Book Review

A compilation of fifteen essays covering the period from the American Revolution to the 1990s, Anglo-American Attitudes seeks to divert the story of Anglo-American relations from a traditional, twentieth-century, diplomatic focus. Its contributing authors and editors, all senior scholars well known in British studies, consider topics ranging from the end of salutary neglect in the colonies to the political power of Irish Americans to the waxing and waning of trade and finance between Britain and the United States. Unfortunately, while the quality of some of the essays is excellent, in others the case for a comparative framework is lacking, the research is not firmly based in primary sources, or the focus is so specific that it holds little relevance for a wider audience.

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The best essays consider British self-presentation over the long term; this could have been the theme of a more tightly constructed volume. Eliga Gould finds the surrender of Gen. John Burgoyne at Saratoga in 1777 to have been the moment in which the British came to regard a portion of British North America as a separate nation. The Revolutionary War taught the British an important lesson: that parliamentary supremacy could not be enforced abroad, nor could onerous taxes be collected in the colonies as at home. Paul Langford describes the ensuing early American republic as a time of cultural instability, during which the British and Americans painted each other as having drastically different manners and morals. As he shows, most Americans were at least as genteel as the middle-class parvenus who traveled to the United States to snipe about its inhabitants.

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