1998 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
Rapprochement
Published in:
Anglo-American Relations in the Twentieth Century
The relations between Britain and the United States have their roots in a war, the American War of Independence, initiated on 18 April 1775 with exchanges of fire at Lexington between the colonists and British forces, and concluded by the Peace of Paris on 3 September 1783, which left uncertain the boundaries with British North America. George III was reluctantly forced to accept ‘the dismemberment of America from this Empire’. For the American colonists the separation from the mother country marked the birth of a new nation.1