ABSTRACT
Britain and the US had engaged in normal business relations ever since 1783, with only occasional interruptions in the nineteenth century because of international and civil wars. In the twentieth century war had a different effect from what had gone before. The war years witnessed an intensification of the economic problems which had existed prior to the war, and the emergence of a broad spectrum of new and intractable ones. They were not differences between strangers which might flare up at a chance encounter and then gradually dissolve and die by neglect. Britain’s departure from the canons of international free trade would not have had such an impact upon Anglo-American relations if it had not been for Cordell Hull. The inter-war story of Anglo-American monetary and financial relations was just as full, if not fuller, of differences and recriminations. Britain became increasingly aware after the First World War of her relative decline as an industrial power.
