You might be forgiven for thinking that, with this degree of economic difficulty and social distress all around them, the full attention of the political class in both the United States and the United Kingdom would be focused on these two features of life alone. But, of course, the full attention of those who govern us is not so singularly focused, because in each case those in power in Washington, DC and in London do more than govern internally. They also move around the world stage as important and intrusive players. They each supervise economies, one major export of which are armaments sold to governments and individuals abroad;* and they each rely on societies, part of whose stability is underwritten by both the legacies and the contemporary practice of empire. There is an external dimension to the flaws of contemporary capitalism in both the UK and the US. We therefore need both to understand the linkage between external role and internal weakness in each case, and to see that – in consequence – going beyond the internal flaws of each economy and society will require, as one element of reform, a major resetting of those external roles.

The most immediate costs of empire are most visible in the empire which is most immediate: namely the American one. The British empire is now very much a thing of the past, and the British like to think of themselves as fully post-imperial. But to the degree that they do, they partially delude themselves: because the economy and the society of the contemporary UK continues to be shaped by the legacies of an empire now gone. Those longer and more subtle costs of empire await America down the line; which is why here it makes sense to focus on the immediate costs of empire through American data and the longer consequences of empire through British data.

Modern economies can be very similar in their basic principles of organization and in their associated strengths and weaknesses, and still sustain very different kinds of societies. Economies have their logics, but societies also have their histories. The logics may be similar but the histories can be different – and in the US and UK cases they most definitely are. They are different in the ways in which the two societies were originally constructed and have developed over time. They are also different in the ways in which they now struggle to cope with the common set of economic problems released upon them by the shared nature of their flawed capitalisms. This overlap of the similar and the different is what allows so rich a cultural exchange between the two societies, with the similarities facilitating the exchange and the differences making the exchange perennially fascinating. Americans play baseball. The English play cricket. Nothing could be more different than that; and yet each sport carries the marks of a shared experience of imperialism. American baseball calls its end-of-season play-offs “The World Series”, although only North American teams are permitted to participate. The Japanese and the Cubans play baseball too – a legacy of previous decades of American dominance – but they are not invited. The English now regularly lose at cricket to teams from countries that only play the game because once they were British colonies. In the heyday of empire and as late as the early-1950s, the English always won at cricket, unless playing teams from the white dominions; but as this is being drafted, the national test team just lost a series of five-day games 4-0 to the Indians.

Unlike any other major industrialized economy, the American one sits on top of a consciously-created society, one put together after 1620 by a mixture of voluntary and involuntary migration – the trans-oceanic movement of immigrants and slaves – into a land mass whose native inhabitants were an early casualty of that migration. Carefully editing US history to downplay the ethnic cleansing and forced slavery elements within it, contemporary American apologists regularly assert that – precisely because of its unique design – the society so consciously created turned out to be morally, socially and economically superior to the societies that the first generations of American transplants had left behind. As the American national anthem has it, the United States understands itself to be “the land of the free and the home of the brave” – understands itself, that is, as a country that possesses a unique trio of advantages: a unique set of dominant values focused around individualism and personal freedom, a uniquely prosperous economy based on private ownership, and a uniquely open social order in which individuals can progress entirely through their own merit. The continuing influx of immigrants seeking precisely those freedoms, prosperity and social mobility then only serves to reinforce the conviction – visible across the entire US political class, but particularly well-embedded in the belief systems of American conservatives – that the United States remains “the shining city on the hill” which all other countries and peoples seek to emulate.

The reality behind such claims is much more complicated than their advocates imply: but in one regard at least the claim for American superiority has, until recently, had enormous force. For over the postwar period as a whole, living standards in the United States have been significantly higher than those enjoyed by the mass and generality of people living in other major industrial economies – not to mention higher than the living standards of those unfortunate enough to be marooned either in former communist countries or in the underdeveloped world.