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Americanizing Britain
Modernist Literature & Culture
Kevin J. H. Dettmar & Mark Wollaeger, Series Editors

Consuming Traditions Criminal Ingenuity

Elizabeth Outka Ellen Levy

Machine-Age Comedy Modernism’s Mythic Pose

Michael North Carrie J. Preston

The Art of Scandal Pragmatic Modernism

Sean Latham Lisi Schoenbach

The Hypothetical Mandarin Unseasonable Youth

Eric Hayot Jed Esty

Nations of Nothing But Poetry World Views

Matthew Hart Jon Hegglund

Modernism & Copyright Americanizing Britain

Paul K. Saint-Amour Genevieve Abravanel

Accented America
Joshua L. Miller
Americanizing
Britain
The Rise of Modernism in the Age
of the Entertainment Empire

Genevieve Abravanel

1
3
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electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
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ISBN 978-0-19-9754458

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Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper
 Contents

Series Editors’ Foreword vii

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 1
1. Ameritopias: Transatlantic Fictions of England’s Future 24
2. Jazzing Britain: The Transatlantic Jazz Invasion and
the Remaking of Englishness 53
3. The Entertainment Empire: Britain’s Hollywood between the Wars 85
4. English by Example: F.R. Leavis and the Americanization
of Modern England 110
5. Make It Old: Inventing Englishness in Four Quartets 131
Afterword 157

Notes 165
Index 197

v
This page intentionally left blank
 Series Editors’ Foreword

There are many things we love about editing the Modernist Literature & Culture
series: one of those is nicely represented in Genevieve Abravanel’s Americanizing
Britain: The Rise of Modernism in the Age of the Entertainment Empire. To wit: it’s
a thrill to encounter the work of new scholars in modernist studies, and to allow
their work to mess with your head.
For us, the central paradox of Americanizing Britain is this: if Abravanel’s claim
is correct—if much about British modernism can be understood only by restoring
the dynamic relationship of British and American to those various other vectors
along which we’ve become used to performing our analyses (high vs. low, art vs.
entertainment, center vs. margin)—then surely we would have known of it before
now. A claim as bold as this is almost certain not to prove out.
But when it does . . . well, it’s a beautiful thing; and for that reason, this is a beautiful
book. In it, Abravanel unravels, with extraordinary patience and clarity, the absolutely
articulate (if largely unconscious) history of twentieth-century British culture’s simul-
taneous invention and demonization of “the American Age.” The “Americanizing”
trope from her title is not her coinage, it turns out, but instead floated through British
cultural discourse in the early decades of the twentieth century to identify a force
akin to what Matthew Arnold had, a half-century earlier, dubbed “Philistinism.”
“Early twentieth-century British writers, scholars, and commentators,” Abravanel
explains, “had a name for what was happening to England and the world: they called
it ‘Americanisation.’ ” Arnold had spotted it “on the French coast,” whereas Kipling
and Wells and Woolf and Leavis saw it instead across the Atlantic: but both genera-
tions understood themselves as standing on “a darkling plain / Swept with confused
alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night.”

vii
viii SERIES EDITORS’ FOREWORD

As Abravanel unfolds her tale, Britain’s fear of Americanization is seemingly

everywhere. It’s bound up intimately, if secretly, with its fears of loss of empire,
with “a collapse from Britishness to Englishness, a shift from imperial confidence
to pride in local customs and national traditions.” And as Britain lost her grip on
her empire, and was poised to shrink from Great Britain to a modest, nostalgically
reduced state of “merrie England,” so she began reactively to identify imperial-
ism in the form of American popular entertainment—what Abravanel calls the
American Entertainment Empire. Hence the oft-voiced fears that “England was
being colonized internally by American cinema” or—even worse—that Britain’s
own colonies were being recolonized by the American “talkies,” putting, as
Abravanel writes, “England in the role of colony to America’s new media empire.”
In another era, such nefarious influence might have been troped in terms of viral
infection; during the Cold War, it would likely have manifested in fantasies of zom-
bie takeover. Abravanel quotes from a rather fantastic speech given in the House
of Commons in 1927: “We have several million people, mostly women, who, to all
intents and purposes, are temporary American citizens.” He was talking, of course,
about American movies, but not Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
One of the admirable features of Americanizing Britain is the way that Abravanel
draws from both canonical and noncanonical texts and treats a wide range of writ-
ers, including those conventionally considered “minor,” to illustrate her thesis.
H. G. Wells and Rudyard Kipling are both put in the dock, and testify as vividly
as Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, or the editors of Close Up to the pervasive fear of
Americanization. Wells actually championed a version of Americanization—what
he referred to as “The United States of Everywhere”—as an antidote to the retro-
gressive embrace of an ersatz Englishness he saw taking hold. This kind of pro-
posal Abravanel reads under the banner of “Ameritopia,” a distinctive thread in the
texts she explores; somewhat surprisingly, she finds Woolf, in an essay written for
the American Cosmopolitan magazine, one of its breathless exponents. Breathless
but not guileless: “Woolf can write so cunningly about the United States without
ever needing to visit,” Abravanel points out, “because as she well understands, by
the late thirties Ameritopia exists nowhere so potently as in the British imagina-
tion.” In the discourse of Americanization, we learn, what matters is not so much
the “actual” effect of American cultural production on an embattled British way of
life, but instead British perceptions of that impact.
Abravanel’s treatment of the Leavises, especially F. R., is one of the book’s real
treats, as she seeks to understand the response of English criticism to the men-
ace posed by the American Century. What she discovers is that “Leavis’s influen-
tial role in the development of English as a discipline follows from his desire to
 SERIES EDITORS’ FOREWORD ix

design a field of study that would save England from Americanization.” She even
suggests—though it’s left at the level of suggestion—that literary studies in the
United States itself imbibed Leavis’s fear of Americanization, a type of literary
self-loathing that must have taken a toll on the shape and trajectory of U. S. lit-
erary study. Most surprising of all—though we’ll leave you to read the details
yourself—Abravanel shows how the British “anti-Leavis,” Richard Hoggart, foun-
der of the Birmingham School of cultural studies, himself replicates Leavis’s anti-
Americanism.
For us, the book’s most surprising argument, and the one most likely to pro-
voke response, is Abravanel’s reading of Four Quartets as a poem of beginnings
and endings that silently elides . . . well, the United States. This closing chapter
demonstrates most fully the heuristic power of Abravanel’s critical lens; “In Four
Quartets,” she argues, “Eliot resolves the dilemma between modern Britain and
the United States by refusing them both, returning instead to the moment in colo-
nial history when America was part of Great Britain. In so doing, Four Quartets
produces a specifically transatlantic nostalgia that recalls the golden age of British
imperialism through its colonial relationship with America.” It’s a tour de force
reading of a poem that’s been much read—but never quite like this.
When a book articulates a thesis with this kind of analytical power, it seems
almost to generate its own examples and case studies: one puts down the book
still wearing its lenses, and looks at English modernism altogether anew. The most
charming example of this comes in the book’s brief Afterword, and we won’t spoil
that lagniappe further than to say that its deft reading of the novels of J. K. Rowling
absolutely “gets” the Harry Potter phenomenon, while at the same time present-
ing the most convincing argument to date for its curious force. For we Americans
still carry a strong strain of Anglophilia, of course, and that same English cul-
ture, in its twentieth-century variety, is formed around an irritant grain of
anti-Americanism.

Kevin J. H. Dettmar
and
Mark Wollaeger
This page intentionally left blank
 Acknowledgments

A long project such as this one incurs many debts. It started at Duke, under the
guidance of a fantastic committee. Toril Moi gave generously of her tremendous
talent, reading countless drafts with precision and rigor. She has earned my lasting
gratitude. Ian Baucom introduced me to Atlantic Studies and helped me to see how
my work might transform assumptions in that field and others. I learned much from
his ease with complexity. I am extremely grateful to Michael Moses for his encyclo-
pedic knowledge and generous insights as well as to Houston Baker for inspiration.
Thanks are also due to the fabulous Kathy Psomiades and my wonderful peers, espe-
cially the gang-of-three: Lili Hsieh, Amy Carroll, and Julie Chun Kim. Special thanks
to Jené Schoenfeld, who remains a superb interlocutor and treasured friend.
My new home at Franklin & Marshall College introduced me to support-
ive, inspiring colleagues: Patrick Bernard, Katie Ford, Tamara Goeglein, Kabi
Hartman, Emily Huber, Peter Jaros, Padmini Mongia, Nick Montemarano, Judith
Mueller, Patricia O’Hara, Jeff Steinbrink, and Anton Ugolnick. Emily Huber, Kabi
Hartman, and Giovanna Faleschini Lerner in particular went above and beyond to
encourage the book’s final revisions.
Across the academy, collegiality of the best sort has come from Paul Saint-
Amour, Jessica Berman, Jim English, Michael Tratner, Priscilla Wald, Jed Esty,
Brian Richardson, Peter Mallios, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Amardeep Singh, Rebecca
Wanzo, Sonita Sarker, Mary Lou Emery, Judith Brown, Melba Cuddy-Keane, and
Douglas Taylor. I also want to thank Gail Potter and Jennifer Davis for their friend-
ship throughout these many years of writing.
This work greatly benefited from the support of the American Academy of
University Women, the NEH Summer Stipend Program, the Penn Humanities

xi
xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Forum, and the Franklin & Marshall College Faculty Research Fund. Thanks
as well to Rita Barnard and Demi Kurz who, under the auspices of the Gender,
Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program at Penn, offered me space to write at
a crucial moment in the project’s development. In addition, I feel fortunate to
have had the opportunity to discuss some of the book’s central ideas at Modernist
Studies Association conferences over the years; those conversations have been
integral to what follows.
At F&M, Andrew Yager was an outstanding, meticulous research assistant and
research librarian Scott Vine came through in a pinch. I would also like to thank
the librarians at the British Film Institute and the British Library for their assis-
tance. A portion of chapter 3 first appeared in Modernist Cultures 5 (2010) and an
earlier, partial version of chapter 4 in Modernism/Modernity 15, no. 4 (2008). I
thank the editors of these journals for permission to reprint.
Mark Wollaeger and Kevin Dettmar are superlative series editors; it has been
a true pleasure to work with them both. Thanks, Mark, for talking shop with
me whenever I needed it. Shannon McLachlan and Brendan O’Neill at Oxford
University Press are at once rigorous and humane. I couldn’t have asked for bet-
ter. I would also like to thank the anonymous readers whose detailed remarks
informed and improved the finished book.
Last but never least: my family. I am grateful to Fred and Nancy Abt for their
love and belief in me, always delivered with humor and grace. Bessie Abravanel at
104 years of age continues to inspire me. I would like to thank my father, Eugene
Abravanel, for modeling academic rigor and for bringing a capacious curiosity to
every topic of conversation. To my mother, Wendy Abt, who has been there for
me throughout the writing of this book and beyond: there are no words to express
how grateful I am. It is a blessing to be your daughter. To my husband, Johnny, let
me here mark the enduring delight I feel at having you in my life. You are the best
decision I ever made. And to Joshua, you arrived at the very end of this project, to
make everything sweet.
Americanizing Britain
This page intentionally left blank
 Introduction

Take up the White Man’s burden!

Have done with childish days

—Rudyard Kipling, “The White Man’s Burden,” 18991

The old Edwardian brigade do make their brief little world look pretty tempting. All home-
made cakes and croquet . . . Always the same picture: high summer, the long days in the sun,
slim volumes of verse, crisp linen, the smell of starch. If you’ve no world of your own, it’s
rather pleasing to regret the passing of someone else’s. But I must say it’s pretty dreary living
in the American Age—unless you’re an American, of course. Perhaps all our children will be
American. That’s a thought, isn’t it?

—John Osborne, Look Back in Anger, 19562

In John Osborne’s landmark 1956 play, Look Back in Anger, the shopkeeper, Jimmy
Porter, is struck by a disquieting thought. England, he reflects, is now living in the
“American Age”—so much so that the next generation of English children may
simply turn out to be Americans.3 Yet only a few decades earlier, at the beginning
of the century, many in Britain believed their nation to be the dominant world
power, the empire on which the sun never set, and a highly developed society
in contrast to which, in Rudyard Kipling’s phrase, the United States appeared
“childish.” It is worth asking how, in roughly half a century, Britain managed the
transition from Kipling’s imperial confidence to Osborne’s grim defeatism. How
did the storyline shift from Britain’s worldly predominance to its minor role in a
global American Age? Who told the stories that made up the shift, and how were

1
2 AMERICANIZING BRITAIN

they told? Moreover, given that literary modernism came of age during this time,
how have these stories not become much more familiar to literary critics, and how
has Britain’s invention of the American Age not become a common feature of
the field?
To return, for a moment, to Jimmy Porter. What Jimmy laments, in backhanded
fashion, is a world that has already been lost, a world of cakes and croquet, of the
upper crust, and the empire. By midcentury, with the so-called high summer of
British imperial supremacy chilled by the Cold War, such stories abounded of the
displacement of Britain by its former colony across the Atlantic. These stories told
of the rise of American capitalism and a shift in financial prowess from London
to New York. They told of a world learning to speak American slang and placing
their faith in the dollar rather than the pound. They told of the deluge of American
mass entertainment—Hollywood movies and jazz recordings—even into the most
rustic pockets of the English countryside. And in tones variously elegiac, bitter,
and hopeful, they told of the end of England and the demise of the empire with the
coming of this new American epoch.
The most apparent crux of these stories was the transition from the height of
British imperial power to the dawn of the American Century. Still, the question
arises, how can anyone tell the story of the passing of one age into the next, par-
ticularly if an age is the kind of thing made up of stories in the first place? In
Jimmy’s case, he looks ahead to the generation that will be born into the brave
new world of American pleasures, leisures, and commodities. At the same time,
as Osborne’s title implies, in order to tell of the present and future, Jimmy must
look back. Jimmy’s backward gaze takes him to the early twentieth century, to
the precipitous decades when the coming of this American Age seemed at once
impossible and inevitable. Such a backward glance provokes its own questions.
How did the early twentieth century experience this epic shift? In what ways did
this shift alter diverse British conceptions of their role in the world and their cul-
ture at home? Why did that unusual practice of storytelling, literary modernism,
come into its own at the beginning of the American Century? How did the shift
itself lessen the chance that literary scholars would tell its story? If we look back,
what will we find?
The answers will take us not only through literary modernism but also direct our
gaze toward the rise of literary studies itself. After all, English studies in its modern
form took root at the university during the early twentieth century. Developing
concurrently as they did, literary modernism and English studies might be
deemed separated at birth, their morphologies reflected in each other in relational
and inverse fashion—fraternal twins born under the sign of the narrative of the
 INTRODUCTION 3

American Age. While this study will not be a history of our discipline, I will along
the way briefly consider the stories we have told ourselves, as well as our attempts
to escape what we thought we knew, namely, Anglo-American modernism. I do
not wish to reinstate Anglo-American modernism as a central figure but rather
to unpack it, to suggest that it remains a blind spot rather than a known quan-
tity, such that our very attempts to escape it remain tacitly, even invisibly, guided
by it. Increasingly in recent years, modernist criticism has taken important and
vast strides beyond an undifferentiated Anglo-American modernism to consider
transatlantic influence and exchange.4 Such work takes part in what Doug Mao
and Rebecca Walkowitz identified in 2008 as the “transnational turn” in modern-
ist studies; that is, a movement away from nation-based epistemologies toward an
interest in other networks of connection. Nonetheless, modernist studies remains
tethered to the Anglo-American model, even its modes of resistance, in part
because the elements of the imagined transition from Britain to America—ideas of
high and low, of art and entertainment, of language and nation—were there from
the beginning, helping to constitute what we now know as literary studies.
At the same time, the story of the Americanization of Britain is a transnational
tale—and not only transatlantic—insofar as British anxieties about American
influence participated in, and contributed to, conceptions of Britain’s imperial
scope and what it meant to have or be an empire. Rather than focusing primarily
on artistic influence, shared artistic movements, or the migrations of individual
writers—what might be deemed a model of transatlantic plenitude—I situate key
texts and narratives within the broader cultural field of Americanization. This
broader field in its turn allows me to consider that which studies of exchange and
influence tend not to foreground; namely, the negative reactions and anxieties that
narratives of Americanization often embody and provoke. Americanizing Britain
is not a cultural history of Anglo-American relations nor of British responses to
American mass culture. Rather, it is an exploration of how Britain reinvented itself
in relation to its ideas of America, and how Britain’s literary modernism developed
and changed through this reinvention.

Americanization

Early twentieth-century British writers, scholars, and commentators had a name

for what was happening to England and the world: they called it “Americanisation.”
Americanization (along with cognates such as the French “américanisation”) was
the neologism of the century in part because it seemed to name the century’s
4 AMERICANIZING BRITAIN

profound transformation. As a rough synonym for standardization or what

F. R. Leavis called “levelling down,” Americanization generally referred to the rise
and spread of American-style capitalism and the mass entertainment that often
followed in its wake.5 After the First World War, jazz music spread contagiously
throughout Britain’s cities and countryside at the same time that Hollywood films
began to dominate their homegrown counterparts in British cinemas. Hollywood
films in particular became such a ubiquitous feature of daily life that cultural critics
lamented the extent to which England was being colonized internally by American
cinema. To some, Americanization seemed capable of fulfilling Jimmy Porter’s
prophecy: turning the English into Americans, or at least into rampant, mindless
consumers of American goods and media. Even more pervasively, Americanization
seemed a subtraction, an erasure of cultural specificity and the history that pro-
duced it. During the interwar period, the United States was slowly becoming syn-
onymous with the “modern,” leading the British Empire—historically viewed as a
vanguard of progress—to begin to seem old-fashioned and poised to decline.
Such an equation of America with the modern was not only a British dilemma.
European responses to Americanization are revealing both for their consonances
with and their differences from those in Britain. The very term “Americanization”
can be traced back to an early and even a progenitive moment in the development
of European modernism. Charles Baudelaire, often considered a direct ancestor
of modernist writing, is also often given credit for coining the term “américanisa-
tion.” In a grim prophecy, Baudelaire referred to the modern age as “the period
we shall next be entering, of which the beginning is marked by the supremacy
of America and industry.”6 Philippe Roger, who has called Baudelaire “the torch
bearer of resistance to Americanization,” noted how Baudelaire’s thinking pro-
gressed from the image of reprehensible “Americanized” individuals to a nightmare
vision of collective Americanization.7 As Baudelaire wrote in 1861, “so far will
machinery have Americanized us, so far will Progress have atrophied in us all that
is spiritual, that no dream of the Utopians, however bloody . . . will be comparable
to the result.”8 Although Baudelaire famously celebrated decadence and decline,
he conceived of the rise of America as the death of humanity. The concept “améri-
canisation” thus served Baudelaire as a diagnosis of the particular malady of the
modern condition.
Baudelaire’s fervent resistance to Americanization foreshadows the posi-
tions of twentieth-century European intellectuals such as the Frankfurt-school
theorist Theodor Adorno and the French social commentator André Siegfried.
These European responses signaled the widespread character of conceptions
of Americanization while ultimately revealing the singular nature of Britain’s
 INTRODUCTION 5

relationship to its former colony. Whereas Adorno feared for the fate of art in
the age of what he saw as a largely American “culture industry,” Siegfried, in
widely reprinted and translated works such as America Comes of Age (1927) and
Europe’s Crisis (1935), played on circulating fears that the United States might sup-
plant Europe in worldwide stature and influence.9 According to Siegfried, “To
America the advent of the new order is a cause for pride, but to Europe it brings
heart-burnings and regrets for a state of society that is doomed to disappear.”10
Siegfried’s “heart-burnings and regrets” reflect a belief that the economic strength
of the United States, often emblematized in the figure of Henry Ford, was setting
the stage for the destruction of Europe’s cherished values and traditions. Bertolt
Brecht echoed such sentiments, though from a distinctly political vantage point,
when in a 1929 poem referring to America’s “films” “records” and “chewing gum,”
he ironically noted that Americans seem “destined to rule the world by helping
it to progress.”11 At the same time, European support for the United States some-
times emerged from surprising quarters. For instance, the Italian Marxist Antonio
Gramsci lamented the “anti-Americanism . . . of the European petty bourgeois”
and wondered if Henry Ford’s methods might be turned to socialist ends.12 Ford’s
potential for socialism was taken with even greater seriousness in parts of the new
Soviet Union, where workers celebrated Ford and even occasionally named their
children after him.13
Although the British echoed the European range of attitudes about the threat or
promise of the United States, the Anglo-American situation was distinct. First, as
a former British colony, the United States represented a new, independent nation,
not bound by the Commonwealth, born out of the British Empire. The failure of
the British imperial project—or the possibility of its failure—was thus encoded
into the very existence of the United States. Additionally, it was the legacy of
British imperialism that Britain and the United States should have the great mis-
fortune, according to some, of sharing a language. To those for whom American
entertainment was becoming a global menace, the fact of a common language ren-
dered Britain and its empire particularly vulnerable markets for American music
and film. By viewing modern Britain in a transatlantic framework, it is possible to
move beyond the familiar pairing of metropole and colony to suggest that British
imperial anxieties not only emerged within the geographic bounds of empire but
were also roused by the idea of the United States.
Texts of the period variously represent the United States as colonizing the future,
interrupting British imperial teleologies of progress, and forcing redefinitions of
Britain’s place in the world. In some cases, these redefinitions entail a collapse from
Britishness to Englishness, that is, a shift from imperial confidence to pride in local
6 AMERICANIZING BRITAIN

customs and national traditions. This ideological shift marks a turn from the vision
of the vast and unshakeable British Empire toward a romanticized Englishness tied
to tradition and the past. While reactions to American influence varied greatly
throughout Britain—the working classes in Scotland and Wales, for instance, gen-
erally eschewed this romantic vision of Englishness, sometimes in favor of even
greater alliance with an imagined America—those writers and intellectuals with
connections to London found it hard to avoid the discourse of American threat
and English resistance. The rise of what some critics have called “little Englandism”
not only reflects British imperial decline but also the transatlantic comparison that
throws this decline into ever sharper relief.14 As a result, Englishness becomes a kind
of consolation prize for the anticipated loss of imperial supremacy, and the virtues
of the English past compensation for the ebbing power to produce the future.
The fictionality of this Englishness, and the impetus for its construction,
becomes especially clear in the reactions of those outside the London elite: the
English, Scotch, and Welsh working classes, especially the younger generation,
and in some cases, those looking at England from other parts of the empire. To the
extent that these groups tended (though never uniformly) to embrace American
entertainment and absorb aspects of its culture, they lent urgency to the invention
of Englishness as an imagined center. While the pages that follow often turn to this
dominant narrative of Englishness, the reader will also find persistent, if periodic,
reference to the modes of resistance, exclusions, and fragmentation that made
the consolidation of Englishness feel all the more necessary. After all, through-
out Britain, America’s rise to global power had its champions. British newspapers
widely cheered the victory of the United States in the Spanish-American War of
1898, viewing their former colony as a possible strategic ally. After the American
intervention in the First World War, such hopes appeared borne out. The very idea
of the United States, especially as embodied in the figure of Woodrow Wilson,
briefly but potently raised mass enthusiasm. And although they were in the minor-
ity, some intellectuals greeted America’s rise to world prominence as a boon. For
instance, H. G. Wells’s various rhapsodies to American progress as “the future”
contrast British social hierarchy to American democratic ideals.15 By the twenties,
Ford Madox Ford identifies the United States as more important than Europe to
Britain, claiming that “civilisation has become, quite integrally, a matter of what
goes backwards and forwards across the Atlantic.”16 Not only did British writers
such as Ford enjoy robust markets in the United States but, in the shadow of the
Second World War, an increasing number of writers such as W. H. Auden emi-
grated to America, in some cases adopting American citizenship, further compli-
cating their relationships to the United States.17
 INTRODUCTION 7

American Modernity, British Modernism,

and the Entertainment Empire

The broader context for British reactions to Americanization, part of what lent
them their weight and gravity, emerged through perceptions of an interwar shift
in fortunes from Great Britain to the United States. Scholars of this shift tend to
note its material markers: the dollar largely displaced the pound as the global cur-
rency of the moment, and the financial center began its migration from London
to New York.18 Whereas the United States had been in debt to Britain at the begin-
ning of the century, the First World War effectively reversed the situation.19 Britain
suddenly found itself literally in debt to its former colony at the same time that
the United States’ military intervention at the war’s end left Britain figuratively
indebted as well. Historians have documented this interwar shift from British
to American hegemony and sociologist Giovanni Arrighi has identified it as the
defining phenomenon of the twentieth century.20 Yet whereas Arrighi and others
tend to discuss the shift as a material phenomenon, I am more interested in its
imaginative dimensions. Along these lines, it is possible to frame the change in
Anglo-American relations as a paradigm shift in the sense proposed by Thomas
Kuhn.21 The paradigm shift is a useful model here because it does not intimate a
clean break or rupture but rather captures the accretion of change over time, gen-
erally accelerated by specific events, until a new world picture that once seemed
impossible comes to seem inevitable. In the case of British reactions to the rise of
the United States, the turning point can be roughly identified with the period fol-
lowing the First World War, a time when both material and psychic investments in
the United States underwent considerable change.
Before the war, even those who anticipated a rise in American power generally
imagined the United States would emulate British or European imperialism. Thus
when the United States announced its imperial project via the Spanish-American
War of 1898 and subsequent annexation of Cuba and the Philippines, many in
Britain imagined the United States was following Britain’s lead. In “The White
Man’s Burden” (1899), Kipling addresses a newly imperial United States with
the assumption that the younger nation has much to learn from Great Britain.
Yet increasingly in the years after the First World War, these earlier conceptions
of American power were changing. Whereas Kipling’s prewar model presents
American power as a weaker but essentially similar variant of British power, later
writers registered the shock of facing a new style of world power; one predicated
more obviously on global commercialism and standardization than on occupation
and colonial rule.
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