Historians disagree
Historians Disagree: Imperialism
Have historians viewed late nineteenth century U.S. overseas expansion as an unusual or representative phenomenon in the nation’s history?
by Naoko Shibusawa, Brown University
Should the United States, itself a former colony, be considered an empire? How historians have answered this question lets us know how they have interpreted U.S. foreign policy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For most of the twentieth century, the majority of historians saw the U.S. acquisition of territories beyond its continental borders during the 1890s as an aberration in U.S. history. But some historians disagreed, seeing the continuity of U.S. imperial ideas and actions since the colonial era—an interpretation that has become more mainstream during the twenty-first century. Questions about the nature and extent of U.S. empire reveal the changes in how historians have thought about who matters in their narratives. In turn, these widened perspectives have influenced ideas about historical justice and what constitutes historical accuracy.
The very act of defining imperialism has been central to these varying interpretations. For much of the twentieth century, most historians did not include westward continental expansion in their definition of imperialism. While Native American scholars and activists have long described U.S. “expansion” as the colonization of Indigenous people, only since the late 1990s have more historians come to define this process with the term “settler colonialism.”
The interpretation that overseas colonialism marked a departure from continental settlement dates to the late nineteenth century when history as a scholarly profession was taking hold in the United States. In 1893, the year that American plantation owners overthrew the Hawaiian Kingdom, Frederick Jackson Turner called attention to what he termed the end of the frontier, arguing that the era represented a turning point in U.S. history. Turner’s thesis that American national character required movement or expansion struck a chord with Americans like Theodore Roosevelt, himself a historian and the author of The Winning of the West (1889), a four-volume epic that presented continental expansion in heroic terms. Roosevelt advocated extending the “empire for liberty” envisioned by Thomas Jefferson beyond the U.S. continent in order to ensure market access to Asia.
Historians a generation after Roosevelt were less enthusiastic about U.S. imperialism. They questioned the wisdom of acquiring overseas colonies, particularly the Philippines, so far away from the continent. Historians, however, disagreed as to why they believed U.S. imperialism was bad policy. Samuel Flagg Bemis believed that the U.S. colonization of the Philippines was not only an aberration from U.S. policies, but also a great mistake because it overextended U.S. budgetary and military resources. In 1936, Bemis noted that, before the war with Spain, “the average American citizen could not have told you whether the Filipinos were Far Eastern aborigines or a species of tropical nuts.” Bemis emphasized that the imperialists’ prediction of increased U.S. trade with Asia had not actually materialized. In contrast, historians like Charles A. Beard, a consistent critic of historical narratives that he saw as favoring elite economic interests, had been arguing since 1914 that the colonization of the Philippines was in fact a continuation of U.S. efforts to extend its commercial power. To Beard and others, the issue of increased trade was beside the point; the impact of U.S. military action felt the same to Filipinos whether or not U.S. companies turned a profit in their state-assisted search for markets.
After World War II, both decolonization movements around the globe and the U.S. civil rights movement made historians more sensitive to questions of racial oppression in their evaluation of U.S. imperialism. Historians who saw U.S. imperialism as an aberration pointed to the U.S. support for Philippine independence in 1946 and Hawaīi statehood in 1959, which marked the acceptance of a majority nonwhite state into the union. (And two decades later, in 1979, the United States handed sovereignty over the Panama Canal Zone to the Panamanian government.) If one ignored Guam, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, U.S. overseas colonization could be seen as a temporary lapse. But one historian who took exception to this interpretation was William Appleman Williams who, like Beard, emphasized economic motives in U.S. policy. In one of his lesser known works, The Great Evasion (1964), he argued that continental settlement was also colonialism, pointing out that “there is no serious justification for making the crossing of water a necessary condition of colonialism.”
The Vietnam War can also be seen as a turning point in how historians have interpreted U.S. policy at the turn of the twentieth century. The war provided ample evidence to argue about continuities in U.S. foreign policy. Historians pointed out similarities in racist tactics used in the U.S. war against Vietnamese revolutionaries with those deployed in its suppression of Filipino revolutionaries. But they continued to disagree about whether or not the United States was an empire, with those who saw it as an empire continuing to emphasize economic motivations. Those who did not have analyzed other continuities. Arguing against Williams, Michael Hunt could see no economic cause for the Vietnam War, and this led him to theorize instead that since the U.S. founding, its foreign policy has been guided by nationalism, racism, and fear of social revolutions. His work, published in 1987, roughly coincided with Joan Scott’s influential essay on gender and the end of the Cold War. Thereafter, many studies analyzed the cultural—especially gendered and racialized—dimensions of U.S. foreign policy. Kristin Hoganson, Gail Bederman, and others interrogated the mindsets of U.S. policymakers and the public that supported them. These historians emphasized how preserving notions of manly honor and civilizational progress also shaped U.S. policy.
The Cold War’s end inspired many scholars in history and other fields to look backward at the turn of the twentieth century, when the United States first emerged as a global power. More expansive definitions and views of imperialism have moved the historiography beyond a narrow consideration of the events surrounding 1898 to a more wide-ranging view of the workings of imperialism in a variety of places and contexts. But as they have seen a twenty-first century world continuing to be riven by wars and beset with economic and environmental crises, historians have begun writing newer interpretations that emphasize the connections between politics and economics while incorporating cultural insights in the history of U.S. foreign relations.
Additional Reading
William Appleman Williams, The Great Evasion (Chicago: Quadrangle Press, 1964).
Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987).
Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (December 1986): 1053–75.
Gail L. Bederman, Manhood and “Civilization”: American Debates About Race and Gender, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995)
Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).
Naoko Shibusawa, “U.S. Empire and Racial Capitalist Modernity,” Diplomatic History 45, no. 5 (November 2021): 855–84.