This is a question has been bothering me as someone who’s country was colonized by the British Empire. We were taught about it in schools and how it lost power over time but never how the USA came to take its place especially over such a short compared to the British Empire.
Because we came out on top at the end of WWII, but we were the main Allied nation whose country didn’t get blown to smithereens during the war due to being an ocean away. (Granted, neither was Australia but they were not and did not become a manufacturing powerhouse in the process.)
All of the European colonial powers lost a ton of their colonies either during or in the immediate aftermath of the second world war, especially the British empire. Australia is even included in that list, becoming independent in 1942. The rest looks like a who’s-who of former British colonies and protectorates, the most impactful and arguably the most famous being India in 1947. Also Jordan (1946), Myanmar/Burma (1948), Sri Lanka (1948), Israel (carved out of the British mandate of Palestine, also 1948), and many others in the intervening decades.
The Brits had to dedicate most of their military forces to fighting the war which left their various colonies undermanned. India’s independence in particular put into motion the expectation that all of these lands and protectorates could self-determine, and since Britain was A) broke, and B) imperialism was becoming progressively less socially acceptable in Europe, Britain let most of them go. Not least of which because they did not have the manpower to spend keeping those pesky natives down, nor did they have the money to spend paying anyone to do so for them.
America, meanwhile, built huge swathes of industrial capacity during the war which was all still there afterwards, owned significant amounts of debt from the various European powers from loans made and equipment provided before we entered the war fully, essentially owned Japan for a decade or two, and importantly did not suffer any damage to its own infrastructure, factories, or civilian populations due to being separated from both theaters of war by an entire ocean each.
TL;DR: Pretty much everyone involved in the war was left with a country made of rubble and ashes in varying degrees, except the US.
TL;DR: Pretty much everyone involved in the war was left with a country made of rubble and ashes in varying degrees…
… and massive, massive financial debt to the US. America’s assistance during the war wasn’t free, it came with repayment terms which (in the UK’s case at least) crippled economies to America’s benefit.
There’s a host of factors, I’ll try to outline the ones I can think off off the top of my head
- Industrial base: The UK was bombed during WWII, the US was not. That gave the US a production advantage.
- Natural Resources: The UK was dependent upon many resources from their empire while the US was using a lot of their own domestic resources for production.
- Decolonialization: the UK’s resource base, as mentioned in the last point, were largely seeking independence in the wake of the war. The US brand of imperialism was more economic in nature than political so they didn’t have the same issue.
- Population: it’s tough to outproduce a nation that’s 3x the size (UK pop was about 50 million in 1950; the US was roughly 150 million)
- The Marshall plan. It’s hard to overstate how much of a boon rebuilding Europe was for the American economy.
- Debt: military goods aren’t cheap. The UK sourced a ton of war material from the US. I just looked it up; the UK made its final WW2 debt payment to the US in 2006. Sheesh!
not the UK who histrionically dominated most of it
I’m sure “histrionically” is a typo, but it still kind of works.
Because there were two world wars that mainly took place in Europe. America was never subjected to bombing or invasion, meaning their industrial capacity was never crippled. They came out on top each time and used their influence and strength to become the new superpower.
This is overly simplified of course.
Because there were two world wars that mainly took place in Europe.
Hold our Coor’s.
Fun fact: Alaska was invaded a little bit by Japan during WW2. On Attu Americans suffered heavy casualties from the weather and basically all of the Japanese force was killed in battle. On Kiska there was a pretty bad skirmish between US and Canadian forces resulting from mistaken identity and a ship hit a stray seamine before they found out the island was abandoned anyway. So a real bad time all around but still not really affecting industrial wellness
Every single European country spent everything they had fighting each other in the first world war, and then every single country in Europe went to the United States for financial loans in order to keep fighting.
1914 to 1918 marked the single largest wealth transfer in human history. By the end of the war, America was holding much of Europe’s wealth, which they used to build up their infrastructure and manufacturing base and become, frankly, an economic powerhouse far surpassing what anyone had seen before.
The rest is history.
Everyone else seems to have covered the basics… But what’s missing is The Suez Crisis.
France and Britain, the two preeminent colonial powers in Europe thought that they could use Israel to pressure Egypt into returning the Suez Canal to them (which Egypt had nationalised following Britain, France, and the USA reneging on their obligation to help build the Anwar Dam).
France and Britain coordinated with Israel for an Israeli invasion of Egypt, and then France and Britain would step in “as peacekeepers” and control the Seuz as a demilitarised zone. However, the US was having none of it, and went behind France and Britain’s back to undermine them and coordinated with Israel and showed to the world it was a British and French plot, humiliating the two nations, cementing the US as Israel’s main backer, and destroying what good will remained for France and Britain in the Middle East.
For the formerly top dogs of Europe, it was a rude awakening which showed them that the pre-Second World War order was truly gone and they could no longer make big geopolitical decisions without the US.
I don’t want to go into a big long thesis so I’ll try to summize.
America, now firmly cemented in its boarders, fully federalised and with a wealth of natural resources and ballooning population was becoming a big power by the start of the 20th century and American politicians were putting in considerable effort into undermining the big European powers, but especially Britain.
The British empire being so spread out made it hard to defend and control. So with Britain and it’s colonies fighting on every front for the whole length of the war Britain lost many colonial holdings in Asia.
Those colonies also paid a heavy price in the fighting and independent movements flourished after the war and Britain didn’t have the money or political will the fight them, so the empire dissolved.
America was able to use its war economy to massively ramp up its domestic manufacturing.
They were also able to use their position as financers and occupiers in Europe and Asia to extend considerable American influence to those regions. And also Latin America and the Caribbean. Giving American companies influence over much of the world without the obligations the British Empire had.
The US has a military base in every country, our boot is on the neck of the world.
Don’t worry tho soon the boot will be Xi’s and we will dissappear before we can even think about organizing
Right now it looks like the boot will be on American citizens neck first
Yeah shit really goes belly up in human society when we allow wealth inequality to grow.
Because that was the deal for them to choose sides during WW2, now they’re at the end of that deal.
The UK just about lost and probably would have if the US didn’t get fully involved, and the big kid on the block need help and then the helper became the leader.
Which country is next, every empire collapses.
my uneducated guess would be guns/military and computers.
WWII left much of Europe and Asia in shambles while the continental US was isolated from the fighting and swooped in to fill the power vacuum.
It was simply money all along
I am talking out my ass, but didn’t the UK basically overextend itself with its colonies and have to let them loose so it could focus on issues at home?
More that as independence movements grew, and the economy shifted to valuing high value manufactured goods colonies became more expensive to hold and less profitable.
Combine that with the anti Nazi rhetoric, it made holding colonies militarily much harder to do. Especially as Britain, unlike France, has never really seen itself as a military force.
We much prefer to control the seas and play off local groups against each other and help the preffered side to come out on top and work as a local ruling elite.
Because the cost of two world wars broke the bank, and the US saw the opportunity to seize global hegemony.
Post WWII the US had massive increases in economic power by exporting a lot of stuff made with our wartime factories as a starting point. The US also is bigger and had a comparable population to Europe, massive amounts of natural resources, and a culture of economic growth and expansion to rival any of the other colonial powers at their peak.
We built on previous empires and went with economics and soft power instead of directly colonizing.
Natural resources, naturally resistant to land wars, capitalism, and trading loans/deficit to fund things that had higher returns than then loan interest.
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Historically, not histrionically haha
