Modern economies can be very similar in their basic principles of organization and in their associated strengths and weaknesses, and still sustain very different kinds of societies. Economies have their logics, but societies also have their histories. The logics may be similar but the histories can be different – and in the US and UK cases they most definitely are. They are different in the ways in which the two societies were originally constructed and have developed over time. They are also different in the ways in which they now struggle to cope with the common set of economic problems released upon them by the shared nature of their flawed capitalisms. This overlap of the similar and the different is what allows so rich a cultural exchange between the two societies, with the similarities facilitating the exchange and the differences making the exchange perennially fascinating. Americans play baseball. The English play cricket. Nothing could be more different than that; and yet each sport carries the marks of a shared experience of imperialism. American baseball calls its end-of-season play-offs “The World Series”, although only North American teams are permitted to participate. The Japanese and the Cubans play baseball too – a legacy of previous decades of American dominance – but they are not invited. The English now regularly lose at cricket to teams from countries that only play the game because once they were British colonies. In the heyday of empire and as late as the early-1950s, the English always won at cricket, unless playing teams from the white dominions; but as this is being drafted, the national test team just lost a series of five-day games 4-0 to the Indians.