This special issue on āAmerican Empire in Global Historyā is the result of a joint-research project at the Global History Division, the Institute for Open and Transdisciplinary Research Initiatives (OTRI)1, Osaka University, to celebrate the 70th Anniversary Annual Congress of Japanese Association of Western History, in May 2020 at Osaka University, Japan. We originally planned to have an international workshop followed by a symposium on āāAmerican Empireā in the context of Global Historyā. The symposium aimed at reconsidering the presence of the United States (US) in the twentieth century by combining recent historiographical developments in studies of the American empire in Europe and the US, with work on international relations and comparative studies of empires by East Asian and Japanese scholars set in the wider context of global history.
The OTRI of Osaka University is conducting a series of joint research projects that are related to the historical origins of the contemporary economic resurgence of East Asia, or āthe East Asian Miracleā (as named in a World Bank report in 1993). We tried to reveal the close links between the development and transformation of āintra-Asian tradeā, the emergence of āopen-regionalismā in the Asia-Pacific, and the formation of ādevelopmental statesā and the progress of ādevelopmentalismā as the driving forces behind the economic resurgence of East Asia. This subject aims to investigate the modern and contemporary international economic order of Asia through collaboration with scholars from the United Kingdoms (UK) and the US as well as Asian scholars from Korea, China, and India. Relevant research areas include the role of hegemonic states in transforming the international order, and the comparative study of empires from the early modern period to the twentieth century.
Based on this experience, we decided to start our project by examining a provocative book, American Empire: A Global History, written by Antony Hopkins. We have eight contributors to this special issue from the US, the UK, the Philippines, Australia, and Japan. Some are well-established senior scholars; others are young and spirited historians. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, we organised four intensive Zoom meetings in 2020 as substitutes for the Congress.
American Empire and Globalisation
Given that American Empire is a large, wide-ranging book that covers three centuries, readers might find a compass and map helpful in guiding them through the detailed essays in this volume. The book approaches U.S. history from an external perspective to reappraise events that have usually been considered within a domestic frame of reference. The central hypothesis holds that important and familiar developments can be fitted into the history of globalisation, which encompassed most of the Western world from at least the eighteenth century onwards and spread throughout the globe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Osaka groupās complementary approach covered the history of globalisation from the Mongolian World Empire in the thirteenth century to the present.2 It paid close attention to the role of empires, which contributed to the development and transformation of globalisation, not only in early-modern Asia on the Eurasian continent but also in the modern and contemporary world. The so-called āAmerican Empireā, or the global-scale American hegemony in the twentieth century, known as the āPax Americanaā, can be included in this wider range of empire studies. By utilising Hopkinsās American Empire, we aim to locate and interpret familiar features of US history as crucial components of global history.
American Empire conceives of globalisation not as a general, undifferentiated process that simply became bigger over time, but as three overlapping but still distinct phases ā proto, modern, and post-colonial ā each with distinguishing characteristics. The book then argues that empires were the most powerful agents of globalisation during this period. The transformation of one phase into another was driven by a dialectic that elevated a particular social formation to the point where countervailing forces arose to challenge its supremacy. These propositions are expanded to show how each phase applied first to the mainland colonies and then to the US, which retained close ties with Europe and, in particular, the UK. The book brings economic considerations into focus, while also linking them to political and cultural developments to avoid charges of determinism and monocausality. The discussion of post-colonial globalisation in the final part of the American Empire differs from previous chapters. Its purpose is not to produce a comparably detailed account but to identify the main features of the emerging post-colonial order, which represents a fundamental departure from the conditions that had defined the great age of Western territorial empires. Post-colonial, it is worth noting, is not synonymous with post-imperial. Imperialism can survive the end of formal colonial rule.
Proto-globalisation was the product of pre-industrial, predominantly agricultural economies and dynastic states under the control of landowners. Although the reach of these societies extended to distant parts of the world, their ability to penetrate societies beyond Europe was limited by technological constraints. Improvements in the technology of destruction, however, were sufficient to transform military power and led to increased warfare among European states during the eighteenth century. The result was a rapid growth in public debt and a mounting financial crisis that eventually brought down many of Europeās dynastic states. The UK survived partly because its financial system was superior to those of continental European states. Moreover, it used the empire to offset the costs of war and avert domestic discontent. India served the purpose for a time but soon became a costly commitment. At that point, the government in London turned to the mainland colonies as a source of taxation that would help reduce the national debt. The move proved to be counter-productive; it played a key role in the American Revolution and the consequent creation of the US in 1783. Independence, however, was formal rather than effective. The US remained dependent on the British connection through continuing bonds spanning the economy, politics, culture, and defence. Any established historiography that treats 1783 as a great divide underestimates the long lines of continuity that survived the constitutional break, as they did in other countries where decolonisation remained incomplete.
Modern globalisation was characterised by the development of industrialisation and the rise of nation-states, which eroded predominantly agricultural societies and displaced or modified dynastic polities. The upheaval brought by the revolutions of the late eighteenth century continued throughout the nineteenth century and was manifested in a political struggle between conservatives and progressives, typically representing land and town, an economic contest between established agricultural interests and expanding urban manufacturing centres, and a developing conflict between capital and labour. The strains imposed by these structural changes stimulated a range of responses, one of them being the assertive imperialism that was a common feature of the late nineteenth century.
Similar trends affected the US and can be seen in the rivalries that led to the Civil War, the displacement of Southern plantation owners, the demise of slavery, the bonding of a nation-state, and the expansion of modern manufacturing from the 1870s. By the 1890s, these developments had induced rapid social changes, alienated key rural and urban interests, and heightened the political contest to control the federal government. These manifestations of a society caught in the middle of immense structural changes were reproduced throughout Europe. Similarly, the participation of the US in the assertive imperialism that marked the end of the century and the creation of an insular empire was neither a coincidence nor an aberration but a consequence of these developments.
Post-colonial globalisation, which gathered pace after the Second World War, was marked by the rise of mass anti-colonial movements, changes in the structure as well as the orientation of world trade and finance, and the promotion of concepts of human rights through the agency of supra-national organisations, notably the United Nations (UN).3 These influences were consequences of the further development of the advanced economies, the global spread of industrialisation, and mass opposition to colonial rule, all of which reduced the value of colonies while increasing the cost of holding them. The US fitted into these broad trends, as it had done in the past. It acquired its formal, territorial empire in 1898, at the high point of the scramble for colonies, and unscrambled it after 1945, when the European empires were also being dissolved. Between these dates, the US managed its empire the same way as the European empires and with similar results.
The first three articles in this special issue cover the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well as dealing with features of US history that arose from its proto-global phase, when the economy was dominated by agriculture, landed interests (large and small), and slavery. The next three articles illustrate aspects of imperialism during the early phase of modern globalisation. Each represents a historiograpical trend that highlights the role of the recipients of imperialism, or the periphery, whether in opposition or as associates. The two final articles deal with the formation of policies in the twentieth century that either underpinned the empire or sought to perpetuate it after the demise of formal rule.
Decolonisation, Settler Colonialism and Intra-imperial Relationship
Based on these grand outlines of the history of globalisation, as the subtitle of the book indicates, American Empire covers the history of US expansion from the eighteenth century to the present. Part I āDecolonization and Dependence, 1756ā1865ā (Chapters 2-5) and Part II āModernity and Imperialism, 1865ā1914ā (Chapters, 6-9) occupy about 60 per cent of the text. The main focus of US activities overseas is on the territorial empire from the Spanish-American War of 1898 to the incorporation of Hawaiāi as the 50th state in 1959. It is worth emphasising this feature of the book because it deals with four sites in the Caribbean and Pacific (Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaiāi and the Philippines) that have rarely been given the visibility they deserve in general studies of Western empire-building and management. However, there are two reasons why the book begins in the eighteenth century and covers the nineteenth century down to 1898. The first is obvious: until 1783 the US was itself a colony, or rather a set of colonies under British rule. Durng this period. American Empire meant the British Empire in North America. The second reason is not immediately apparent and follows from the proposition that formal independence in 1783 was not immediately followed by effective sovereignty. On the contrary, during the period down to the Civil War decolonisation was incomplete and the United States remained subject to Britainās informal influence.
The articles by Griffin, Edling, and Sexton are concerned with the ālong nineteenth centuryā in the US. They examine the enduring links between the US and the former colonial power and its implications for the new republicās aim of creating a continental-scale sovereign nation-state. One of the most provocative arguments of American Empire is its claim that the US remained dependent on the British connection through continuing bonds spanning the economy (trade, migration, and finance), politics, culture, and defence (through the agency of the Royal Navy). These kinds of dependence on multiple British influences can be related to the famous controversy on āinformal empireā or āthe imperialism of free tradeā advanced by Gallagher and Robinson in 1953. American Empire underlines the need to consider the historical process of ādecolonisationā in a long perspective. Formal indpendence can be dated to the day and hour; effective independence is the work of decades.
Griffin re-examines the familiar story of westward expansion after 1783 to see whether it fits the defnition of empire and, if so, in what sense. Territorial acquisition, through wars and treaties with indigenous Americans were undoubtedly imperialist in intent and they have regularly been seen as resulting in the creation of an empire through the ultimate incorporation of Territories into the federal Union. The expansionary process was promoted and accelerated by a huge influx of white settlers and migrants from Europe, who are often gathered together under the heading āsettler colonialismā.4 Drawing a distinction between post-colonial and post-revolution, Griffin argues that the US was constructing an empire in the eighteenth-century sense of an extensive sovereign state. Jefferson and his successors faced the conundrum of managing a potentially anarchic and radicalised mass of new immigrants. The solution was to appropriate the resources of indigenous Americans to allow the liberty of white Americans to flourish while keeping them within the post-revolutionary state. The strategy did not create an empire in the sense that was to gain currency as the nineteenth century progressed because the constitutent states of the federal Union enjoyed constitutional equality and, unlike colonies, were not subjected to commands from an authoritarian centre. Griffinās central argument not only supports the position taken in American Empire but also offers a challenge to specialists to re-think customary approaches to the period by pursing the paradox that the United States acquiesced in continuing dependence on the former colonial power as a means of preserving liberty through territorial expansion.
By concindence rather than planning, Edling follows Griffinās lead and carries it through most of the nineteenth century. In a perceptive and thorough review of westward expansion, he, too, concludes that the term āempireā is applicable only in the eighteenth-century sense. His reasoning, ...
