It’s a certainly a form of colonization but clearly of a different variety. European colonies had varying degrees of rights but it’s clear that they were all second class compared to the mainland. Remoteness and large indigenous populations meant that colonies didn’t last. US colonization was largely border expansion and the new territories turned into states fairly quickly. The indigenous population was small enough that it might as well have not existed and wasn’t an obstacle to state admission.
It’s no surprise that the exceptions to this–Guam, say–are tiny, remote, and are culturally distinct from mainland culture. We keep them around for strategic purposes.
If you did a full taxonomy of the kinds of possible colonies, you could label each branch on its long-term sustainability. US colonization was mostly sustainable; European colonization was not.
European colonialism was based on a single precept: That industrialization gave Europe economic and military capacity scores of times greater than the non-industrialized world. For a long time this was true, but it faced the dilemma of “dying of success”: the point would inevitably be reached either where the formerly backward nations would themselves industrialize and therefore want greater autonomy, or else it would be necessary to institute a blatant policy of keeping the colonies in deliberate backwardness to foster their dependency. The former would mean loss of control, the latter (aside from its repugnance to the values Europeans claimed to have) would foster resentment and revolutionary movements. The breaking point came after World War Two, when for the first time there was an industrial power- the Soviet Union- willing to arm and support the revolutionaries.
I noticed this too, years ago when I was taking United States History at the community college. The teaching was that the United States never really got into the empire-building like the European nations did, but instead that we had briefly gotten interested, and dabbled at little bit.
I noticed exactly what aldiboronti says here – that we simply did our conquering and empire building right at home, expanding westward across the continent. And thus, relatively little of the overseas empire building.
In fact, we had one exam (it may have been the final exam, I don’t recall for sure) that had one essay question about our limited imperialism. I made this the thesis of my essay, and filled an entire blue-book on it, then turned the book over and filled half the book on the back-sides of the pages. The overall tone of my essay tended toward being critical of the growing America for its treatment of the Native Americans (like, Trail of Tears anyone?).
The teacher (who had a bit of a leftist slant) was highly impressed.
ETA:
Well, it doesn’t look quite the same at some superficial level, so we didn’t call it that.
Actually it’s quite a bit different. European style Colonial Imperialism is moving colonist into a colony and forcing the natives into subjugation. The colonies will not be given full voting or be really considered part of the homeland for decades- if ever.
As Dr. Strangelove sez, Americans followed their settlers west, into lands that were mostly empty (empty due to Europeans accidentally spreading plague, true), then quickly bringing them into America as full fledged states. Very few revolts. The natives were mostly displaced or ignored, not enslaved- but yes, when they fought back we killed them. Hardly a Golden moment for us, true.
They are both Expansionism, sure. But only the European one is Colonial Imperialism.
The American natives may not have been enslaved, but they were certainly subjugated. And of course European colonialism during the same era also involved subjugation, not enslavement, of the natives - look at India, Australia, French colonies in Africa, etc.
The main difference is that in the American case the natives were not only subjugated, but massively outnumbered by the settler population. This made a restoration of the status quo ante impossible. This was also true in Canada, Australia, etc, but not in India, Indochina, most of Africa, etc.
In the event, the territories taken and massively settled by the US were completely integrated into the US, while the territories taken and massively settled by European powers eventually moved to independence, but independence as states dominated by those of European ethnicity and culture. In both cases, the indigenous population was pretty comprehensively dispossessed, and remains so today. The fact that the outcome in the US case was political integration, as against political independence in other cases, probably has more to do with geography than with any fundamental difference in US the expansionist impulse. For the most part, US acquisitions which were not geographically contiguous were not integrated, and still aren’t - Hawaii and Alaska being the exceptions.
I see. So expansion westward by the colonists north of the 49th parallel was Imperialist land-grabbing while southwards of the border the push westward was benign state-building. It must have been rather tricky for the indigenous peoples to tell the difference.
It’s dubious they even paid off in the late 19th century. Probably places like India did, but African colonies appear to have been a money sink for European powers.
You have the scare quotes around the wrong words. They should be enclosing “government” as it was the result of a coup d’état by the white businessmen supported by the US marines.
No less a personage than Rudyard Kipling, an old-school British imperialist through and through, urged America to “take up the White Man’s burden” with regards to the Philippines.
Manifest Destiny sucked, yes, and was both catalyst and excuse for some of the worst atrocities ever committed by our country’s government, but it wasn’t Imperialism because the purpose of Manifest Destiny was to increase the borders of the United States of America and not to subjugate existing nations beneath the rule of an American Empire.
It could very well be argued that what we did to those tribes was far worse, but that’s irrelevant. What we did instead was displace them from any area that had usable land, fill up the area with settlers, and turn those areas into territories and then states which were full members of the Union.
Of course, this is certainly an accident of geography. Empires are created because powerful nations need a way to govern far-flung acquisitions. We never had a need to do that because we simply expanded our borders across a contiguous landmass. Had the Mississippi River instead been an ocean, things might have turned out very differently. But the (relative) ease with which settlers were able to travel to new American territories and stake out cheap or free land meant that there was never an impetus for European-style empire-building. It also helped that our particular “savages” were themselves spread out. There were no great cities and no nations (as we viewed nations) worth maintaining as client states.
You may feel that this is a distinction without a difference, but such distinctions are important to historians.
Manifest Destiny was not Imperialism, but that did not make it benign or morally justified.
I have heard this. The pistol was the only one made with left handed thread rifling in the barrel. supposedly it was designed to bring down drug-addled Moro tribesmen.