A Racialized Peace? How Britain and the US Made Their Relationship Special

Abstract

The extensive literature on the Anglo-American “special relationship” revolves around an observation that Britain and the US tend to cooperate more closely than any other comparable pair of states. I argue that this cooperation pattern originates in the construction of a “racialized peace” between the American and British empires at the fin-de-siècle. My argument builds on constructivist theorizations of the links among state/national identity, foreign policy, and international conflict/cooperation. Beginning with a discourse analysis of representative texts from the period leading up to the Venezuela crisis of 1895–96, I show how American and British elites succeeded in framing themselves as the vanguards of civilization and how the idea that two Anglo-Saxon entities could not fight each other in a global political system defined by race had significant consequences in world politics.

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