Abstract
Reviewed by: Robert Bothwell (bothwell@chass.utoronto.ca ), University of Toronto, Canada
About 30 years ago, the distinguished Yale historian Paul Kennedy published a work on the rise and fall of great powers. It tapped into the rich vein of pessimism and dread that ran through the study of international relations at the time, for the Cold War was still a going concern, and all kinds of illusions fluttered, bat-like, around national security establishments. Soviet power still loomed, East Germany was a prosperous communist state, and the Soviet Union was a stable and accepted part of the international system. So, there was something powerful to dread, something that might supersede the West, and its leader, the United States.
Kennedy, a skilled and very learned historian, could draw on hundreds if not thousands of years of history, as the question of why one nation rose and another fell—and the conflicts that this process engendered—went as far back as Thucydides’ analysis of the wars between Athens and Sparta in the 5th century BCE, while the 18th-century historian Edward Gibbon chronicled The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, while worrying, as a member of the British Parliament, about the fragmentation of the British Empire during the American Revolution. Wars and civil wars adjusted the balance of power, as one country rose, and another fell.
The political scientist Kori Schake has produced a book that analyzes the recession of the British Empire around the end of the 19th century, and its replacement by the United States during the 20th. It was, she argues, a unique event in the history of declines and falls, because it was peaceful. The United States and Great Britain had not had a war since the Treaty of Ghent—which Schake places in 1815 (it was signed 24 December 1814)—which brought an end to the War of 1812. She then rehearses various Anglo-American connections and confrontations over the next 150 years, all of them familiar to historians of Anglo-American relations, funnelled into historical bites for the instruction of her political science readers. Nothing wrong with that, of course, and nothing new either. History is generational, and so is political science, and if Schake chooses to follow the path pioneered by Bradford Perkins, and open his arguments to a new generation, so much the better.
History and political science may be fraternal disciplines, but sometimes they follow different roadmaps. History has the annoying habit of going one step beyond. Schake retraces some of these steps—for example, in the region of cultural similarity—but she does not give them their due, or their context, which is bigger than she is prepared to allow. When the treaties concluding the Revolutionary War were being signed in Paris, a French minister gloated to a British diplomat over the loss of America to the British Empire. The Briton acknowledged the fact, but added that, independence or no, the Americans all spoke English.
The Revolutionary War had effects that went beyond simple independence for the United States. It convinced later generations of British generals, like the Duke of Wellington, that there was no point in plunging into the depth of the continent in search of victory, for victory would never amount to conquest. Asked if he would take command of the British army in North America in 1814, Wellington demurred. War would do no good: 1783 had demonstrated that fact. Better make peace, and turn to Britain’s real interests, which, as far as the duke was concerned, were elsewhere. Repeatedly, over the next 60 years, the British followed the duke’s advice, culminating in the Treaty of Washington of 1871, an act of explicit appeasement. And after 1871, they just kept going. The reader will look in vain for the Treaty of Washington in Schake’s index.
For the whole of this period, the British Empire included a significant piece of real estate in North America, inhabited by millions of British subjects. Historians and political scientists who deal with great events on the grand scale usually treat Canada as “noises off.” And yet, Canada—the existence of Canada—is an exception in US foreign relations. Canadians spoke English, mostly. They sounded like Americans. They looked like (white) Americans. They were not objects of predation, unlike Mexico, or Cuba, or Santo Domingo. It does no injustice to Schake to note that she has not seriously considered the significance of Canada in Anglo-American relations.
Schake’s book must remain a curiosity, a case study in and of itself. Oscar Wilde once observed that Britain and the United States were divided by a common language. The same is true of political science and history, at least as presented by Kori Schake.