The US still has territories (and a certain district in the midst of the metropole) that don’t elect any voting members of Congress or (except that district) presidential electors. And while the people in most of those territories at least have U.S. citizenship, the people of American Samoa are U.S. “nationals” rather than citizens.
A lot of our overseas acquisitions were justified as taking away from worse empires (Spain), or “if we don’t, someone else will;” (Hawaii, and Samoa.) Maybe the Germans who horned in at Manila were still smarting from the proxy war we’d fought a decade earlier.
It was during the period 1898-1907. The Spanish-American War, annexation of the Philippines, Guam and American Samoa; Roosevelt’s negotiation of the Russian-Japanese treaty of 1905, and finally the Navy’s Great White Fleet 'round the world voyage of 1907. Taken together they showed the U.S. had the desire, military strength and diplomatic clout to be a player on the world stage.
A side question which may deserve its own thread: was there ever a chance that the US wouldn’t become the huge nation or world power it is today? Or was it inevitable?
If the US did break down into the North and the South, we would be a much smaller power.
If earlier the Brits and Canada had kicked our ass in 1812 instead basically having a draw we would probably not have achieved all we did. Many historians call that the second war of American Independence.
Once we got past the Civil War, the US becoming a very major power was inevitable. Theodore Roosevelt sped the process up in a big way though. He put us on the world stage.
If this discussion is to continue, please start a new thread though: How to Reply as a linked Topic
Click Reply, in the upper left corner of the reply window is the reply type button, looks like a curving arrow point to the right.
Choose Reply as linked topic and it starts a new thread. As an example, you can choose GD, IMHO or The Pit for it.
That is actually the best method.
July 16th, 1945.
Moderating
@Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor, don’t do that in the future. Include the fact that was the Trinity Test of the Atomic Bomb.
I picked 1789, because government over various Indigenous nations and disenfranchised populations is effectively one nation-state which governs several different nations.
Whereas Native Americans might say you’re not setting it early enough. I mean, why count taking territory from Mexico, but not from them?
Let’s see :
Wiki sez:
" An empire is a political unit made up of several territories, military outposts, and peoples, “usually created by conquest, and divided between a dominant center and subordinate peripheries”."
Leaving aside whether Empires have to be monarchies (they don’t) , the USA even at its independence was already composed of conquered territory and multiple peoples, and a metropole (the big Eastern cities) and periphery (all the West).
Some people seem to be arguing that the USA is a unitary entity and it’s only when it has conquest/territories external to the USA it’s an empire. But the USA was within itself imperial in nature.It didn’t start out from sea to shining sea, and more than Rome started out with the whole of the latin territories.
Crimea became part of Russia through a referendum. The Czechoslovakian land taken by Germany along with the Sudetenland was nominally autonomous.
We still have a military presence in all those countries.
We’re all old enough to remember the outrage in certain circles when France was wary of furnishing troops for one of our military expeditions. Let’s not forget the current controversy over whether our European allies pay us sufficient military tribute.
We may or may not be an empire in whatever technical sense we choose, but we can safely say we often act as if we are one.
Not true; America has installed a number of puppet governments over the decades. Much like the USSR, in fact; installing puppet governments while not officially absorbing the conquered nation has become a common imperial style since WWII. It’s part of the Post-WWII attitude that treats borders as sacrosanct, so you aren’t really engaging in conquest as long as you don’t change the borders or re-name the territory.
As far as post WWII, I think each conflict has to be taken individually. Some were imperial, some weren’t. What I was talking issue with was using the definition of the conquered territories having to remain lesser in some way. I disagree with using that definition, but would suggest that if one insists on using it, then the US isn’t an empire, or a minor one at best.
I don’t see any practical difference in the US adding the 37 non-original states to the union vs. the Spanish conquering Mexico, the British with India, the Dutch with the Congo, the Portuguese and Brazil, and so on. In other words, IMHO the US is an empire, just not exactly the same type as the European colonial empires.
As to when it started, looking further into the timeline for when states were admitted, I’d go with the addition of Kentucky as the 15th state in 1792. The fact that Kentucky got to send elected representatives to Washington but Mexico or India didn’t get to send representatives to Madrid or London isn’t, IMHO, a disqualifying factor. As such, the first new state formed from conquered land (taken from the Cherokee among others) seems like a good date.
But that’s exactly what a puppet state is, a subordinate territory treated as lesser than its puppetmaster. And we’ve installed & propped up plenty of puppet dictators.
The entire point of using puppets is to pretend that the subjugated state is still independent, and I see no point in going along with the ruse.
Sure. But for the most part, we don’t maintain them as puppets in the long term. Yes, there’s Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa. and so on. But for the most part, especially post WWII, we haven’t made permanent colonies. Instead we go in, break things, sometimes we fix the mess (Japan and Germany after WWII), more often we don’t (Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti, etc.) but we do leave afterwards. Again, that isn’t to say the US isn’t an empire. It is. Just not the same kind as the Western European empires from the age of colonialism.
What countries has the US ever truly left? Afghanistan? Thank Trump, of all people. Cuba? Iran? Anything the US has given up voluntarily?
Yeah, this is why i voted for the declaration is Independence, and might be talked into signing off the Constitution. Before that, it might have been several imperial states, but wasn’t the United States. But i feel like the USA started it’s life as an imperial agent, with as mandate to conquer the West.
Colonies subject essentially at will to the whims of a foreign monarchical empire cannot properly themselves be termed an empire. Where does one stop in history if that were the definition? The first Spanish outposts in what is now the U.S.? The first French? The first Dutch? The first Russian? The first Norwegian? The first of those latecomers the British?
[Nitpick below]
However heinous the usurpation of Indian lands were, that was the product of many individuals, often at odds with one another and with both the colonial and imperial governments. It’s fanciful at best to consider the American colonies, individually or separately, as a single authority before the Articles of Confederation. Or that the federal government had any control over migration then or today, to be realistic. The case for the federal government adding territory is a better one, starting in 1787 when the Confederation’s Congress created the Northwest Territory. Some of this territory was gained by purchase or treaties with indigenous peoples, but let’s not kid themselves that they had any say in the process.
I should have added that date to my poll. Although much legal procedure was involved, many small wars took place before and after 1787, and that is conquest under the guise of a central authority. Anything before that is not American empire.
[nitpick from above] That quote links to National Geographic and not Wiktionary or Wikipedia, not that I can find it in that article.
The quote is from the pop-up when you click the word ‘empire’ in the article.
And the US Empire was a unitary entity, itself springing from a larger unitary empire, the British Empire. Empires can bud off smaller ones that grow and even eclipse their parents.
That it was individuals or non-government groups doing the grabbing of new territories wasn’t unique to the US either. What counts is that the Empire then accepts these spoils into iself. That’s partly how the European colonial Empires grew, too.
Before the Articles, it simply wasn’t.
Even under the Articles of Confederation, the United States was only a weakly confederated state with virtually no powers of taxation, annexation, or influence over the internal affairs of the individual states which were recognized as being individual sovereign entities. Only after the adoption of the Constitution and the development of Federal authority did it have any real power. But, as previously noted, the United States was essentially a continuation of colonial empire (of the Dutch, British, and French) and progressed within North America and (eventually) as far flung as the expansive British and Dutch Empires (albeit never holding as much foreign territory as either). The ‘interregnum’ of sorts between the beginning of the American Revolutionary War and the establishment of the US Constitution was a period of instability but not really retreat of imperialism in any material way.
Stranger