Public interest is, if anything, more preoccupied than ever with the current state of the Anglo-American association. This has been a critical relationship in the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first, with an enormous breadth of influence worldwide. It was undoubtedly a vitally important relationship in the nineteenth century, not least in terms of trading, family and religious connections. The political understanding shared by the two nations has been profound; and yet political assumptions have also been distinctly different on many different levels, and the United States continues to be perceived as a rival by the United Kingdom despite the enormous disparity in their sizes. As a result, if one listens to many current British discussions about the United States of America – for instance in the British coverage of the presidential election of 2012 – sooner or later one hears a cocktail of widely varying views, ranging from curiosity and mystification, admiration and adulation, through envy and resentment, to contempt and fear. These mixed and contradictory reactions are partly the products of recent events, but they are also rooted in the separation between Britain and America in 1776, and the creation of the new American republic in the decades which followed. This book examines the formation of British attitudes to America in the crucible of the early relationship between the two independent states, from the declaration of the War of Independence in 1775 until the years after the War of 1812–15 and the end of Britain's conflict against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. Many British visions and projections of America originated in the colonial period, but those which endured into the early years of the republic and circulated in British public opinion at the start of the relationship between the two independent nations may help to explain why the United States is regarded as it is in twenty-first century Britain. This study does not attempt to unpick modern British attitudes towards America, but simply to trace British perceptions of it in the early decades of its independent statehood.