Worth mentioning is that after 1588, Britain indisputably owned the seas. Philip II, Napoleon, and Hitler all tried to defeat Britain, and found that they could not overcome such a vastly superior naval force. Sea power is the lifeblood of Empire, and Britain was the dominant force in Europe from the 16th century onwards and built the largest of the European Empires because of its supremacy on the high seas. France never really came all that close to defeating Britain at sea, and thus failed to overtake Britain.
The US navy of the late 19th century could have easily crushed the British.
Not exactly. At that point the US had, by a wide, wide margin, the best defensive fleet in the world. Most of the ships were not meant to be operated on the high seas. If Britain had tried to invade the US, or supply Canada or anything on the NA shores they would have suffered a very nasty surprise.
Unfortunately for the British, this is exactly what they would have tried to do. They had a contempt for so call "brown water" fleets and thought they were in every conceivable way inferior to a "blue water" or high seas fleet. Fortunately for them the only nation on the planet that both believed in a brown water fleet and funded it heavily was the US.
This is not to sat that the US did not have a fine high seas fleet. Indeed, the US navy has a long history of doing very well ship for ship with any navy. It's just that, for a long tome, we did not have enough ships.
