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Any short list of my favorite diplomatic historians has to include Emily Rosenberg. Rosenberg is a pioneering historian in multiple dimensions, including her Spreading the American Dream (Hill & Wang, 1982), one of the important early depictions of “Americanization” (more on that later); in her work on gender and diplomacy, helping to center gender even in – especially in -- the mighty halls of international power; and, most germane to one of our current conversations, her scholarship on the privatization of American power.
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We’ve been discussing public goods recently and will continue to expand on that theme going forward. Let’s make an initial stab at what public goods have to do with U.S. foreign relations and with American empire. At first glance, the answer is obvious, if pedantic: the instruments of statecraft are public goods. Economic aid (or sanction), real or threatened military action, diplomacy itself, all of these activities – goods and services, if you like – are pursued and provided by the government, under the collective umbrella of “U.S. interests.” Many of the instruments of our statecraft operate in secret as covert operations. But the National Security Agency or the Central Intelligence Agency are no less providers of public goods for all their secrecy.
Now here is where I present the outlines of an historical argument about American foreign relations and about American imperialism: If you’ve never visited, you may be inclined to think of China’s Great Wall as a singular installation, as a very great wall, as perhaps the greatest of walls. In fact, the so-called “Great Wall of China” is a series of walls and fortifications built over centuries as the Chinese empire expanded northward. Walls were built for protection from marauding nomads outside of the empire, but new structures were extended northward and westward as the empire expanded. Grand as they were (and are), the walls did not demarcate the limit of the empire; instead, they ratcheted the empire ever further outward. “Build and move on was the principle,” historians Burbank and Cooper observe about these walls, “not setting up a fixed border for all time.” Protection was one function of the wall, but “the wall” was never intended strictly to demarcate the empire from non-empire. Rather, in their successive geographical march, the walls offered the ongoing contact with the outsider, non-imperial subjects – “barbarians,” if you will -- that is the hallmark of imperial frontiers.  The premise of this website is that individual stories can reveal larger patterns, and vice-versa: important truths can often be discerned in small or even forgotten details. In that spirit, I observe that today is the 102nd anniversary of one of the most notorious events in modern American history, the so-called Tulsa Race Riot [sic] of 1921. There are no less than a dozen thoughtful books on the subject, so readers who are unfamiliar with the riot -- better thought of as the massacre and dispossession of the black residents of the Greenwood District in Tulsa, OK -- are referred to those books, or to the reasonable synopsis on Wikipedia: Tulsa race massacre - Wikipedia. My attention is drawn, fractal style, to the larger pattern of which the Tulsa race "riot" was one example: systemic racism in American history.
Several years ago I attempted to visualize how racism and discrimination function in American life and throughout American history. It is of necessity a crude attempt to render such a complicated topic. But nevertheless I present for my readers’ consideration the following illustration: The reflection entreated of us on Memorial Day is essentially historical: for what purposes has America fought? to what aims have her soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines given their sacred lives? We will have ample opportunity in the coming weeks and months to consider how those seemingly similar questions might generate very different responses. History is complicated and motivations do not always align. But today, this observation:  We’ve begun to consider the intersection of American pop culture and empire in our discussion of Captain America’s shield, below. A crucial dimension of this intersection is the reach and influence of American culture abroad, a complicated phenomenon often thought of as “Americanization.” Here is one of my favorite Americanization teasers:  The first diary bought as a present for Anne Frank by her parents. Courtesy of the Anne Frank House, Amsterdam. One aspect of the “myth of the frontier” that has contributed so mightily to American culture is the belief in rugged individualism: the conviction that America was (and should be) made by hearty men and women who seized a continent by their bare hands and through toil, ingenuity, and unmeasured doses of violence carved a great nation out of a wilderness. The social tropes of the west embody the myth: the stoic pioneer, the laconic cowboy, the law-skirting frontiersman, even the prostitute with a heart of gold. We’ll leave aside for the moment the historical reality of a country largely made through unpaid slave labor; here we’re discussing myths, not historical reality, and their power. And it is a powerful myth, measured, as all myths are, by how effectively they erase competing historical truths. In this case, the truth that however much the private labors of rugged individuals made and remade the United States, and leaving for the moment slavery out of the equation, no American development would have happened without what we call “public goods.”
Historians of empire tend to stress political, social, and economic motivations, both at the metropole and in the periphery, as the mainsprings of empire. These are important considerations that will all receive treatment in due course. Rather newer to the historians' toolbox is the subject of ideology. Ideology seems to be a part of every empire, though its importance has undoubtedly intensified in the modern period as democratic mass society has emerged as an important authorizing context for imperial policy. Imperial ideology, of greater or lesser intensity, is characteristic of all empires and, while it may not constitute one of the purposes of empire as outlined by Professor Colás (expansion, hierarchy, order), it is nevertheless essential.
One of the essential aims of this blog is to trace how the ideas that shape American empire are reflected and amplified by American culture, even – and perhaps especially – in American popular culture. Expect to see frequent excursions into American pop culture: coming are more than a few posts about Star Trek, for example, a venerable proponent of American empire. Today, let’s consider another revered piece of pop culture, one that has been around quite a while, but which has also gotten renewed attention in the early 21st century: Captain America’s shield.  The relationship of capitalism to modern empire is of paramount importance, but of unclear significance. For some, like Hobson and Lenin, empire is the apotheosis of capitalism, its logical and inevitable product and endpoint. For others, like the economist Joseph Schumpeter, capitalism is antithetical to empire, its free markets a solvent of empire’s inherent tyranny. Capitalism is undoubtedly a crucial component of early modern empires, including the Spanish, Dutch, French, and British empires. But vital and dynamic empires existed long before capitalism as we know it. We will continue to explore in detail the relationship between capital and empire, especially in the modern context. For now, let’s register a few broad points about the political economy of empire.
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