ABSTRACT
In commemorating the end of the Second World War, historians are bound to reflect that the year of victory marked the end of a specifically British empire and the beginning of what became, in effect, an AngloAmerican imperial system. Many historians have always assumed that the United States, with its historic anticolonial tradition, helped to bring about that empire’s liquidation. Yet one of the remarkable features of the archival evidence still being divulged, is the extent to which American assistance sustained the British empire, enabling it to revive before it collapsed. Neither side cared to publicize the fact that British imperial power depended substantially on American support. The United States was concerned to avoid the taint of imperialism, while Britain wanted to keep the prestige of empire untarnished. An imperial coalition was as unnatural for the Americans as it was demeaning for the British. Yet it ought to become a commonplace that the post-war British empire was more than British and less than an imperium. As it survived, so it was transformed as part of the Allied front in the Cold War.
