This study investigates the relations between Britain and the United States with regard to East Asia at the turn of the twentieth century with a view to establishing how far these conformed in practice to the ideal of the ‘great rapprochement’. It makes the case that interaction between the two powers, while generally cordial, was not characterised by cooperation or collaboration on a practical level. Through discussion of the issues of foreign investment and encroachment in China, the Boxer Rising, the Russo-Japanese War, Japanese immigration to the Pacific Coast of North America and the Chinese Revolution of 1911, the study considers why Britain and the United States failed to cooperate despite an apparent basis for joint action in both shared interests and ideological motivations. It argues that the community of interest of the two powers was generally nullified by the broader concerns of each power, principally the dictates of domestic politics for the United States and the global policy needs of an already overstretched British Empire. With regards to ideology, the study demonstrates that in spite of a significant body of shared ideas regarding race and civilisation, specifically the ideologies of Anglo-Saxonism and the Yellow Peril, British and American policymakers did not often employ such ideas or make use of ideological language in their interactions. It suggests that policymakers deliberately avoided or downplayed ideological considerations, apparently believing that these had the potential to be counterproductive. The key findings of the study are therefore that British and American policymakers were surprisingly sensitive and careful in their handling of ideas relating to race and civilisation and that very similar, if not identical, interests in a given region were not sufficient to overcome the wider limitations on British-American cooperation, bringing into question the notion that the ‘great rapprochement’ was effective beyond the level of rhetoric and friendly relations.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:721320 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Cooper, Timothy Samuel |
| Contributors | Hilfrich, Fabian ; Crowcroft, Robert |
| Publisher | University of Edinburgh |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://hdl.handle.net/1842/22979 |
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