When we talk about the American “empire”, what are we talking about? Is this westward expansion across the continent, the buildup of overseas dependencies, or something else entirely?
Let’s start with the word “expansion”. we have the continental colonies and the process of settlement in the west and south during the nineteenth century and, in fact, it continues under different circumstances today. we also have the creation of a formal empire, that is, the islands in the caribbean and pacific that were formally placed under our jurisdiction in 1898. on top of that, one can argue for the presence of what is called an empire” informal”. , where American influence has been so pervasive, whether in Japan, Korea, or Latin America, as to constitute the equivalent of a formal empire.
You are reading: Books on american imperialism
so, the term ‘expansion’ covers everything. imperialism represents a kind of expansion, a determination to overwhelm and subjugate that results in the creation of a formal empire. As a complement to that, you have the spillover of influence into places that remain independent in name but are effectively under the control of a greater power. you can see right away that there are big problems with all of these terms, but that’s inherent in the name of the game. we can’t describe the world little by little, we have to use big words, and they all contain ambiguities and uncertainties.
I see the word “hegemony” a lot in this context. is this what that word implies?
Take the period after 1945, when the United States was recognized as one of the two major world powers. everyone can agree on that. the difficulty comes when you try to put a name to it. A large body of opinion holds that after 1945 the United States was an empire or became one. however, some American scholars and commentators disliked the designation because it linked the land of the free with unsavory qualities associated with the term “empire.”
So during the cold war they applied an alternative term: “hegemony”, which comes from a Greek word meaning leadership. It sounds much more persuasive and less coercive to call the United States hegemon than to refer to it as an empire. hegemony then becomes the smiling face of domination.
in your new book, american empire, you write: “in the united states, imperialism was part of the nation-building process”. What do you mean by that?
That’s a great follow-up to your previous question because nation-building is often linked to territorial expansion, and in some cases expansion can be imperialistic. From the eighteenth century onward, American expansion across the North American continent was an integral part of the state-building process and, in turn, of nation-building as well. the question is: was that purely expansionist or was it imperialist? the answer I think most people would give is that it was necessarily expansionist. but you can also refer to it as imperialistic because it meant to eliminate, bypass, or subjugate Native Americans and take their land without compensation. That form of assertive colonization by white settlers, which is very similar to what later occurred in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, was an expression of an imperialist impulse. I’ll add to that the hard question that follows: whether the result was an empire or something else.
what would the something else be?
well, there are two schools of thought here. one is that the result of imperialist expansion was the creation of a continental empire. in my opinion, the result was a nation state rather than an empire. The argument is that the intention from the beginning was to create separate states that would enjoy constitutional equality within the United States Federal Constitution. An alternative view emphasizes the period between occupation and statehood, when the mainland was governed from Washington.
excuse my ignorance, but do the five remaining overseas dependencies today have any voting power?
some yes, some no. Some of them, notably Puerto Rico, the largest and most important of the residuals, have a very ambiguous constitutional status. Puerto Rico became a commonwealth in 1953, but remains an unincorporated territory today. However, in 1917 Puerto Ricans were granted United States citizen status, and those residing on the mainland were and are eligible to vote in the United States. elections. These anomalies have baffled the political leaders of Puerto Rico and Washington from 1898 onwards. Hawaii, on the other hand, was incorporated in 1959 with full citizenship rights, including voting rights in federal elections. Hawaiiʻi stands as the only instance of an overseas territory that, after a long battle, was formally incorporated into the United States. the other islands were kept at a distance for various reasons. The Philippines, the largest and most populous of the overseas possessions, was treated as a colony without rights of incorporation into the US. uu. and, finally, it was granted independence in 1946.
let’s move on to your five books. When we discussed his options prior to this interview, he clarified that he had chosen examples that he considers to be “distinctive for being illuminating, if not necessarily correct.”
criterion means a lot to me as a historian, because it’s relatively easy to be right about little things, but incredibly difficult to be enlightening about big things. anyone who has ever tried it just bows, hats off, to those who have made the effort, because you expose yourself on all fronts and often take the beating you deserve. it is a very challenging undertaking.
However, it is the enlightening books that stand the test of time. they may well be flawed or limited in one of many ways, but there is something about them that still commands respect and admiration, even decades after their appearance. therefore, my selection has a consistency that I can summarize by saying that each of the five books reflects key changes in the way the American empire has been studied over the last century.
let’s start with julius w pratt’s 1898 expansionists: the acquisition of hawaii and the spanish islands.
pratt’s book was published in 1936 and remains unsurpassed today. One of his critics, Walter Lafeber, whose book I’ll talk about later, was generous enough to call it a classic.
pratt was writing against a trend in the study of history associated with the so-called progressive school, spearheaded by charles beard. This school criticized the egotistical vision, as they saw it, that saw the United States as a single nation with a particular mission to bring freedom and democracy to the world. they took what they thought was a very realistic view that emphasized the basic, dirty material factors behind expansion, imperialism, and empire.
pratt appeared in 1936 and wrote what was the first serious book that tried to go beyond generalizations and analyze the reasons for fighting the war that handed over the Spanish colonies in the Caribbean and the Pacific to the United States in 1898 also included Hawaii, which was not in the Spanish empire but was annexed in the same year. When you look at Pratt’s book today, you have to marvel at the depth of the research, the clarity of the presentation, and the care and restraint of the argument.
In summary, Pratt argued that although there were many considerations that led to the war with Spain, the expansionist mood of the time owed very little to economic influences. He recognized that there was a vocal group of expansionists who argued that the United States needed more markets and opportunities to invest abroad. in his opinion, however, commercial interests were of little importance in the formulation of international policy. business lobbies were divided. some of them remained uncommitted until territories were acquired, uncertainty removed, and confidence built.
According to Pratt, the analysis of causality must turn to other considerations, particularly to party politics within the United States: the Republican Party’s need to cling to power; the impulses that arose from the concepts of white supremacy; the duty of bringing civilization to the less fortunate parts of the world. his most revealing illustration emphasized the missionary activity of the Protestant churches. He shows how these interests were far more effective in committing the “advanced party” to fighting the war with Spain and taking the island territories afterwards than were commercial interests. this approach provided a powerful alternative to the position taken by progressives and others who emphasized the primacy of economic considerations.
You mentioned a white supremacist aspect to this. i know rudyard kipling waded into this debate and offered the poem “take the white man’s burden” to help persuade anti-imperialists to accept annexation of the philippines. how controversial was it among Americans? Was there a lot of opposition?
yes, indeed there was, and some famous names lined up against imperialist expansion. The former president of Cleveland, a Democrat, was one of them. mark twain was the most famous. And you had great philosophical figures, like Dewey, who were associated with the anti-imperialist movement. other interests were a mixed bag. the labor organizations were worried about imperialism because they did not want to have competition with cheap imported labor. if the overseas territories had the rights of states within the federal constitution, then the free entry of labor from the pacific islands and the caribbean would have undermined the wages of white workers in the united states.
See Also: The 100 bestselling used books from 2000 – 2015
Southern interests were also important in this regard. it is often said, correctly, that the concept of racial supremacy was a driving force behind overseas expansion. Against this, however, stood a powerful alternative that opposed imperialism for fear that immigration from non-European sources would dilute the purity of the white race and eventually lead to racial degeneration. so yes, there was a powerful, if also heterogeneous, anti-imperialist movement in the united states.
The case of the United States was by no means exceptional: there were influential anti-imperialist movements elsewhere, notably in Britain and France. It is interesting to contrast the prominence of the anti-imperialist movement in the United States in 1898 with its weakness in 2003. Opposition to the 2003 invasion of Iraq dissolved very quickly. Between the two dates, and especially after 1941, American citizens had become accustomed to the exercise of military power overseas. what was once considered contrary to republican values had become an accepted norm.
let’s move on to book two: the negation of the empire of whitney t perkins, the united states and its dependencies.
I think this book justifies its appearance here because of its uniqueness. but it’s different from all the others, because it has been almost completely neglected since it was published in 1962. it can pass the illumination test, but it fails the recognition test.
The book makes my list because Perkins was one of those academics who lays the groundwork for a topic without receiving the credit it deserves. this has nothing to do with whether I agree with the author or not; it is about trying to assess his contribution as objectively as possible. No one else has undertaken the task since 1962. Perkins’s research is thorough, thorough, and reliable, and he deserves the recognition that has been denied him until now.
perkins was writing after pratt, but in the same mode. he was what might be called a rather orthodox or conventional scholar. He later wrote a similar study on the Caribbean, but Empire Denial was the first book to present a comprehensive account of the management of the colonies the United States acquired in 1898 from the empire’s founding until its demise half a century later.
“perkins research is thorough and reliable, and deserves the recognition it has so far been denied”
There are a couple more things to say about perkins. he was not a brilliant scholar. His book has a stubborn quality that has made it extraordinarily trustworthy. he was also unlucky, as we’ll see in a minute, at the time of its publication, because his views were being questioned, even when his book appeared. it was the changing mood of the times, not his scholarship, that sent his book into oblivion.
Perkins argued that there was nothing wrong with the benevolent intentions of the American colonial government, but that they were frustrated by local complexities and political problems at home. she was not whitewashing or trying to exaggerate what could be called the success of the imperial project. was adequately and admirably objective about it. Her difficulty was that she seemed to have accepted—understandably, because it was in the air at the time—the ideas of people like George Kennan, who believed that the United States had a civilizing mission. The United States was compelled to span the globe to fulfill a benign duty, that of liberating other peoples. from that perspective, the problem did not lie in the project but in the difficulties to achieve such a monumental task.
Rightly or wrongly, this perspective is not one most scholars would start with today. However, the Perkins study remains one of the starting points for evaluating American colonial rule. my own book is littered with page references to his work, and I am more than happy to acknowledge a scholar who should be considered one of the founding fathers of what I believe will soon be recognized as a new subject. As new publications on the American empire appear, I’m sure his book will be recognized as a groundbreaking study.
what did perkins mean by the title “denial of empire”?
That’s another good question. Perkins did not offer a lengthy explanation of his title, but he clearly used it to refer to the contradiction between the values enshrined in the 1776 declaration of independence and the subsequent acquisition of colonies. an ex-colonial state that heralded anti-imperialist values found it difficult to accept that it had become a colonial power in its own right. Consequently, the United States was “in denial” when it came to its own empire, while criticizing other powers that admitted they ruled over colonial subjects.
in 1999, george w bush declared that “the united states has never been an empire”. is this an extension of that same state of denial?
I think it is. America’s expansionist imperial history from 1898 to the late 1950s has been more or less erased from the books. it is quite extraordinary. I have called this, in my own book, the greatest historiographical gap in the history of modern empires. There is a vast literature on the War of 1898. But as soon as the war is over, everyone loses interest, and I have not found a study of Western Imperial history that makes a half-hearted attempt at dealing with the history of the islands. After 1898. It is true that the American empire was small relative to the British and French empires. however, by 1940 the united states ruled over 23 million people in the pacific and caribbean. It was a substantial number of souls to save and stomachs to fill.
george bush spoke with understandable ignorance of half a century of history of formal colonial rule. It is a tribute to Perkins who saw the importance of the topic and was a great start for the rest of us who can build on the empirical work he so reliably assembled.
absolutely. Are we going back to the tragedy of diplomacy by William Appleman Williams?
yes. I mentioned that the mood of the historical profession was profoundly changing just as Perkins was producing his book. contemporary commentators were concerned with what was called the crisis of capitalism and its various expressions, such as urban decay. the vietnam war divided the nation and generated unprecedented hostility towards military adventures, which were seen as expressions of imperialism. the American dream seemed to fade. It was then that William Appleman Williams published his famous book, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, which appeared in 1959. Of course, he had other books to his name, but this one serves to symbolize the transformation in historical studies that took place in that moment. time.
Perkins conceived of the United States as a benevolent but misguided imperial power; Williams was inspired by the progressive and materialist interpretation of history that Pratt had rejected in 1936. Williams believed that the causes of imperial expansion could be related to the evolution and contradictions of the capitalist system. imperialism was not a matter of benevolence, coincidence, or psychic crisis, as other writers had claimed. For Williams, the story was one of capitalist crises that created acute hardship at home through falling standards of living, limited opportunity, and unemployment. it was the search for solutions to these internal problems that led to imperial expansion abroad. This approach gave Williams a comprehensive view of American history. he returned to the era of mercantilism, advanced with the progressives until the war of 1898 and continued to his time with a reappraisal of the cold war. 1898 was not the end of history: it was the beginning.
“The American dream seemed to be fading away”
Interestingly, Williams was not very interested in the formal empire that the United States had created, and I have often wondered why. His main concern was the informal expansion of the United States through what he called the “open door.” he used this term to refer to the strategies adopted to enter the territory of a sovereign state and effectively subordinate it to our interests without formally colonizing it. In doing so, he initiated a topic of research that continues to this day and has produced a series of studies on the presence of the United States in the Caribbean, Central America, and of course Latin America, as well as Asia. /p>
There has been much discussion about Williams himself, and much remains to be said. I will mention here his view of the cold war, which Platt could not have written about and Perkins evaded. Williams produced an analysis that became an enduring controversy. the conventional view held that the cold war was caused by Russian expansionism. not so, said williams. The Cold War was as much, if not more, the result of American expansionism, driven by fundamental economic forces that had assumed a new shape after 1945. Crudely put, that was his argument. As expected, it was an argument that sparked all kinds of criticism. it is said to be mechanistic and monocausal. it minimizes political, ideological and geopolitical arguments, and diminishes the importance of individual action. there is an entire industry devoted to proving and disproving analysis of it.
It’s a really good case of an exceptional book that, to my knowledge, never won any major awards. it was off center. he was out of the mainstream. Williams himself was investigated by the IRS and the House Committee on Un-American Activities. what a scary duo to have knocking on your door, and also to write the “wrong kind of story”! but none of that matters to historians. Williams’s book is arguably the most influential study of American imperialism written in the 20th century. Whether we like it or not, it is one of the classics of the field.
When it was initially published, it was described as socialist and even anti-American. is it still controversial?
no, I don’t think so, at least not in that sense. To understand the reaction to his work, you have to go back to the McCarthy era, the Cold War, and the Vietnam War. To be an American patriot was to be “on the side” in the battle against the Soviet Union. the sentiments of the time explain much of the hardening of “for” and “against” attitudes. Williams has since taken his place as a leading historian. and as we will see in a moment, he inspired a whole group of other scholars whose careers are now, like mine, drawing to a close. time modulates and moderates all things.
let’s look at walter lafeber’s new empire: an interpretation of american expansion, 1860-1898. I find the title interesting because, as he describes in his book, imperialism had already taken place on a large scale throughout the world. what made US imperialism “new”?
See Also: Usborne Books and Kane Miller Ultimate Gift Guide 100 Best Books – Spring 2021 Edition
That’s another very good question. Whether you agree with him or not, lafeber provides an impressive answer. We can understand Lafeber’s title and argument by linking him to Williams. Williams was the chief founder of the new left branch of what is known as the Wisconsin School of History. a handful of his students went on to have distinguished careers as historians. They were very much inspired by the themes of the 1960s and 1970s that we have been referring to, and in particular by Williams’s arguments.
williams wrote several books, but it has been said that he was predominantly an essayist. I think he is a bit exaggerated, but it is true that he exposed the great ideas. what was needed was a set of studies to exemplify, elaborate, qualify or extend them. Lafeber’s 1963 book did just that. His study is probably the most prominent and influential of the works dealing with American imperialism to emerge from the Wisconsin School. retains its value today.
“whether you agree with him or not, lafeber provides an impressive answer”
what did lafeber mean by the term “new empire”? He accepted the view that there were long continuities of expansion in US history, but argued that 1898 saw the creation of a new form of empire. that’s the empire i, too, mean: the overseas territories that were acquired by the united states after the war with spain in 1898. it was new, not only because territorially the united states had not owned these places before, but also by the causality that lafeber attributes to it. This is where Lafeber built on Williams’ rather more schematic generalization to devise an argument that drew attention to the process of industrialization in the United States from the 1870s onward, the growth of cities, the consequent concentration of people and urban unemployment that followed economic downturns. .
lafeber took this materialist argument and applied it in considerable detail to the events of the 1880s and 1890s in particular. his special emphasis was on showing how the acute difficulties of the 1890s prompted business interests to push for expansion abroad as a means of restoring economic health and political stability at home. Lafeber’s work was not only highly detailed, but also expresses his own originality at every step of the book. it is carefully and justly argued. As I said at the beginning, Lafeber goes out of his way to express his admiration for Pratt’s book, although he completely disagrees and emphasizes the role of commercial pressures rather than ideological impulses and missionary effort.
finally, we come to a very different book, that of louis a pérez, cuba in the american imagination. This is a different perspective, because it’s seen from an island that was colonized rather than written from Washington’s perspective.
yes. We haven’t covered 100 years, but we’ve come a long way since Pratt in 1936, a long way in terms of how history has been studied. I have quoted Pérez for two reasons. the main reason is that i am using perez to indicate a change in attitude between his own work and the other four books i have mentioned. the other books really have neither the apparatus nor a primary interest in seeing the world from the point of view of the recipients, that is, those who experienced the weight of colonial rule. This is not the criticism it might seem because very few scholars were interested in this perspective until the 1960s. Until then, much of the history of the rest of the world was compiled by the West from centers of power in Washington, London, paris, etc., which extended outwards. that was the conventional approach at the time.
well, what happened in and after the 1960s was a revolution that produced what is now known as area studies. the term sums up the enormous research effort that followed decolonization to write about indigenous or local peoples themselves rather than treating them as agents, victims, or lucky recipients of alien influences and domination. then pérez represents a dimension of this new research applied to cuba. his work is a distinguished statement in a much larger process of rewriting world history. Excellent examples could also be drawn from Hawaii, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, as well as, of course, Africa and Asia.
However—and this is the second reason why I have chosen Pérez—I don’t think anyone has contributed as much as he has to any other part of the island empire. Over the course of half a century, he has written some 12 books on the history of Cuba, ranging from bandits to the military and including the environment and culture, as well as standard political issues. You cannot write a word about the history of Cuba without citing Pérez.
“cuba was described as a ‘ripe fruit,’ which would eventually fall into the hands of the united states”
I have chosen this book in particular because of the way it shows how the interaction between the US presence and its perception of Cuba produced misleading stereotypes that fed back into politics. Pérez shows that the United States invented a series of mythical constructions of Cuba. The United States was not well informed about the realities in Cuba and did not bother to learn more. consequently, misperceptions and misjudgments created a form of reality that became the basis for action. I will give you some examples. In the 19th century, observers in the United States saw Cuba as an island that had drifted away from the mainland and had to be reclaimed. The word ‘natural’ was frequently applied to support the assumption that Cuba was really part of the United States. The island was also seen as a ‘ripe fruit’, to use a common phrase, that would eventually fall from the tree and fall into the hands of the United States. Then, in 1898, to justify war with Spain, Cuba became a damsel in distress in need of rescue from Spain’s tyrannical medieval rule.
After 1898 and until 1959, the United States exerted considerable influence in Cuba, which was effectively a protectorate. however, the Cubans did not always obey their protectors. and so the picture changed again. the Cubans became inferior. They had limited potential. they were undisciplined. they were rebellious. consequently, they needed a father’s help and guidance before earning the right to manage their own affairs.
In 1959, the Cuban revolution meant their rejection of the forms of imperial subordination to which they had been subjected. at this point, of course, earlier attitudes solidified. Cubans became ungrateful, rebellious, dangerous and even today they deserve to be walled off and removed from civilized countries until they somehow repent and see the light. President Trump’s decision to reaffirm a hard-line policy towards Cuba indicates that salvation still lies ahead in the very distant future. it is said that the president is not a great reader. He would be a great help to American policymaking if someone could provide him with a one-page summary of Perez’s book.
an image that pérez collects and that catches my attention is that of a child learning to ride a bicycle. is extremely condescending.
in fact.
Do these images reflect how Americans feel about Cuba, or do they develop a power of their own?
a bit of both. I think Cuba has become, through this long history of mutual misunderstandings, a special case because of what Washington sees as its stubbornness combined with its proximity. other islands have aligned themselves to various degrees, but the Cubans were not content. It is a great irony that his demand for self-determination was what President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the goal of American policy at the end of the First World War. It is also what the American colonists wanted in 1776. So, the precedents for what the Cubans are doing or trying to do are in the history of the United States. It is their practice that Washington dislikes.
but it would not be good to overemphasize the Cuban case in terms of world history, because very similar attitudes marked all the great colonial powers from the end of the 19th century onwards. everyone thought they were superior. all thought they had a divine right to rule, and all concluded, one way or another, that colonial subjects were ungrateful, obstructive, and occasionally rebellious, and that the colonial burden was indeed heavy. it had to take as long as possible, but there was not much benefit to be gained from it. Therefore, you can take the Cuban case as a fairly typical attitude of ours towards all its possessions, and those attitudes in turn are linked to those of the largest imperial powers, such as Great Britain and France.
In your own work, American Empire, you look at US imperialism in a larger context.
Yes, if I think about my own work in relation to the great books I’ve mentioned, I’d say I’ve tried to do two things that aren’t fully covered by the available literature. The first is to place the United States in a larger Western context. The argument here is that although the United States is, of course, distinctive in many respects, there is something in common about its evolution from the 17th and 18th centuries to the present day that has been overlooked. To underscore this point, I intertwine my chapters on the United States with chapters on what is happening in Western Europe in terms of the changing nature of the state from an agricultural, military, and fiscal state to a modern, industrial, and constitutional nation state, and the struggles concomitants between progressives and conservatives. The kind of trends we know as staples of modern European history were also operating in the United States, and at about the same time.
For example, when the United States acquired its formal empire in 1898, it did so at the height of the “new imperialism” in the late 19th century, when Britain, France, and others were expanding or creating their own empires. Thus, there is nothing exceptional about US involvement in a generalized Western enterprise. neither is the moment of decolonization surprising, except that it is not dealt with in the books that offer a synthesis of the subject. The United States divested itself of its empire after 1945 and at the same time that the decolonization process was underway in the rest of the world. In short, I am trying to show that the history of the United States, at least in its broad international contours, was part of a much larger history of Western development.
The second contribution I hope to make stems from what I have said about Perez. now i am speaking as an african who has done fieldwork in africa in my younger, healthier and more athletic days. The point is that now no type of imperial history can be written without taking into account the enormous work done on the indigenous history of the places that were colonized. Also, it’s not just about completing the story. it is because the story, being complete, alters the original message. that is, the view from washington and london was created in part by feedback from experience in africa, india and elsewhere. there is a sense, albeit a patchy one, that colonialism co-produced and was not simply an imposition from the outside world. It was that, but it was much more than that.
In my book, I have drawn attention to the admirable and detailed work that has been done in Hawaii, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and, as we have just seen, Cuba. this literature is part of the movement over the last generation or so to write indigenous history. Until now, however, no one has brought together the research on the imperial experience of all the major islands and linked the Caribbean with the Pacific. what I have done in this, I must say, is by no means definitive. and there are, I am sure, many weaknesses that I have not yet fully perceived. However, I have tried to reflect in my study of approaches to American empire that historians working in Africa, India, and other parts of the now-defunct colonial world would take for granted but would also regard as highly important. one could say that it is an attempt to write a global history for a globalized world.
See Also: The Originals – Book Series In Order