1. 01A Colonist in the CapitalFranklin lived for most of sixteen years in a lodging house off the Strand. This site argues that the household, more than Parliament, shows how an American agent became a revolutionary, and that it also held two enslaved men, which complicates the founder story.
2. 02A Company, Not a CountryJamestown is usually told from Virginia. Seen from London it was a joint-stock venture sold to City investors, and this site argues that the Company’s money problems shaped what Virginia became, including the arrival of the first Africans in 1619.
3. 03Who Paid for Slavery?The City did not need to own plantations to profit from them. Underwriters insured the ships and the cotton, merchant banks lent to planters, and the state later borrowed to pay owners rather than the enslaved. This site follows that chain with the American South at its centre.
4. 04Speaking from LondonAccounts of Douglass’s British tour tend to dwell on Scotland, Ireland and the provinces. This site argues that London mattered as the place where American abolitionists found a press, a pulpit and a lobby, and looks at who else used it.
5. 05Idle Mills, Open LettersLancashire’s mills fell idle while London’s newspapers argued about whether to side with the South. This site reads the London press and Punch against Manchester’s address to Lincoln and asks whether metropolitan opinion matched the mill towns.
6. 06Over HereThe soldiers arrived with a printed guide to British manners and found a city whose welcome did not stretch equally to the Black soldiers among them. This site argues that London tested the special relationship at street level, and that race was where it strained most.
7. 07Whose Money?Britain’s financial establishment helped design the postwar monetary order and then found it ran on American terms. This site argues that the City lost the argument at Bretton Woods, was squeezed by the 1945 loan and the 1947 convertibility crisis, and then rebuilt its role through the Eurodollar market.
8. 08One Embassy, Two AddressesOne address gives a way into a larger story. The embassy went up in 1960 as a statement of friendly modernism, became the target of the 1968 Vietnam protests, and left in 2018 for a fortified glass block. This site argues that its buildings record how the United States chose to present itself in London.
9. 09London Hears JazzTaken as a whole this topic is too wide for 1,500 words, so this prototype narrows to 1919, when the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and the Southern Syncopated Orchestra reached London within months of each other. The question is how London audiences, critics and unions responded, and what that did to the music.
10. 10Who Built the Tube?In 1902 a Chicago traction magnate with a controversial reputation set up the company that built three of the deep lines. This site argues that the Underground we know owes its early capital, and part of its management style, to American finance.