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.
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.