One guy who should get more credit for the relationship is Ulysses Grant. As president, he made a conscious decision to settle all remaining disputes with England, and a lot of the American expansion was financed with English capital as a result. The whole crowd of presidents from 1870-1914 get too little historical attention, in my opinion.

Pure, rife speculation as to why no war developed:
1) The British version of colonialism was less malignant than others, and was able to adapt itself to the case where the “colony” was formally independent without too much strain. To my knowledge, Britain retains fairly good relations with its former colonies to this day.

2) The US had little interest in, and a strong ideological opposition to, taking over control of Britain’s colonies.

3) Post WWI, the country which was explicitly trying to take over Britain’s colonies was Japan, and they were reasonably obvious about rearming, etc, in pursuit of this goal. So maybe the “post Britannic empire” war was fought after all.

“The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics, Civil Warfare, and the Triumph of Anglo–America.” By Kevin Phillips.

As a general rule for English and Canadian posters, it’s probably worth skipping over to the Yale diplomatic document site for a review of actual Anglo-American treaty history and treaty terms.

There’s no doubting that the US Republic and Second British Empire grew together in a symbiotic manner, each benefitting from the others institutional strengths and weaknesses as long as distance allowed a minimum of friction. This ended with the Atlanticist era, and subsequent attempts to find a solution that would allow co-habitation, from The League of Nations to the United Nations to NATO and on, have consistantly failed.

As the saying goes in some US circles, Timeo Britanicuos et dona ferrentes.. etc.

Certainly there were pragmatic reasons for such a stance:
- British Canada was vulnerable; it’s security depended on avoiding conflict with the US. Strategically a powerful and hostile US Navy would present enormous challenges to the Royal Navy for protecting the commercial routes to the UK, let alone connections to Canada and the West Indies.
- US development was clearly producing a country whose wealth and population, and power potential, would rival all Europe.
- US seemed likely to be a benign international actor; it had been open to peaceful resolutions of Canadian border disputes, and disinclined towards an imperial expansion on the scale it was capable of.
- The US was never likely to be an existential threat to the UK; whereas a hostile European hegemon would be.
- The US seemed likely to share with Britain an interest in a relatively open world trade and financial system, which could translate into shared foreign policy objectives: for instance in China both supported “Open Door” policies against partition proposals.
- The greatest risk of a breach would be if British conflict with a European state involved in blockading actions that the US viewed as violation of its neutral rights as in 1812. Fortunately this was avoided in 1914 to 1917.

But as Lex indicates, there is ultimately something more, something beyond pragmatism, and perhaps the ultimate reasons why German (Hohenzollern Imperial or Nazi) or French (Bourbon, Revolutionary or Napoleonic) ascendancies were so bitterly resisted and the American accepted.
As the French political theorist Raymond Aron put it in “Peace and War”:
“…in the abstract, England could have sought allies on the Continent to forestall American hegemony: yet such a thing was out of the question…A change from the pax Britannica to the pax Americana did not involve a change of universe, and pride, rather than the soul, suffered.
A pax Germanica could not replace the pax Britannica without England resisting to the death: only a military catastrophe could have cleared the path from one to the other.”

Thanks for this insight, I don’t often think widely enough to notice the dogs that don’t bark .

Also, I think the reason America and Britain did not fight a war against each other was due to their cooperation, and concessions to each other, in WWI and WWII. Before WWI, America and Britain were very much potential, and real, rivals. Remember that the original HMS Dreadnought was built not in response to German shipmaking but, in part, to the start of construction on the USS South Carolina. This arms race has been rehistoried into the frame of a Britain vs. Germany affair due to the later war, but at the time it was very much a multi-party affair. Also keep in mind that during and after WWI, the US, Japan, and Britain very much continued their ship building race. So much so that it necessitated major international arms control agreements (The Washington Naval Treaty of 1921 and the London Naval Treaty of 1930).

As a result of just fighting in ferior enemies in defense of the empire, I dont think the British Empire could really “concive” how to take on major power like the US

Free market economies are based on creating a multitude of relationships that are win-win for everyone. Both sides are better off with the relationship than without it. War would cause an immediate loss of these benefits. Widespread democracy in turn means that all those that benefit from the trading relationships will have a voice in any war decisions.

Britain and America never went to war because neither would have gained any overall benefit from doing so.

The marxist are completely wrong in their model of the causes of war. Wars are not about economics but instead are caused by elite militaristic minorities seeking to maintain their status within their own societies. WWI was caused by the remnants of Europe’s military aristocracies trying desperately to fight off their obsolescence by encroaching capitalism. WWII was caused by Fascist and Communist elites doing the same thing. Ditto for the Cold War and Isalmo-facsism today. In each case, people who cannot create or trade turn to destruction as their only means of maintaining their own relevance.

The incredible carnage and sublime wastefulness of trench warfare in WWI convinced a generation of Americans, and more importantly, a generation of Britons, that war was an anachronism, that could no longer be justified under any circumstances, and that the only hope for humanity was pacifism. In fact, the acceptance of pacifism in America and Britain was so complete that an unprepared Britain likely would have fallen to the Germans in WWII were it not for Churchill’s leadership, and the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor forcing America to her aid. Not only were America and Britain not prepared for wars of hegemony, they weren’t even prepared for self-defense.

The pacifist movement that was born out of the destruction of WWI was one of the most important ideologies of the 20th century, affecting America’s and the world’s view of every subsequent conflict up to the present day war in Iraq.

(This reminds me of Winik’s take on the Civil War and the remarkable peace – if spotty & imperfect – that followed April 1865.)

These are our myths and our histories that we take with us to Iraq – it may make us misread countries with such different histories from our own but it also makes us much more optimistic about the universality of our institutions and freedoms.