Our close bond with Great Britain seems inevitable, given our shared language and heritage. But as distinguished historian Kathleen Burk shows in this groundbreaking history, the close international relationship was forged only recently, preceded by several centuries of hostility and conflict that began soon after the first English colony was established on the newly discovered continent. Burk, a fourth-generation Californian and a professor of history in London, draws on her unrivaled knowledge of both countries to explore the totality of the relationshipthe politics, economics, culture, and societythat both connected the two peoples and drove them apart. She tells the story from each side, beginning with the English exploration of the New World and taking us up to the present alliance in Iraq. She reveals the real motivations for settling North America, the factors that led to Britain's losing the colonies, and the reasons why hawks in Congress took the two countries to war again in 1812. The first joint history of its kind,Old World, New Worldis a vivid, absorbing, and surprising story of one of the longest international love-hate relationships in modern history.