Yes and no. The Europeans and the US might have quibbled over whose colony a particular region was, but afaik there was never any question of attempting to foster native independence by giving them the means to resist colonialism. The Soviet Union was a different animal because it was outside the capitalist system of nations: every successful Third World resistance hurt their enemies and benefited them. And while Cuba or Vietnam for examples might be heavily dependent on trade with the Soviet Union they weren’t ruled by a Soviet-appointed governor, unlike the situation in Eastern Europe where the satellite states were heavily under the Russian thumb. In fact, this is where the USSR went wrong in Afghanistan: trying to directly rule it as an imperial power.
Poland, The Ukraine, Afghanistan, East Germany, etc, were all pretty much fully inhabited, so no.
Siberia wasn’t, so for eastward expansion, yes.
The US Marines didn’t fire a shot* and were there just to prevent violence. The coup d’état was not by "white businessmen " but by Queen Liliʻuokalani , who unilaterally abrogated the Constitution, going for a return to almost absolute Monarchy, stealing property based on race, and a return to the Taboo system. Not a single native so much as raised a hand to prevent the Committee of Safety from overthrowing the Queen, in fact most politically aware natives were horrified by her abrogation and wanted nothing to do with a return to the Taboo system, a nigh-Absolute Monarchy and property & voting rights based upon race.
And you say " white businessmen" which is pretty racist, since Lorrin A. Thurston** was born in the Islands of missionaries also born there. He was 3rd gen, but if Queen Liliʻuokalani had had her way, he would have had no rights at all, and his property could be confiscated purely on the basis of race.
*162 sailors and Marines came ashore well-armed but under orders of neutrality. The sailors and Marines did not enter the Palace grounds or take over any buildings, and never fired a shot.
** His father was speaker of the house of representatives of the Kingdom of Hawaii.
He was also fluent in the Hawaiian language and had the Hawaiian nickname Kakina. So, yeah, maybe he was “white”:rolleyes: but he was born there, his father was born there and was a well loved political leader and one of his grandparents was born there.
True.
There are a couple of flavors of imperialism. The really classic imperialism is conquering neighboring regions, and exploiting them in some way. Plunder, vassalage, setting up your guys as the new ruling class, mass enslavement, or population replacement. And so we have Rome conquering the neighboring Italian states, then neighboring areas around the Mediterranean, and then anywhere they could march armies to. And they employed all the above tactics at different times.
And various European states used the above against each other. Take England. They tried to grab chunks of France, they integrated Wales and Scotland, they conquered Ireland. Or France integrating the mostly independent dukedoms of Brittany and Burgundy and kicking out the English. Or Spanish unification. All classic imperialism.
But then we come to a new era, where Europeans developed some key technologies–long range sailing ships, gunpowder, and eventually industrial production. And now you could sail halfway across the world and use your advanced technology to conquer people you’d never heard of. In previous times the effort needed to conquer a single walled city was extremely high. Now bands of adventurers could conquer whole regions.
So what was the fate of the newly conquered overseas empires? They weren’t integrated into the fabric of the state like border regions would be, because they weren’t border regions and the people who lived there were nothing like the neighboring countries. So a new sort of imperialism arose, which is what most people today mean when the talk about “imperialism”. The newly conquered areas were never intended to be integrated into the home nation, instead they were to be exploited in one way or another.
Yes and no. For the States engaged in it was typically a net loss, sure. For (some) private entrepreneurs, financiers and industrialists however, the plunderin’ was good as were the new markets. Oh, and for the gun salesmen, obviously. Same ol’ same ol’.
Still, generally speaking investing in the colonies was less profitable than investing right at home. Getting *other *people to invest in your pie-in-the-sky colonial railroad or rubber plantation was still a good way to get rich(er) quick though ;).
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That’s not generally considered Imperialism or Colony building.
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Like hell it ain’t.
Whether you want to call it colonialism or not is irrelevant. The point is that the westward expansion of the US was different in philosophy, goals, means, and outcome as compared to European imperialism as practiced in the 18-19th century. The US (mostly) didn’t have to practice that kind of imperialism since we had huge tracts of mostly-empty land to expand into.
I am curious, though. Did any European colonies ever gain first-class legal recognition in the way that Hawaii did? I know there are a bunch that are along the lines of Puerto Rico, where the people may be citizens but still don’t have all the same rights. But I wonder if any of them had an outcome other than independence or hanging on as a territory.
Correct. He is confusing Expansionism with Colonial Imperialism, which is a subset of Expansionism.
I realize that you’re just joking here, but this is pretty cringeworthy. Believe me, they noticed. And we weren’t all that polite about it.
Ummm… Northern Ireland?
We did grab it. I lived in Hawaii and am very aware of the history. It was a total scam by the pineapple barons, all of them American. One of them, Lorrin Thurston, headed the provisional government that illegally overthrew Queen Liliuokalani in 1893. He lobbied the US government for annexation, but the monarchy, represented in Washington, by Princess Victoria Kaiulani, argued that the overthrow had been illegal. They were not successful.
I am glad the US has Hawaii, I do not subscribe to the tiny present Free Hawaii Movement at all, but to say Hawaii went willingly is being disingenuous. I was in Honolulu in the early 1990s when downtown they staged a day-by-day re-creation of the events of the overthrow on the 100th anniversary, complete with period costumes. It’s a given in Hawaii that it was a steal.
Doesn’t fit at all. The territory was held by England long before the wave of colonialism that we’re talking about. Also, the politics of the UK is bizarre. Obviously, NI was not made a part of England. But then, neither are Scotland or Wales, so maybe that doesn’t matter. Anyway, it’s complicated and weird and not analogous to US statehood.
French Guiana and the other overseas regions of France appear to be good examples, though it seems this is actually a fairly recent change, with their powers improving in 1982.
I lived there at that time also. Haunani Kay Trask, what a dreadful person.
As soon as you say they were mostly empty lands, you are taking the classic imperial line that “nobody there, so it’s okay for us to take it.” It’s the same line that the English, French and Spanish used along the east coasts of the Americas.
Aside, of course, from the Indian Wars, which went on from the founding of the United States in the late 18th century on into the 20th century, with the last conflict in 1924. The frontier was both a settlement frontier and a military frontier, steadily moving west.
One estimate I have seen is that in the 1850’s and 1860’s, the US government was spending $25 million dollars fighting the Indians of the west.
Again, classic imperialism: if the original owners of the land don’t surrender, military action to kill them and subjugate them.
So you’re saying that the indigenous inhabitants of North America weren’t nations? Why not? They certainly got subjugated and conquered.
It’s a vague qualification. Better to trace back in history when imperial powers started realizing that territories should be given the right to self-determination, rather than a benevolent assimilation.
No one’s claiming it was morally right. But there’s an obvious difference in outcomes between settling lightly-occupied lands adjacent to your own territory vs. shipping settlers to some populated remote area. In the former case, the land quickly becomes “yours” by sheer force of numbers. In the latter case, you almost inevitably run into a situation where a tiny minority oppresses the natives, which is just not sustainable. It’s not a path for long-term territory expansion.
It seems to me that some people want to call any kind of disreputable land-grabbing as colonialism and leave it at that. That’s fine, but it’s an extremely superficial view, and doesn’t lead to any kind of insight about the patterns of history. You need a tad more detail for that.
Do you think $25M was a lot or a little? It seems like a tiny amount to me. Inflation has been about 30x since then, so it was less than a billion in adjusted dollars. Of course the total budget was also much less.
Were you, by chance, a UH student too?