World Policy Journal
Volume XXIII, No 1, Spring 2006

 

The American Way of Empire
By Thomas Bender

 

In 1884-85 representatives of the major European powers met in Berlin. The topic was empire. Great Britain, France, and Germany agreed on ground rules for their great game. They negotiated a blueprint for carving up Africa among themselves, an agreement that, along with new technologies of violence, medicine, and communication, accelerated their imperial expansion and tightened control over their colonies. Between the Berlin meetings and the world war, nearly a quarter million square miles were added each year to empires worldwide.

The United States was invited to Berlin (probably because of its interest in Liberia, founded by the American Colonization Society in 1821), and it sent a representative but refused to be a signatory to the final agreement. The reasons derived in part from the legacy of Washington's warning about entangling alliances, and also from a widely held belief, sometimes loudly broadcast, that America's republican institutions were a standing rebuke to Europe's corrupt politics and imperial pretensions. Histories of the United States and Europe have largely accepted this American pretension.

An essential part of American national identity is based on difference, on a tendency to define America as distinct from, even separate from, all that is foreign, whether Europe or those parts of the world Americans unself-consciously called "uncivilized" or "savage." American republicanism and Protestant Christianity, they thought, were the keynotes of their distinctiveness, as was their rejection of imperial ambitions. One could argueand I willthat here they were indulging in a semantic sleight of hand.

It is true and important that with the unhappy exception of the annexation of the Philippines and the somewhat more successful instance of Puerto Rico at the end of the wars of 1898, the United States did not formally colonize any overseas territories. That differentiates it from the European powers and Japan, but it does not close the question. U.S. citizens avidly acquired an entire continent, and they did it through conquest; meanwhile, they developed and militarily defended an overseas empire based on trade and finance. It has been said that the United States was an empire without being imperial. In eschewing territorial control and favoring an empire of commerce and finance, the United States was perhaps prescient. Certainly it helped to shape the global economy and culture that it dominated for most of the twentieth century. The American way of empire raised fewer moral issues than did the European empiresthough moral questions there were, and they were revelatory ones.

Endnotes

* Thomas Bender is a professor of history and University Professor of the Humanities at New York University, and the author or editor of more than a dozen books on American culture.