The United States and the Imperial Web

Abstract

The passing of the baton of power from Britain to the United States illustrates how the imperial network has functioned in the last 300 years. In the seventeenth century Britain joined an imperial web of European powers and established a burgeoning formal empire around the globe, with trade focused on the North American colonies. Britain then held an informal empire over sections, some would argue all, of the new United States after formally losing the 13 American colonies. Competing with the United States for informal empire in the Americas and then around the world, Britain took centre place in the imperial network during the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries until giving way to the United States in the Second World War. After 1945 elites in newly decolonized territories shifted many of their commercial ties to the United States - and this included a vast network of infrastructure, built by British formal and informal empire — once conceived, funded and maintained by the British. American elites raced at high speed down an imperial roadway built by their British and European competitors.