In the summer of 1913, the newly appointed US ambassador to Great Britain, Walter Hines Page, wrote to a friend back in Washington: “These English are spending their capital… what are we going to do with the leadership of the world presently when it clearly falls into our hands?” Page was an Anglophile, but he saw that the realignment was already happening, as America’s huge natural resources and new-found economic might allowed it to replace Britain’s dwindling empire. In 1930, the American journalist Ludwell Denny summed up his country’s approach to imperialism: “Too wise to govern the world, we shall merely own it.” Denny believed capitalism would enable the US to take over other countries without ever needing to invade: “What chance has Britain got against America?” he asked.
Nowhere has America asserted its economic dominance more strongly than in Britain, where around two million people now work for US companies. Tens of billions of dollars per year are transferred across the Atlantic in the form of dividends paid on the proceeds of British work, conducted on behalf of American owners. A jaunty little map on the Office for National Statistics website gives the good news that our goods exports to America actually outweigh our imports by a few billion. Go, Global Britain! But a less accessible chart, found in the deeper reaches of the website of the American tax authority, the IRS, tells a different story: in 2020 (the latest year on record) the revenue recorded by American companies in the UK was over $707bn, more than ten times the amount made in the entire continent of Africa. In 2019, large US corporations made an (aggregated) profit of £2,500 from every household in the UK.
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