From the Transatlantic to the Transnational: Reflections on the Changing Shape of International History

Abstract

The first of Kathleen Burk's many books, based on her Oxford D. Phil. dissertation, was Britain, America and the Sinews of War, 1914–1918 (1985). This explored a hitherto neglected aspect of the Great War when Britain became dependent on American supplies and finance to maintain its war effort. By the autumn of 1916 two million pounds of the five million needed every day by the British Treasury in order to prosecute the war came from the United States. “If things go on as at present,” the Chancellor of the Exchequer warned, “I venture to say with certainty that by next June or earlier the President of the American Republic will be in a position, if he wishes, to dictate his own terms to us.” The situation did improve somewhat after the United States entered the war in April 1917, but Britain's underlying dependence remained. The war had mobilised America as a global financial power, whilst also permanently sapping Britain's economic strength. In retrospect the period can be seen as a turning point in Anglo–American relations and, indeed, in global history. ¹

Notes

1. Kathleen Burk, Britain, America and the Sinews of War, 1914–1918 (Boston, MA, 1985), p. 81.

2. W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman, 1066 and All That (London, 1960), pp. 122–3.

3. H.G. Nicholas, “Foreign Historians Get First Say,” Times (19 June 1962), 11; D.C. Watt, “Foreign Affairs, the Public Interest and the Right to Know,” Political Quarterly, 34(1963), pp. 121–36, quoting 122.

4. Harold Wilson's memorandum is printed with commentary as an appendix to Keith Wilson, ed., Forging the Collective Memory: Government and International Historians through Two World Wars (Oxford, 1996), pp. 289–93.

5. For instance, Terry H. Anderson, The United States, Great Britain, and the Cold War, 1944–1949 (Columbia, MO, 1981); Fraser J. Harbutt, The Iron Curtain: Churchill, America, and the Origins of the Cold War (New York, 1986); Michael J. Hogan, The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1945–1952 (New York, 1987).

6. Charles S. Maier, “Marking Time: The Historiography of International Relations” in Michael Kammen, ed., The Past Before Us: Historical Writing in the United States (Ithaca, NY, 1980), pp. 355–87, quoting 355, 356; Ernest R. May, “The Decline of Diplomatic History,” in George A. Bilias and Gerald N. Grob, eds, American History: Retrospect and Prospect (New York, 1971), Chapter 10, quoting 430; Alexander DeConde, “On the Nature of International History,” International History Review, 10/2(1988), pp. 282–01, quoting 286, 292, 293.

7. For this distinction, see David Reynolds, “A “Special Relationship”? America, Britain and the International Order since the Second World War,” International Affairs, 62/1(1985–1986), pp. 1–20.

8. Kathleen Burk, Old World, New World: The Story of Britain and America (London, 2007); B.J.C. McKercher, Transition of Power: Britain's Loss of Global Pre-Eminence to the United States, 1930–1945 (Cambridge, 1999).

9. Arnold Wolfers, “The Actors in International Politics,” in idem., Discord and Collaboration: Essays on International Politics (Baltimore, MD, 1962), pp. 3–26, quoting 23; Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Transnational Relations and World Politics (Cambridge, MA, 1973).

10. Kathleen Burk and Alec Cairncross, “Goodbye, Great Britain”: The 1976 IMF Crisis (London, 1992).

11. Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (New York, 1990).

12. “The Nation and Beyond,” Journal of American History, 86/3(1999); Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley, 2002); Thomas Bender, A Nation among Nations: America's Place in World History (New York, 2006); Ian Tyrrell, Transnational Nation: United States History in Global Perspective since 1789 (Basingstoke, 2007).

13. Randolph Bourne, “Trans-National America,” Atlantic Monthly, 118(July 1916), 86–97. In Britain, around this time, the pacifist Norman Angell wrote about “trans-national” economic processes in his book The Fruits of Victory: A Sequel to “The Great Illusion” (Glasgow, 1921), pp. 62, 68. I am grateful to Martin Ceadel for drawing my attention to Angell.

14. “AHR Conversation: On Transnational History,” American Historical Review, 111(2006), 1441–64; David Reynolds, One World Divisible: A Global History since 1945 (London, 2000). For a thoughtful conceptual essay, see Patricia Clavin, “Defining Transnationalism,” Contemporary European History, 14 (2005), pp. 421–39.

15. John Gallagher, The Decline, Revival and Fall of the British Empire, ed. Anil Seal (Cambridge, 1982); David Reynolds, Britannia Overruled: British Policy and World Power in the Twentieth Century (London, 1991); W. Roger Louis, The British Empire in the Middle East, 1945–1951: Arab Nationalism, The United States, and Postwar Imperialism (Oxford, 1984). On historiographical patterns see Robin W. Winks, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume 5: Historiogaphy (Oxford, 1999), especially pp. 1–42, 653–68.

16. “This book is about thirty years in the history of the English people, and others come in only if they made a stir in English politics or aroused English interest in other ways.” A.J.P. Taylor, English History, 1914–1945 (Harmondsworth, 1970), p. 22.

17. For instance, Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (London, 2002); Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society and Culture in Britain (London, 2005); Andrew Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century (London, 2005); John M. MacKenzie, ed., European Empires and the People: Popular Responses to Empire in France, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Italy (Manchester, 2011)

18. John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (Cambridge, 2009); idem., After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire since 1405 (London, 2007); Dominic Lieven, Empire: the Russian Empire and its Rivals from the Sixteenth Century to the Present (London, 2002).

19. Christopher Thorne, Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain and the War against Japan, 1941–1945 (London, 1978), p. xxiii. See also idem., The Issue of War: States, Societies and the Far Eastern Conflict of 1941–1945 (London, 1985).

20. Charles A. Kupchan, The Persian Gulf and the West: The Dilemmas of Security (Boston, MA, 1987), pp. 30, 212.

21. Geir Lundestad, “Empire by Invitation? The United States and Western Europe, 1945–1952,” Journal of Peace Research, 23(1986), pp. 263–77.

22. David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 1, 22.

23. David Reynolds, America, Empire of Liberty: A New History (London, 2008), pp. 100, 605. For more detail, see Peter S. Onuf, Jefferson's Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (Charlottesville, VA, 2000).

24. “The Future Uses of History,” reprinted in Morey Rothberg and Jacqueline Goggin, John Franklin Jameson and the Development of Humanistic Scholarship in America, Volume I: (Athens, GA, 1993), pp. 311, 312.

25. Explored in Carol S. Gruber, Mars and Minerva: World War I and the Uses of Higher Learning in America (Baton Rouge, LA, 1975).

26. William C. Binkley, “The Two World Wars and American Historical Scholarship,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 33(1946), pp. 1–26, especially 25; Ian Tyrrell, “Making Nations/Making States: American Historians in the Context of Empire,” Journal of American History, 86(1999), pp. 1015–44.

27. Charles S. Maier, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and its Predecessors (Cambridge, MA, 2006), especially pp. 3, 69, 255–8, 274–5. See also the concept of “post-territoriality” that he developed in “Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era,” American Historical Review, 105(2000), pp. 807–31.

28. Stephen Lovell, The Shadow of War: Russia and the USSR, 1941 to the Present (Oxford, 2010), 317–19; Ian Bremmer and Ray Taras, eds, New States, New Politics: Building the Post-Soviet Nations (Cambridge, 1997), pp. xix.

29. Charles S. Maier, “European Order—European Empire: A Catastrophic but Indispensable Relationship, 1905–2005,” William Kirby, “When Did China Become China? The Empire as Nation in the Twentieth Century”; Ross Terrill, The Future of Chinese Imperialism,” in Kurt Almqvist and Isabella Thomas, eds, Empire and the Future of World Order (Stockholm, 2007), pp. 103, 170, 184.

30. Ranke's vast oeuvre of some sixty volumes is replete with contradictions—there is continued debate about issues such as his demand for precise documentary scholarship and his commitment to an idealist metaphysic—but my concern here is with what constitutes the “Rankean” legacy. See, for example, Georg G. Iggers and James M. Powell, eds, Leopold von Ranke and the Shaping of the Historical Discipline (Syracuse, NY, 1990).