy was sliding. British growth rates had dropped below two percent in the decades leading up to World War I. The United States and Germany, meanwhile, were growing at around five percent. Having spearheaded the first Industrial Revolution, Britain was less adept at moving into the second. The goods it was producing represented the past rather than the future. In 1907, for example, it manufactured four times as many bicycles as the United States did, but the United States manufactured 12 times as many cars.
Scholars have debated the causes of Britain’s decline since shortly after that decline began. Some have focused on geopolitics; others, on economic factors, such as low investment in new plants and equipment and bad labor relations. British capitalism had remained old-fashioned and rigid, its industries set up as small cottage-scale enterprises with skilled craftsmen rather than the mass factories that sprang up in Germany and the United States. There were signs of broader cultural problems as well. A wealthier Britain was losing its focus on practical education, and British society retained a feudal cast, given to it by its landowning aristocracy.
But it may be that none of these failings was actually crucial. The historian Paul Kennedy has explained the highly unusual circumstances that produced Britain’s dominance in the nineteenth century. Given its portfolio of power — geography, population, resources — Britain could reasonably have expected to account for three to four percent of global GDP, but its share rose to around ten times that figure. As those unusual circumstances abated — as other Western countries caught up with industrialization, as Germany united, as the United States resolved its North-South divide — Britain was bound to decline. The British statesman Leo Amery saw this clearly in 1905. “How can these little islands hold their own in the long run against such great and rich empires as the United States and Germany are rapidly becoming?” he asked. “How can we with forty millions of people compete with states nearly double our size?” It is a question that many Americans are now asking in the face of China’s rise.
Britain managed to maintain its position as the leading world power for decades after it lost its economic dominance thanks to a combination of shrewd strategy and good diplomacy. Early on, as it saw the balance of power shifting, London made one critical decision that extended its influence by decades: it chose to accommodate itself to the rise of the United States rather than to contest it. In the decades after 1880, on issue after issue London gave in to a growing and assertive Washington.
It was not easy for Britain to cede control to its former colony, a country with which it had fought two wars and in whose recent civil war it had sympathized with the secessionists. But it was a strategic masterstroke. Had Britain tried to resist the rise of the United States, on top of all its other commitments, it would have been bled dry. For all of London’s mistakes over the next half century, its strategy toward Washington — one followed by every British government since the 1890s — meant that Britain could focus its attention on other critical fronts. It remained, for example, the master of the seas, controlling its lanes and pathways with “five keys” that were said to lock up the world — Singapore, the Cape of Good Hope, Alexandria, Gibraltar, and Dover.
Britain maintained control of its empire and retained worldwide influence with relatively little opposition for many decades. (In the settlement after World War I, it took over 1.8 million square miles of territory and 13 million new subjects, mostly in the Middle East.) Still, the gap between its political role and its economic capacity was growing. By the twentieth century, the empire was an enormous drain on the British treasury. And this was no time for expensive habits. The British economy was reeling. World War I cost over $40 billion, and Britain, once the world’s leading creditor, had debts amounting to 136 percent of domestic output afterward. By the mid-1920s, interest payments alone sucked up half the government’s budget. Meanwhile, by 1936, Germany’s defense spending was three times as high as Britain’s. The same year that Italy invaded Ethiopia, Mussolini also placed 50,000 troops in Libya — ten times the number of British troops guarding the Suez Canal. It was these circumstances — coupled with the memory of a recent world war that had killed more than 700,000 young Britons — that led the British governments of the 1930s, facing the forces of fascism, to prefer wishful thinking and appeasement to confrontation.
World War II was the final nail in the coffin of British economic power: in 1945, the United States’ GDP was ten times that of Britain. Even then, Britain remained remarkably influential, at least partly because of the almost superhuman energy and ambition of Winston Churchill. Given that the United States was paying most of the Allies’ economic costs, and Russia was bearing most of the casualties, it took extraordinary will for Britain to remain one of the three major powers deciding the fate of the postwar world. (The photographs of Franklin Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, and Churchill at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 are somewhat misleading: there was no “big three” at Yalta; there was a “big two” plus one brilliant political entrepreneur who was able to keep himself and his country in the game.)
But even this came at a cost. In return for its loans to London, the United States took over dozens of British bases in Canada, the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, and the Pacific. “The British Empire is handed over to the American pawnbroker — our only hope,” said one member of Parliament. The economist John Maynard Keynes described the Lend-Lease Act as an attempt to “pick out the eyes of the British Empire.” Less emotional observers saw that the transition was inevitable. Toynbee, by then a distinguished historian, consoled Britons by noting that the United States’ “hand will be a great deal lighter than Russia’s, Germany’s, or Japan’s, and I suppose these are the alternatives.”
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