Yet those 13 colonies certainly thought themselves enough of an identifiable, distinguishable entity to stand together against Britain and not include, say, the West Indian colonies. There was a commonality there.
Also, slight thing, but could you be specific about which Treaty of Paris you’re referring to, as the 1763 one is also of relevance here.
I’m assuming the 1783 one, as that’s the one in your poll and I imagine your argument is that before than there was no US anyway so why would anyone care about the pre-Revolution one, but for my argument, the 1763 one is actually the more important one, as it includes the first big territorial expansion beyond the original 13, and hence the true birth of the Empire.
I just read up on this. Not only is this untrue, but the Law of April 6, 1830 reiterated and strengthened the ban on slavery and was a major impetus for the rebellion. It was passed before Santa Anna came to power. Where are you getting this claim from?
The coup was bloodless because the queen didn’t have an army, and because 162 US Marines had taken up station around the palace to make it clear that they would fight, and because White Americans and American-born settlers had taken up arms and made it clear that they would fight, and because the US had a reputation for bloodiness by that point, and because the Queen knew that there would be massive bloodshed that would ultimately have the same result.
The constitution that she “abrogated” is still nicknamed the Bayonet Constitution, in reference to what it was signed at the point of. The previous monarch was told: sign this constitution that gives massive power to American businessmen, or we assassinate you.
It’s an example of a thing that an entity you might consider an “Empire” would do. It isn’t the definition of what an Empire is, though. So we can’t really use it to tell whether any given entity is or is not an Empire.
Yes, America has definitely expressed hegemony over much of the rest of the world, especially in the post cold war era. That doesn’t make the US an empire, though.
It sounds like the working definition for the non-professionals in the thread amounts to “international bully”. Damn near every country is one of those; they just differ on who they choose to pick on and in which era they were doing their peak picking. Of course the bigger and more powerful you are, the more, and more severe, picking-on you can do.
Even those perennial Nice Guys® the Canadians were pretty beastly to the First Nations as they expanded the White Man’s dominion over the white landscape.
My personal view, I’m not a historian, would be that Imperalism differs from expansion in that the intent of the conquering country is not to incorporate that entity into itself, but to leave it as a distinct entity under the thumb of the controlling power. I would say that this distinction was the impetus of the US war of independence.
So I would say that the expansion of the US west was not imperialism. If the US had left the native tribes in tact and then demanded tribute then it would have been imperialism. But by kicking them out and moving in our own people it was simply a genocidal land grab. Contrast this with India, which the British never intended to make part of Britain.
Hawaii is a bit interesting in that it started out as imperialism but once enough white people found how nice it was there and moved in it changed to expansion.
The Law of April 6, 1830, was the second action of the national government to affect Texas in less than year. In September 1829 President Vicente Guerrero issued a decree abolishing slavery, although Texas received an exemption in December,
Mexico had in fact abolished slavery in 1829, causing panic among the Texas slaveholders, overwhelmingly immigrants from the south of the United States. They in turn sent Stephen Austin to Mexico City to complain. Austin was able to wrest from the Mexican authorities an exemption for the department – Texas was technically a department of the state of Coahuila y Tejas – that would allow the vile institution to continue.
The law, reasonable from the Mexican point of view, authorized a loan to finance the cost of transporting colonists to Texas, opened the coastal trade to foreigners for four years, provided for a federal commissioner of colonization to supervise empresario contracts in conformity with the general colonization law, forbade the further introduction of slaves into Mexico,
Early in the evening of Jan. 16, 1893, Navy Lt. Lucien Young led a force of 162 American Marines and sailors from the USS Boston as they disembarked the ship anchored in Honolulu Bay and marched up the city’s cobblestone streets roughly half a mile to Aliʻiōlani Hale — then the seat of government for the Kingdom of Hawaii — to carry out a bloodless coup in the name of the US government.
The American force occupied Aliʻiōlani Hale and its adjacent buildings, which stood directly across the street from Iolani Palace, where Liliʻuokalani lived. Although the American force had Gatling guns and light artillery, the queen had a palace guard force of almost 600 soldiers, artillery of her own, and a defensible position.
That certainly seems like an army.
And they took up a station around Aliʻiōlani Hale, where the Committee of Safety was based. The palace was nearby, but the 160 Marines did not enter it or surround it.
It also took away the power of the king to act without the consent of his cabinet and gave the legislature the power to dismiss the cabinet instead of the king. It also removed language from the 1864 constitution implying that the king was above the law, replacing it with language that the king was required to obey his laws to the level of his subjects. The cabinet was now allowed to vote in the legislature, but to reduce the king’s influence, he was not allowed to appoint legislators to any other government post. The legislature also gained the authority to imprison those that disrespected, published false reports or comments about or threatened or assaulted any of its members.[11]
Hardly evil.
I am not sure that bullying or taking over your own territory is “imperialism”. Yes, what the Americas did to their native population is a tragedy but not imperialism.
I totally grant the distinction between governing newly controlled territory by making it part of your own country co-equal with all your existing territory versus governing newly controlled territory by making it a colony / overseas territory / vassal state / choose your favorite term.
But I find the idea of “taking over your own territory” tone deaf. If it needs taking over it isn’t yours. Until you do take it over; then it is yours by force of arms, but whoever used to have it is now dispossessed and also mightily pissed about that. Unless genocided too, in which case there’s (almost) nobody left to complain.
I find this discussion interesting. I hope there won’t be a prolonged back and forth about facts, though.
I think this is a crucial first step. Telling the world that The Americas/Western Hemisphere the under the aegis of the U.S. that early showed the world the extent of American exceptionalism.
As an outsider I can’t think of the U.S. in the sense of Empire before
(Trinity test)
if at all.
I mean, there’s no real consensus in this thread about what an empire is.
Let’s use Rome as a template.
Was the republic an Empire. Per definitions by historians, no. Or it would have been the Roman Empire at that point. The most common starting point is Octavian/Augustus. I also pick Rome since it lasted a fairly long time, especially compared to Alexander and Kahn. Possibly the rapid expansion of Islam can compare but it was splintered into sectarianism from the start, whereas Rome managed to keep control over the Mediterranean basin from before the Empire era and up to the split.
If Rome was big and powerful before actually becoming an Empire, applying that template to the U.S. I do think the end of WWII. But only if we think of the U.S: in the second half of the 20th century as an Empire.
I understand the claim that it represents a wielding of American soft power. But at the end of the day, soft power IS meaningfully different than hard power.
The Roman Republic already controlled vast territories full of people who they ruled over as subjects, not citizens. I think they absolutely could be described as Imperialist.
True - again we get into the overlapping terminologies. Conquest is something we associate with imperialistic conduct, but is not something exclusive to empire.
As alluded earlier upthread, it is better seen along the lines of being hegemonic.
The “benign hegemon with no designs on others’ territory” was certainly the hagiographic gloss of a lot of US civics and history texts from ~1920 until it could no longer be said with a straight (enough) face.
Teddy Roosevelt always sought a path between the authoritarian monopolists and the Socialist. To that end he advocated imperialism in all but name. The US simply produced more than it could consume back then, and the robber barons were loath to pay their workers enough to buy the things they made. So foreign markets were the answer. The crap about helping “our little brown brothers” convinced nobody at all, and the working expression of that was “civilize them with a Krag.
Years later, a fat and happy US was legitimately more able to practice “benign hegemony.” The Marshall Plan, Peace Corps, etc. and also the Mekong Delta Project: our Tennessee Valley Authority gifted to the Vietnamese. Somehow it failed to translate, and LBJ might have fared better had he followed Stalin’s example of “Socialism in One Country,” replacing “Welfare Capitalism” as the economic system of choice.
