Dictionary:

imperialism

  (ĭm-pîr'ē-ə-lĭz'əm)

1. The policy of extending a nation's authority by territorial acquisition or by the establishment of economic and political hegemony over other nations.
2. The system, policies, or practices of such a government.

Policy of systematic domination and exploitation of a country by another country or an empire. Marxists assert that the United States engages in imperialism because powerful U.S. Businesses need to protect their foreign markets.

n.a policy of extending a country's power and influence through diplomacy or military force: the struggle against Western imperialism.

imperialistic adj. imperialistically adv.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

The control of one or a number of countries by a dominant nation. This control may be political, economic, or both, and indicates a degree of dependence in the subordinate nation. Many writers take the word as a synonym for colonialism, but imperialism can exist without the creation of formal colonies, which usually require military force and the institution of a colonial administration.

Imperialism was promoted by monopolizing the external trade of the subordinate nation. The imperial power takes raw materials from the colony and sells it finished goods in return, discouraging the development of any manufacturing industry which might compete with its own. It was further endorsed by the imperialist gaze, which saw subsistence landscapes as ‘empty’ (despite the presence of indigenous people) and ripe for capitalism: colonized spaces were deterritorialized, ‘stripped of preceding significations and then re-territorialized according to the convenience of the…imperial administration’ (D. Harvey 1989). This imperialist gaze also developed new constructs of race and gender—See colonial discourse—and Blunt (Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 24) has illustrated the political significance of imperial power at the domestic scale.

There now exist few relics of political empires but economic imperialism is alive and well. See neo-colonialism.

Domination or control by one country or group of people over others. The precise nature and the causes of imperialism, the clearest examples, its consequences, and therefore the period which exemplifies it best, are all disputed.

The so-called new imperialism was the imposition of colonial rule by European countries, especially the ‘scramble for Africa’, during the late nineteenth century. Many writers construed imperialism in terms of their understanding of the motivating forces. Among these, Hobson, Luxemburg, Bukharin, and especially Lenin focused on economic factors, the rational pursuit of new markets and sources of raw materials. Lenin argued, in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), that imperialism is an economic necessity of the industrialized capitalist economies, seeking to offset the declining tendency of the rate of profit, by exporting capital. It is the monopoly stage of capitalism.

Schumpeter (1919) defined imperialism as the non-rational and objectless disposition on the part of a state to unlimited forcible expansion. Imperialism is rooted in the psychology of rulers and the effects of surviving pre-capitalist social structures, not the economic interests of nation or class. Alternative accounts view imperialism as: an outgrowth of popular nationalism; a device to underwrite the welfare state, which pacifies the working class (notably in Britain); personal adventurism; an application of social Darwinism to struggles between races; a civilizing mission; and as simply one dimension of international rivalry for power and prestige. The latter implies that socialist states too were prone to be imperialistic.

All these ‘push’ versions share an endogenous or Eurocentric focus. Competing views emphasize pull factors: the contribution made at the periphery by local crises such as a power vacuum (perhaps induced by foreign intervention) and the collaboration of indigenous elites. Imperialism becomes a matter of accident as well as design.

‘Informal imperialism’ is said to render direct political control unnecessary, in the presence of other ways of exercising domination, for example through technological superiority or the free trade imperialism of a leading economic power, and cultural imperialism. Therefore, for modern neo-Marxists, capitalism in the West has been able to survive the process of decolonization; imperialism outlives the age of territorial annexation. Economic, financial, and social structures of dependence remain, and are reproduced by multinational corporations especially. The Third World is still exploited and is subjected to indirect political control. Ghana's first President, Kwame Nkrumah, depicted this imperialism without colonies in Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (1965).

Some analysts argue that the idea of imperialism loses its usefulness when equated with international capitalism, where asymmetries of economic power and integration are inevitable. They reject monocausal explanations, and stipulate that the political relationships must be specified closely before imperialism can be inferred from the existence of economic inequalities.

— Peter Burnell

For more information on imperialism, visit Britannica.com.

Imperialism was not used in its modern sense until the later 19th cent. Before then it usually referred to the aggression of Napoleon Bonaparte. That does not mean of course that it cannot be used retrospectively, to describe the origins and growth of the British empire in Stuart and Hanoverian times, for example; but the convention is to call these ‘colonization’. It has also taken on a wider meaning. It usually refers to territorial acquisitions, but can also cover extensions of power or influence which fell short of that. ‘Economic imperialism’, for example, means the process by which an economy extends its financial control over others.

It has been explained in various ways. Missionaries used to attribute Britain's imperial successes to the will of God. ‘Social Darwinists’ thought they proved the British race was ‘fittest’ to survive. The favourite theories, however, are economic. At the root of imperialism lay Britain's phenomenal commercial expansion following her industrial revolution. That gave her world-wide material interests, which needed to be secured. Later, according to J. A. Hobson, the Marxists, and some capitalists (like Rhodes), that need grew desperate, as capitalism began ‘over-producing’, and the industrialized countries began competing with each other for outlets. That, however, is controversial.

At its height, around 1900, imperialism also took on a domestic character. Britons forgot the old Napoleonic connotations, and took pride in their imperialism. At its crudest, this pride manifested itself in jingoism; but it also had a more responsible side. All the main political parties—even Labour—sprouted imperialist wings.

By 1902 it was clear that the empire was stretched about as tight as it could be without bursting, and imperialists turned away from expansion to consolidation. An imperialist became someone who wished to federate the empire: economically (through imperial preference), militarily, and even politically. Many of these imperialists were highly idealistic, and even liberal in their vision of a great multiracial empire, which would bring peace and civilization to the world. Some of them hoped that the post-Second World War Commonwealth might achieve all this, only to be disappointed in the longer run.

Americans have long thought of themselves as an "anti-imperial" people. The nation was, after all, founded in revolt against the British Empire. In the twentieth century, the rhetoric of national "selfdetermination" pervaded American discussions of foreign affairs. From Thomas Jefferson to Woodrow Wilson, the United States defined itself in opposition to the imperialism of other empires.

Imperialism, in this American usage, refers to the domination of another society against the expressed will of its people. Imperialism can be both formal and informal. In the case of formal empire—as in the British rule over the thirteen American colonies during the eighteenth century—a powerful foreign state manages the day-to-day political, social, and economic affairs in another land. Informal empire, in contrast, refers to a more indirect arrangement, whereby a foreign state works through local intermediaries to manage a distant society. In early nineteenth-century India, for example, British authorities negotiated favorable trade arrangements with native monarchs rather than bear the heavy costs of direct imperial control.

Close attention to these two kinds of imperialism has led many scholars to conclude that, despite popular assumptions, imperialism as a general term applies to American history. In particular, the years after the Civil War show abundant evidence of Americans expanding their economic, political, military, and cultural control over foreign societies. The post-1865 period is distinguished from previous decades, when the young Republic was both struggling for its survival and expanding over contiguous territory that it rapidly incorporated into the constitutional structures of the United States. Imperialism implies something different from continental expansion. It refers to the permanent subordination of distant societies, rather than their reorganization as states of equal standing in a single nation. America extended its federalist structure of governance across the North American continent before the Civil War. After that watershed, a powerful United States established areas of domination in distant lands, whose people were not allowed equal representation in governance. By the dawn of the twentieth century, the United States had a large informal empire and a smaller but still significant formal empire as well.

From the Civil War to the Twentieth Century

William Henry Seward, secretary of state during and immediately after the Civil War, recognized that the United States needed an overseas empire for its future peace and prosperity. The wounds of the bloody North-South conflict would heal, he believed, only with the promise of overseas benefits for all sections of the country. Informal U.S. expansion into foreign markets—especially in Asia and the Caribbean—provided farmers and industrialists with access to consumers and resources. At a time when the U.S. economy had begun to employ factory manufacturing, mechanized agriculture, and railroad transportation, large overseas outlets became necessary for prosperity. Americans were dependent on assured access to international markets, Seward believed, and this required expansion across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

Seward began by building a "highway" to Asia. This included annexation of the Brooks Islands in 1867 (renamed the Midway Islands in 1903). The secretary of state also negotiated a treaty guaranteeing American businesses access to the island kingdom of Hawaii. The U.S. Senate eventually approved this treaty in 1875. Seward expected that the Brooks Islands and Hawaii would serve as important stepping-stones for American influence in the lucrative markets of China and Japan.

When the United States encountered resistance to its post–Civil War expansion in Asia, the government employed diplomatic and military pressures. In 1866, after the Japanese government closed itself to foreign trade, the United States joined other imperial powers—the British, the French, and the Dutch—in forcing Western access to the island nation over the objections of native interests. Seward dispatched a warship, the U.S.S. Wyoming, to join in naval exercises off the Japanese coast.

In China, the largest and most promising market, Seward used diplomacy instead of explicit force. According to the Burlingame Treaty, signed in September 1868, the Chinese government gave the United States trading access to designated coastal areas, with the additional right to build railroads and telegraphs facilitating penetration of the hinterland. In return, the United States allowed thousands of Chinese laborers to migrate across the Pacific. This arrangement helped to relieve China's overpopulation difficulties, and it provided American companies—particularly on the West Coast—with a large pool of low-wage workers. The U.S. government worked with the Chinese emperor to guarantee a market for the export of American products and the import of cheap labor.

Seward's imperialism set the stage for succeeding secretaries of state, but his policies inspired strong domestic resistance. By the time he left office in 1869, Seward had built an American overseas empire that included formal possessions, including the Brooks Islands and Alaska (1867), as well as larger informal areas of influence, which included Hawaii, Japan, and, most important of all, China. Many Americans expressed discomfort with this evidence of imperialism, including Republican Senator Charles Sumner and Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune. Seward's other ambitious plans—including acquisition of the Danish West Indies (the U.S. Virgin Islands) and the construction of an isthmian canal connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through a sliver of Colombia—died at the hands of anti-imperialists on the floor of the U.S. Senate.

Despite these setbacks, Seward and his successors recognized the overriding imperialist trend in American foreign policy at the time. In addition to the economic advantages derived from overseas expansion, a series of internal social and cultural pressures pushed the United States to become more involved in managing distant societies. Religious belief—in particular a desire to spread Christian "civilization"—had motivated Western settlement across the North American continent during the period of manifest destiny, before the Civil War. Now these same urges inspired overseas proselytism. Ministers like Josiah Strong of the Home Missionary Society called upon thousands of their followers to establish churches and schools throughout China and other foreign countries. Christian missionaries would not only save less privileged souls, they would also display the profound righteousness of American society. As was the case with Britain and many other imperial powers in the nineteenth century, the United States defined its national identity by asserting superiority over—and a duty to convert—"Oriental" heathens.

American imperialism, in this sense, was part of a much larger international competition. Britain, France, and Russia—and by the last decades of the nineteenth century, Germany and Japan—were all competing for in-fluence in Asia, Africa, and other "open" spaces for expansion. American leaders felt they had to adopt imperialistic policies of their own. Otherwise, the United States risked permanent exclusion from future opportunities abroad. Secretary of State John Hay's Open Door Notes of 1899 and 1900 codified this argument, proclaiming that the United States would assert its presence in China and other countries to make sure that other imperialist powers did not close off American access. As a self-conscious great power with a civilizing mission and a growing dependence on foreign markets, the United States needed its own empire—preferably informal. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner's influential 1893 essay, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," captured this sense that the proving ground for American society was no longer on the North American continent, but now overseas.

One could not build an empire—even an informal one—without an adequate military. After an initial decade of demobilization after the Civil War, the United States embarked upon a period of extensive naval construction in the late nineteenth century. Alfred Thayer Mahan, president of the newly created Naval War College, outlined a new military doctrine for American imperialism in his widely read lectures, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783. First published in 1890, Mahan's text mined the history of the Roman and British empires to show that a large trading state could ensure its wealth and security by asserting dominance of the sea. A large battleship navy, in control of important strategic waterways and coaling stations across the globe, would guarantee the flow of commerce. It would also allow for the United States to influence foreign societies, transporting concentrated forces across great distances.

Largely as a consequence of Mahan's influence, the U.S. naval fleet grew consistently between 1890 and 1914. More ships created new opportunities for force projection. New overseas naval interests, in turn, justified ever larger estimates of strategic necessities. By 1898, the U.S. Navy had become both an advocate and a tool of American imperialism.

The United States used its growing naval power to force the declining Spanish empire out of Cuba and the Philippines. In both areas, America became the new imperial power. In 1901, the United States—now in formal control of Cuba—forced the native government of the island to include in its constitution a series of stipulations known as the Platt Amendment (named for Senator Orville Platt, a Republican from Connecticut). These included assurances of American political and economic domination. The U.S. Navy acquired possession of a major facility on the island, Guantánamo Naval Base. Washington also asserted the future right to intervene militarily in Cuba if U.S. interests were jeopardized. After granting the island nominal independence in 1902, the United States did indeed send an "army of pacification" to the island in 1906 for the purpose of repressing anti-American groups. The United States practiced a combination of informal and formal imperialism in Cuba.

In the case of the Philippines, the United States initially went to war with Spain in 1898 for the purpose of acquiring an informal naval coaling station. Native resistance to U.S. interests and a growing recognition in Washington that the archipelago would serve as an ideal point of embarkation for trade with the Chinese mainland led President William McKinley to declare the Philippines a permanent U.S. colony on 21 December 1898. America fought a bloody forty-one-month war to secure possession of the entire archipelago. During this Philippine Insurrection, the United States created an occupation army that waged total war on local resistance. Forty-two hundred Americans died in battle for possession of this colony. As many as twenty thousand Filipino insurgents also died. As never before, the United States had established direct control over a foreign society—seven thousand miles from North America—through brute force. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the evidence of American imperialism was unmistakable.

Liberal Imperialism

During the first half of the twentieth century, the United States was both an advocate of democracy and a practitioner of imperialism. The two are not necessarily contradictory. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson both believed they had an obligation to spread American ideas and interests across the globe. As a new world power, the United States had an apparent opportunity to remake the international system in a way that would eliminate the old ravages of war and corrupt alliances. Roosevelt and Wilson sought to replace militaristic aristocracies with governments that promised economic development and, eventually, democracy. International change of this variety would, they assumed, best serve America's long-term interests.

In the short run, however, the "new diplomacy" of Roosevelt and Wilson required more extensive American imperialism. When societies refused to follow the alleged tide of "modern" economic development and democracy symbolized by the United States, Washington felt an urge to intervene. On a number of occasions, U.S. leaders went so far as to force societies to be "free" on American terms. This was the rationale behind a series of early twentieth-century U.S. interventions in the Western Hemisphere that included, among others, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Mexico. In each case, the United States asserted strategic and economic interests, and a long-term commitment to the betterment of the society under Washington's control. When U.S. military forces left their foreign areas of occupation, the threat of their redeployment served to intimidate those who wished to challenge U.S. influence.

In Europe and Asia, the United States pursued a consistent policy of informal imperialism during the first decades of the twentieth century. Contrary to the image of American diplomatic isolation before and after World War I, U.S. businesses worked with Washington's explicit—though often "unofficial"—support to build new overseas markets during this period. Investment firms like J. P. Morgan and Company lent large sums to countries such as Great Britain and France, forcing them to allow more American influence in the daily workings of their economies. Industrial concerns like Standard Oil, Singer Sewing Company, and International Harvester became more active in controlling natural resources overseas and marketing their products to foreign consumers. Perhaps most significant of all, intellectual and charitable groups like the Carnegie Council and the Rockefeller Foundation began to advise leaders in Europe, Asia, and Latin America on how they could make their societies and economies look more like that of the United States. Their seemingly "objective" counsels encouraged private property concentration, natural resource extraction, and increased trade—all factors that served to increase the influence of American firms.

The worldwide economic depression of the 1930s and the rise of fascism restricted much of the international commerce and communication that had flourished in the first decades of the century. These conditions, however, only heightened the pressures for informal American imperialism. Fearful that economic and political forces—especially in Germany—were moving against trade, economic development, and democracy, the U.S. government continued to encourage the activities of American companies and advisory groups abroad.

The administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, in particular, sponsored the overseas marketing of Hollywood-produced films. Movies helped to proselytize the individual freedoms and personal prosperity that Americans believed were essential for a peaceful, liberal world. Hollywood helped nurture foreign consumers who would soon want to purchase the American-made automobiles and other products glorified on the silver screen. Most significant of all, policymakers like Roosevelt believed that movie exports would help inspire positive views of the United States in foreign societies. The president even thought this might work with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin—an avid consumer of American movies. Roosevelt hoped that Hollywood depictions of Soviet-American friend-ship would help solidify the two nations in their fight against Nazi fascism.

World War II and the Cold War

U.S. participation in World War II formalized America's liberal imperialism of the prior decades. As part of the Atlantic Charter—negotiated when Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met in secret between 9 and 12 August 1941—the United States proclaimed that the war against fascism would end with a "permanent system of general security" that would embrace national self-determination, free trade, and disarmament. Citizens of foreign countries would benefit from "improved labor standards, economic advancement, and social security" when they restructured their societies to look like the United States. The Atlantic Charter laid out an agenda for total war against the large standing armies, state-run economies, and dictatorial governments that characterized fascist regimes. This is what one scholar calls the "American way of war." Between 1941 and 1945, the United States deployed unprecedented military force—including two atomic bombs—to annihilate its most direct challengers in Asia and Europe. American commitments to free trade, economic development, and democracy required the unconditional surrender of Japanese, German, and Italian fascists. U.S. leaders and citizens not only asserted that their nation was the necessary "arsenal of democracy," they also proclaimed that they would remake the world after the horrors of war and genocide. The defeat of fascism would christen the "American Century," when the United States would play the unabashed role of liberal imperialist, planting the seeds of American-style economic growth and democracy across the globe.

The United States undertook this task with extraordinary resolve as soon as World War II came to a close in 1945. In the western half of Germany and the European continent, American policymakers rebuilt wardevastated societies. The Economic Recovery Program of 1947 (also known as the Marshall Plan, after Secretary of State George Marshall) provided a staggering $13 billion of U.S. aid to feed starving people, reorganize industry, and jump-start economic production. Instead of the reparations and loans that weighed down European economies after World War I, the United States used the Marshall Plan to foster postwar stability, prosperity, and integration in Europe. With their economies organized along liberal capitalist lines, the west European countries developed favorable markets for American exports only a few years after the end of World War II.

In Japan and the western half of Germany, America's liberal imperialism was formal and incredibly successful. In both societies, U.S. officials helped to write new constitutions. The Japanese national charter of 1946 prohibited militarism and state control over the economy. It gave Japanese women the right to vote for the first time, promoted noncommunist labor unions, encouraged free public expression, and created new opportunities for American-style schooling. The new German "Basic Law," promulgated in 1949, similarly outlawed fascism and ensured individual rights, personal property ownership, and free elections. In both societies, the United States worked with a series of local politicians to uproot authoritarian traditions and impose liberal democracy. American officials sought to prevent future war, improve the lives of foreign citizens, and ensure U.S. strategic and economic interests. These goals were not incompatible; in fact, they reflected a formalization of American assumptions dating back to 1865.

The Soviet Union objected to America's liberal imperialism for obvious reasons. Joseph Stalin and his successors recognized that U.S. expansion in Europe and Asia prohibited the spread of communist ideals. Instead of the worker rights and economic equality championed by the Soviet Union—in words, if not in practice—American influence privileged personal liberties and individual wealth accumulation. The conflict between America's liberal democratic vision and the Soviet Union's communist alternative created an environment of competing imperialisms, which contemporaries called the "Cold War."

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Soviet criticisms of U.S. imperialism gained some popular support in Asian, African, and Latin American societies struggling for independence against inherited European and American domination. This was most evident in Indochina. Despite its anticolonial inclinations, U.S. leaders supported French colonialism in this region of Southeast Asia after World War II. In the eyes of U.S. policymakers, national independence for Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian citizens threatened to undermine the stability and security of the region. Nationalist governments would allegedly threaten trade and economic development. Most significantly, American leaders feared that newly independent governments would fall under the influence of Soviet and, after 1949, Chinese communism. Liberal imperialism appeared necessary to contain communist expansion and prepare "underdeveloped" societies for eventual independence.

When Vietnamese nationalists—aided, as Washington predicted, by China and the Soviet Union—forced the French out of Indochina in 1954, the United States took over as a formal imperialist in the region. By the end of 1965, U.S. soldiers were fighting an extensive ground, sea, and air war against Vietnamese nationalists. Before the last U.S. troops withdrew from the region in 1975, hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of peasants had died or suffered dislocation as a consequence of American military activities. In addition, 58,193 U.S. soldiers perished in this war.

The Vietnam War illustrated the extended brutality of American imperialism during the Cold War. Longstanding economic and political impulses had combined with militant anticommunism to devastate much of Southeast Asia. Observers in countries around the world—including the United States—condemned American foreign policy for undermining the liberal purposes that it claimed to serve. The global revolt witnessed in 1968 on city streets across the United States, Europe, Asia, and Latin America was an international reaction against American imperialism.

After Vietnam and to the Twenty-First Century

American foreign policy was never the same after the Vietnam War. Aware of the resistance that the formal elements of American imperialism had inspired, policymakers returned to more informal mechanisms for asserting influence abroad. Economic globalization and human rights advocacy took center stage, along with continued anticommunism. The promise of American-style prosperity and individual rights—championed by politicians, businesspeople, and Hollywood writers—triumphed over the gray authoritarianism of communist regimes. By 1991, societies across the globe rushed to attract American investment and aid. Citizens sought out American cultural exports—including McDonald's, Coca-Cola, and Michael Jordan.

America's informal imperialism in the late twentieth century was remarkably effective. It did, however, inspire serious resistance. Instead of adopting communist slogans, as they had in the 1950s and 1960s, opponents of U.S. influence after 1991 turned largely to religion. Fundamentalisms of many varieties—Christian, Jewish, and Islamic—arose to challenge the decadence and hypocrisy of American liberal democracy. They condemned the United States for undermining traditional sources of authority and morality in foreign societies. They recognized that the free trade, economic development, and popular elections advocated by the United States would destroy many local hierarchies.

International terrorism—symbolized most frighteningly by the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon—emerged, in part, as a reaction to a long history of formal and informal American imperialism. This observation does not, in any way, justify the abhorrent terrorist activities. American imperialism has produced both positive and negative outcomes, as the contrast between post–World War II Japan and Vietnam makes clear. Nonetheless, the extraordinary overseas influence of the United States, dating back to 1865, has inspired violent resistance. Americans probably will not abandon their liberal imperialist assumptions in the twenty-first century, but they will surely develop new strategies for isolating and defeating foreign challengers.

Bibliography

Cooper, John Milton, Jr. The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1985. A superb comparative study that analyzes the politics and foreign policy of early twentieth-century America.

Gaddis, John Lewis. Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. The best analysis of the sources and implications of America's anticommunist containment policy during the Cold War.

Gardner, Lloyd C. Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam. Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1997. A provocative analysis of how American liberal imperialism contributed to the Vietnam War.

Hahn, Peter L., and Mary Ann Heiss, eds. Empire and Revolution: The United States and the Third World since 1945. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2001. A useful survey of American imperialism in the "third world" during the Cold War.

Hogan, Michael J. The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947–1952. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. A penetrating account of how the Marshall Plan reconstructed Western Europe on America's model.

Hunt, Michael H. Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987. A stimulating account of how ideas about liberty, race, and revolution shaped American imperialism.

Iriye, Akira, ed. The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations: The Globalizing of America, 1913–1945. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. A compelling discussion of Americanization in the first half of the twentieth century.

Knock, Thomas J. To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995. An excellent account of Wilson's liberal approach to foreign policy.

LaFeber, Walter. The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998. A classic history of American imperialism between the Civil War and the War of 1898.

Leffler, Melvyn P. A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992. A rich account of how American values and fears of Soviet power drove foreign policy in the early Cold War.

McCormick, Thomas J. China Market: America's Quest for Informal Empire, 1893–1901. Chicago: Ivan Dee, 1990. A provocative account of American imperialism in Asia at the end of the nineteenth century.

Ninkovich, Frank. The Wilsonian Century: U.S. Foreign Policy since 1900. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. A compelling account of Wilson's influence on American imperialism in the twentieth century.

Rosenberg, Emily S. Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890–1945. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982. A thoughtful account of America's cultural and economic imperialism between the two world wars.

Smith, Tony. America's Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994. A provocative analysis of American liberal imperialism.

Weigley, Russell F. The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977. A compelling analysis of America's imperialistic approach to war.

Williams, William Appleman. The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. New York: Norton, 1988. Originally published in 1959 and one of the most important works on the history of American foreign relations—a penetrating discussion of economics, ideas, and imperialism.

Imperialism, in its most precise traditional usage, means the forcible extension of governmental control over foreign areas not designated for incorporation as integral parts of the nation. The term is commonly used to mean any significant degree of national influence, public or private, over other societies; but to some it refers principally to foreign economic exploitation with or without other actions. In all usages, however, the essential element is that one society must in some way impose itself upon another in a continuing unequal relationship. Thus, American expansionism dated from the beginning of the national experience, while its evolution into true imperialism occurred only in the later nineteenth century.

Continental Expansion

The expansion of the United States from 1803 to 1853 into contiguous areas such as Louisiana, Florida, Texas, the Oregon territories, and the Mexican cession is not best described as imperialism, although it contained related elements. This expansion involved lightly populated areas in which the influx of settlement from the older portions of the nation soon constituted the great bulk of the inhabitants. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, a profoundly anti-imperialist measure, had early defined the process by which such areas could be divided into prospective states and ultimately brought into the union as equal members. The resulting expansion represented the continuous extension of a single society over vast neighboring areas, rather than the takeover of one society by another.

The North American continent was not unoccupied; indigenous Indian tribes were found in every part of it, while the areas taken from Mexico contained many scattered settlements, particularly in California and around Santa Fe. Neither the people nor the government of the United States showed much interest in such preexisting societies; the aim of the United States was to brush them aside and replace them with the society and culture of the incoming majority. This was particularly true in regard to the Indians; rather than take over Indian society, the whites virtually destroyed it. The process was tragic for its victims, and Americans' constant assertions that they were peopling an empty continent contained the seeds of hypocrisy. There were nevertheless important differences between the movement of such a settlement frontier and the establishment of a true empire. For example, while the United States acquired half of Mexico's national territory between 1845 and 1848, the transfer entailed less than 2 percent of the Mexican population. Broadly speaking, the Mexican War was fought to gain territory, not a captive people, and the land thus gained would be populated largely from the existing United States. For purposes of comparison, the activities of the British in India, where they ruled a teeming alien society, and the British in Australia, where they settled a continent and built a self-governing nation, were so dissimilar that the use of a single term to describe both cases does more to obscure than enlighten. Prior to the Civil War, American expansion came closer to the Australian example, though dispossessing a more numerous indigenous people, and the end result cannot be accurately classified as imperialism.

There were, of course, common features in the earlier expansion and later imperialism of the United States. Chief among these were a strong sense of national mission and special destiny, a general confidence in the unique superiority of American institutions, a belief in the inequality of races and peoples, and the very habit of expansion itself. The expansionism of "manifest destiny" could lead toward true imperialism, as in the abortive movement to annex all of Mexico during the Mexican War. If westward expansion was not the same as imperialism, it furnished some of the materials out of which the latter could grow.

Post–civil War Period

The purchase of Alaska in 1867 ended the period when new territory was assumed to be on the path to eventual statehood. By that time the nation's policymakers were already debating a new and more truly imperialist form of expansion. Schemes to acquire Cuba, by purchase or otherwise, had been current from 1848 onward, while in 1870 the Ulysses S. Grant administration negotiated the annexation of the Dominican Republic, only to see the Senate reject the instrumental treaty. Critics of this latter scheme were quick to point out the break with tradition implicit in the quest for territory already compactly settled by an alien society. Such a society could be assimilated into the nation proper only with great difficulty and over a long period, or more probably it could not be assimilated at all. Thus, the United States had to choose between incorporating an unassimilated people into its federal system, thereby endangering its integrity, or ruling them as colonial subjects in violation of the right to self-government supposedly inherent in the American political system. Foreshadowed by the earlier opposition to the all-Mexico movement of the late 1840s, the Senate debate over the annexation of the Dominican Republic developed the main lines of the controversy over imperialist expansion and marked the maturing of an active anti-imperialism in the United States.

For a generation after 1870, projects for further expansion attracted little support in the United States, and most people assumed that imperialism had become a dead issue. A number of developments, however, prepared the nation for imperial ventures at the end of the century. Chief were the rapid industrialization and soaring productivity of the national economy, which made the United States the leading industrial power by 1900. Increasingly conscious of their numbers, wealth, and strength, and proud of their unique institutions and sprawling territory, Americans began to aspire to a place for their country among the world's great powers. The severe economic depression of the 1890s added material aims to the drive for prestige, as the nation's business leaders and political spokesmen hoped for economic salvation in increased exports of American manufactures. By the mid-1890s, a new mood had brought a reappraisal of America's world position.

While largely internal forces first prompted the nation's leaders to look outward, the global sweep of European imperialism was reaching its high point, providing both the model and the final impetus for the new activism. Initially, Americans reacted to European imperialism as a threat to be repelled, fearing its penetration into the Western Hemisphere. Still mindful of France's incursion into Mexico in the 1860s, Americans were startled by a French project in 1879 to build a ship canal across the Isthmus of Panama. Later they also came to see Great Britain as a potential interloper, inspiring Secretary of State Richard Olney to a famous warning against such penetration during the Venezuelan crisis of 1895. Fears of European encroachment undoubtedly added urgency to the drive for Hawaiian annexation after 1894 and figured in discussions of Caribbean expansion later in the decade. One result of such fears was advocacy of a sort of preemptive imperialism, a conviction that the United States should seize desirable areas before a rival power got them.

In addition, the constant example of the European powers in time led many in the United States to take a more positive view of imperialism. Thirsting for national prestige, they saw that colonies were highly valued status symbols in Europe and that colonial empires had already swallowed up most of the non-Western world. Furthermore, if Europeans claimed to spread civilization to unenlightened peoples, did not the United States have a more compelling mission to implant its own superior institutions? Finally, the theorists of the Old World had proclaimed that colonial empires could provide strategic bases, captive markets, raw materials, and investment opportunities—in short, could alleviate the persistent distresses from which the American economy suffered.

By 1895 a small but growing number of American politicians, publicists, naval officers, and businessmen supported a modest expansionist program. This generally included the annexation of Hawaii, the acquisition of one or more base areas in the West Indies, and the construction of an isthmian canal across Central America to facilitate naval and mercantile movement between the eastern United States and the Pacific Ocean. Some also aspired to the peaceable annexation of Canada, while others wished to challenge British political and economic leadership in South America. But virtually all limited their ambitions to the Western Hemisphere, and most to areas traditionally within the sphere of American interests. While this program fell short of a full-fledged scheme of empire, it gave a specific direction to expansionist currents and reinforced the appeal of the imperialist idea.

Many Americans continued to be suspicious of imperialism, but others found that it was increasingly easy to identify imperialism with many aspects of the American tradition. Territorial expansion, a strong sense of national mission, and a dynamic economic growth had been dominant themes in American history. The belief in the inequality of man, which imperialism demanded, offered few problems at a time when the South was even then perfecting a system of segregation and disfranchisement of blacks, the West was in the final stages of suppressing the Indians, and the East fulminated against the inferiority of the new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. Currently popular theories of social Darwinism held that the various races of man progressed at differing rates according to their place on the evolutionary scale, or failed to progress and fell victim to "natural selection." No one believed more devoutly in progress than Americans, and the presumed duty of carrying progress to backward lands was popularly called "the white man's burden." This combined belief in progress and human inequality, along with boundless self-confidence and a hope of gain, constituted the principal attitudes that underlay imperialism.

Whether the imperialist appeal was chiefly economic, psychological, nationalist, or idealistic has long been the subject of contention. In fact, it was all of these, and perhaps more. The most fundamental explanation of the global imperialism of the nineteenth century was that the Western world, containing a relatively small minority of the world's people, had achieved a virtual monopoly of effective power. The development of the nation-state enabled the effective mobilization of a society's resources, and coincided with the growth of modern science and industrialization. The latter developments created societies of unprecedented wealth and armed them with weapons of unparalleled destructiveness, while the steamship, the railroad, the telegraph, and the oceanic cable greatly diminished the distances that separated the Western peoples from the rest of the world.

The disparity of power between "modern" and preindustrial societies reached its maximum in the nineteenth century, and it was this disparity that was, quite directly, the driving force behind the breakneck colonialism of the period. Conscious of their strength and brought into close contact with weaker peoples, Europeans quickly developed a sense of superiority and discovered desirable goals to seek in vulnerable foreign places. The process soon created its own mystique, which could be shared by almost any member-state in the Western world. While American imperialism had special national characteristics—as did that of England, France, Germany, and other nations—during the 1890s, American imperialism was not essentially different from the parent European variety. Its American disciples believed otherwise, having as firm a faith in their own uniqueness as their European rivals.

The Era of Global Imperialism

Although this new thinking rapidly gained ground during the 1890s, it took the shock of tangible events to bridge the gap between ideas and action. After a revolution in Hawaii, which American officials actively abetted, the proposed annexation of Hawaii in 1893 reawakened the debate over colonial expansion but was blocked by the transfer of the presidency from Benjamin Harrison to Grover Cleveland. It was rather the revolt that began in Cuba in 1895 that ultimately mobilized the emotions and ideas of the new expansionism. In 1898 the United States was drawn into a struggle between Cuba and Spain that had brought mass suffering and wholesale destruction to its very borders. An aggressive national pride, emotional partisanship in favor of the Cubans, and tangible damage to American trade and property—all worked to arouse the public and the press, while the dramatic destruction of the battleship Maine acted as a spark to these combustibles. Originally regarded by most Americans as a crusade to free Cuba, the Spanish-American War quickly took on an expansionist thrust. The retention of Puerto Rico, Spain's other Caribbean colony, was soon regarded as a necessary war reparation. Strategically the key to the Pacific, Hawaii was annexed during the war by a joint resolution of Congress. Even the cries to free Cuba gave way to protests that the Cubans needed a period of tutelage before essaying complete self-government.

It was the Philippine Islands, however, that most forcefully brought the imperialist issue to a head. Large, populous, alien, and distant, they neither fell within the traditional geographical scope of American expansionism nor seemed even remotely assimilable to the American federal system. In the United States there had been little thought of acquiring the Philippines before the Spanish-American War, but once war came, the U.S. armed forces attacked them because they represented valuable enemy territory that was highly vulnerable. The initial American victories quickly led to a national conviction that the United States now controlled the islands and was responsible for determining their destiny. Expansionists were quick to argue that the nation should not turn the Filipinos back to Spanish misrule, while to let them drift would invite an Anglo-German struggle for their control. On the other hand, American rule could bring enlightenment to the islands, and their proximity to China might aid American penetration of what was assumed to be one of the great world markets of the future.

Expansionism carried the day, and the peace treaty with Spain provided for American possession of Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam. Hawaii had already been separately annexed, and Cuba was subjected to a three-year military occupation followed by a theoretically sovereign independence in 1902. In fact, however, Cuba became a self-governing protectorate of the United States, with the latter nation retaining important governmental controls and the right of military intervention at its discretion, under the terms of the Platt Amendment of 1901. In the Philippines, meanwhile, an armed independence movement revolted against American rule in 1899, and the ensuing three-year Filipino-American War introduced the Americans to the frustrations and mutual atrocities characteristic of antiguerrilla warfare. The public had expected the Filipinos to greet the advent of American rule with cheers and were disillusioned to meet with hostility instead. Critics questioned the utility of the new colony and the morality of subduing it by force. While U.S. forces finally succeeded in crushing all resistance, anti-imperialists made the most of the contradictions inherent in spreading enlightenment at the point of a bayonet. Colonial empire quickly lost its glamour in the United States, while less formal techniques of expansion gained easier acceptance from the relative success of the Cuban protectorate program. In the twentieth century, American imperialism would be characterized by the extension of influence or control rather than by the outright annexation of territory.

The Advent of Informal Empire

After 1900 the American public lost interest in its new colonies, but the United States continued to expand its power in essentially imperialist ways. This was true principally in the Caribbean region, where the creation of formal and informal protectorates characterized American foreign policy in the period after the Spanish-American War. The war had spurred interest in the building of an isthmian canal, which was to be built as a national project; and following Panama's secession from Colombia in 1903, the project became a reality. The great strategic importance of the Panama Canal, thereafter joined with the considerable American stake in Cuba and its direct sovereignty over Puerto Rico, drew the nation further into Caribbean affairs.

Still fearful of European intervention and solicitous of the growing American economic interest in the area, policymakers in Washington viewed the chronic political instability of the Caribbean and Central American nations as an invitation to foreign penetration and an obstacle to local development. The Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, enunciated by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1904, claimed for the United States an "international police power," which entailed a general right to intervene and keep order in the Western Hemisphere. Not only Roosevelt but his successors, William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson, steadily expanded American hegemony in the Caribbean. By World War I, Cuba, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Nicaragua were in some kind of protectorate status, while Puerto Rico remained an outright colony. Actual military interventions occurred in Cuba (1906–1909), Haiti (1915–1934), the Dominican Republic (1916–1924), Nicaragua (1912, 1927–1933), and Panama (intermittently and on a lesser scale).

Besides the use of special treaty relationships and military force, the United States attempted to maintain a "monopoly of lending," under which Caribbean governments would borrow money only in the United States; it also established customs receiverships in several countries, which effectively placed their government revenues under control of the United States. Meanwhile, private enterprise had permeated the region with American investment and business activity, while the one-crop economies of the Caribbean nations made them heavily dependent upon the American market. Thus, the nominally sovereign states of the Caribbean area were subject to American controls, both formal and informal, which made their real status essentially colonial.

After 1898, the United States was also active in the Far East, but its impact was weaker there than in the Caribbean. Faced with a huge and populous China, and competing with most of the other major world powers, American policymakers could not aspire to regional dominance or military solutions. The "dollar diplomacy" of the William Howard Taft administration (1909–1913) attempted to foster American investment in China and to create international financial arrangements, which would impose a Caribbean-style "monopoly of lending" upon the government of China. This attempt to mobilize American economic strength as a diplomatic tool accomplished little in the Far East, however, on account of both the difficulties of the situation itself and the limited interest of the nation's business and financial leaders. The earlier Open Door policy of 1899–1900, therefore, remained the principal basis of policy. It represented little more than an attempt to obtain a general agreement to preserve the existing treaty system of shared control in China, and thus equality of economic opportunity in China for the United States. The policy was not very effective, and the Chinese market never came near to meeting the inflated expectations of the West. In general, the limited objectives and relative ineffectiveness of American activities in the Far East fell well short of real imperialism in this period, although the United States was long a party to the treaty system by which the Western powers jointly had imposed a limited protectorate upon China.

Isolationism and the World Wars

American participation in World War I led to a revulsion against overseas commitments, which reached its peak in the Senate rejection of the Treaty of Versailles (1919) and the new League of Nations. Rising domestic criticism in the 1920s brought about the liquidation of the military government in the Dominican Republic and moderate relaxation of American political controls elsewhere in the Caribbean. At the same time, however, the U.S. government and business community cooperated in pushing American exports and foreign loans, leading some later historians to envision an "open door imperialism" based on American economic influence abroad. An alternate view was that the United States did indeed seek such economic influence, but that most Americans then thought it possible to separate the political and economic aspects of international relations in a manner considered unrealistic by later generations.

The Great Depression of the 1930s brought an even greater emphasis on the economic side of foreign policy and a corresponding decline in interest in other aspects. The Good Neighbor policy of Franklin D. Roosevelt brought the dismantling of Caribbean military interventions and political protectorates, at the same time that Latin America was tied more closely to the American economy by means of reciprocal trade agreements. The Philippine Islands were set on the path to independence in 1934, while the Neutrality Acts of 1935–1938 were designed to minimize economic ties to belligerents in foreign wars. The Monroe Doctrine took on a new theoretical formulation as an association of hemispheric equals for collective security, and the isolationist majority in the United States eschewed any national interest in the world's affairs outside the Western Hemisphere. American imperialism was declared to be dead, never to arise again.

At the end of the 1930s there was a rapid reversal of thinking largely caused by the early victories of Nazi Germany during the new European war, and particularly by the shock created by the fall of France in 1940. Americans quickly became internationalists, the new consensus being that the world's democracies must stand together to check the crimes of "gangster nations" like Germany, Italy, and Japan. It now appeared that peace was indivisible and that the United States must be concerned with events in every corner of the globe. With the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor late in 1941, the United States went to war in both Europe and Asia. During World War II, the United States fought as a member of a coalition that included Great Britain, the Soviet Union, Nationalist China, and many lesser members—a circumstance that drew the United States even further into global affairs. Mobilizing enormous fighting power and productivity, Americans found themselves at the close of the struggle with their armed forces deployed in Europe, Asia, North Africa, the Middle East, Australasia, and Latin America.

The Cold War and Its Aftermath

World War II humbled or drastically weakened every great power except the United States and the Soviet Union, both of which emerged with greatly enhanced power and prestige. In a world full of power vacuums, this dangerously simplified bipolar balance contributed to a growing rivalry between the two superpowers, as did the strong but mutually contradictory ideas of mission that each possessed. Initially competing for hegemony in Europe, this postwar rivalry soon became global in scope, and American military and political commitments proliferated. At the same time, the preeminent economic position of the United States at the end of World War II much enhanced its influence abroad and gave it great weight in shaping the economic structure of the noncommunist world. Thus, American influence over other societies reached a new high and took many different forms. In the Caribbean, the United States supported anticommunist military ventures in Guatemala (1954) and Cuba (1961), and in 1965, out of fear that a leftist government would come to power, intervened in the Dominican Republic. In East Asia, South Korea, Taiwan, and, later, South Vietnam and Cambodia became heavily dependent upon U.S. military aid. Japan grew into an economic giant but retained close ties to the United States. Other initiatives in the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere made American activities truly global.

In the economic sphere, the United States overwhelmingly became the chief investor, source of credit, and supplier of new technologies. From the 1940s to the 1960s, the American dollar was the yardstick of international currency exchanges, while an American-sponsored drive toward freer world trade facilitated American exports of goods and money. The purchase of foreign subsidiaries and the development of multinational corporations gave American business enterprise increased influence abroad, while many foreign nations found their principal export markets in the United States.

The political and economic impact of the United States was accompanied by significant social effects. American-style mass consumption spread its appeal everywhere, as the elite of half the globe rushed to emulate the lifestyles of New York and California. American tourists, motion pictures, and television programs went everywhere, while students flocked to American universities from all over the world. Even an economically advanced country like Japan assimilated American models of dress and amusement, and readily accepted bondage to the automobile.

Some viewed the international vogue of American lifestyles and consumer products as cultural imperialism, or a thinly veiled form of economic exploitation. Others deplored the subversion of native cultures and the consequent destabilization of traditional societies by the tide of westernization. Many twenty-first-century scholars, however, are skeptical of the idea of a one-sided cultural aggression, citing the eagerness with which Eastern Europeans and others sought Western fashions, films, and popular music even when their governments attempted to shut these things out. In this view, developments in the Western world have set off an irresistible global cultural change, in which cross-fertilization complicates any notion of a simple one-way influence. Terms such as "modernization" and "globalization" are used to suggest a generalized force beyond the control of any one society. It was nevertheless the United States that led the way in the process.

In any case, the worldwide distribution of U.S. military bases, security agreements, investments, multinational corporations, foreign-aid programs, and open and undercover political activities gave rise to the charge that American imperialism had not only revived but had expanded over enormous areas. Some critics described an "open door empire" in which American foreign policy sought to impose everywhere the conditions necessary for the penetration of American exports and enterprise, while keeping underdeveloped nations in a state of perpetual economic colonialism. From this point of view, the term "imperialism" applied to virtually every overseas activity of the United States.

Given the undeniably great impact of the United States in the postwar world, the issue was not whether there had been an American influence on other societies but whether that influence was best described as imperialism. Since the United States annexed no territory during the period in question, the most obvious form of imperialism does not apply; there was no formal empire. There were, however, attempts at neo-imperial control of other states. In 1965 the Dominican Republic experienced a U.S. military intervention that imposed a new president, who was retained in power for many years by the active use of American influence and machinations of the Central Intelligence Agency. The Ronald Reagan administration (1981–1989) supported civil wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua in an attempt to bolster right-wing regimes against leftist opponents. Other cases could be cited, but blanket assertions of imperialism went too far. It was doubtful terminology to apply that label to the postwar American record in Europe. It is true that the United States threw its influence into an effort to erect a liberal-capitalist system in Western Europe, just as the Soviet Union worked for Marxist-Leninist states in Eastern Europe. Given a virtual power vacuum in one of the world's vital centers, no less was to be expected of either superpower. It is also true that the Marshall Plan and companion policies were designed not only to aid European economic recovery but to boost European purchases of American exports. Yet the end result was not merely exploitive, for it helped to recreate in Western Europe one of the great industrial centers of the world, which soon offered stiff competition to the United States itself. Like Japan, West Germany pressed American manufacturers hard in their own markets and often bested them in markets abroad. In time, many European states became effective competitors. To call this performance economic imperialism is both misleading and intellectually counterproductive.

The U.S. military intervention in Southeast Asia during the 1960s ended in the following decade in humiliating failure and a national reappraisal of the American role abroad. For a time, the shadow of Vietnam inhibited further overseas adventures, but the global network of American commitments and interests continued largely intact. Foreign involvements reappeared with the previously mentioned Reagan administration's activities in Central America, as well as its military deployments in Grenada (1983) and Lebanon (1984), but on a limited scale.

The end of the Cold War in 1989 and the subsequent breakup of the Soviet Union changed the global situation fundamentally, leaving the United States as the only superpower. The Cold War justification for foreign military interventions thereby disappeared, but new reasons for such ventures multiplied. In varying scales of magnitude, U.S. armed forces were deployed in Panama (1989), Somalia (1992), Haiti (1994), Bosnia (1995), and Kosovo (1999), the latter including a bombing campaign against Serbia. By far the largest overseas operation was the Gulf War of 1991 against Iraq, which involved more than 500,000 U.S. troops to protect the industrial world's oil supply, but motives for the other interventions varied widely. In Somalia, for example, where no visible U.S. interests were at stake, the goal was to remove the obstacles to feeding a starving population, and in Bosnia and Kosovo it was to prevent the out-break of regional war and prevent mass genocide. Some saw the United States as world policeman, others as global bully, but none could deny the reality of the nation's power and influence virtually everywhere on the globe.

As the world's strongest and wealthiest nation for the last half century, the United States was responsible for its full share of neo-imperialist hegemony. At times, however, it acted abroad in conjunction with less powerful nations that lacked the American capacity to project force quickly to crisis areas. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Gulf War both saw U.S. military power enlisted in the service of a broad coalition of nations and interests. Operating within a highly competitive global economy, U.S. economic power was great but hardly hegemonic, while its cultural influences were eagerly received in large parts of the world even if deeply resented in others. No single definition can contain the enormous variety of American activities, motives, and effects on the world; certainly the term "imperialism" cannot.

Bibliography

Gienow-Hecht, Jessica C. E. "Shame on US? Academics, Cultural Transfer, and the Cold War—A Critical Review." Diplomatic History 24 (summer 2000). Traces the evolving debate about U.S. cultural expansion since 1945.

Healy, David. U.S. Expansionism: The Imperialist Urge in the 1890s. Madison, Wis., 1970. A multi-causal approach that shows the convergence of numerous and dissimilar forces in the movement for overseas empire.

Hollander, Paul. Anti-Americanism: Critiques at Home and Abroad, 1965–1990. New York, 1992. A stimulating look at the views of the naysayers, domestic and foreign.

LaFeber, Walter. The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898. Ithaca, N.Y., 1963. Depicts American overseas expansion as creating a commercial empire in order to serve a drive for export markets.

Lundestad, Geir. The American "Empire" and Other Studies of U.S. Foreign Policy in a Comparative Prospect. New York, 1990. Explores the ambiguities of American power abroad.

May, Ernest R. Imperial Democracy: The Emergence of America as a Great Power. New York, 1961. Sees the expansionism of 1898 in terms of an eruption of public opinion that swept the nation's leaders before it.

Rosenberg, Emily S. Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890–1945. New York, 1982. A useful broad-gauge approach.

Thornton, A. P. Doctrines of Imperialism. New York, 1965. A short but good conceptual study of imperialism.

Trask, David. The War with Spain in 1898. New York and London, 1981. The best work on that conflict.

Weinberg, Albert K. Manifest Destiny: A Study of Nationalist Expansionism in American History. Baltimore, 1935. Still a standard work on the ideology of continental expansion.

Williams, William Appleman. The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. Cleveland, Ohio, 1959. An influential book that helped launch a revisionist movement in American diplomatic history and popularize an "Open Door School," which held that the economic goals of capitalism were central to the formation of U.S. foreign policy.

— David Healy

Acquisition by a government of other governments or territories, or of economic or cultural power over other nations or territories, often by force. Colonialism is a form of imperialism.