this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2025
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why is it that the USA holds such power over the world now and not the UK who histrionically dominated most of it? (programming.dev)
submitted 3 days ago by cactus_head@programming.dev to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world
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This is a question has been bothering me as someone who's country was colonized by the British Empire. We were taught about it in schools and how it lost power over time but never how the USA came to take its place especially over such a short compared to the British Empire.

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[–] NOT_RICK@lemmy.world 27 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

There’s a host of factors, I’ll try to outline the ones I can think off off the top of my head

  1. Industrial base: The UK was bombed during WWII, the US was not. That gave the US a production advantage.
  2. Natural Resources: The UK was dependent upon many resources from their empire while the US was using a lot of their own domestic resources for production.
  3. Decolonialization: the UK’s resource base, as mentioned in the last point, were largely seeking independence in the wake of the war. The US brand of imperialism was more economic in nature than political so they didn’t have the same issue.
  4. Population: it’s tough to outproduce a nation that’s 3x the size (UK pop was about 50 million in 1950; the US was roughly 150 million)
  5. The Marshall plan. It’s hard to overstate how much of a boon rebuilding Europe was for the American economy.
  6. Debt: military goods aren’t cheap. The UK sourced a ton of war material from the US. I just looked it up; the UK made its final WW2 debt payment to the US in 2006. Sheesh!