More colours than red, white and blue: race, ethnicity and Anglo-American relations

Abstract

Although scholars have produced a copious literature on Anglo-American relations, the racial and ethnic aspect of that history is comparatively understudied. This article provides a critical overview of the key texts that have evaluated the role of ethnicity and race in promoting kinship and conflict between Britain and the United States, from the transatlantic debate over slavery in the nineteenth century to post-Second World War international politics.

Thumb through the index of many histories of Anglo-American relations for ‘race’ and the word will appear only with reference to Cold War nuclear arms competition. This omission is reflective of the marginalisation of race and ethnicity from foreign policy scholarship more generally. To take one example, in 1990 the Journal of American History featured a roundtable, ‘Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations’. Contributors to the forum focused on nine analytical categories including bureaucratic politics, corporatism and gender. Race and ethnicity were not among them.¹ Both, however, have been of great significance as sources of co-operation and conflict between Britain and the United States. The transatlantic crusade against slavery is one of the most important chapters in the history not only of Anglo-American relations, but also of global humanitarianism. Conversely, the Anglo-Saxon racial cult around which the two countries formed a common transatlantic identity during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century helped legitimise their imperialist conquest and subjugation of millions of people of colour. Although scholars have scrutinised both of these subjects, the racial and ethnic dimension of Anglo-American relations remains in many other respects understudied. From the 1950s, the African American freedom struggle inspired the proliferation of research and writing on race and ethnicity within the historical profession. Yet, with the particular exception of transatlantic slavery and abolition, scholarship on Anglo-American relations has largely been immune to these developments, not least with regard to its principal area of focus, twentieth-century war and diplomacy.

How to account for this lacuna necessitates a certain amount of speculation. Whether it is the unconscious bias of a field dominated by white male scholars is one possible explanation. The traditional methodological focus on formal diplomatic interaction also marginalises racial and ethnic minorities who historically had little representation at the higher levels of government. Yet, as historian Alexander Deconde suggested, the WASP elite who have wielded power on both sides of the Atlantic are themselves an ethno-racial group, and their policies a form of what we now call identity politics. As we will see, it is only in the last few years that scholars have started to assess the implications of this line of analysis by considering the impact of domestic racial thought and practice on foreign policy.²

This essay travels over the relatively small terrain charted by scholars who have studied the impact of race and ethnicity on Anglo-American relations before suggesting still unmapped areas in need of exploration.

Slavery and abolition

Scholars have most extensively examined the role of race in the history of Anglo-American relations with regard to slavery and abolition. That literature focuses both on governmental interaction and grassroots activism.

Slavery was a source of serious diplomatic friction between Britain and the United States. Confronted by a British government that advocated the global abolition of slavery, southern planters became concerned for the security of their property. The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, which granted freedom to bondsmen and women throughout the British Empire, induced fears that Britain and its colonies would become places of refuge for fugitive slaves. Southerners were also alarmed by the British Navy’s attempts to suppress the international slave trade by exercising its right to search vessels on the high seas. Slaveowners’ influence in Washington led the US government to denounce British interception of American naval craft as an infringement of national sovereignty and even to threaten military retaliation.³

Tensions were further aggravated by the freeing without compensation of slaves aboard ships that had, because of stormy weather, become stranded or wrecked in British territory. A different sort of incident occurred in November 1841 when slaves being transported from Virginia to New Orleans aboard the brig Creole overwhelmed the crew, killing the captain, and forced their former captors to pilot them to Nassau. A group of American sailors attempted to regain control of the ship and sail it out of British waters but were repelled. Bahamian colonial authorities determined that under British law the slaves aboard the Creole should be freed rather than returned to US custody. In total, 128 slaves gained their liberty, many of them starting new lives in Jamaica. Only in 1855 did a claims commission finally recommend financial compensation for the slaves’ former owners. The incident was in the intervening years the cause of bitter animosity between Britain and the United States, southerners accusing the British of not only failing to respect slaveowners’ property rights, but also inciting the rebellion through their abolitionist propaganda.⁴

While many historians have documented the impact of slavery on transatlantic relations, Matthew Karp is particularly illuminating about its aggravation of American Anglophobia. In This Vast Southern Empire, Karp shows how southerners accused the British of hypocrisy for piously proclaiming that African Americans had a right to freedom while imposing colonial rule over millions of people of colour around the world (a criticism that gained renewed force during the modern civil rights struggle). Slave-owning interests also used the issue of Irish home rule to berate the British. Karp cites the vindictive observation of Britain by South Carolina politician James C. Calhoun: ‘While apparently actuated by so much zeal on this side of the Cape of Good Hope in the cause of humanity and liberty, she appears to be actuated on the other side by a spirit of conquest and domination not surpassed by Rome in the haughtiest days of the republic.’⁵ Southerners also saw the British Empire as a threatening rival to their own plantation economy. Karp describes as ‘imperial abolitionism’ the prospect of Britain using India as its principal source of cotton and thereby breaking free of its economic interdependence with southern slavery. Southerners also feared that the British would demand an end to slavery in the Republic of Texas as a condition of granting it diplomatic recognition. Apprehension about British intentions sometimes spilled into feverish paranoia. Southerners believed British abolitionists had travelled to the United States with the intention of inciting slave insurrection. Alarm that the British could launch a land invasion of the Gulf Coast region spearheaded by West Indian troops also led to calls for the federal government to invest in improved naval defence.⁶

The transatlantic rift caused by slavery made the appointment of a US minister to Britain a matter of great importance and potential dispute. Andrew Stevenson, the Virginia planter and lawyer who held the position between 1834 and 1841, was a staunch proslavery advocate. As Matthew Mason has shown, the selection of onetime Massachusetts governor Edward Everett as his successor fuelled fierce debate in the United States. Everett was no radical abolitionist. He opposed the further expansion of slavery but not the system itself. Neurotic southerners nonetheless opposed his appointment in the belief that even such a temperate position made him a potential collaborator with a British government scheming to overthrow US slavery.⁷

What Karp, Mason and other historians show is that slavery was the cause of mutual mistrust at times bordering on the delusional that destabilised diplomatic relations between Britain and the United States during the mid-nineteenth century. The story also points to the imbalance of power in the relationship between the two nations, with Britain at that moment in its history being the dominant force feared by US slaveowners.

According to Duncan Andrew Campbell, ‘to properly understand British views of the United States, one first needs to comprehend British conceptions of themselves.’⁸ The abolition of slavery in the British Empire imbued Britons with a belief that their nation set a moral example to the rest of the world. This conviction inspired sanctimonious criticism of other countries that still maintained slavery. Their principal target was the United States. Not only did it have the largest slave population in the world, but this system also contradicted the ideals of freedom and democracy that gave birth to the republic. Given that the founding of the United States was in reaction to the supposed tyranny of Britain, its subjugation of people of colour provided an opportunity for British observers to reclaim the moral high ground. As Samuel Johnson famously remarked of the American War of Independence, ‘How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?’ Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) and Charles Dickens’ American Notes (1842) are the most commonly cited examples of the pious criticism of slavery by British travel writers, who saw the system as morally corrupting white masters as much as, if not more than, black bondsmen and women. Such works did not, however, necessarily have the corrosive impact on transatlantic relations that is commonly supposed. As Jonathan Wells has shown, Dickens remained enormously popular with the reading public in the American South. Although critical of southern slavery, Dickens also wrote damningly of the dehumanising impact of the northern factory system. Southerners seized on these observations as evidence of the hypocrisy of antislavery critics from outside their region. Ironically, the abolitionist Dickens therefore became appropriated by proslavery ideologues.⁹

Travel writers’ outspoken criticism of slavery might have caused dissent between Britain and the United States but moral opposition to slavery also brought some of their peoples together. The rise of a transatlantic abolitionist movement was one of the most important developments in Anglo-American relations during the first half of the nineteenth century. According to Clare Taylor, antislavery activists from both sides of the Atlantic collaborated ‘so closely that it is impossible to discuss the organizations of one country without some reference to the societies of the other’.¹⁰ The story of how ordinary men and women separated by three thousand miles of ocean devised and developed this network provides a compelling illustration of how bonds between Britain and the United States are forged beyond the level of the nation state.

Historians have extensively documented the origins, attributes and impact of transatlantic abolitionism. Its roots were religious, grounded in Quaker ethical and scriptural opposition to slavery and later becoming entwined with evangelical Protestantism.¹¹ At the outset, many abolitionists advocated colonisation but eventually disavowed it as an insidious means for the forced resettlement of free black people. Although the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 ordered only the gradual dissolution of enforced servitude in the British Empire, it had an inspirational impact on American antislavery activism. The date when the new law came into force, August 1st, even became celebrated as an alternative Independence Day to July 4th. Radical abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison articulated American activists’ faith in the power of internationalism to fight the domestic evil of slavery. Garrison, who had travelled to Britain before the abolition bill had even become law in search of transatlantic support for the American antislavery cause, launched the newspaper Liberator in 1831 with a masthead that proclaimed ‘Our Country is the World, Our Countrymen All Mankind’.¹² It was the British on whom American activists most relied, emulating their rhetoric, organisational skills and political strategies.¹³

The World Anti-Slavery Convention held at London’s Exeter Hall in June 1840 is, in spite of the controversy over the exclusion of women, often celebrated for the common spirit that prevailed between British and American abolitionists. Thereafter, however, their relationship was, in the words of Christine Bolt, one of ‘intermittent strain and ill will’.¹⁴ Factionalism within the American movement further complicated matters. Tensions emerged between moderates and radicals within only a few years of the founding of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. The two sides clashed over the role of women within the organisation and whether they should engage in mainstream politics or, as Garrison proposed, renounce the US Constitution as a proslavery document and agitate for immediate reform. Matters came to a head in 1840 when disaffected moderates led by Arthur and Lewis Tappan walked out of the society’s annual meeting to form the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. This split within the American abolitionist movement complicated relations with its British counterpart. The British Foreign and Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS), the dominant force in abolitionism on Britain’s side of the Atlantic, favoured the moderates, the name of whose organisation not coincidentally mirrored their own. Many local abolitionist groups outside London where the BFASS was based nonetheless offered their support to the militant vision of Garrison. Even within these competing factions there were still further schisms, with American abolitionists sometimes accusing British activists of condescension and a misunderstanding of the constraints imposed by the US political system.¹⁵

Opposition to slavery nonetheless remained an important political force on both sides of the Atlantic. This was true even during the 1850s, a decade recognised by historians as one of decline in British antislavery activism. American author Harriet Beecher Stowe’s antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) captured the imagination of the British reading public, selling more than one million copies, three times the number in her native country. Stowe rode the wave of what Sarah Meer describes as ‘Uncle Tom Mania’, triumphantly touring Britain three times.¹⁶

Abolitionism was also an instrument of liberation, not only for slaves but also many of the activists who filled the ranks of the antislavery movement. It afforded new public opportunities for women on both sides of the Atlantic. They established their own antislavery societies, signed petitions, raised funds and participated in consumer boycotts. In the United States, abolitionism helped fuel the rise of feminism as female activists drew analogies between slavery and their own subjugated status in a white patriarchal society. This was less the case in Britain, notwithstanding the fact that women’s involvement in abolitionism challenged traditional notions of their place in public life. A comparative study by Clare Midgley provides an explanation for this disparity. In Britain, she argues, opposition to slavery was widespread and women could claim public respectability for their philanthropic enterprises.¹⁷ By contrast, the frequently violent antagonism towards abolitionism even in the northern states encouraged American female activists to assert their own rights as well as those of slaves. This interpretation is consistent with an essay by British abolitionist Harriet Martineau published in 1838, ‘The Martyr Age in the United States’, which documented how antislavery campaigner Angelina Grimké steadfastly turned the verbal and physical assault she faced into ‘sympathy in her cause, and veneration for herself’.¹⁸

The antislavery cause also provided black people with an unprecedented participatory voice in public life. Historians have shown how the extensive tours of Britain by African American abolitionists galvanised transatlantic opposition to slavery. The most famous of these former slaves was Frederick Douglass, who between 1845 and 1847 delivered addresses to audiences numbering in their thousands. Others followed, among them William Wells Brown and Ellen and William Craft. These activists brought their stories to the British public in churches, meeting halls, theatres and even private homes. Their poignant personal narratives, sometimes illustrated by their own scarred bodies, exposed to audiences without immediate experience the brutal hardships of slavery. The written accounts by these runaway slaves further captured the imagination of the British reading public. When the US Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 raised the threat that some black abolitionists could be captured and returned to their masters, Britons also raised the funds to purchase their freedom. Numerous scholars have recounted this crucial chapter in the history of transatlantic race relations but the recent work of Hannah-Rose Murray merits attention for the online interactive map she has produced that enables users to follow the touring routes of Douglass and other black abolitionists.¹⁹

The US Civil War and emancipation

While there is considerable academic consensus about transatlantic abolitionism, the same cannot be said about the role of slavery in shaping British responses to the American Civil War. The traditional interpretation of British reaction to the conflict, associated with historian Ephraim Douglass Adams, is that class status determined public opinion. According to this analysis, the conservative upper classes supported the Confederacy out of a sense of kinship with the southern planter class. By contrast, the lower and middle classes sided with the Union in opposition to slavery and, in the case of radicals such as John Bright, because they saw in the republican government of the United States a model for democratic reform in their own country.²⁰ While other scholars had earlier contested this binary class model, the most serious revisionist challenge came with the publication in 1972 of Mary Ellison’s Support for Secession: Lancashire and the American Civil War. Ellison showed how the Union blockade of southern ports which cut off the supply of cotton to Lancashire mills led out-of-work labourers to mobilise in support of the Confederacy. Motivated as they were by economic self-interest more than the merits of slavery and secession, their actions still repudiated the conventional class model of British opinion.²¹

More recent scholarship has in turn contested this revisionist interpretation. In Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War, Richard Blackett reclaims much of the old conventional wisdom about British attitudes. While the upper echelons of society tended to side with the Confederacy, according to Blackett pro-Union sentiment prevailed among the broader public, including those mill-working communities most adversely affected by the ‘cotton famine’.²² David Brown’s forthcoming study of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society corroborates Blackett. Cotton workers who were among those who attended a mass meeting at the Manchester Free Trade Hall on New Year’s Eve 1862 supported an antislavery resolution encouraging the Union to maintain its blockade despite the ruinous impact on their own lives. Lincoln later acknowledged this sacrifice as an act of ‘sublime Christian heroism, which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country’.²³

Two years after the publication of Divided Hearts, Duncan Andrew Campbell argued in English Public Opinion and the Civil War that the focus on class differences is a false dichotomy. Campbell believes that Blackett has misrepresented public attitudes by focusing on organisations which actively lobbied for either the Union or Confederacy. In truth, he concluded, ‘most English observers, irrespective of class, wished to remain neutral in the struggle and distrusted (and even disliked) both sides’.²⁴ Although there was stronger support for the North, Lincoln’s emphasis on the restoration of the Union rather than the abolition of slavery as the aim of the war alienated many people on the other side of the Atlantic, as did his administration’s enactment of the Morrill Tariff in 1861, which increased tariffs on British exports. The English were, in Campbell’s opinion, more concerned about events in Europe than they were with the war across the Atlantic.

The unwary reader should therefore tread carefully for fear of becoming entangled in an intricate web of opinions. Nor are historians likely to stop spinning more threads. A recent article by Matthew Griffin counters Campbell’s claim about public neutrality by demonstrating the success with which George Thompson, the British abolitionist who was a longstanding associate of William Lloyd Garrison, mobilised popular support for the Union. Contrary to Campbell’s assertion that cities such as Liverpool and Sheffield were ‘effectively no-go areas for Union supporters’, Griffin shows how Thompson, despite his own concern about Lincoln’s commitment to emancipation, rallied audiences to sign antislavery resolutions and resuscitate ailing abolitionist societies.²⁵

Counter to Ellison’s focus on mill workers acting out of economic self-interest, there does at least seem to be a consensus in more recent scholarship that slavery was fundamental to British attitudes about the Civil War. Historians have observed that the decade before the conflict saw a decline in British abolitionism, the consequence both of a white supremacist ideology that legitimated imperial expansionism and the blame placed on the supposedly innate deficiencies of black people for the shortcomings of West Indies emancipation. The practical decline of British abolitionism did not, however, mean a moral acquiescence with slavery. Britain’s global leadership of abolitionism was a source of enduring national pride. Slavery was the principal obstacle to Britain bestowing diplomatic status on the Confederacy. Even Britons who championed the Confederate cause did so not because of their support of slavery but rather the right to self-determination. James Spence, the Liverpool businessman and Confederate proselytiser, might have claimed in The American Union (1861) that slavery was more benign than northern industry, but even he saw the system as ‘a gross anachronism’ that should be abolished, albeit gradually by white southerners as opposed to invading northern soldiers.²⁶ Where scholars including Richard Blackett and Duncan Andrew Campbell also agree is that the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863 eventually restored British faith in the Union war effort as a moral crusade against slavery.

It is probable that the future will see further studies add to the already rich debate about Britain and the American Civil War. Historians should nonetheless be wary of continuing to cultivate rich fruits on the war while allowing Reconstruction to wither on the vine. The only detailed assessment of British attitudes towards the impact of emancipation in the southern states is by Christine Bolt in her book The Anti-Slavery Movement and Reconstruction: A Study of Anglo-American Co-operation 1833/1877. Bolt showed that, despite the founding of philanthropic organisations in support of former slaves, many Britons had little belief in African Americans’ ability to attain racial equality with whites. The perceived failure of West Indian emancipation informed British thought. Britons attributed the economic collapse of Jamaica to the supposedly innate indolence of black people. Popular support for the brutal suppression of the Morant Bay rebellion in October 1865, which coincided with US congressional debate on black suffrage, was both a cause and effect of this cynicism about the prospects for black progress.²⁷

The intellectual foundation laid by Bolt remains firm half a century later but no historian has made a serious effort to build on it. In particular, it is important to determine whether British racism had become so hardened by the 1870s that the country had abandoned its abolitionist heritage. If, as is usually understood, the bond of racial Anglo-Saxon brotherhood between the United States and Britain did not become fully formed until the late nineteenth century, then was the plight of African Americans a source of any continued friction?

British attitudes towards another racialised minority, Native Americans, hint at a possible answer. While Britons accepted that it was the ‘manifest destiny’ of white Americans to expand across the North American continent, they condemned their failure to as members of the superior Anglo-Saxon race to promote the uplift of the conquered Plains Indians. Other than occasional references to accusations that the British incited indigenous peoples into armed rebellion during the early nineteenth century, historians have paid insufficient attention to the impact of Native Americans on Anglo-American relations after the Revolutionary War. One notable exception is Kate Flint’s excellent The Transatlantic Indian, 1776–1930. Flint shows how Native Americans retained an exotic allure to many Britons, reflected and reinforced by the touring Wild West shows of the late nineteenth century. British authors also used the supposedly more benevolent treatment of indigenous peoples in Canada as a means to assert their moral superiority over the systematic slaughter of Native Americans by white settlers in the United States. Britons had showed an earlier pride in Canada as a refuge for fugitive slaves from the United States and it would be useful to learn whether there were other parallels in British criticism of American racism during the later nineteenth century.²⁸

The ‘great rapprochement’ and racial imperialism

John Bull and Uncle Sam toil up a mountain on whose rocks are scratched the words ‘ignorance’, ‘superstition’ and ‘barbarism’. The backs of both men are bent with the weight of wicker baskets strapped to their backs into which are crammed representatives of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Bowed but unbroken, the travellers trek towards a summit where on a throne sits a shining figure that symbolises ‘civilization’. This cartoon by Victor Gillam, published in the April 1, 1899 issue of Judge magazine, was a pictorial representation of ‘The White Man’s Burden’, the title of an evangelising poem by Rudyard Kipling.²⁹

The notion that Britain and the United States shared a common destiny to lead the world towards peace, liberty and enlightenment was integral to what historian Bradford Perkins described as The Great Rapprochement between the two countries.³⁰ This convergence of diplomatic, economic and military interests occurred in the last decade of the nineteenth century. The transatlantic circulation of racist ideology imbued white Britons and Americans with a belief that their shared Anglo-Saxon heritage elevated them above the other peoples of the world.

As scholars including Stuart Anderson and Paul Kramer assert, this conviction in their own superiority provided a rationalisation for the domination of other races. ‘Not content with explaining the unquestionable achievements of Great Britain and the United States in terms of cultural attributes, historical circumstances, or even the workings of inscrutable fate’, Anderson declared, ‘they embraced the belief that the success of the two countries was determined by the racial characteristics of the Angles and the Saxons.’³¹ At a time when Germany and Russia posed an increasing challenge to British global hegemony, Britons could, because of their common kinship with white Americans, champion the imperial expansion of the United States as buttressing their own declining power. English newspaper editor W. T. Stead articulated this conception of the United States as the anointed heir of Anglo-Saxon supremacy in his 1901 book, The Americanization of the World. In Stead’s opinion, while Americans were by the turn of the century rapidly turning the world into a reflection of their own principles and practices, this was also ‘substantially the image of ourselves’.³² This belief in their ancestral bond informed the foreign policies of both countries. Although officially neutral, the British government offered implicit support to the United States in the annexation of Cuba and other territories after its war with Spain in 1898. Washington reciprocated by refusing to recognise the rights of Boers when they rose in rebellion against British colonial rule the following year. Intellectual historian Duncan Bell has also documented how this conceit about the blood ties between the British and American people inspired the idea of a federalised world state run by the two countries together with the white settler colonies of what would later become known as the Anglosphere.³³

The pseudoscience of racial classification undoubtedly had an influential role in shaping a common transatlantic identity during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Theories of Anglo-Saxon racial superiority permeated popular culture in Britain and the United States, as evidenced by authors such as H. Rider Haggard an Jack London, as well as Edgar Rice Burroughs’ pulp hero Tarzan. Theresa Runstedtler has provided a particularly engaging and instructive account of the impact of white supremacy on both sides of the Atlantic in recounting a world heavyweight title fight between African American champion Jack Johnson and British challenger Billy Wells scheduled for the Earl’s Court exhibition centre in London on October 2, 1911. Johnson initially received an enthusiastic public reception in Britain. However, British racial attitudes began to harden in reaction to increasing rebellion by colonised subjects in many parts of the empire. According to Runstedtler, Britons became more attracted to the racial segregation of the Jim Crow South as a potential solution to their own ‘colour problem’. The interracial fight between Johnson and Wells assumed a politically charged symbolism, Britons and Americans touting the challenger as a ‘Great White Hope’ who would put not only the champion but, implicitly, all black people in their place. White fears that Wells would prove no match for Johnson nonetheless eventually led to the cancellation of the fight.³⁴

The pervasiveness of Anglo-Saxonist ideology has led Srdjan Vucetic to conclude that, ‘it is simply not possible to substantively account for fin-de-siècle American and British foreign policies without conceptually and theoretically engaging race and racialized identity’.³⁵ Indisputable as this claim seems, it is nevertheless important to provide some caveats. The national interests that separated Britain and the United States could yet prove more powerful than the racial ties that bound them together. It was still possible in 1896 for Yale historian George Burton Adams to produce the polemic Why Americans Dislike England, in which he warned that, despite their common kinship, the two countries were at risk of war with one another. According to Adams, many, if not most, Americans held ‘a particular feeling of dislike towards England, which they cherish towards no other country’.³⁶ As Stuart Anderson concedes, the bullish nationalism of President Theodore Roosevelt during the Alaska boundary dispute in 1903, when he warned Britain of serious consequences if arbitration failed to end in a favourable outcome for the United States, demonstrates the limitations of racial identity as a transatlantic adhesive.³⁷ Stephen Tufnell has also shown that Anglophobia was still strong among sections of the broader American public in the late nineteenth century, not least immigrants such as the Irish and Germans.³⁸ Members of these communities were active in opposing the imperial missions of both Britain and the United States.³⁹

By the late nineteenth century there was certainly a widespread belief that the United States and Britain had a common imperial mission to impart Anglo-Saxon civilisation to the supposedly lesser races of the world. The treatment of racial and ethnic minorities within the existing territorial boundaries of the United States was nonetheless a source of serious transatlantic tension. Sarah Silkey has revealed how the speaking tours of Britain by African American activist Ida B. Wells in 1893 and 1894 aroused moral indignation against lynching in the United States. Wells disabused Britons of their belief that lynching was a legitimate form of justice in frontier communities without an established court system, demonstrating instead its use as an instrument of racial terror. In so doing, she followed in the footsteps of the black abolitionists who came to Britain half a century earlier to mobilise transatlantic opposition to American slavery. Silkey demonstrates how British admirers of Wells defined their own national identity in opposition to what they saw as the barbaric racial practices of the United States. ‘Regardless of whether lynching had been essential to the early development of American society’, she writes, ‘it seemed wholly inappropriate for a thriving modern nation to tolerate mob violence at the end of the nineteenth century, and Britons would not have wished to associate themselves with any culture that demonstrated so little respect for propriety.’ It was neither the first, nor the last, time that Britons used American racism as a foil for their own supposed racial progressivism. As Silkey also shows, British criticism of lynching in turn provoked a furious response from white southerners, further muddying transatlantic waters.⁴⁰

The notion that Americans and Britons were united in racial brotherhood also begs the question why the United States did not immediately rally to the Allied cause in the First World War. David Haglund attempts to solve this riddle in his recent book, The US “Culture Wars” and the Anglo-American Special Relationship. According to Haglund, the Anglophobic reaction of Irish and German Americans to the outbreak of the war unintentionally roused the larger population to reappropriate their British heritage and identity and mobilise in support of US military intervention. As he concludes, Americans descended from England overcame ‘their own political prejudices against the mother country, thereby opening a path for fundamental transformation, eventually, in the Anglo-American relationship’. This is a persuasive claim although one that needs further empirical evidence than Haglund’s heavily theoretical analysis offers.⁴¹

The  Second World War

Britons had a humanitarian interest in African Americans that dated back to the days of slavery. That connection became more personally intimate during the Second World War. On the eve of the D-Day landings in June 1944 there were around 130,000 African American soldiers stationed in Britain. This black presence was unprecedented. The usual estimate of the indigenous black population at this time is only between seven and eight thousand.⁴²

Historians have substantially documented the impact of black GIs on British racial opinions and practices. The most commonly cited studies are David Reynolds’ Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Britain, 1942–1945 and Graham Smith’s When Jim Crow Met John Bull: Black American Soldiers in World War II Britain.⁴³ Published more than a decade before the appearance of either of these books, Thomas E. Hachey’s overlooked article ‘Jim Crow with a British Accent’ nonetheless anticipated much of their analysis.⁴⁴ What all of this scholarship discloses is a tension between the state and the broader public over the acceptance of US Army racial practices on British soil. Prime Minister Winston Churchill opposed the stationing of African American troops in anticipation of such conflict although, as Hachey details, his correspondence with government officials also exposes some vulgar racial prejudice, including a request to Secretary of State for War Sir James Grigg for information on acts of violence and sexual assault committed by black soldiers.⁴⁵ The collusion of national and local authorities in enforcing the colour line contrasted with the welcome African American troops received from much of the British public. In contrast to white GIs who many Britons considered overbearing, black servicemen earned respect for their modesty and politeness. As historians such as Sonya Rose have shown, despite the tough measures taken by police and magistrates against white women who fraternised with black GIs, the colour line proved little barrier to interracial sexual relationships. Establishment reaction to these romantic affairs reveals much about changing gender as well as racial dynamics, authorities fearing that with so many men serving in the military, women freed of conventional patriarchal controls would commit transgressions that threatened the social order.⁴⁶ Sexual relations between black soldiers and white women tested British racial tolerance to its limits. In a moving account of two thousand or so mixed-race children born through these relationships, Lucy Bland observes how British authorities considered transporting them overseas to African American adoptive parents but backed away from this policy because of the harm it would cause to their country’s liberal reputation. Bland’s narrative, which also reveals the deep-rooted revulsion of many ordinary Britons towards interracial relationships, is a sobering riposte to the traditionally sanctimonious British criticism of American racism.⁴⁷

Expanding on the analysis of a racially reactionary British state, my article ‘Reluctant Partners: African Americans and the Origins of the Special Relationship’ considers the profound scepticism with which black authors and activists responded to Churchill’s proposal in his famous ‘Sinews of Peace’ speech in March 1946 for a permanent alliance between ‘the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States’. It shows how many African Americans perceived Churchill as a racist intent on preserving white global hegemony and suppressing the democratic aspirations of persons of colour. That conviction stemmed in part from his opposition to extending the democratic principles of the Atlantic Charter, the statement of Allied war aims produced by Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt in August 1941, to all people, including British colonial subjects demanding the right to national self-determination. African Americans interpreted the ‘special relationship’ as a cynical attempt by the British government to secure US support for an exploitative empire that it could no longer afford.⁴⁸

Post-war politics

The marginalisation of African American dissenters from the foreign policy-making process raises the issue of whether, taking a cue from Alexander Deconde, we should see the ‘special relationship’ as a racialised project led by and for white elites on both sides of the Atlantic. Churchill’s advocacy of unity between the English-speaking nations certainly contained an appeal to racial and ethnic identity that had its roots in the Anglo-Saxon supremacist ideology of the nineteenth century.

Most scholars would nonetheless conclude that the Cold War alliance between Britain and the United States came about primarily because of their common purpose in the protection and promotion of western liberal democracy. However, a small number of revisionist studies have suggested that race was of more enduring influence than scholars commonly suppose. The racism that infused ideas of an Anglo-American world order was most virulent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet, as these scholarly reevaluations show, it retained a residual influence on British and American foreign policy during and beyond the Second World War. Political scientist Inderjeet Parmar emphasises racism as an essential element of the liberal internationalism espoused by post-war governments in London and Washington. Using a case study of the Korean War, Parmar asserts that the racist and imperialist ideologies of the Attlee and Truman administrations informed their decision to intervene in the Korean conflict and the subsequent direction of military strategy. Assumptions about the superiority of their own Anglo-Saxon civilisation imbued both governments with a ‘presumed right to intervene globally and use disproportionate illegal military violence against “lesser” peoples’.⁴⁹ Parmar has also pushed this line of analysis in an article co-written with Mark Ledwidge on non-governmental organisations such as Chatham House and the Council on Foreign Relations. According to Ledwidge and Parmar, these institutions adopted a policy of ‘race silence’, eschewing anachronistic language about the civilising mission of the Anglo-Saxon peoples while pursuing an agenda organised around that very principle. Liberal internationalism, in short, is little more than the old rags of racism and imperialism dressed up in new finery.⁵⁰

Parmar’s thesis is a provocative corrective to the common erasure of race from analyses of Anglo-American foreign policy. Future studies will need to reckon with his contention that post-war liberal internationalism represented less historical change than a rebranding of the old racial imperialism. Nevertheless, such an interpretation could be criticised as overly deterministic. To take Parmar’s own example of the Korean War, the British government might have promptly aligned itself with Washington but it did so with misgivings and for complicated reasons, including concern that failure to do so could undercut Marshall Aid and the US contribution to western defence.⁵¹ Nor did the Attlee government agree with the United States on the conduct of the war, not least the prospect of using atomic weaponry. Transatlantic tensions during the conflict suggest the common vision of an Anglo-American world order had lost much of its focus.

Scholars nonetheless need to assess more thoroughly the persistence of racial and imperialist thought in the formulation of post-war foreign policy. Peter Harris has made a particularly important conceptual and methodological contribution to this commonly overlooked matter.⁵² Harris applies the developing trend to ‘decolonise’ academic curricula specifically to Anglo-American relations. He criticises the ‘state-centrism’ of most scholarship on the special relationship because it omits the opinions and experiences of individuals and organisations outside of government.⁵³ Harris uses a case study of Diego Garcia, an island in British Indian Ocean Territory, to show how decentring the role of the state broadens our understanding of historical events. Between 1968 and 1973, the British government forcibly expelled the indigenous Chagossian population of Diego Garcia to allow construction of a US military base on the island. Harris observes that scholars have told this story from the perspective of state relations between Britain and the United States but not of the ordinary men, women and children who suffered this enforced displacement. His article therefore recovers ‘the experiences of the subaltern’ by assessing the impact of British and American policy at ground level. The readiness of both governments to prioritise their own interests over the emotional and material wellbeing of the islanders leads Harris to conclude that, ‘It was imperialism that delivered the Chagos Islands to Anglo-American hands and it was through imperialist means—that is, the creation of a formal colony and the inhuman expulsion of the island’s native inhabitants—that Diego Garcia was made ready for use by the US military.’⁵⁴ Beyond the terrible events that are the particular focus of the article, Harris has identified a broader issue about the role of non-state actors that future scholarship on Anglo-American relations (and diplomacy more generally) must address.

Scholars have only scratched the surface in assessing the persistence of racism and imperialism in post-war foreign policy. They have nonetheless discovered riches by boring deeply into the transatlantic dimensions of black political activism. This research has revealed how the US freedom struggle shaped both grassroots protest and government policy in Britain. Throughout the nineteenth century, crusading African Americans such as Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells came to Britain to mobilise international support for their own fight against racism. Tours of Britain during the 1960s by black civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael, by contrast, had a catalytic impact on anti-racist activism in the UK.⁵⁵ The adoption and adaptation of African American ideologies and strategies was only moderately successful because of differences in the political dynamics of Britain and the United States, not least the absence of legalised discrimination on this side of the Atlantic.⁵⁶ Connecting their own struggle for equality with the larger campaign for civil rights in the United States—made all the more possible in an era of satellite communications and increased transatlantic travel—nonetheless imbued Britain’s small racial and ethnic minority population with a sense of belonging to a broader global movement.⁵⁷

The ties between US and UK activists adhered to the asymmetry of the broader relationship between their countries. While British campaigners usually emulated their American counterparts, there was some cross-pollination between the two. Paul Stephenson, a black community organiser inspired by the Montgomery bus boycott to lead a similar campaign against discrimination on public transport in Bristol during 1963, in turn accepted an invitation from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to address black audiences in the United States.⁵⁸ On the opposing political side, British Conservative MP Enoch Powell also became a standard-bearer to segregationists in the American South following his notorious ‘Rivers of Blood’ anti-immigration speech of April 1968.⁵⁹

This research on the interconnectedness of civil rights campaigns, not only in Britain and the United States but also around the world, provides an important historical context for the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement. Established in the United States, its spread to other countries including Britain demonstrates a diasporic identity among black activists that transcends national boundaries.⁶⁰

Conclusion

In 1976, H.C. Allen and Roger Thompson commemorated the bicentennial of the American Declaration of Independence with a collection of essays on Anglo-American relations. The book’s title, Contrast and Connection, perfectly captured the complexity of that history, but its content less so. The thirteen chapters included discussions of such issues as gender, religion and trade, but nothing on race and ethnicity.⁶¹ Were a comparable book to appear in 2020 as a tribute to the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower’s transatlantic voyage, such an omission would be surprising. A rising flow of scholarship is now turning the once relatively arid topic of Anglo-American ethnicity and race into increasingly fertile territory.

That literature nonetheless still needs to be integrated into the broader narrative of British and American interaction. To take one example, Robin Kelley and Stephen Tuck titled their recent anthology of essays on the transatlantic dimension of black civil rights The Other Special Relationship. That title suggests that racial issues ran only in parallel with other aspects of Anglo-American relations. What we therefore need is a more cohesive and integrated narrative that allows us to see how the fight for racial equality was influenced by, and in turn impacted on, the wider ties between Britain and the United States.⁶²

There are also many aspects of race and ethnic relations that merit further research. Suggestive examples include Anglo-American policy towards apartheid South Africa, the influence of African American popular culture on Britain, the interrelationship of immigration policy, and the collusion of the British and American governments in upholding rights of national sovereignty to undermine the United Nations’ human rights agenda. Further case studies are also needed to assess the claims made by Inderjeet Parmar and Peter Harris about the enduring role of racism and imperialism in shaping post-war foreign policy.

For any reader still unconvinced of the need for greater focus on race and ethnicity, contemporary events underline their enduring relevance. Then mayor of London and future prime minister Boris Johnson’s criticism of Barack Obama for his intervention in the Brexit debate as a ‘part-Kenyan President’ with an ‘ancestral dislike of the British Empire’ suggests a troubling conception among some members of the political right in this country about the relationship between racial heritage and American national identity.⁶³ The marriage of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle attracted press adulation as symbolic of the ‘special relationship’ between their countries. Subsequent discriminatory criticism of the biracial Markle nonetheless raises further issues about Anglo-American identity.⁶⁴ Discussion of strengthening the ‘Anglosphere’ as a means to solve the uncertainty caused by Britain’s departure from the European Union also evokes the historical rhetoric of racial Anglo-Saxonism, the idea of ‘Global Britain’ being a near synonym for nineteenth-century notions of ‘Greater Britain’.⁶⁵ Today’s headlines are tomorrow’s history and it will be fascinating to see how scholars incorporate these episodes into new and updated accounts of the transatlantic relationship.