Excuse my poor history knowledge, but the Europeans sailed here to find new lands, settled, and then after generations, they were overthrown by their descendants. The British empire still ruled around the world for centuries yet, the U.S. arguably is in a better state of economics, military, and such.
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Among other things, we won the war. It is easy to be the big kid on the block when you were one of the few counties not mowed down with tanks.
The USA was already on that trajectory, but without WWII the British Empire wouldn’t have been so dramatically weakened to the point where they essentially ceded large parts of their territory to American interests or simply handed their colonies to the locals. Without any real competition American companies had a huge leg up. All of that great R&D to come out of the war was pressed into civilian service. Computing, nuclear power, communications infrastructure, the aviation industry, among others were all areas where the USA had a technical and capacity advantage. The Germans could make electronics with the best of them but much of their resources ended up going to building new housing and repairing war damage. The German government provided herculean assistance to the German auto industry because of how important it is/was to them. The USA had that (a huge auto industry) plus aviation, plus business electronics (so IBM, HP, etc), plus an industrial base of construction plus a large influx of immigrants.
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