In the 16th and 17th centuries, most people in Britain lived in small village communities. They knew all their neighbours. They dressed alike, and almost all were white. The vast majority belonged to the same religion and spoke much the same language.
— Linda Colley
Even leaving aside its military bases, America's influence on the domestic ordering of British life has been enormous, though sometimes unrecognised.
Historically, individuals possessed of the confidence that privilege and good fortune bestow have often proved conspicuous reformers: think only of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The United States was founded on a revolution that abolished the monarchy, aristocracy, titles and primogeniture. Britain may be able in the future to become a more equal and open society while retaining all of these things. But this has yet to be proved.
Now, as in the past, rank is closely associated with modes of representation and display: with making an ordered arrangement of people or things visible and evident to onlookers in some fashion.
Although Britain has, since 1653, had nothing approaching a single, codified constitution, it did for a very long time possess a broad cult of constitutional writing. The Petition of Right of 1628, like the Bill of Rights of 1689, was a cherished text. So, most of all, was Magna Carta.
Responding to Britain's future challenges will require unceasing agility in seeking out new alliances and refurbishing old ones inside Europe, not just outside it.
A break-up of the U.K. would affect the deployment and strength of its armed forces and play havoc with the ownership of its overseas consulships and embassies.
The 1857 uprising in India did not free the subcontinent, but it changed the way the British viewed and sought to govern it.
London is not just an international financial centre: it is also one of the most ethnically diverse places on earth. Three hundred languages are represented within its boundaries, and - as is true of some other English cities - more than half of London's inhabitants describe themselves as non-white.
Any kind of new U.K. federal system would almost certainly demand the creation of a written constitution. Properly drafted, such a document could, among many things, pin down more effectively the proper dimensions of prime ministerial power.
A vital part of Trump's appeal was his promise to make America emphatically great again, staunching the haemorrhage of jobs and investment to China and Mexico, and cutting back on handouts to NATO and illegal migrants.
If the U.S. and its allies can invade a weaker country on the excuse it is abetting terrorism, then why should not India, say, launch a pre-emptive strike against Pakistan on the self-same grounds?
The British especially have no excuse for forgetting that empire is a most complex and persistent beast. And it has claws.
British prime ministers and prime ministers' spouses and children are together becoming ever more like first families. They need to be given sufficient resources and personnel to enable them to carry out their shifting roles efficiently, decently, and safely.
For good or for ill, Britain is in some respects moving away from a prime-ministerial system towards a presidential one. This is emphatically not, as is sometimes argued, simply a function of Tony Blair's personal ambition. The shift towards a more presidential style was already visible under Margaret Thatcher.
Before they became Americans, most white inhabitants of the 13 colonies considered themselves British. It was predictable, therefore, that they would lust after empire, because this was exactly what their counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic also did.
Conservative and Labour governments have arguably championed British rights in Brussels so ostentatiously in order to deflect public attention away from their deference to Washington.
One knows something is important when the powers that be choose not to acknowledge it in public.
Had Barack Obama been obliged to take his degree at the University of Akron, say, it is doubtful that his progress would have been remotely as stellar.
Both Conservative and Labour politicians in Britain are rather too fond of praising the relative 'classlessness' of American society and of urging their own people to emulate it. There is a certain falseness about such arguments, and also a certain hypocrisy.
For a very long time, loyalists were often left out of patriotic American histories of the revolution. Or they were caricatured as upper-class Tory reactionaries, or - rather like the Jacobites - made the subject only of nostalgic antiquarianism.
The argument that any income redistribution is tantamount to socialism, and that socialism has always been unAmerican, has helped legitimise keeping taxes on America's very wealthy very low.
Of course the U.K., and its component parts, should seek out as many connections with as many parts of the world as is profitable and feasible. But to play any kind of global role effectively, the U.K. is likely always to require allies within its own continent, and far more enterprise needs devoting to this.
The Canadian risings of the 1830s obliged the men in London to think much harder about settler self-government.
The American revolution not only cost Britain the 13 colonies but also forced it to rethink the slave trade and slavery, and influenced its power relations in Asia and the Pacific.
Margaret Thatcher's decision to use Scotland as a testing ground for the poll tax was arguably the most disastrous attempt at fiscal engineering since London slapped the stamp tax on the American colonies in the 1760s.
America is the proud possessor of the oldest extant written constitution in the world, which was for its time - 1787 - a highly innovative and important document.
Globalisation is not remotely new; it has been occurring, at differing rates and with differing degrees of scale, for centuries.
Once conscription was introduced during the First World War, and once Britain's wars ceased being confined to the empire or to continental Europe and began seriously threatening our own shores and safety, it became much easier to denounce any anti-war agitation and argument as inherently irresponsible and unpatriotic.
The immediate impact of British imperial free-trading was often the collapse of local indigenous industries which were in no position to compete, and a consequent destruction of livelihoods and communities.
High-level political wives are by no means new. In the 18th and 19th centuries, when patricians dominated British political life, it was common for politicians' spouses to play an active political role.
In the past, Britons were scathing about the cruelties of the old Roman empire and the excesses of Catholic empire builders such as the Spanish and the French. They convinced themselves that their empire was different and benign because it rested on sea power and trade rather than on armies.
From the very beginning, Americans have exhibited a taste for expansion, an appetite for empire. One of the fundamental reasons for this is very clear. Like every other western empire that has ever existed, Americans may claim to have inherited the mantle of ancient Rome.
Postcolonial critics are, I suspect, wrong when they argue that the mass of British people still mourn the loss of empire. But Britain's politicians - and its Foreign Office - have found it hard to adjust to the loss, not so much of onetime colonies as of the global clout the colonies once afforded.
One of the reasons why the personnel of U.S. politics are more diverse is that - unlike the U.K. - one can compete for the top job without spending long years, or any years, in the nation's legislature.
Hillary Clinton is tough, clever, and formidably well briefed, and has been politically ambitious all her adult life.
Monarchs, aristocrats, and other powerful and wealthy individuals have usually been happy to have themselves and their possessions and families immortalised in oil paintings and sculpture. But before the 20th century, such dynasts rarely commissioned artworks that set out to represent society as a whole.
Modernity is a shifting entity, not easily defined. Exactly the same is true of empire.
In the U.S., highly selective renditions of its history have served in practice to impose blinkers on some of its citizens and catered to vested interests.
Even at its most powerful, Britain always needed alliances with other European states. There would almost certainly have been no British victory at Waterloo, for instance, without the assistance of Prussia.
The so-called Boer War advertised British vulnerabilities, and these were confirmed by the Irish rising of 1916 and the subsequent creation of the Irish Free State, blows that attracted the notice and attention of colonial dissidents in Asia and Africa.
Many of the Victorian and Edwardian activists who campaigned for Irish home rule, for instance, also wanted what they called 'home rule all round': separate parliaments not simply for Ireland but also for the Scots and the Welsh - and for the English.
To be sure, political unions between European countries have often failed in the past, but usually only after relatively brief periods. Denmark and Iceland separated after 130 years; the unions between Spain and Portugal and between Sweden and Norway each lasted less than a century.
Many Britons who backed Brexit believed - and believe still - that a U.K. 'freed' from 'Europe' would be able to recover and re-establish its historic destiny as an independent global trading nation.
Embarking upon war is always dangerous for national leaders because it makes them more than ever at the mercy of events. When domestic opinion is acutely divided, however, war can be politically lethal for its makers.
Far from being aberrant and un-British, criticising a war in which our troops are actively engaged is a long-established parliamentary and political tradition.
Look at how the British covered India with railroads, and it is easy to view them as modernisers. Look, however, at the abysmal levels of mass illiteracy in the subcontinent they left behind in 1947, and they appear rather differently.
Irrespective of their party affiliation or wishes on the matter, those governing from 10 Downing Street now have to take on much of the aura and role of head of state. And this is bound to have heavy consequences for their family.
In both British and American history, fervent imperialism has always coexisted with bouts of fierce isolationism.
