Two Nations, One Race

As is well known, the Great Britain and United States have beentwo prominent world powers in history; they have established acomplicated relationship with each other: they are intimate friends orbrothers on the surface, while on various occasions they have showntheir great contradictions to each other. By comparing English Traits byRalph Waldo Emerson and American Notes by Charles Dickens, thisstudy aims to investigate the complex relationship between these twogreat nations and their contradictory attitudes towards each other in the19thcentury. After the detailed and profound analysis of the similaritiesand differences between these two travel writings, this study hasrevealed that the two writers had both developed ambivalent attitudestowards the other nation. And since these two writers were therepresentatives of the two peoples in the19thcentury, the study hasconcluded that the British and American people in that age hadconflicting attitudes towards each other. As far as the British citizenswere concerned, they sometimes felt affinity to Americans who shared the similar language and cultural background with them; on the otherhand, they were alienated from the political idea, social customs, andsocial system of Americans. As to the American people, most showedreverence for Britain’s achievements in history while some anticipatedthat the United Kingdom was in decline and the United States wouldsucceed it as a world power. Most important of all, the study has furtherconcluded that such contradictory attitudes of both sides had come fromthe special relationship between the two nations; that the UnitedKingdom and United States have shared one race but they havedeveloped into two different nations in a wide range of aspects.Furthermore, the complicated British American relations have provedone of the disadvantages of western nationalism: the nationalism hadcaused a number of western nations of the close blood-relations to beseparated from one another and it had made the western world lack thespirit of unification.