Dominic Sandbrook
THAT SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP
Old World, New World: The Story of Britain and America
By Kathleen Burk (Little, Brown 832pp £25)

'It is always a joy to me to meet an American, Mr Moulton,' remarks Sherlock Holmes in a story first published in 1890, 'for I am one of those who believe that the folly of a monarch and the blundering of a Minister in far-gone years will not prevent our children from being some day citizens of the same world-wide country under a flag which shall be a quartering of the Union Jack with the Stars and Stripes.'

Not an enormously popular view, these days, of course, but then Conan Doyle was writing at a time when Anglo-Saxon racial brotherhood was all the rage, and when Britain would automatically have assumed the senior role in any putative transatlantic partnership. Indeed, as Kathleen Burk points out in her vast new history of the Anglo-American relationship, the balance of power shifted so radically during the twentieth century that one of the principal forces in American cultural life - hatred and resentment of England, and of the patrician pretensions of men like Sherlock Holmes - almost completely disappeared, to be replaced by mild, if patronising, affection. These days the hatred and resentment all flows in the opposite direction, a sign less of American evildoing, perhaps, than of British inferiority.

Burk's new version of the Anglo-American story is a massive scholarly enterprise, taking in everything from seventeenth-century Puritanism to Cold War missile diplomacy, and any reader's first reaction must surely be awe at the scale and depth of her research. And while her journey often covers familiar ground, it does so with impressive grace and clarity. The first sections, charting the early days of the English colonies in North America, are particularly deft and evocative. The glory and hypocrisy of the golden age of exploration; the grim, gloomy theology of the Puritans; the romance and tragedy of the Roanoke settlement and Jamestown famine: all of this makes terrific entertainment.

What Burk really brings home in these early pages is just how risky, miserable and violent life in the American colonies was. Settlers were often in danger of starving to death, hence the Jamestown colonist who killed and 'powdered' (ie salted) his wife, although, as the contemporary reporter put it, 'whether shee was better roasted, boyled or carbonado'd, I know not'. With government often in the hands of flint-hearted religious maniacs, bust-ups and walk-outs were common: the state of Rhode Island, for example, was founded after just such a defection. And the sheer uncertainty and violence of life left an enduring legacy: the appalling cruelty and sadism of the American Revolution - the rapes and massacres, the tarring and feathering - was surely rooted in such blood-soaked soil.

Burk's version of the Revolution is refreshingly clear-eyed, so we have to endure none of the usual mawkish nonsense about the supposed greatness and heroism of the insurgent tax-dodgers. She really comes into her own, however, in her discussion of the formation of American national identity during the nineteenth century, which takes in everything from travellers' tales to high finance. While English visitors excoriated the vulgar, turbulent populism of the early republic, their American counterparts often railed against the supposed injustice and feudalism of the Old World. But, as Burk shows, American culture owed more to the old country than its progenitors often cared to admit. Writers like Twain and Hawthorne were often far more popular in London than in New York, while even Emerson, despite his call for a purely American national literature, owed a great deal to Thomas Carlyle - as too, curiously, did Walt Whitman.

For Burk, literature was not the only field in which it makes little sense to draw a firm line between nineteenth-century Britons and Americans. The abolitionist movement, she argues, was a truly international phenomenon, with American organisations borrowing texts, techniques and even speakers from their British counterparts. So too were the reform movements of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods inspired by the same Protestant social gospel, rooted in the same genteel upper-middle-class milieu, and working towards the same ends, whether at Toynbee Hall or at Hull House. And even American churches, notably the Methodists, almost deferentially took their lead from Britain. It was little wonder that Sherlock Holmes dreamed of a union of the two countries, or that American society's disaffected losers railed against the sinister conspiracies of the Bank of England.

What permanently altered the balance between the two nations, of course, was the shattering impact of two world wars, both of which Britain fought from start to finish at great cost in blood, influence and, above all, money. Burk identifies a little-acknowledged moment as the key turning point: the summer of 1917, when the Americans agreed to lend Britain billions of dollars to pay for the war. Keynes told a friend that 'it almost looks as if they took a satisfaction in reducing us to a position of complete financial helplessness and dependence', and to some extent he was right. Anglophobia died hard, even at the top, and a quarter of a century later even FDR made no secret of his hatred of the British Empire.

Indeed, Burk's account of the wartime alliances, always emphasising their strains and stresses, makes a useful corrective to the teary-eyed tub-thumping of the Andrew Roberts school. She quotes Harold Macmillan's famous remark about becoming the Greeks to Washington's Romans, 'great, big, vulgar, bustling people, more vigorous than we are but more idle, with more unspoiled virtues but also more corrupt'. Yet these were the words of an Americanophile: most of his Tory colleagues would have been far more scathing. As late as the 1940s, opinion polls showed that most Britons had a more favourable opinion of the Soviet Union than of the United States.

Balanced, intelligent, insightful and sometimes funny, Burk's book is sure to be regarded as the definitive work on the subject. Yet one thing she does not address is the future of the relationship, perhaps regarding this as beyond the historian's remit. With both countries experiencing vast waves of immigration, the relationship seems unlikely to endure in its current form. The colonisation of North America did not end in 1776, for entire American cities, especially in states like Texas, California and Florida, are increasingly dominated by Spanish, not English. It seems doubtful that a future American president named, say, Gonzalez would care much about the sensibilities of the British. In this context, Sherlock Holmes's dream seems more implausible than ever.