ABSTRACT
This book explores the agency of African Americans altogether, several British commentators shifted the blame for the continuance of slavery during the 1850's onto an electorate comprising an Irish Mobocracy' in the North in order to exonerate Anglo-Saxon' planters in the South. It suggests, as integral a part of the transatlantic imaginary as it is of imperialism but nineteenth-century racial thinking is never entirely predictable in its mapping of national cultures. Although the invocation of Englishness by Burke modulated into the scientific racism of Anglo-Saxon ethnicity, such ideas of a shared racial heritage remained an inherent part of nineteenth-century understandings of transatlantic politics and culture. While the Cold War polarized putative American freedom and democracy against the dictates of a Soviet single-party state. Thus, the conditions of austerity in Britain made for a vision of America in which the pleasures of consumption and self-determination were the natural accompaniment of its political ideals.
