Celebrating the Mayflower: 400 years of Anglo-American relations
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Celebrating the Mayflower: 400 years of Anglo‑American relations Robert M. Hendershot1 · Steve Marsh2 Published online: 21 September 2020 © The Editor of the Journal 2020
It is a fitting tribute to the strength, vitality, contradictions and controversies of Anglo-American relations that their 400-year span can this year be bookended on one side by the Mayflower pilgrimage and, on the other, BREXIT and the closure of US President Donald Trump’s (first?) administration. Trump has periodically been as popular and politically toxic in Britain as was King George III to the Founders of the American Republic. At the same time BREXIT reflects a continuing British reflexive Atlanticism and, reciprocally, unparalleled American fascination with the British Royal family suggests an ongoing popular interest in the ‘motherland’. Indeed, the marriage of Prince Harry to biracial American divorcee Meghan Markle constitutes a thoroughly modern twist upon the familial hands across the water imagery invoked often by Winston Churchill through his Anglo-American parentage. One of the most remarkable features within this tale of two nations is how their relationship has transitioned many times over through what in retrospect appears to be a continual bilateral dialogue spanning politics, culture, economics, identity, law, philosophy and so on. In the same way that the ‘othering’ of Britain was a key component of early American identity construction, so recognition of a shared AngloSaxonism was a central plank in the later Great Rapprochement.1 That British and American elites have so often found their interpretations of world events more alike than with any other country owes much to what Dobson has claimed to be a distinctive Anglo-American political tradition rooted in their interpretation and practice of
1 Bradford Perkins, The Great Rapprochement: England and the United States, 1895–1914 (New York: Atheneum, 1968); Srdjan Vucetic, The Anglosphere: A Genealogy of a Racialized Identity in International Relations (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011).
* Robert M. Hendershot [email protected] Steve Marsh [email protected] 1
Grand Rapids, USA
2
Cardiff, UK
Vol.:(0123456789)
406
Journal of Transatlantic Studies (2020) 18:405–414
Liberalism.2 And from this have flowed notions of a shared way of life, the defence of which has brought Britain and the US shoulder to shoulder in combat many times over and which helps explain the remarkably peaceful transition of global power from the British Empire to Pax Americana.3 George Bernard Shaw’s quip that ‘England and America are two countries separated by a common language’ is often quoted by Anglo-American officials in emphasis of the opposite. More aptly, German Chancellor Bismarck prophetically noted that the US sharing of the English language would be the defining factor of the Twentieth century. He was correct, albeit his prophesy has stretched also into the twenty-first century. The British and American peoples are amongst the world’s leading monoglots. Without the s
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