ABSTRACT
In the nineteenth-century world of ideas, teleology and prediction assumed a prominence which must appear brash and disturbing to our own age of dissolving certainties. The ‘discovery’ of the ground-rules of laissez-faire political economy, the rise of geological and then biological notions of change and evolution, the positivistic faith in science and rational enquiry, all provided impulses to that general endeavour by early-to-mid Victorian intellectuals to explain the past and to forecast the future. Nineteenth-century Germany, on the other hand, appeared to have no reason to apprehend the growth of American power. In the first place, until the founding of the Second Reich, one can hardly talk about German-American relations, as opposed to the relations which individual German states. The difficulty for the historian of the Anglo-American rapprochement is in trying to establish just how far these cultural and ideological factors influenced the various British concessions to the USA over the Alaskan border, the Isthmian Canal, and so on.
