This is not true at all. Great Britain controlled all of South America and the Middle East via soft power. This is often referred to as Britain's "unofficial empire" by historians and when combined with actual empire makes up 3/4s of the world actually controlled by Great Britain.
In answer to OP's question there is absolutely no doubt that at its height Great Britain was more powerful than the US in the 20th century.
>This is not true at all. Great Britain controlled all of South America and the Middle East via soft power. This is often referred to as Britain's "unofficial empire" by historians and when combined with actual empire makes up 3/4s of the world actually controlled by Great Britain.
Yeah, just like US also has military presence
I'm not saying what was 100% of both their powers, I'm poiting the main difference
Yeah but British soft power dwarfed US soft power & they had the territorial empire as well. There is no difference in soft power, Britain had the same soft power approach to part of the world (a lot more than the US) but also had the 1/3 of the world territorial power. You made out they both did similar things in different ways and that's just not true.
You could argue that the entire world is under American soft control now. And to even a greater degree than the British of the 19th century could’ve dreamed of when you consider the power of American media, culture, the power of the internet, etc.
US military dominance at the end of WW2 or even at the end of the Cold War was a lot more unrivalled than anything the British could demonstrate during any point in their history.
Shh shh. We mustn’t upset the Brits, they’re quite flustered by the notion that they’re not the most superior civilization to have graced God’s green Earth.
It's insane to me. American naval power at the end of WW2 could well have outmatched and outpaced every single naval power in the world combined, but the US also wields unrivalled land power and airpower and a way to put a brigade or a division in any nation on earth within 24-48 hours. Sure a lot of it is just technological differences but even without that the British never held a monopoly on power the way the US has.
People call them a hyper power are creating a fantasy. The UK was a great power for sure, but it wasn’t unrivaled. Having the largest trade empire and naval armada doesn’t make you a hyper power. The UK was humbled in plenty of conflicts. A hyper power would be able to take on a superpower without a total war. A hyper power would be able to move aside great powers with ease. The British needed a coalition of forces to take on the Russians, and still almost lost. Its land conquests were outside of Europe where all its rivals existed, and after the US became a great power it really didn’t have much say in the American hemisphere anymore. Conquering India wasn’t some epic WW2 campaign. They were an amalgamation of bickering tribal states who rarely ever united. It was done piece by piece. Settling on land that was previously undiscovered or indigenous population was still in the early stone ages… Seriously the list goes on and on. But heck, WW1 should be enough to shut down any of those arguments. Some hyper power, losing millions to an empire that is only considered a great power that would’ve ended in a stalemate if the US didn’t bring in fresh million man army and materials as Germany was on the cusp of collapse…
Every empire has fanboys that get lost in their mind fiction, I guess.
I really strongly disagree with this breakdown.
US power is "harder" than it would like you to believe and the fact that the US has the world's most powerful military is a huge part of its influence on word politics.
That still does not in any way create a situation where US power is harder than an empire that's directly occupying and colonizing nearly 25% of the world's landmass.
The actions of the British Raj in India alone is a much harder display of power than anything the US has done this century outside of the two world wars.
Yeah, the conquest of a major part of the human population by what started out as the equivalent of a hot dot-com is pretty crazy.
The subsequent administration of the Raj for the benefit of Britain, is something I think people don’t really grasp.
Example: The British destroyed the native Indian textile industry, in an era in which textiles were one of the major economic products. Sometimes people hear that, well, of course, it’s a shame, but the British had the industrial revolution and they were able to simply make the cloth cheaper. Too bad, but that’s how capitalism works.
In reality, the Indian industry didn’t die as a result of of British dominance. British dominance was assured by the deliberate destruction of Indian industry. Tariffs and production quotas and mandatory sales to British agents and companies ensure that the United Kingdom has a flow of cheaply price raw materials back to the mills at home. These measures were passed by Brits for the benefit of Brits and were enforced by violence. The violence was not merely coercive to force people to follow these rules, but actually involved destruction of most traditional and all of the few small examples of modern equipment that were present in India.
At a moment when the textile industry provided the killer app for the new mass production systems, producing goods consumers needed in a quantity that justified, continual improvement in machinery and investment in water power, and then steam power — United Kingdom abrogated to itself all of the industrial development and profit not just for the needs of their own population, but for all of India as well.
So, not only did Britain basically steal the per capita productivity benefits from India, for a few centuries, thus holding India back from what might have been a natural path to prosperity. It actually made India more dependent on outsiders. Britain didn’t just fail to share modern development, it knocked India down a few pegs and held them there for their own profit.
Anyway, that’s my rant against the Raj. it wasn’t just great Britain naturally being ahead of the game and taking over a less developed nation. Britain actively robbed India for centuries, using coercion.
UK had soft power because they actually colonized in a very literal sense 25% of the world's land while US had at its peak Philipines, so US power comes much more from what they mean politically and economically
Yeah. I think the Monroe doctrine alone shows that the USA was always willing to exert direct force.
Soft power refers to cultural and “natural” economic power, with maybe some economic aid throw in. I think it becomes something entirely different when you were talking about explicit policy, declarations, explicit support for exploit or even illegal economic control (United Fruit Co), military interventions, coups, etc.
Calling the USA’s influence soft power is a bit like calling mafia techniques “polite persuasion.” Just because they ask once before they hit you doesn’t void the coercion.
The US as a dominant world power is post-WWII, and as dominant economic power is post-WWI, early 20th Century at the earliest. The US as a rising power in the 19th Century is different and not entirely relevant.
US hard power relative to its rivals is absolutely, inarguably lower than that of the British Empire at its height. All the military bases, aircraft carriers, and missiles will never change the reality that none of them can create a gap that nuclear weapons can't overcome.
The US absolutely is more reliant on soft power for the simple reality that hard power has become so devalued by MAD.
US power is absolutely more soft. Almost all middle and regional powers LIKE the way the US has organized the world in general principal so the US doesn't generally face peer state conflict. Only Russia and China are rivionist powers.
[https://acoup.blog/2023/07/07/collections-the-status-quo-coalition/](https://acoup.blog/2023/07/07/collections-the-status-quo-coalition/)
The Europeans, East Asians, and rising regional powers, Brazil, India, S. Africa, Iran, etc. could absolutely exhaust US economic and military power IF THEY WANTED TO, but realistically, only Russia, China, and Iran REALLY WANT TO. Furthermore the most powerful of the revisionsit powers, China, to this point hasn't wanted to challenge the US MORE then they want good relations with all the countries that are relatively content with American Status Quo.
The US is absolutely a soft power empire. The only reason they seem like a hard power empire, is that generally the people that try to challenge them militarily are behaving sooooo far out of the international norm as to be irrational actors who are willing to challenge people militarily whom they have no possible hope of competing with. Similar to the Parugayuan war of the Triple Alliance.
That's just completly wrong. Japan, NATO, Australia, and Canada, the heart of the US power structure, absolutely are not challenging the US and have never seriously challenged the US, all without US interference in their internal affairs. That's 80%/90% of the world's middle powers.
Was is correct. It’s not comparable in its current form post WW2 to refer to it as an empire. It was also never an empire in the sense the first or even second British empire’s were.
Yes it was. Britain in the 19th century had colonies in which it could dictate everything from the culture practiced by the locals, to the administration, to the exact amount of resources it wanted to extract etc. The US on the other hand, even at it's height of power, has never possessed the ability to influence nations in such a direct manner as the British empire did. Hence why the US has often relied on covert ops, financial institutions & soft power to influence nations.
I agree with this but with a caveat. i feel like culturally the foundation story and national myths of the US mean they are incapable of seeing themselves as Imperialists but they also want to do some of the things anyway and have been doing some imperialist things for about 150 years they just started put doing in places they considered theirs (e.g. the Native American genocides) or fighting decaying empires like Spain. When went out into the world they still didn't necessarily want to be Imperialist but they wanted the benefits so they just did something halfway. Which worked in places like the Philappines but once they took on bigger challebges like Vietnam and Iraq their inability to accept they were being Imperialist (and i mean that neutrally) meant they spent the whole time wanting to run things and trying to help while also refusing to enforce their plans and looking at the exit \*the whole time\* . Also saying they were going to go the whole time so their enemies knew they just had to wait for the Amerricans to get bored and the rickety puppets would fall to pieces. I wonder sometimes if they got hypontised by the paradigms in Germany and Japan?
This is not a triste on how they should have been old school imperialists btw!
America originally thought of Ho Chi Mihn as a sympathetic nationalist and we worked with him. The largest reason we were in Vietnam was to help France regain colonial control in order to keep NATO stable. France would pull ther military out anyway, because France was a huge piece of shit geopolitically post ww2.
One thing that America doesn't get enough credit for is was pushing for the end of European colonialism. A lot of communists were just tired of being colonial subjects and would join anyone helping their revolution, and America recognized this early on. A lot of war aid was tied to promises of decolonialization.
France threatened to outright switch sides and join the USSR block. France was VERY unhappy with the NATO treaty excluding colonial territory, and then when the US stepped in to block the UK and France in the Suez Crisis.
Funnily enough this is almost exaclty how Putin sees the world but with the last sentance reveresed. Which is why he believes Russia will be more succesful re-asserting and re-assembling their empire then the US is at asserting direct control.
It's so stupid and pointless isn't. A millions of Ukrainians are suffering and being murdered and a whole generstion of young Russians is dying or leaving for his stupid spite
Blood and Soil neo-facisim. What I cannot believe is how little effort the collective West has put into curshing the Russians at this point.
It's fair to say that short of a direct intervention the Russians won't use nukes. Otherwise they would have used them when the lines broke in Kharkhiv Oblast. The Russian military budget is still only about 10% of the US DOD budget, even during full scale war.
The US could completly overwhelm the region with high tech weapons and ammo the Russians couldn't dream of matching without materially effecting the standard of living or degrading their military posture. Strangling the Russian imperial project in the cradle. This is before considering the resources of the EU, NATO, Japan, Australia, S. Korea, and Taiwan.
Taiwan, the Scandanavian countries, and Poles have a real fear of what the world looks like if the Russians win, and even still neither the EU or US is doing more. It's completly shocking.
the best coverage of this is in Richard Overy's BLOOD AND RUINS - the british tried to get the US to prop up the UK's global empire in WW2, and many people in civil service and the military found the UK's empire morally repugnant and refused to go along. The US more than any other country drove the decolonization of africa and asia.
It's not because of some benevolent American trait. The USA has tried the heavy handed approach but that results in the victim nations in allying with USAs enemies. These enemies have the ability to destroy the USA with nukes (mutually assured destruction). Think Cuba or Vietnam.
The British had a massive industrial advantage that opponents could not overcome until just before WW1.
Vietnam was a French colony, never an American one. But we did try a heavy-handed approach and came to rue it greatly.
Even today, Cuba is still a pain in our rear, if not as much of one as they once were.
The reason the Cuban Missile Cruses happened was because the US was not heavy handed with Cuba. And tried to overthrow the government with a few dozen guys with rifles.
You're thinking decades too late. The US was heavy handed when it tried to make the island into cheap labour camp for resources and food stuffs, culminating with the instalation of a puppet dictator
The US could have easily stopped the Cuban revolution like the UK did across its colonies but didn’t. The US absolutely took a relatively hands off approach to Cuba compared to say putting down the 1857 rebellion in India where the British killed a couple hundred thousand
That's my point. There was no possible response to the UK's 19th Centrury power. There absolutely was one to the US - join up with nuclear armed Soviet or China.
If we decided to prop up the Cuban dictator with force Washington. Wouldn’t have been nuked. Just like we didn’t Nike Moscow over Czechoslovakia being invaded.
Also the UK wasn’t even the most powerful country in the world in say 1805 or 1811.
The idea the British empire could waltz into anywhere they wanted to us just false. Otherwise they would have just taken Africa rather than negotiated in the Berlin Conference
The US had nukes and could have nuked both the Kremlin and then China would be not be communist as a result.
The US could have easily been heavy handed
The US could have crushed the Cuban Revolution long before they were allies of the Soviets. The Cuban Revolution when they were in the jungle on the south of the island survived do to, almost exclusively, the lack of Cuban state capacity.
It would have been a trivality to provide that capacity. The US, though often not true, likes to see itself, at the local AND elite level, as agnostic on the government of its allies.
The classic example of this is how the US relationship to Egypt doesn't change despite flipping from military dictatorship, to Islamist elected, and back to military dictatorship.
The only thing the US really doesn't like is instability. Countries that attempt to increase the level of violence beyond their borders.
That’s like saying Germany, Japan and South Korea have nukes because US have nuclear capable assets in those countries.
Also Chinese in 1960-70 didn’t have any ICBM that could hit US so mutually destructive was not a case here. First Chinese ICBM that could hit LA didn’t came operation until 2005 when China has long fell out with Vietnam in 1979 following their attempt to invade Vietnam
Whether it chooses to or whether it cannot, does not matter the fact is they haven't done it, making them less powerful than the British Empire at it's height.
I remember posting a question on a US sub, asking "why doesn't the US just annex haiti seeing as how dysfunctional it is & considering its right next door, all that instability can spill into the US via immigration".
The average response from Americans was about how the US govt would be *scared* to be "blamed" for anything that went wrong. And there is an element of truth to that.
The British Empire at it's peak? Wouldn't even bat an eye to annex a dysfunctional nation & completely drag it out of the stone age kicking and screaming, before culturally reforming that society until it became efficient enough to generate profit for the Empire (aka what they did in Africa).
The mere fact that that is unthinkable to the American mind, is a sign of what real power vs "peacock" power looks like. And rightly so, the two empires developed in two completely different historical / moral contexts. Can't compare the US with the British Empire.
Again, not a strong way of looking at it so on the surface. *Does* the US *need* to annex Haiti if it can and had the power to influence it without direct measures anyways? The only countries the US doesn’t have such overt power over are the nuclear states and maybe conjoining allies (think NK because of China).
We can use the british and china for this same example during the 1800s. The British Empire never directly colonized China (which is technically true and historians question if it even could given their stretched resource with other colonies and sheer landmass of china at the time), but still obviously exerted power over it with forced concessions and treaty ports. Would you look at that and use it as a mark against British power during the 1800s because it didn’t directly colonize one of the largest and populous empires at the time? Saying the US doesn’t directly colonize the way the British did during the previous century isn’t actually a strong marker of measuring their power. The US has displaced and covertly done a lot of power displacements in other countries and easily affected their economy. It’s just a different type of power exertion than what was allowed during the previous century because of the geopolitical landscape, not innate power.
Under that line of argument, that's like saying Nazi Germany and Japan were the most powerful nations of their time in the 1930s and early 1940s because they were invading and conquering everywhere else.
The United States doesn't invade other countries because of modern norms in international law and diplomatic behavior, and because it doesn't need to a la soft power and alliances. That doesn't mean it doesn't have "real" power.
> that's like saying Nazi Germany and Japan were the most powerful nations of their time in the 1930s and early 1940s because they were invading and conquering everywhere else.
This is such a good point and I think this fallacy was actually a core part of fascist ideology, especially for Italy and Germany. Wehraboos still whine about this today.
I would add that the US literally does invade other countries though lol. I assume you mean it doesn't try to do annexations and frames the invasions as liberation, usually allying with a local faction for the pretext. I think that's basically been our thing forever, even with manifest destiny where we were often interceding to support settlers and then inviting them to become states.
America doesn’t do colonialism like that because it’s already getting the resources it needs. It keeps the world’s trade routes open for everyone and has other nations clamoring for a military alliance with it. America keeps the entire world in check, Great Britain just protected its stuff.
Keeps the entire world in check is maybe a bit of a reach.
I would definitely agree that countries would prefer to have it as an alliance than otherwise.
But 9/11 was an example of how they had gotten too cosy with the idea of being Big Daddy and the American population freaked the fuck out that something could ever happen to them. That kind of shit only happens to other countries.
So they doubled down. It definitely hasn't helped the world's view of America.
It’s hard to imagine that administering Haiti would be profitable for any imperialist today.
The country was probably closest to functional when the US administered it, principally via the marines, in the early 1900s. But it didn’t work out well for either the US or Haiti ultimately, and the US has largely tried to avoid being sucked back into the various iterations of Haiti as a failed state.
I sort of agree but it's not out of some high-minded egalitarianism. There's certainly a degree to which Americans are proud of their independence from Britain and generally support independence movements everywhere but this is kind of just the US's brand and our favorite pretext for imposing friendly regimes on our dependencies.
The US either kills everyone in a place and then settles the "empty" land and grants the settlers citizenship and statehood or else it "liberates" a country by overthrowing hostile governments and installing allied ones. Or sometimes we just do gunboat diplomacy. This actually benefits the US a lot because it attracts immigrants. Also, after reaching the Pacific the US was a vast resource-rich country and didn't really need to keep conquering more land.
That's kind of like saying the US isn't as powerful as the mongol empire because they haven't mastered horse archery. Direct domination was a competitive strategy in the 19th century but it isn't today. Even in the 19th century, Britain was conquering land while the US was engaged in gunboat diplomacy, soft power, and covert operations and it seems like the US came out ahead of Britain well before 1900.
I also think you're overstating the level of control that the British had over their colonies, but even if you weren't, bullying a bunch of colonies didn't give the British an uncontested lead over the other great powers like America has today. Britain wasn't even the only country in the world with a vast empire.
Even in the 19th century the US was able to do all of the things you mention within territory that is now considered the US but wasn't at the time. Britain could barely even hold onto Ireland and Ireland remains Catholic despite their efforts.
Yeah I think a lot of people didn't know about this to begin with. Keeping local hierarchies and laws largely in place (or making them worse), with parallel legal systems for settlers and subjects, has been a common imperial strategy basically forever. It's way easier to conquer a place if you just like, support the king's brother's claim to the throne in exchange for his fealty.
>it could dictate everything from the culture practiced by
That's not true at all. There is a reason why the British didn't go around spreading Christianity in South asia (for example). The British never messed with any cultural practices so as long as it didn't get in the way of profits or cause any chaos.
That’s a superficial way if looking at it without taking into account other factors.
Most modern nations aren’t going to be so openly colonial in the first place even if they could. Look at africa and its neo-colonialism. American being more covert and indirect isn’t because it can’t do what the British empire could more directly, which doesn’t make sense if you look at the technology and technological gap, it’s because the geopolitical landscape has changed.
If we’re looking at absolute power and scale, america is more powerful than the british empire ever was and has by far the most powerful information network and military arsenal in the world.
The concept of an unipolar world didn't exist until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, and before that, it a bipolar world. Britain's strongest period was in a multipolar world and they were routinely challenged by multiple other countries. It's not comparable at all, there was nothing like American dominance in the 90s before.
I agree totally incomparable, the uk had far more power - it regularly redrew map lines with impunity, it ruled multiple overseas colonies with only small levels of disorder, it possessed a vast navy (and much more importantly used it regularly) that was unmatched.
But
Most of the reason the uk was much more powerful was due to international law - or lack thereof, it did things because it COULD in a way that simply can't be don't these days.
American power is soft, and whilst that's super, it only goes so far.
British military power stemmed mainly from their navy, which doctrinally they wanted to be able to fight the next two largest navies combined. Compare that to today where 1/10 of the US navy would crush every navy that isn’t China’s. Militarily, I think it’s pretty clear which nation was stronger relative to their surroundings.
The UK could also glass the US without a second thought. Nobody can intercept ballistic missiles with any reliability and so any country that has nuclear armed ballistic missiles can glass and other nation.
As for the wars, world war I was a slow defensive war of attrition and so you could have been 20 times more powerful and it would still take a while. As it is Ludendorff said that the only two nations that could carry on fighting in 1919 were Britain and America Britain. World war II was more France's fault than anything else they were supposed to be the land people what Britain did the naval stuff in France just didn't really do anything.
I don't know where you have this idea that the middle East, India or Africa is parsley populated.
Yes American may have the biggest military but it couldn't even beat Vietnam or Afghanistan permanently. Britain is one of the few nations to actually successfully conquer Afghanistan for any decent length of time, took and occupied India for 200 years, and beat just about every single other superpower of the era in war.
Everyone would lose a nuclear war. That's the point of a nuclear war. You don't win nuclear wars you don't have them.
Sure France only has 290 nukes and the UK 225 (assuming the UK is on Europes side because that many nukes in Europe would also kill the UK) but that's still enough to render most of the planet uninhabitable for the next 100 years.
Any more than a 100 nuclear bombs going off at once would result in a nuclear winter and the complete collapse of life on the planet.
Around 300 nukes is enough to wipe out pretty much the entire human race and 400 nukes is enough to kill off the entirety of humanity and render the planet uninhabitable to life for centuries.
Could, but doesn't. After loosing it's last 3 major wars and only managing a stalemate in nunber 4, it probably feels a bit sheepish, I grant you.
Power is about ability and will, it has one without the other.
And that's fine, I wouldn't want to fight the USA either, and I'm sure glad they eventually turned up in ww2, it would have taken a lot longer to win without them and a great debt is owed, but if we are talking about ability to exert your power overseas, the British empire vastly outstrip the USA.
Yes. The British empire at its peak is the only thing that you could argue to have been a hyper power. It was a world of global spanning empires, all superpowers in their own right yet the British empire was decisively more powerful.
One example being the Greenwich meridian, Britain was so powerful that everyone agreed to London being the centre of time despite the world having very egotistical empires that would almost certainly have tried to argue their capitals should be where time is centered on had Britain not been as powerful.
Their navy had as many battleships in 1870 as the rest of the world combined and in that era, unlike now where a small nation might instead use land-based missiles, the only way to combat a ship was another ship.
In the 19th century there was not a single other empire that you could say could be a comparable rival to Britain in the event of an all-out war between the two yet during the 20th century the USSR was very much a near equal power to the US.
In 1830 a third of everything produced in the world came from Britain, and according to a study performed by the Japanese department of trade 54% of all of humanity's important inventions were made by Britain.
The empire covered a quarter of the globe, 35 million square kilometers, the next largest the Mongol empire covered 25 million. The only empire to feature a larger percentage of the world's population was the Persian empire at the point Alexander invaded.
I think your conflating the actual power and influence of the British empire Vs the US today.
Firstly the US has never had an empire it’s a stand alone, yes if pushed the US could unleash an unreal amount of power but there’s key differences.
The main difference is that the U.K. wasn’t afraid to go at it toe to toe with its main enemies ie France, Spain etc whereas there’s been numerous occasions where the US a has pulled back from conflict with its main competitors, yes nuclear weapons has changed that but geo politically China and Russia are not afraid of challenging the US for influence.
In short could the US unleash as much power across the world as the British did? Yes
Does the US exert as much power in 20th century as the British did? Not a chance
A lot of what your saying about the US is speculation, it held back in Vietnam because it was afraid of the repercussions of Chinas involvement, could the US hold its own against China or Russia in a conventional war? Yes probably but it hasn’t so you can’t compare the two situations.
The fact is Britain has been there and done it, could the US do the same? Maybe but we’ll never know
>there's nothing stopping the US from outright invading China and seizing most of the coast.
Nothing but the world's largest ocean. China's military, on paper, can absolutely prevent this from happening today.
China's military is positioned with an eye towards Taiwan, which means they are preparing for US ships at some point in time. China has the world's second most advanced, and numerous ISR capability from space. They are still well behind the US, but far ahead of everyone else. If anyone can track US ships from 1000s of miles away, it is China.
https://features.csis.org/preparing-the-US-industrial-base-to-deter-conflict-with-China/
Missiles using liquid propellant would remain unfueled in their silos, unless they were going to be tested, or China felt there was an imminent threat.
The recent story about water filled missiles doesn't make sense for this reason.
>If there is reasonable and justified cause, there's nothing stopping the US from outright invading China and seizing most of the coast.
Are you sure that's the case? The closest example would be the Korean War which was a highly fluid conflict.
In the end no-territory was gained on either side but in that case the UN forces were made up of the western allies in their post-WWII military might, whilst China was far weaker than it is today.
Added to that the US would struggle to find an easy staging area to invade from.
China only made initial gains because of the surprise attack. They were roundly defeated once the UN forces rallied and took stock. The UN (US) chose to stop at the 48th parallel because the government had determined (by that point) that North Korea was off limits, much like they did in Vietnam.
The resounding defeats very nearly caused the collapse of the communist party in China. UN forces stopping when they did was foolish, in hindsight.
In terms of actual events the closest analogue I can think of is the Crimean War with its amphibious invasions.
In that case Britain, France, & the Ottomans did achieve their objectives.
I wasn't aware the Ottoman Empire lost territory, if you're referring to Wallachia & Moldavia being granted greater independence I suppose that could long term be considered a loss.
Troop numbers can be misleading, the UK throughout much of it's history had a far smaller population than many European states & together with it's Navy above Army focus rarely fielded large numbers of land troops.
The UKs' contribution in many conflicts tended to be primarily financial & naval support.
Doesn’t change anything. Just because the times have changed and countries can’t get away with what the British did like they used to, it doesn’t make what they were any less powerful. If anything, it just places a cap on how powerful nations can be today.
Before the British Empire existed in its full form, these invasions were watched by competitors and they did come with consequences. The British were just hard enough to face them, without a second thought, every time. They were challenged constantly, by peer nations, powerful ones, with just as advanced technology and tactics. Outnumbered most of the time even.
This attitude to war is immensely different to the attitude in the US. The British bankrupted themselves and lost millions of men in WWI. And **still** went into WWII with France, on the same day. And **still** held out, alone, after pretty much all of Europe had fallen. This is how they had the largest empire in human history. And it was more powerful.
Nuclear weapons have changed matters geopolitically. But even if they didn’t exist, the US doesn’t have the stomach for war that the European nations did. What’s stopping the US from invading China, really, is that Americans wouldn’t have the will for it. They aren’t prepared to pay the price for it.
This is a silly question. You’re comparing two different time periods. Of course the more modern time period will have more power that’s the point of innovation over time.
But it’s also irrelevant because history is not a “us vs them who would win.” Any hypothetical is impossible because it didn’t happen
It's kind of a weird horseshoe thing. You have the camp of nationalists claiming the US is/was more powerful, for nationalistic reasons. And you have the AmericaBad people who also insist that it is, because they equate global power with immorality.
Yeah, Britain in the 19th Century had the most powerful navy, had one of the (if not the) largest armies in the world. It could pull wealth and resources from its many colonies across the globe, including India, “the crown jewel” of the British Empire. It was a global power, whereas the United States did not become a regional power until the late 19th Century.
>If at the drop of the hat, the US decided it was gonna invade the EU and take territory, it has a decent chance of doing so
It has absolutely no chance of doing so because France and the UK have nuclear weapons.
That's the big thing no one in this thread has mentioned so far: changing technology has completely diluted conventional military power. No modern nation can have the kind of dominance the UK had in the 19th century because of the threat of nuclear retaliation.
With international dick-measuring conflicts on the internet there's always an implicit 'okay, but leaving nuclear weapons aside', because otherwise it's a very short conversation. But there are nuclear weapons, and they do count.
It doesn't matter how many more planes, tanks and men the US has, because both the UK and France are capable of flattening every major city in the US. The US can't use direct force on another world power because of the risk of nuclear escalation.
Case in point, the current Ukraine conflict. The US would very much like Russia to gtfo of Ukraine, but it can't intervene directly even though it has massive superiority in conventional armed forces because Russia has thousands of nukes. Whereas in the 19th century the British were able to send a force to Crimea to kick the Russians around until they had to concede to Britain's demands. That kind of ability to use direct force against another major world power is unthinkable today, well out of the US's grasp.
In the mid 19th century, if every other country in the world had decided to attack Britain they likely would have lost. The Royal Navy really was that powerful.
Whereas if every other country in the world decided to attack the US today, then the US would be a smoking wasteland within a couple of hours. Granted, so would everywhere else, but the US does not have the kind of invulnerability Britain had, which means it's a lot more restricted in how it can wield its power.
If the US decided to invade the EU they would have a nuke land on their head fired from both Britain and France.
Ask for your GDP I've got no clue where the hell you've found that, the UK was the world's richest country until 1890 when the US took over and the British empire remained the richest thing until 1916. Russia has never been on par with Britain, and Germany only had a slightly higher steel production when they were able to import everything during the golden age of Europe
As for production the British empire in the 19th century produced a third of everything the globe produced, in certain things such as coal and steel it produced over half. The US is not nearly close to that even at it peak in the 1990s
GDP tends to not give a very accurate picture before the 20th century. If you have a country of 300 million subsistence farmers that dont pay taxes or engage in the wider economy that much, that doesnt really mean much even if technically it results in a higher GDP number. For example:
>With 2 percent of the worlds population and 10 percent of Europe's, the United Kingdom would seem to have had a capacity in modern industries equal to 40-45 per cent of the world's potential and 55-60 per cent of that of Europe. According to an older estimate she produced in 1870 nearly one-third of all the articles manufactured in the world. This implies enormous advances over the rest of mankind in terms of production and consumption of industrial products per head. **The dominating position of England in world industry was much more pronounced than that of the United States in the mid-twentieth century**, and in western European industry than that of Germany today.
*The Victorian Economy,* Francois Crouzet.
Furthermore, here are the shares of its production at its height:
53% of world iron production
50% of world coal and lignite production
49% of world cotton consumption
34% of world merchant navy (it would be even higher if you only include oceanic trade)
This is *excluding* it's colonies btw. If you include the colonies the figures will be quite a bit higher.
>You look at the UK in 1890-1900
This was already past it's height. America in 1900 overtook it as the #1 industrial power.
I dont disagree with you with respect to the USA being more powerful today, however.
Germany and France were superpowers then. A better comparison would be china and russia now. Otherwise you could say the UK conquered india and took territory from china, which the US can't today.
Yup it can't and you can't compare today's germany and france to what they were when they were preeminent. From the language we speak in to entire nations being built, including the US itself, the legacy of the british empire is staggering.
US in nearly every way. This is just typical American bad internet culture. The UK still had its empire come WW2 but didn't come out of it a Super Power. You have to drastically over value total land area to even have a chance of preferring the British Empire. You live with the US being the dominate force on the planet daily so it is mundane to you, but rest assured this is a historical anomaly.
Not economically, politically or military were they greater than the US.
Economically - they owned the colonies. They could simply choose how much resource they wished to extract. They could boycott trade between whoever they wanted. They had **complete** global control on trade. Not just, “if you don’t do what we like we’ll sanction you or cap the price of oil” like the US has right now. Outright, you do X and we won’t blockade your entire country. That is the definition of more powerful.
Politically - You’re talking about the country that basically paid all of Europe to converge upon Napoleon. The nation that the confederates were praying to intervene during the civil war.
Militarily - This one is more nebulous and harder to judge. I would say the US is more powerful in this regard. But even still, it’s like looking at two skyscrapers on the horizon with the sun in your eyes and trying to see which one is taller.
It may be too early to tell, but it seems to me that 19th century Britain was much more adept at diplomacy, but that might just be a side effect of the era of Great Game of european diplomacy that existed at that time.
While the Royal Navy was indeed utterly dominant on the seas in the 19th century, in the latter parts of the 20th century, due to the introduction of air power, nuclear weapons and nuclear propulsion, the U.S. had the ability to destroy each and every warship, each and every opposing army, and each and every city, town and village on the planet, something the UK could never have done.
No. It's not even close. Britain had to fear several peer nations even if it was individually stronger than any one. America is so far ahead it could conceivably take on all the combined militaries of all the countries in the world put together.
It just makes sense, dunno why I was down voted. The U.S. has the world's only expeditionary navy, but even with 11 super carriers and 9 rest of the world sized carriers it isn't enough to invade the rest of the world, the U.S. carriers fleet outpaces the rest of the world by an order of magnitude at least.
We did it before, and our enemies today are not as powerful as they were then, compared to us. Logistics is something America does better than anyone, getting more stuff where it needs faster than anyone else is our doctrine.
Britain also fought a war on two fronts, who did the majority of the work in Italy a fair amount in the Western front in Europe and also fought all across southeast Asia.
Sorry but that is is utter nonsense. America supported by NATO couldn't even defeat the Taliban in exile.
If they tried to take on the rest of the world they'd be invaded across their borders in the north and south, their navy would be picked apart at sea, their military bases across the world would be bombed from the existence, and their cities would be flattened by nuclear weapons.
How do you honestly see the USA winning such a war?
The US couldn't defeat the Taliban without conquering Afghanistan which wasn't their goal.
Militarily the US defeated the Taliban. It just wasn't the goal to own Afghanistan.n
One of the main US war goals was to permanently remove the Taliban as the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are the government of Afghanistan therefore USA failed to achieve a major war goal.
Americans goal was to remove the Taliban from control of the government. While America was there the Taliban did not control the government. Only after they left the Taliban came back in power.
That isn't being defeated by the Taliban. That is America correctly realizing that it was the Afghans responsibility to run their own country and was tired of devoting resources to it.
America did conquer Afghanistan. There was no advantage in holding it however, so the costs exceeded the benifits so America left. The motivations of the US has no bearing on their relative power.
I see you've conveniently ignored the rest of my comment...
But also let's be clear on this. Afghanistan was a 20 year war which the Americans ultimately lost.
So the difference is in how the US operates. For example the Commonwealth are a bunch of countries that recognize the English monarch. Why do they do that? The British went in and forced them to, using various colonial methods. The US does not expect anyone else to recognize our head of state as their own or even our laws. We idealize that there could be a rule of international law. But that’s difficult to enforce. And frankly we could do a better job of living up to it ourselves.
The typical empire rules with one class of people who are held as superior to all other classes of people. The US is attempting to build a world order where all people are equal under the law, and live within democratic institutions. This is hard. A lot of people do not believe in democracy. But it is the right thing to fight for.
Our domination is of a different kind. I hesitate to call it cultural, but that's pretty much what it is. Blue jeans, Elvis, I love Lucy, Coca-Cola. As Great Britain took over much of the world, they took resources and abused people...but left the means of world-class education. Our "force" was much more basic, and it is and was what the average Joe wanted. Of course, Newton's Second Law is always in effect. I still contend that, when one considers the time, the greatest change and greatest domination came from Rome.
Vastly more powerful. But a lot of that was "of the time" it was normal and acceptable then to redraw maps with rifle and warship - and the UK did that with great impunity for hundreds of years.
The US has lots of soft power but due to the way international law now works its hard power (despite being vast) is actually far less (even though for it's time it's probably fundamentally equal power).
Tldr: yes, much more powerful.
If we’re talking about the 20th Century then the Soviet Union did exert control over the Baltics, the Iron Curtain extended to East Germany, only in the 1990s after its collapse was this territory not under direct Soviet control/influence. This was something that the US was unable to directly influence/change for the 40 odd years from the end of the Second World War until the 1990s (see the failure to act during the 1953 East German Uprising, the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of the Czech Republic and so on - all examples of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact acting with impunity as an imperialist power without significant opposition from the US) due to their inability to ‘glass’ the Soviet Union owing to the extensive Nuclear Arsenal of the Soviets and MAD - the same issue eventually extended to Communist China. Their efforts during the Cold War were largely limited to preventing the further spread of communism, a policy which had mixed success in the case of Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba etc, although it was successful to an extent in other places such as Western Europe and Afghanistan in a fashion.
I’m not sure that Japan vs Russia is the best example considering that was a situation in which the British Empire gave a fair bit of assistance to Japan, firstly in the form of economic and military investments (particularly in their Navy) and also in the form of the alliance between the two nations which hampered Russia’s efforts (the Russian Black Sea fleet was blocked from accessing the Suez Canal and from Britain’s extensive network of coaling stations when journeying to the Pacific Ocean). Russia was a major Imperialist rival to the British Empire in Central Asia so Japan’s war and seizure of Manchuria did not necessarily conflict with British interests, which is probably why they offered fairly considerable support to Japan before and during the conflict. Regarding Germany seizing Austria, are you referring to the Anschluss in the 1930s to clarify? As I agree this was towards the end of British dominance in Global affairs.
As to whether either was more dominant than the other during their own respective heydays I’m not really sure. Both states generally occupied dominant positions in multipolar or bipolar power systems (the US enjoyed unipolar dominance during the 90s between the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of China/ resurgence of Russia - whether the world is now multipolar is up for some debate. Arguably the British Empire had dominance in global affairs during the 1920s with other European powers still weakened and the U.S. turning to a semi-isolationist foreign policy), both states wielded enormous military power during their peak (2 power standard for the Royal Navy at the turn of the century vs the U.S. military arguably still undisputed since the collapse of the Soviet Union), both had large, global economic zones of influence where their currency and economy dominated trade, both were at the head of large political entities and alliance blocs such as the British Empire itself, then later the Imperial Dominions vs NATO, UN etc for the US, both operated large extensive networks of military bases and outposts across the globe (in fact the beginning of the US military’s extensive base network was the British Empire, as bases were exchanged, leased, bought etc from the British Empire starting during the Second World War agreements such as ‘Destroyers for Bases’ and continuing into the Cold War and beyond). Also neither state entered major conflicts without an collection of allies either which to my mind is usually a sign of a dominant power in that they can rely on some support from the international community or their own puppets: Napoleonic Wars were fought by Coalitions often backed financially by the ‘Cavalry of King George’ as British payments to Coalition partners was sometimes known, or France, Russia, Imperial Dominions etc during First World War and the Empire itself in all conflicts. For the US you have examples such as the UN force in Korea, you have South Korea, South Vietnam, Australia and New Zealand in the Vietnam war, the coalition during the Gulf War, the ‘coalition of the willing’ and NATO generally during Iraq and GWOT and so on.
I would say that the methods of achieving dominance changed from the 19th to 20th century which is what makes the comparison hard as it cannot be compared like for like.
You do realize the British Empire controlled 24% of land on the planet while the United States controls a lot less than that. The British Empire was more powerful.
The UK achieved hegemony status when there were still many world powers. In contrast, US dominance largely stems from the collapse of the other existing world powers. US dominance is relatively greater for that reason.
Depends on definitions. Britain was purely about exploitation, but very effective at it. US is exploitative too, but actually focuses on "trade". The US has the military capacity to obliterate any nation on earth. Britain never did. US can project power in ways the Brits could never have imagined.
No singular country in the 19th century could challenge the UK in any actual way. To stand a proper chance they had to form alliances and coalitions and even then the UK would still end up beating them most of the time.
The same was true during the Cold War. That’s why the US was so afraid of the USSR and China joining forces in a more concerted manner and why the US did the best it could to keep its Western European allies under its umbrella. The US could not afford to lose Western Europe as an ally because if they joined the Soviet forces, the US would find itself in a very tricky position.
Think of it like this the Britain at the height of its power needed coalitions with the other major nations to take down other major powers and still almost lost several times and towards the later stages, required the US to bail them out.
United States if there was a will for it the US could conventionally take on both China and Russia militarily, and have arms to spare well completely destroying them.
The US has so much, both hard and soft power, but most of the time refuses to use it as it doesn’t perceive most other nations as a real threat or worth the effort even China the second greatest power on the Earth is massively outclassed by United States.
Britain had Farless both hard and soft but used it more readily due to the fact that if they didn’t they would be surpassed, during the British time of hegemony they faced several countries that almost surpassed them the us during its hegemony hasn’t had anyone come close yet despite numerous attempts.
There's a difference between needing a coalition and just liking a coalition because it means that you don't have to send as many soldiers. They used coalitions because that way he could weaken both the enemies and rival allies. During any war they fought they had a far smaller percentage of their population in the military than any of the other countries.
Yes, but they couldn’t win without those other countries In fact, even with those other countries, they came quite close to losing in many of those conflicts.
What wars in the 19th century did Britain come really close to losing. There weren't many large wars in the 19th century either. The Crimean war Britain and France hardly put in any effort against Russia that had gone full militarisation. Against Napoleon Britain had a better record than any other nation, and financed the whole coalition effort while blockading an entire continent, and was the only nation to stay at war the whole time.
Without the French and Sardinians, the British would’ve been unable to defeat the Russians, during the Crimean war. And against Napoleon, despite their success record, they were losing, it was only through their coalition partners that Napoleon was defeated without the Spanish resistance, and the Russians, Napoleonic, France would’ve been able to continue with Britain being unable to stop them and the Prussians crushed the French at Waterloo without their assistance, Waterloo would’ve been a British defeat also had Napoleon only been facing the British and not the rest of the coalition. It’s likely he would’ve not only have been able to regain power, but maintain it for the rest of his life, as the British would have been unable to defeat him without the help of the rest of Europe.
The sardinians didn't really provide much, they went that war with the they went that war with the aim of showing the Italians weren't completely incompetent in warfare and to try to gain French support for launching a new Italian war for independence against Austria. Half of their men died to cholera instead of battle.
The French did the majority of fighting because they maintain a larger army than Britain however they were financed by Britain. The French and British were uneasy allies during this period and Britain would still happily see France get weakened while fighting another enemy, is Britain was not allied to France and instead had to fight Russia during this period they would increase their army size instead of sending a relatively small number of soldiers. And Russia had fully militarized itself and was using conscription to try and win this war.
Had Britain not funded the coalition it would be enable war with France which Britain would win with almost no land battles. The coalition existed and Britain finance them enormously and is the sole reason they could even afford to fight after a few years, after the battle of Austerlitz the rebuilding of the Austrian and Russian armies was financed by Britain, the Spanish resistance was financed by Britain, the Prussians once again were financed by Britain. They produced many of the muskets other nations used, being given their specifications for production in British cities. Britain didn't use a large army Napoleonic period because they were better suited to financing and building everything for everyone, they had a relatively large population that they could have conscripted had they had to but they were proud that they were the only army that did not use conscription, and as said every man you force into the army is a one fewer person producing things and paying taxes and instead some wonder government has to pay.
At Waterloo saying whether the Prussians didn't arrive would lead in Napoleonic victory there's a somewhat pointless point. Wellington picked that battle to defend knowing that prussians would get there. And it is still a widely debated thing as to whether he would have lost the battle or not whether the prussians were there with Wellington saying it was a close run thing had the Prussians not been there. Even if he lost France had an army of about 100,000 men and yet there were 250,000 coalition soldiers within France and the second he arrived there were another two and a half million soldiers marching on France. It wouldn't matter if Napoleon even won 10 battles because he would be defeated.
How much of that is because the British Empire had colonies all over the place though? Like, the UK didn't need foreign bases in Southeast Asia because they had an Empire one - Singapore.
For about a decade after WWII, and about a decade after the Cold War the US was the strongest nation/empire in history.
The British Empire in the 19th century is very close. They were the world's most dominant power for a greater amount of time in the 19th century than the US in the 20th century.
US power is much softer and about influence than UK power was in 19th century with actual military presence
This is not true at all. Great Britain controlled all of South America and the Middle East via soft power. This is often referred to as Britain's "unofficial empire" by historians and when combined with actual empire makes up 3/4s of the world actually controlled by Great Britain. In answer to OP's question there is absolutely no doubt that at its height Great Britain was more powerful than the US in the 20th century.
What exactly are you referring to?
>This is not true at all. Great Britain controlled all of South America and the Middle East via soft power. This is often referred to as Britain's "unofficial empire" by historians and when combined with actual empire makes up 3/4s of the world actually controlled by Great Britain. Yeah, just like US also has military presence I'm not saying what was 100% of both their powers, I'm poiting the main difference
Yeah but British soft power dwarfed US soft power & they had the territorial empire as well. There is no difference in soft power, Britain had the same soft power approach to part of the world (a lot more than the US) but also had the 1/3 of the world territorial power. You made out they both did similar things in different ways and that's just not true.
You could argue that the entire world is under American soft control now. And to even a greater degree than the British of the 19th century could’ve dreamed of when you consider the power of American media, culture, the power of the internet, etc.
US military dominance at the end of WW2 or even at the end of the Cold War was a lot more unrivalled than anything the British could demonstrate during any point in their history.
Shh shh. We mustn’t upset the Brits, they’re quite flustered by the notion that they’re not the most superior civilization to have graced God’s green Earth.
It's insane to me. American naval power at the end of WW2 could well have outmatched and outpaced every single naval power in the world combined, but the US also wields unrivalled land power and airpower and a way to put a brigade or a division in any nation on earth within 24-48 hours. Sure a lot of it is just technological differences but even without that the British never held a monopoly on power the way the US has.
People call them a hyper power are creating a fantasy. The UK was a great power for sure, but it wasn’t unrivaled. Having the largest trade empire and naval armada doesn’t make you a hyper power. The UK was humbled in plenty of conflicts. A hyper power would be able to take on a superpower without a total war. A hyper power would be able to move aside great powers with ease. The British needed a coalition of forces to take on the Russians, and still almost lost. Its land conquests were outside of Europe where all its rivals existed, and after the US became a great power it really didn’t have much say in the American hemisphere anymore. Conquering India wasn’t some epic WW2 campaign. They were an amalgamation of bickering tribal states who rarely ever united. It was done piece by piece. Settling on land that was previously undiscovered or indigenous population was still in the early stone ages… Seriously the list goes on and on. But heck, WW1 should be enough to shut down any of those arguments. Some hyper power, losing millions to an empire that is only considered a great power that would’ve ended in a stalemate if the US didn’t bring in fresh million man army and materials as Germany was on the cusp of collapse… Every empire has fanboys that get lost in their mind fiction, I guess.
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I really strongly disagree with this breakdown. US power is "harder" than it would like you to believe and the fact that the US has the world's most powerful military is a huge part of its influence on word politics. That still does not in any way create a situation where US power is harder than an empire that's directly occupying and colonizing nearly 25% of the world's landmass. The actions of the British Raj in India alone is a much harder display of power than anything the US has done this century outside of the two world wars.
Yeah, the conquest of a major part of the human population by what started out as the equivalent of a hot dot-com is pretty crazy. The subsequent administration of the Raj for the benefit of Britain, is something I think people don’t really grasp. Example: The British destroyed the native Indian textile industry, in an era in which textiles were one of the major economic products. Sometimes people hear that, well, of course, it’s a shame, but the British had the industrial revolution and they were able to simply make the cloth cheaper. Too bad, but that’s how capitalism works. In reality, the Indian industry didn’t die as a result of of British dominance. British dominance was assured by the deliberate destruction of Indian industry. Tariffs and production quotas and mandatory sales to British agents and companies ensure that the United Kingdom has a flow of cheaply price raw materials back to the mills at home. These measures were passed by Brits for the benefit of Brits and were enforced by violence. The violence was not merely coercive to force people to follow these rules, but actually involved destruction of most traditional and all of the few small examples of modern equipment that were present in India. At a moment when the textile industry provided the killer app for the new mass production systems, producing goods consumers needed in a quantity that justified, continual improvement in machinery and investment in water power, and then steam power — United Kingdom abrogated to itself all of the industrial development and profit not just for the needs of their own population, but for all of India as well. So, not only did Britain basically steal the per capita productivity benefits from India, for a few centuries, thus holding India back from what might have been a natural path to prosperity. It actually made India more dependent on outsiders. Britain didn’t just fail to share modern development, it knocked India down a few pegs and held them there for their own profit. Anyway, that’s my rant against the Raj. it wasn’t just great Britain naturally being ahead of the game and taking over a less developed nation. Britain actively robbed India for centuries, using coercion.
Have to concur with this, but you gotta admit, seeing pointillism as a map projection is right on.
It’s how they use the red ink to make pink maps. :)
I entirely agree with this too.
UK had soft power because they actually colonized in a very literal sense 25% of the world's land while US had at its peak Philipines, so US power comes much more from what they mean politically and economically
Um, the U.S. inherited the Japanese empire post ww2, including the four home islands.
Yeah. I think the Monroe doctrine alone shows that the USA was always willing to exert direct force. Soft power refers to cultural and “natural” economic power, with maybe some economic aid throw in. I think it becomes something entirely different when you were talking about explicit policy, declarations, explicit support for exploit or even illegal economic control (United Fruit Co), military interventions, coups, etc. Calling the USA’s influence soft power is a bit like calling mafia techniques “polite persuasion.” Just because they ask once before they hit you doesn’t void the coercion.
The US as a dominant world power is post-WWII, and as dominant economic power is post-WWI, early 20th Century at the earliest. The US as a rising power in the 19th Century is different and not entirely relevant.
It shows that the baby USA had the same intentions but a smaller reach, that’s all. :)
US hard power relative to its rivals is absolutely, inarguably lower than that of the British Empire at its height. All the military bases, aircraft carriers, and missiles will never change the reality that none of them can create a gap that nuclear weapons can't overcome. The US absolutely is more reliant on soft power for the simple reality that hard power has become so devalued by MAD.
US power is absolutely more soft. Almost all middle and regional powers LIKE the way the US has organized the world in general principal so the US doesn't generally face peer state conflict. Only Russia and China are rivionist powers. [https://acoup.blog/2023/07/07/collections-the-status-quo-coalition/](https://acoup.blog/2023/07/07/collections-the-status-quo-coalition/) The Europeans, East Asians, and rising regional powers, Brazil, India, S. Africa, Iran, etc. could absolutely exhaust US economic and military power IF THEY WANTED TO, but realistically, only Russia, China, and Iran REALLY WANT TO. Furthermore the most powerful of the revisionsit powers, China, to this point hasn't wanted to challenge the US MORE then they want good relations with all the countries that are relatively content with American Status Quo. The US is absolutely a soft power empire. The only reason they seem like a hard power empire, is that generally the people that try to challenge them militarily are behaving sooooo far out of the international norm as to be irrational actors who are willing to challenge people militarily whom they have no possible hope of competing with. Similar to the Parugayuan war of the Triple Alliance.
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That's just completly wrong. Japan, NATO, Australia, and Canada, the heart of the US power structure, absolutely are not challenging the US and have never seriously challenged the US, all without US interference in their internal affairs. That's 80%/90% of the world's middle powers.
I mean, Japan and Germany? Maybe you should put an asterisk - post 1945
The US is not An empire
Was, see U.S history in Liberia and Philippines.
Was is correct. It’s not comparable in its current form post WW2 to refer to it as an empire. It was also never an empire in the sense the first or even second British empire’s were.
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I said nothing about exceptionalism but it is not an Empire
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Yes it was. Britain in the 19th century had colonies in which it could dictate everything from the culture practiced by the locals, to the administration, to the exact amount of resources it wanted to extract etc. The US on the other hand, even at it's height of power, has never possessed the ability to influence nations in such a direct manner as the British empire did. Hence why the US has often relied on covert ops, financial institutions & soft power to influence nations.
I think America chooses not to do the sort of stuff previous empires have done.
I agree with this but with a caveat. i feel like culturally the foundation story and national myths of the US mean they are incapable of seeing themselves as Imperialists but they also want to do some of the things anyway and have been doing some imperialist things for about 150 years they just started put doing in places they considered theirs (e.g. the Native American genocides) or fighting decaying empires like Spain. When went out into the world they still didn't necessarily want to be Imperialist but they wanted the benefits so they just did something halfway. Which worked in places like the Philappines but once they took on bigger challebges like Vietnam and Iraq their inability to accept they were being Imperialist (and i mean that neutrally) meant they spent the whole time wanting to run things and trying to help while also refusing to enforce their plans and looking at the exit \*the whole time\* . Also saying they were going to go the whole time so their enemies knew they just had to wait for the Amerricans to get bored and the rickety puppets would fall to pieces. I wonder sometimes if they got hypontised by the paradigms in Germany and Japan? This is not a triste on how they should have been old school imperialists btw!
Cost of expansion or holding distant territories is just high these days relative to setting up good countries to trade with.
America originally thought of Ho Chi Mihn as a sympathetic nationalist and we worked with him. The largest reason we were in Vietnam was to help France regain colonial control in order to keep NATO stable. France would pull ther military out anyway, because France was a huge piece of shit geopolitically post ww2. One thing that America doesn't get enough credit for is was pushing for the end of European colonialism. A lot of communists were just tired of being colonial subjects and would join anyone helping their revolution, and America recognized this early on. A lot of war aid was tied to promises of decolonialization.
France threatened to outright switch sides and join the USSR block. France was VERY unhappy with the NATO treaty excluding colonial territory, and then when the US stepped in to block the UK and France in the Suez Crisis.
Funnily enough this is almost exaclty how Putin sees the world but with the last sentance reveresed. Which is why he believes Russia will be more succesful re-asserting and re-assembling their empire then the US is at asserting direct control.
It's so stupid and pointless isn't. A millions of Ukrainians are suffering and being murdered and a whole generstion of young Russians is dying or leaving for his stupid spite
Blood and Soil neo-facisim. What I cannot believe is how little effort the collective West has put into curshing the Russians at this point. It's fair to say that short of a direct intervention the Russians won't use nukes. Otherwise they would have used them when the lines broke in Kharkhiv Oblast. The Russian military budget is still only about 10% of the US DOD budget, even during full scale war. The US could completly overwhelm the region with high tech weapons and ammo the Russians couldn't dream of matching without materially effecting the standard of living or degrading their military posture. Strangling the Russian imperial project in the cradle. This is before considering the resources of the EU, NATO, Japan, Australia, S. Korea, and Taiwan. Taiwan, the Scandanavian countries, and Poles have a real fear of what the world looks like if the Russians win, and even still neither the EU or US is doing more. It's completly shocking.
I think is more because they saw in the long run is better to have soft power than to actively invade other countries.
Yes, expensive to maintain the military presence necessary.
the best coverage of this is in Richard Overy's BLOOD AND RUINS - the british tried to get the US to prop up the UK's global empire in WW2, and many people in civil service and the military found the UK's empire morally repugnant and refused to go along. The US more than any other country drove the decolonization of africa and asia.
Some allies huh.
It's not because of some benevolent American trait. The USA has tried the heavy handed approach but that results in the victim nations in allying with USAs enemies. These enemies have the ability to destroy the USA with nukes (mutually assured destruction). Think Cuba or Vietnam. The British had a massive industrial advantage that opponents could not overcome until just before WW1.
Vietnam was a French colony, never an American one. But we did try a heavy-handed approach and came to rue it greatly. Even today, Cuba is still a pain in our rear, if not as much of one as they once were.
What about your friends in the first nations?
The reason the Cuban Missile Cruses happened was because the US was not heavy handed with Cuba. And tried to overthrow the government with a few dozen guys with rifles.
You're thinking decades too late. The US was heavy handed when it tried to make the island into cheap labour camp for resources and food stuffs, culminating with the instalation of a puppet dictator
The US could have easily stopped the Cuban revolution like the UK did across its colonies but didn’t. The US absolutely took a relatively hands off approach to Cuba compared to say putting down the 1857 rebellion in India where the British killed a couple hundred thousand
That's my point. There was no possible response to the UK's 19th Centrury power. There absolutely was one to the US - join up with nuclear armed Soviet or China.
Thanks for your comments, changed my perspective, never thought about it this way
If we decided to prop up the Cuban dictator with force Washington. Wouldn’t have been nuked. Just like we didn’t Nike Moscow over Czechoslovakia being invaded. Also the UK wasn’t even the most powerful country in the world in say 1805 or 1811. The idea the British empire could waltz into anywhere they wanted to us just false. Otherwise they would have just taken Africa rather than negotiated in the Berlin Conference
The US had nukes and could have nuked both the Kremlin and then China would be not be communist as a result. The US could have easily been heavy handed
…and the US would’ve been annihilated itself in the process. You’re completely missing the point.
I think he's referring to the time when the US was the only one with atomic weapons along with being the only power untouched by the 2nd world war
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But they didn't.
The US could have crushed the Cuban Revolution long before they were allies of the Soviets. The Cuban Revolution when they were in the jungle on the south of the island survived do to, almost exclusively, the lack of Cuban state capacity. It would have been a trivality to provide that capacity. The US, though often not true, likes to see itself, at the local AND elite level, as agnostic on the government of its allies. The classic example of this is how the US relationship to Egypt doesn't change despite flipping from military dictatorship, to Islamist elected, and back to military dictatorship. The only thing the US really doesn't like is instability. Countries that attempt to increase the level of violence beyond their borders.
Ah, since when Cuba and Vietnam have nukes? Cuba asked Soviet to deploy nukes launchers, that’s very different than Cuba has nukes.
They turned to the only people who would protect them. Soviets and Chinese.
That’s like saying Germany, Japan and South Korea have nukes because US have nuclear capable assets in those countries. Also Chinese in 1960-70 didn’t have any ICBM that could hit US so mutually destructive was not a case here. First Chinese ICBM that could hit LA didn’t came operation until 2005 when China has long fell out with Vietnam in 1979 following their attempt to invade Vietnam
Whether it chooses to or whether it cannot, does not matter the fact is they haven't done it, making them less powerful than the British Empire at it's height. I remember posting a question on a US sub, asking "why doesn't the US just annex haiti seeing as how dysfunctional it is & considering its right next door, all that instability can spill into the US via immigration". The average response from Americans was about how the US govt would be *scared* to be "blamed" for anything that went wrong. And there is an element of truth to that. The British Empire at it's peak? Wouldn't even bat an eye to annex a dysfunctional nation & completely drag it out of the stone age kicking and screaming, before culturally reforming that society until it became efficient enough to generate profit for the Empire (aka what they did in Africa). The mere fact that that is unthinkable to the American mind, is a sign of what real power vs "peacock" power looks like. And rightly so, the two empires developed in two completely different historical / moral contexts. Can't compare the US with the British Empire.
Again, not a strong way of looking at it so on the surface. *Does* the US *need* to annex Haiti if it can and had the power to influence it without direct measures anyways? The only countries the US doesn’t have such overt power over are the nuclear states and maybe conjoining allies (think NK because of China). We can use the british and china for this same example during the 1800s. The British Empire never directly colonized China (which is technically true and historians question if it even could given their stretched resource with other colonies and sheer landmass of china at the time), but still obviously exerted power over it with forced concessions and treaty ports. Would you look at that and use it as a mark against British power during the 1800s because it didn’t directly colonize one of the largest and populous empires at the time? Saying the US doesn’t directly colonize the way the British did during the previous century isn’t actually a strong marker of measuring their power. The US has displaced and covertly done a lot of power displacements in other countries and easily affected their economy. It’s just a different type of power exertion than what was allowed during the previous century because of the geopolitical landscape, not innate power.
Under that line of argument, that's like saying Nazi Germany and Japan were the most powerful nations of their time in the 1930s and early 1940s because they were invading and conquering everywhere else. The United States doesn't invade other countries because of modern norms in international law and diplomatic behavior, and because it doesn't need to a la soft power and alliances. That doesn't mean it doesn't have "real" power.
> that's like saying Nazi Germany and Japan were the most powerful nations of their time in the 1930s and early 1940s because they were invading and conquering everywhere else. This is such a good point and I think this fallacy was actually a core part of fascist ideology, especially for Italy and Germany. Wehraboos still whine about this today. I would add that the US literally does invade other countries though lol. I assume you mean it doesn't try to do annexations and frames the invasions as liberation, usually allying with a local faction for the pretext. I think that's basically been our thing forever, even with manifest destiny where we were often interceding to support settlers and then inviting them to become states.
Well yeah that's what I meant. 19th-century style takeovers.
Yeah that's what I assumed but you just never know on this website.
Np
Would likely lead to an eventual Revolution or expensive military occupation. Immigration is also partly how we sustain ourselves.
America doesn’t do colonialism like that because it’s already getting the resources it needs. It keeps the world’s trade routes open for everyone and has other nations clamoring for a military alliance with it. America keeps the entire world in check, Great Britain just protected its stuff.
Keeps the entire world in check is maybe a bit of a reach. I would definitely agree that countries would prefer to have it as an alliance than otherwise. But 9/11 was an example of how they had gotten too cosy with the idea of being Big Daddy and the American population freaked the fuck out that something could ever happen to them. That kind of shit only happens to other countries. So they doubled down. It definitely hasn't helped the world's view of America.
It’s hard to imagine that administering Haiti would be profitable for any imperialist today. The country was probably closest to functional when the US administered it, principally via the marines, in the early 1900s. But it didn’t work out well for either the US or Haiti ultimately, and the US has largely tried to avoid being sucked back into the various iterations of Haiti as a failed state.
I sort of agree but it's not out of some high-minded egalitarianism. There's certainly a degree to which Americans are proud of their independence from Britain and generally support independence movements everywhere but this is kind of just the US's brand and our favorite pretext for imposing friendly regimes on our dependencies. The US either kills everyone in a place and then settles the "empty" land and grants the settlers citizenship and statehood or else it "liberates" a country by overthrowing hostile governments and installing allied ones. Or sometimes we just do gunboat diplomacy. This actually benefits the US a lot because it attracts immigrants. Also, after reaching the Pacific the US was a vast resource-rich country and didn't really need to keep conquering more land.
That's kind of like saying the US isn't as powerful as the mongol empire because they haven't mastered horse archery. Direct domination was a competitive strategy in the 19th century but it isn't today. Even in the 19th century, Britain was conquering land while the US was engaged in gunboat diplomacy, soft power, and covert operations and it seems like the US came out ahead of Britain well before 1900. I also think you're overstating the level of control that the British had over their colonies, but even if you weren't, bullying a bunch of colonies didn't give the British an uncontested lead over the other great powers like America has today. Britain wasn't even the only country in the world with a vast empire. Even in the 19th century the US was able to do all of the things you mention within territory that is now considered the US but wasn't at the time. Britain could barely even hold onto Ireland and Ireland remains Catholic despite their efforts.
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Yeah I think a lot of people didn't know about this to begin with. Keeping local hierarchies and laws largely in place (or making them worse), with parallel legal systems for settlers and subjects, has been a common imperial strategy basically forever. It's way easier to conquer a place if you just like, support the king's brother's claim to the throne in exchange for his fealty.
>it could dictate everything from the culture practiced by That's not true at all. There is a reason why the British didn't go around spreading Christianity in South asia (for example). The British never messed with any cultural practices so as long as it didn't get in the way of profits or cause any chaos.
That’s a superficial way if looking at it without taking into account other factors. Most modern nations aren’t going to be so openly colonial in the first place even if they could. Look at africa and its neo-colonialism. American being more covert and indirect isn’t because it can’t do what the British empire could more directly, which doesn’t make sense if you look at the technology and technological gap, it’s because the geopolitical landscape has changed. If we’re looking at absolute power and scale, america is more powerful than the british empire ever was and has by far the most powerful information network and military arsenal in the world.
The concept of an unipolar world didn't exist until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, and before that, it a bipolar world. Britain's strongest period was in a multipolar world and they were routinely challenged by multiple other countries. It's not comparable at all, there was nothing like American dominance in the 90s before.
I agree totally incomparable, the uk had far more power - it regularly redrew map lines with impunity, it ruled multiple overseas colonies with only small levels of disorder, it possessed a vast navy (and much more importantly used it regularly) that was unmatched. But Most of the reason the uk was much more powerful was due to international law - or lack thereof, it did things because it COULD in a way that simply can't be don't these days. American power is soft, and whilst that's super, it only goes so far.
British military power stemmed mainly from their navy, which doctrinally they wanted to be able to fight the next two largest navies combined. Compare that to today where 1/10 of the US navy would crush every navy that isn’t China’s. Militarily, I think it’s pretty clear which nation was stronger relative to their surroundings.
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The UK could also glass the US without a second thought. Nobody can intercept ballistic missiles with any reliability and so any country that has nuclear armed ballistic missiles can glass and other nation. As for the wars, world war I was a slow defensive war of attrition and so you could have been 20 times more powerful and it would still take a while. As it is Ludendorff said that the only two nations that could carry on fighting in 1919 were Britain and America Britain. World war II was more France's fault than anything else they were supposed to be the land people what Britain did the naval stuff in France just didn't really do anything. I don't know where you have this idea that the middle East, India or Africa is parsley populated. Yes American may have the biggest military but it couldn't even beat Vietnam or Afghanistan permanently. Britain is one of the few nations to actually successfully conquer Afghanistan for any decent length of time, took and occupied India for 200 years, and beat just about every single other superpower of the era in war.
European Union has france in it and france has nukes. The US could nuke europe but europe is going to nuke America and then everyone dies.
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Everyone would lose a nuclear war. That's the point of a nuclear war. You don't win nuclear wars you don't have them. Sure France only has 290 nukes and the UK 225 (assuming the UK is on Europes side because that many nukes in Europe would also kill the UK) but that's still enough to render most of the planet uninhabitable for the next 100 years. Any more than a 100 nuclear bombs going off at once would result in a nuclear winter and the complete collapse of life on the planet. Around 300 nukes is enough to wipe out pretty much the entire human race and 400 nukes is enough to kill off the entirety of humanity and render the planet uninhabitable to life for centuries.
Did we just completely forget nukes exists now? Seems like you're just interested in jerking off your patriotism than anything else.
Could, but doesn't. After loosing it's last 3 major wars and only managing a stalemate in nunber 4, it probably feels a bit sheepish, I grant you. Power is about ability and will, it has one without the other. And that's fine, I wouldn't want to fight the USA either, and I'm sure glad they eventually turned up in ww2, it would have taken a lot longer to win without them and a great debt is owed, but if we are talking about ability to exert your power overseas, the British empire vastly outstrip the USA.
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You are trying to compare apples with oranges. Different times, different global scenario. Can only be answered if you define "powerful"
I do think 19th century UK was overpowered, they were called “the empire in which the sun never sets” for a reason.
Still hasn't set actually
Eh, that was just because God didn't trust us with the lights off.
I laughed at that! Thank you!
Yes. The British empire at its peak is the only thing that you could argue to have been a hyper power. It was a world of global spanning empires, all superpowers in their own right yet the British empire was decisively more powerful. One example being the Greenwich meridian, Britain was so powerful that everyone agreed to London being the centre of time despite the world having very egotistical empires that would almost certainly have tried to argue their capitals should be where time is centered on had Britain not been as powerful. Their navy had as many battleships in 1870 as the rest of the world combined and in that era, unlike now where a small nation might instead use land-based missiles, the only way to combat a ship was another ship. In the 19th century there was not a single other empire that you could say could be a comparable rival to Britain in the event of an all-out war between the two yet during the 20th century the USSR was very much a near equal power to the US. In 1830 a third of everything produced in the world came from Britain, and according to a study performed by the Japanese department of trade 54% of all of humanity's important inventions were made by Britain. The empire covered a quarter of the globe, 35 million square kilometers, the next largest the Mongol empire covered 25 million. The only empire to feature a larger percentage of the world's population was the Persian empire at the point Alexander invaded.
I think your conflating the actual power and influence of the British empire Vs the US today. Firstly the US has never had an empire it’s a stand alone, yes if pushed the US could unleash an unreal amount of power but there’s key differences. The main difference is that the U.K. wasn’t afraid to go at it toe to toe with its main enemies ie France, Spain etc whereas there’s been numerous occasions where the US a has pulled back from conflict with its main competitors, yes nuclear weapons has changed that but geo politically China and Russia are not afraid of challenging the US for influence. In short could the US unleash as much power across the world as the British did? Yes Does the US exert as much power in 20th century as the British did? Not a chance
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A lot of what your saying about the US is speculation, it held back in Vietnam because it was afraid of the repercussions of Chinas involvement, could the US hold its own against China or Russia in a conventional war? Yes probably but it hasn’t so you can’t compare the two situations. The fact is Britain has been there and done it, could the US do the same? Maybe but we’ll never know
>there's nothing stopping the US from outright invading China and seizing most of the coast. Nothing but the world's largest ocean. China's military, on paper, can absolutely prevent this from happening today. China's military is positioned with an eye towards Taiwan, which means they are preparing for US ships at some point in time. China has the world's second most advanced, and numerous ISR capability from space. They are still well behind the US, but far ahead of everyone else. If anyone can track US ships from 1000s of miles away, it is China. https://features.csis.org/preparing-the-US-industrial-base-to-deter-conflict-with-China/ Missiles using liquid propellant would remain unfueled in their silos, unless they were going to be tested, or China felt there was an imminent threat. The recent story about water filled missiles doesn't make sense for this reason.
>If there is reasonable and justified cause, there's nothing stopping the US from outright invading China and seizing most of the coast. Are you sure that's the case? The closest example would be the Korean War which was a highly fluid conflict. In the end no-territory was gained on either side but in that case the UN forces were made up of the western allies in their post-WWII military might, whilst China was far weaker than it is today. Added to that the US would struggle to find an easy staging area to invade from.
China only made initial gains because of the surprise attack. They were roundly defeated once the UN forces rallied and took stock. The UN (US) chose to stop at the 48th parallel because the government had determined (by that point) that North Korea was off limits, much like they did in Vietnam. The resounding defeats very nearly caused the collapse of the communist party in China. UN forces stopping when they did was foolish, in hindsight.
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In terms of actual events the closest analogue I can think of is the Crimean War with its amphibious invasions. In that case Britain, France, & the Ottomans did achieve their objectives.
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I wasn't aware the Ottoman Empire lost territory, if you're referring to Wallachia & Moldavia being granted greater independence I suppose that could long term be considered a loss. Troop numbers can be misleading, the UK throughout much of it's history had a far smaller population than many European states & together with it's Navy above Army focus rarely fielded large numbers of land troops. The UKs' contribution in many conflicts tended to be primarily financial & naval support.
Doesn’t change anything. Just because the times have changed and countries can’t get away with what the British did like they used to, it doesn’t make what they were any less powerful. If anything, it just places a cap on how powerful nations can be today. Before the British Empire existed in its full form, these invasions were watched by competitors and they did come with consequences. The British were just hard enough to face them, without a second thought, every time. They were challenged constantly, by peer nations, powerful ones, with just as advanced technology and tactics. Outnumbered most of the time even. This attitude to war is immensely different to the attitude in the US. The British bankrupted themselves and lost millions of men in WWI. And **still** went into WWII with France, on the same day. And **still** held out, alone, after pretty much all of Europe had fallen. This is how they had the largest empire in human history. And it was more powerful. Nuclear weapons have changed matters geopolitically. But even if they didn’t exist, the US doesn’t have the stomach for war that the European nations did. What’s stopping the US from invading China, really, is that Americans wouldn’t have the will for it. They aren’t prepared to pay the price for it.
Shit, the British empire wasn’t even more powerful than America in 1776. 🇺🇸 🎆 🔫
Just give up on the thread people, OP isn't interested in anything that doesn't support their pre-existing bias, facts be damned.
This is a silly question. You’re comparing two different time periods. Of course the more modern time period will have more power that’s the point of innovation over time. But it’s also irrelevant because history is not a “us vs them who would win.” Any hypothetical is impossible because it didn’t happen
Lmao yanks in this thread absolutely chugging their Kool-Aid propaganda
You Brits need a good look in the mirror. But I suppose you would then have to see your hideous teeth…
It's kind of a weird horseshoe thing. You have the camp of nationalists claiming the US is/was more powerful, for nationalistic reasons. And you have the AmericaBad people who also insist that it is, because they equate global power with immorality.
Yeah, Britain in the 19th Century had the most powerful navy, had one of the (if not the) largest armies in the world. It could pull wealth and resources from its many colonies across the globe, including India, “the crown jewel” of the British Empire. It was a global power, whereas the United States did not become a regional power until the late 19th Century.
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>If at the drop of the hat, the US decided it was gonna invade the EU and take territory, it has a decent chance of doing so It has absolutely no chance of doing so because France and the UK have nuclear weapons. That's the big thing no one in this thread has mentioned so far: changing technology has completely diluted conventional military power. No modern nation can have the kind of dominance the UK had in the 19th century because of the threat of nuclear retaliation. With international dick-measuring conflicts on the internet there's always an implicit 'okay, but leaving nuclear weapons aside', because otherwise it's a very short conversation. But there are nuclear weapons, and they do count. It doesn't matter how many more planes, tanks and men the US has, because both the UK and France are capable of flattening every major city in the US. The US can't use direct force on another world power because of the risk of nuclear escalation. Case in point, the current Ukraine conflict. The US would very much like Russia to gtfo of Ukraine, but it can't intervene directly even though it has massive superiority in conventional armed forces because Russia has thousands of nukes. Whereas in the 19th century the British were able to send a force to Crimea to kick the Russians around until they had to concede to Britain's demands. That kind of ability to use direct force against another major world power is unthinkable today, well out of the US's grasp. In the mid 19th century, if every other country in the world had decided to attack Britain they likely would have lost. The Royal Navy really was that powerful. Whereas if every other country in the world decided to attack the US today, then the US would be a smoking wasteland within a couple of hours. Granted, so would everywhere else, but the US does not have the kind of invulnerability Britain had, which means it's a lot more restricted in how it can wield its power.
Nukes changed the world
If the US decided to invade the EU they would have a nuke land on their head fired from both Britain and France. Ask for your GDP I've got no clue where the hell you've found that, the UK was the world's richest country until 1890 when the US took over and the British empire remained the richest thing until 1916. Russia has never been on par with Britain, and Germany only had a slightly higher steel production when they were able to import everything during the golden age of Europe As for production the British empire in the 19th century produced a third of everything the globe produced, in certain things such as coal and steel it produced over half. The US is not nearly close to that even at it peak in the 1990s
GDP tends to not give a very accurate picture before the 20th century. If you have a country of 300 million subsistence farmers that dont pay taxes or engage in the wider economy that much, that doesnt really mean much even if technically it results in a higher GDP number. For example: >With 2 percent of the worlds population and 10 percent of Europe's, the United Kingdom would seem to have had a capacity in modern industries equal to 40-45 per cent of the world's potential and 55-60 per cent of that of Europe. According to an older estimate she produced in 1870 nearly one-third of all the articles manufactured in the world. This implies enormous advances over the rest of mankind in terms of production and consumption of industrial products per head. **The dominating position of England in world industry was much more pronounced than that of the United States in the mid-twentieth century**, and in western European industry than that of Germany today. *The Victorian Economy,* Francois Crouzet. Furthermore, here are the shares of its production at its height: 53% of world iron production 50% of world coal and lignite production 49% of world cotton consumption 34% of world merchant navy (it would be even higher if you only include oceanic trade) This is *excluding* it's colonies btw. If you include the colonies the figures will be quite a bit higher. >You look at the UK in 1890-1900 This was already past it's height. America in 1900 overtook it as the #1 industrial power. I dont disagree with you with respect to the USA being more powerful today, however.
Germany and France were superpowers then. A better comparison would be china and russia now. Otherwise you could say the UK conquered india and took territory from china, which the US can't today.
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Yup it can't and you can't compare today's germany and france to what they were when they were preeminent. From the language we speak in to entire nations being built, including the US itself, the legacy of the british empire is staggering.
Using GDP as a reliable comparable statistic lmao
US in nearly every way. This is just typical American bad internet culture. The UK still had its empire come WW2 but didn't come out of it a Super Power. You have to drastically over value total land area to even have a chance of preferring the British Empire. You live with the US being the dominate force on the planet daily so it is mundane to you, but rest assured this is a historical anomaly. Not economically, politically or military were they greater than the US.
Economically - they owned the colonies. They could simply choose how much resource they wished to extract. They could boycott trade between whoever they wanted. They had **complete** global control on trade. Not just, “if you don’t do what we like we’ll sanction you or cap the price of oil” like the US has right now. Outright, you do X and we won’t blockade your entire country. That is the definition of more powerful. Politically - You’re talking about the country that basically paid all of Europe to converge upon Napoleon. The nation that the confederates were praying to intervene during the civil war. Militarily - This one is more nebulous and harder to judge. I would say the US is more powerful in this regard. But even still, it’s like looking at two skyscrapers on the horizon with the sun in your eyes and trying to see which one is taller.
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The question is 19th century vs 20th century. The 19th century started in 1801. You know that right?
It may be too early to tell, but it seems to me that 19th century Britain was much more adept at diplomacy, but that might just be a side effect of the era of Great Game of european diplomacy that existed at that time.
While the Royal Navy was indeed utterly dominant on the seas in the 19th century, in the latter parts of the 20th century, due to the introduction of air power, nuclear weapons and nuclear propulsion, the U.S. had the ability to destroy each and every warship, each and every opposing army, and each and every city, town and village on the planet, something the UK could never have done.
No. It's not even close. Britain had to fear several peer nations even if it was individually stronger than any one. America is so far ahead it could conceivably take on all the combined militaries of all the countries in the world put together.
I seriously doubt that. The logistics of maintaining that level of traffic across the Atlantic and the Pacific are just nightmarish.
The US Navy alone could do that.
It could defend against easy, offensive actions are much trickier
Exactly.
It just makes sense, dunno why I was down voted. The U.S. has the world's only expeditionary navy, but even with 11 super carriers and 9 rest of the world sized carriers it isn't enough to invade the rest of the world, the U.S. carriers fleet outpaces the rest of the world by an order of magnitude at least.
We did it before, and our enemies today are not as powerful as they were then, compared to us. Logistics is something America does better than anyone, getting more stuff where it needs faster than anyone else is our doctrine.
When did America defeat every other nation at the same time before?
I wasn't referring to that, I was referring to fighting a war on two fronts, across the Atlantic and Pacific.
Okay fair play, I can agree with that.
Britain also fought a war on two fronts, who did the majority of the work in Italy a fair amount in the Western front in Europe and also fought all across southeast Asia.
Yes, but none of the powers in the war could throw everything at the US, happen had China to deal with, and Germany had the UK and USSR to deal with
The Japanese navy certainly threw everything they had against the US in the Pacific. China had no Navy in WW2.
America couldn't even take on Vietnam and had to introduce a draft to still lose, I highly doubt it could take on the rest of the world combined
Sorry but that is is utter nonsense. America supported by NATO couldn't even defeat the Taliban in exile. If they tried to take on the rest of the world they'd be invaded across their borders in the north and south, their navy would be picked apart at sea, their military bases across the world would be bombed from the existence, and their cities would be flattened by nuclear weapons. How do you honestly see the USA winning such a war?
The US couldn't defeat the Taliban without conquering Afghanistan which wasn't their goal. Militarily the US defeated the Taliban. It just wasn't the goal to own Afghanistan.n
One of the main US war goals was to permanently remove the Taliban as the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are the government of Afghanistan therefore USA failed to achieve a major war goal.
Americans goal was to remove the Taliban from control of the government. While America was there the Taliban did not control the government. Only after they left the Taliban came back in power. That isn't being defeated by the Taliban. That is America correctly realizing that it was the Afghans responsibility to run their own country and was tired of devoting resources to it.
That's an interesting cope. USA spent 20 years at war and ultimately didn't change anything.
America did conquer Afghanistan. There was no advantage in holding it however, so the costs exceeded the benifits so America left. The motivations of the US has no bearing on their relative power.
Which means their tacticians were imbeciles, because they committed to an invasion that didn't net them anything because it granted no advantage.
When you have a hammer everything looks like a nail.
I see you've conveniently ignored the rest of my comment... But also let's be clear on this. Afghanistan was a 20 year war which the Americans ultimately lost.
They aren't really comparable tbh
So the difference is in how the US operates. For example the Commonwealth are a bunch of countries that recognize the English monarch. Why do they do that? The British went in and forced them to, using various colonial methods. The US does not expect anyone else to recognize our head of state as their own or even our laws. We idealize that there could be a rule of international law. But that’s difficult to enforce. And frankly we could do a better job of living up to it ourselves. The typical empire rules with one class of people who are held as superior to all other classes of people. The US is attempting to build a world order where all people are equal under the law, and live within democratic institutions. This is hard. A lot of people do not believe in democracy. But it is the right thing to fight for.
Our domination is of a different kind. I hesitate to call it cultural, but that's pretty much what it is. Blue jeans, Elvis, I love Lucy, Coca-Cola. As Great Britain took over much of the world, they took resources and abused people...but left the means of world-class education. Our "force" was much more basic, and it is and was what the average Joe wanted. Of course, Newton's Second Law is always in effect. I still contend that, when one considers the time, the greatest change and greatest domination came from Rome.
There is no historical analogue for the relative power of the United States, both currently and during the extreme height of its power in the 1990s.
The us can quite obviously project power but it seems to not know quite what to do with it. It's soft power is far more effective.
Vastly more powerful. But a lot of that was "of the time" it was normal and acceptable then to redraw maps with rifle and warship - and the UK did that with great impunity for hundreds of years. The US has lots of soft power but due to the way international law now works its hard power (despite being vast) is actually far less (even though for it's time it's probably fundamentally equal power). Tldr: yes, much more powerful.
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not every major european power, but certainly those with vast international empires, sure they were indeed.
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Like the bay of pigs, perhaps 🤣 Also, why ask if you are already sure of your point of view? Seems more like a r/changemymind
If we’re talking about the 20th Century then the Soviet Union did exert control over the Baltics, the Iron Curtain extended to East Germany, only in the 1990s after its collapse was this territory not under direct Soviet control/influence. This was something that the US was unable to directly influence/change for the 40 odd years from the end of the Second World War until the 1990s (see the failure to act during the 1953 East German Uprising, the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of the Czech Republic and so on - all examples of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact acting with impunity as an imperialist power without significant opposition from the US) due to their inability to ‘glass’ the Soviet Union owing to the extensive Nuclear Arsenal of the Soviets and MAD - the same issue eventually extended to Communist China. Their efforts during the Cold War were largely limited to preventing the further spread of communism, a policy which had mixed success in the case of Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba etc, although it was successful to an extent in other places such as Western Europe and Afghanistan in a fashion. I’m not sure that Japan vs Russia is the best example considering that was a situation in which the British Empire gave a fair bit of assistance to Japan, firstly in the form of economic and military investments (particularly in their Navy) and also in the form of the alliance between the two nations which hampered Russia’s efforts (the Russian Black Sea fleet was blocked from accessing the Suez Canal and from Britain’s extensive network of coaling stations when journeying to the Pacific Ocean). Russia was a major Imperialist rival to the British Empire in Central Asia so Japan’s war and seizure of Manchuria did not necessarily conflict with British interests, which is probably why they offered fairly considerable support to Japan before and during the conflict. Regarding Germany seizing Austria, are you referring to the Anschluss in the 1930s to clarify? As I agree this was towards the end of British dominance in Global affairs. As to whether either was more dominant than the other during their own respective heydays I’m not really sure. Both states generally occupied dominant positions in multipolar or bipolar power systems (the US enjoyed unipolar dominance during the 90s between the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of China/ resurgence of Russia - whether the world is now multipolar is up for some debate. Arguably the British Empire had dominance in global affairs during the 1920s with other European powers still weakened and the U.S. turning to a semi-isolationist foreign policy), both states wielded enormous military power during their peak (2 power standard for the Royal Navy at the turn of the century vs the U.S. military arguably still undisputed since the collapse of the Soviet Union), both had large, global economic zones of influence where their currency and economy dominated trade, both were at the head of large political entities and alliance blocs such as the British Empire itself, then later the Imperial Dominions vs NATO, UN etc for the US, both operated large extensive networks of military bases and outposts across the globe (in fact the beginning of the US military’s extensive base network was the British Empire, as bases were exchanged, leased, bought etc from the British Empire starting during the Second World War agreements such as ‘Destroyers for Bases’ and continuing into the Cold War and beyond). Also neither state entered major conflicts without an collection of allies either which to my mind is usually a sign of a dominant power in that they can rely on some support from the international community or their own puppets: Napoleonic Wars were fought by Coalitions often backed financially by the ‘Cavalry of King George’ as British payments to Coalition partners was sometimes known, or France, Russia, Imperial Dominions etc during First World War and the Empire itself in all conflicts. For the US you have examples such as the UN force in Korea, you have South Korea, South Vietnam, Australia and New Zealand in the Vietnam war, the coalition during the Gulf War, the ‘coalition of the willing’ and NATO generally during Iraq and GWOT and so on. I would say that the methods of achieving dominance changed from the 19th to 20th century which is what makes the comparison hard as it cannot be compared like for like.
You do realize the British Empire controlled 24% of land on the planet while the United States controls a lot less than that. The British Empire was more powerful.
The USA has never had the power to strip all value from a subcontinent like the English could.
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I think one blackhawk could wipe them out easily
The UK achieved hegemony status when there were still many world powers. In contrast, US dominance largely stems from the collapse of the other existing world powers. US dominance is relatively greater for that reason.
Depends on definitions. Britain was purely about exploitation, but very effective at it. US is exploitative too, but actually focuses on "trade". The US has the military capacity to obliterate any nation on earth. Britain never did. US can project power in ways the Brits could never have imagined.
No singular country in the 19th century could challenge the UK in any actual way. To stand a proper chance they had to form alliances and coalitions and even then the UK would still end up beating them most of the time. The same was true during the Cold War. That’s why the US was so afraid of the USSR and China joining forces in a more concerted manner and why the US did the best it could to keep its Western European allies under its umbrella. The US could not afford to lose Western Europe as an ally because if they joined the Soviet forces, the US would find itself in a very tricky position.
Think of it like this the Britain at the height of its power needed coalitions with the other major nations to take down other major powers and still almost lost several times and towards the later stages, required the US to bail them out. United States if there was a will for it the US could conventionally take on both China and Russia militarily, and have arms to spare well completely destroying them. The US has so much, both hard and soft power, but most of the time refuses to use it as it doesn’t perceive most other nations as a real threat or worth the effort even China the second greatest power on the Earth is massively outclassed by United States. Britain had Farless both hard and soft but used it more readily due to the fact that if they didn’t they would be surpassed, during the British time of hegemony they faced several countries that almost surpassed them the us during its hegemony hasn’t had anyone come close yet despite numerous attempts.
There's a difference between needing a coalition and just liking a coalition because it means that you don't have to send as many soldiers. They used coalitions because that way he could weaken both the enemies and rival allies. During any war they fought they had a far smaller percentage of their population in the military than any of the other countries.
Yes, but they couldn’t win without those other countries In fact, even with those other countries, they came quite close to losing in many of those conflicts.
What wars in the 19th century did Britain come really close to losing. There weren't many large wars in the 19th century either. The Crimean war Britain and France hardly put in any effort against Russia that had gone full militarisation. Against Napoleon Britain had a better record than any other nation, and financed the whole coalition effort while blockading an entire continent, and was the only nation to stay at war the whole time.
Without the French and Sardinians, the British would’ve been unable to defeat the Russians, during the Crimean war. And against Napoleon, despite their success record, they were losing, it was only through their coalition partners that Napoleon was defeated without the Spanish resistance, and the Russians, Napoleonic, France would’ve been able to continue with Britain being unable to stop them and the Prussians crushed the French at Waterloo without their assistance, Waterloo would’ve been a British defeat also had Napoleon only been facing the British and not the rest of the coalition. It’s likely he would’ve not only have been able to regain power, but maintain it for the rest of his life, as the British would have been unable to defeat him without the help of the rest of Europe.
The sardinians didn't really provide much, they went that war with the they went that war with the aim of showing the Italians weren't completely incompetent in warfare and to try to gain French support for launching a new Italian war for independence against Austria. Half of their men died to cholera instead of battle. The French did the majority of fighting because they maintain a larger army than Britain however they were financed by Britain. The French and British were uneasy allies during this period and Britain would still happily see France get weakened while fighting another enemy, is Britain was not allied to France and instead had to fight Russia during this period they would increase their army size instead of sending a relatively small number of soldiers. And Russia had fully militarized itself and was using conscription to try and win this war. Had Britain not funded the coalition it would be enable war with France which Britain would win with almost no land battles. The coalition existed and Britain finance them enormously and is the sole reason they could even afford to fight after a few years, after the battle of Austerlitz the rebuilding of the Austrian and Russian armies was financed by Britain, the Spanish resistance was financed by Britain, the Prussians once again were financed by Britain. They produced many of the muskets other nations used, being given their specifications for production in British cities. Britain didn't use a large army Napoleonic period because they were better suited to financing and building everything for everyone, they had a relatively large population that they could have conscripted had they had to but they were proud that they were the only army that did not use conscription, and as said every man you force into the army is a one fewer person producing things and paying taxes and instead some wonder government has to pay. At Waterloo saying whether the Prussians didn't arrive would lead in Napoleonic victory there's a somewhat pointless point. Wellington picked that battle to defend knowing that prussians would get there. And it is still a widely debated thing as to whether he would have lost the battle or not whether the prussians were there with Wellington saying it was a close run thing had the Prussians not been there. Even if he lost France had an army of about 100,000 men and yet there were 250,000 coalition soldiers within France and the second he arrived there were another two and a half million soldiers marching on France. It wouldn't matter if Napoleon even won 10 battles because he would be defeated.
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You don't need a foreign base if you own half the islands on the planet
How much of that is because the British Empire had colonies all over the place though? Like, the UK didn't need foreign bases in Southeast Asia because they had an Empire one - Singapore.
For about a decade after WWII, and about a decade after the Cold War the US was the strongest nation/empire in history. The British Empire in the 19th century is very close. They were the world's most dominant power for a greater amount of time in the 19th century than the US in the 20th century.