At the turn of the nineteenth century, citizens of the new United States of America worried about how the empire they had just left would shape their politics, economy, and day-to-day lives. By the early 1900s, people in Britain were lamenting what many described as an invasion of US products, culture, and foreign policy. Historians have explained this rather dramatic shift from US fears of Anglicization to Britons’ fears of Americanization as a nearly inevitable part of the United States’ rise to global prominence in the twentieth century. In Made in Britain: Nation and Emigration in Nineteenth-Century America Stephen Tuffnell sets out to trouble this apparent inevitability and narrative of imperial competition.

Tuffnell does not focus on the machinations of politicians, diplomats, and embassies. Instead, he explores the bonds of transnational connectivity and ideas about distinct British and US national characters that were produced in “the crucible of American communities around the world” (82). Tuffnell argues that these communities—and communities in England in particular—were instrumental in situating the United States in global politics in three key ways. First, they fostered social and discursive spaces in which US citizens and their British interlocutors could debate and define national identities in the wake of the American Revolution. Second, members of US communities abroad deliberately worked to forward US foreign policy, especially at a time when the cash-strapped US government was not able to fund lavish lifestyles for its formally appointed diplomats. Finally—in what I think is the most significant intervention of the book—Tuffnell argues that these Americans abroad worked with Britons to construct, define and police the boundaries of a white Anglo-Saxon racial identity that would operate as a vector of social and political power well into the twentieth century. From this perspective, British rhetoric about a US invasion looks less like one empire dramatically eclipsing another, and more like the negotiation of leadership within that shared white imperial community.

Across five chapters that move roughly chronologically from the American Revolution to the ascension of Edward VII, Tuffnell meticulously details the ways in which different communities of US residents in Britain engaged with the tensions of national politics and identity. In the first chapter, Tuffnell details how white merchants and financiers in Liverpool and London navigated a “post-colonial predicament” (28): trying to balance political independence with financial interdependence. He also explores how transatlantic transportation networks facilitated new kinds of mobility, including for Black Americans seeking to apply British political pressure to the United States. In chapter 2, Tuffnell moves forward in time through the middle part of the nineteenth century, and focuses on the ways in which US citizens in London used social activities and spaces to promote US democracy and advocate for regional interests. Through explorations of groups like the American Chamber of Commerce and collectives like the Young Americans, Tuffnell demonstrates that what it meant to be American was highly contested within expatriate spaces in the 1840s and 1850s. He also illustrates the asymmetrical development of regional relationships. Emigrants from the US North were more successful in building social and financial ties with Britain than were their Southern counterparts. This foreshadows the events of the third chapter, which details parallel efforts by representatives (informal or no) of the United States and the Confederacy in England in the 1860s. Tufnell argues that, far from being driven by formal political alliances, British engagement with both sides in the US Civil War was shaped by “interleaved social and commercial networks” (95) which had been unevenly fostered to the ultimate detriment of the Confederacy. In chapter 4, Tuffnell elaborates on the origins of what he calls the “racial consensus” (128) that forged connections among white racial theorists from the former Confederacy, the United States, and Britain. In this chapter, he also puts wartime relief efforts—including fund-raising for the United States Sanitary Commission and the emergent Red Cross—in transnational perspective. These projects, Tufnell argues, strengthened progressive connections among white citizens on both sides of the Atlantic and contributed to a nascent idea of a shared Anglo-Saxon racial identity. With the final chapter, Tuffnell returns to late nineteenth-century British fears of a US invasion. On the surface, these fears were driven by new kinds of emigrants—most notably middle-class tourists and women—who seemed to shift the character of the US presence in Britain. However, Tuffnell also notes that the very possibility of “invasion” turned on a presumption that the United States had, with the help of British connections, achieved the status of a potential titular leader of “the Anglo Saxon race” (166). Put another way, fears of an American invasion were not the product of the meteoric rise of an isolationist United States, but rather a signal that the United States could be an inheritor of Britain's imperial and racial legacy.

Tuffnell does careful and deliberate work of describing precisely how transnational connections worked in the long nineteenth century. In doing so, he demonstrates that historians of both British and US foreign relations must not take for granted the informal workings of diplomacy, but instead must interrogate their mechanisms on the ground. The ways in which white people in Britain and the United States consciously created an Anglo-Saxon racial identity, and the ways in which that identity dovetailed with formal politics—in the form of both US and British imperialism, scientific racism, and scientific philanthropy—is a much-needed reminder about the workings of white supremacy. In addition to scholars of foreign policy, Made in Britain will also be of interest to historians who study the social worlds of nineteenth-century England, who will value the details and intricacies of life in American communities abroad.