Allies, enemies

A new history of the fluid, often-fraught relationship between Britain and America

This 1859 Punch cartoon is captioned ''What? You young Yankee-noodle, strike your own father!'' (''Old World, New World'')

Old World, New World: Great Britain and America From the Beginning
By Kathleen Burk
Atlantic Monthly, 797 pp., illustrated, $35

Once part of the British Empire, the United States now enfolds its former colonial master beneath the wings of its own empire (or hegemony, for those in denial), furnishing the United Kingdom with American weapons and expecting it to support US policy across the world, including invasions, with loyal rhetoric and even soldiery. What a reversal of fortune, in the space of a few hundred years.

Why, then, has it taken so long for a serious historian to come forward and chronicle that extraordinary turnabout? Kathleen Burk, an American from California who teaches history in London, has bravely taken up the challenge, for which historians and those of us who are transplants from one side of the ocean to the other will be truly grateful.

Whether the general reader will be so pleased, I take leave to doubt, now that I've read "Old World, New World." Writing such a history was a huge undertaking, and the nearly 800-page result is almost unreadable as a narrative, not because Burk cannot write readable English when she sets her mind to it, but because she clearly never sat down at the start and thought through who her audience was going to be. It's as if, having recognized the burning hole in academic historiography, she threw herself into the task of filling it, from the bottom to the top, before anyone else could either beat her to the finish line.

In this way, a third of the text is devoted to the quasi-"marriage" (as Burk calls it) from the early 1600s to 1795. It is a period that Burk apparently does not know well, and for which she has therefore slavishly relied on other historians to help her reconstruct. On every page their sentences appear, either anonymously quoted or introduced by name, as in: "As Kenneth R. Andrews has described," "As one historian has described him," "As Edmund S. Morgan has described it," "As Robert Bliss has pointed out," or "As Gordon Wood has pointed out . . . ." It is as if a young professor, before a faculty panel, has felt obliged to quote every historian present in order to get tenure.

Not only does the narrative become tediously second-hand, but the quotations themselves are almost invariably trite. Why in heaven's name doesn't Burk just tell the story, in her own words, with apt quotation from the period? we ask ourselves. When, after a hundred pages, Burk anonymously quoted a two-pages-long passage from Dr. Howard H. Peckham's 1964 account of a 1697 Indian raid, taken from his book "The Colonial Wars 1689-1762," I very nearly threw "Old World, New World" across the room. (I didn't, lest it hit my dog.) Dense, poorly shaped, and reliant on other historians for even the most mundane observations on Colonial history, it was a great disappointment.

And yet - good news! - if one is prepared to overlook the first third of the book, relating a period that is not the author's forte, a real treat is in store. We already know the discovery/settlement/independence story anyway. It is when the United States becomes its own country, makes peace, and embarks on its 200-year relationship with Britain as a sovereign nation that the story becomes fresh, original, and interestingly told. And what a story it is. In 1812 the United States actually dared to go to war with Britain, again, determined to seize Canada while Britain's back was turned, fighting Napoleon. "The acquisition of Canada this year," wrote Thomas Jefferson, "as far as the neighborhood of Quebec, will be a mere matter of marching, and will give us experience for the attack of Halifax the next, and the final expulsion of England from the American continent."

Well, as Burk - finally abandoning the accounts of her peers - chronicles, it didn't work out that way. In fact, to give President James Madison a black eye, the British even raided Washington, D.C., and burned the White House. How peace came, how the 19th century unfolded in trade, cultural interchange, and military rivalry, is engagingly told, with many a fact and insight the general reader will likely not know. I, for one, was unaware that the British War Office drew up, during Grover Cleveland's presidency, a war plan to defend Canada against US attack - by attacking America. "In retrospect, it looks a bit batty," Burk comments, having at last found her own tart tongue: "Three British army corps were to invade the US from three directions, one to march from Montreal, and the other two to land at Boston and New York" - with support from an Indian uprising!

Thanks to her overlong Colonial prelude, unfortunately, Burk has all too little space in which to tell the rest of her story, covering the 20th and 21st centuries. She therefore takes her narrative at high speed, with no attempt to interview the many still-living figures who have watched the marriage unfold (or deteriorate) in recent years.

The last part of the book thus has a somewhat rushed, superficial feel to it. We get Prime Minister Tony Blair changing his coat to pander to a new president, on the advice of Bill Clinton, but little sense of the true heartache that accompanied Britain's submission. (My own brother, a senior journalist, threw me out of his London club, railing at "your president.")

It is a rich and complex story, but one that isn't over, and will be retold, I imagine, by other historians in the future. All credit, then, to Burk for starting that process.

Nigel Hamilton is writing a history of the last 12 presidents, "American Caesars." He is a senior fellow in the John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.