The War of 1812-13 is usually presented to Americans as being their second ‘War of Independence’, which they won. Well, OK – up to a point. It did help to save the fledgling USA from re-conquest by Britain; but the Americans certainly didn’t win it. Overall it could be described as a ‘score draw’, with the northern colonies holding out against the American ‘revolution’, and refusing to relinquish their British (and French) ties. It was their War of Independence, against the emerging American hegemon.

And the result stood for more than two centuries; until President Trump decided he would like to finish the job on the US’s terms. ‘Canada’, as the clutch of northern territories came to be called, would become the ‘51^st State’ of America; with Greenland, currently owned by Denmark, following on. It seemed rational, when you looked at the map – with the US and Canada being the closest of neighbours it is possible to imagine. But not so rational when you made allowance for their rather different cultures; Canada’s being still more European – specifically, social-democratic – than the USA’s is today. Which makes Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s cunning plan of allying his country with the European Union equally rational, and – to my mind – the most promising idea to come out of the current ill-tempered stand-off between the US and (most of) the rest of the world.

By a historian of the British Empire it can also be seen as resurrecting the old post-imperial ideal of a ‘Commonwealth’, of equal and independent nations – mostly but not exclusively ‘white’ – sharing common values, and dominated by none of them: certainly not by Britain any more. That’s what the British Empire was inching towards in its dotage; and what made liberal anti-imperialists (like me) cleave to it then. The modern United States – deeply scarred by its 250-year history of ‘exceptionalism’, frontier and domestic violence, genocide, slavery, racism, anti-alienism, ultra-capitalism, and (as Carney has implied) simple bad manners – could clearly not be a part of this. (Not that these traits were not found under British rule too, of course; but – I would argue – not quite so existentially.) Canada exemplifies the difference that the British Commonwealth – heir to the rightly criticised Empire – continues to make; hopefully in keeping Trump’s more primitive and despotic type of imperialism in check.