By Way of Introduction

The American national story is most often told as a revolt against imperial power. Two of our most cherished founding myths – the arrival of the Pilgrims and the American Revolution itself – are stories of rebellions against concentrated power. But concentrated power is at the center of the American experience. The development of what would become the thirteen Atlantic colonies is, unlike what our myths tell us, rather the very expression and consequence of imperial power. American colonial history arose out of the interplay of powerful imperial forces: Spanish, Dutch, French, and British maritime empires clashed with each other and contended with potent Native American confederacies on the coasts, around the Great Lakes, and elsewhere. After the extrusion of the colonies from British imperial authority, the now independent United States was immediately thrust into a vortex of inter-imperial rivalry that powerfully shaped American norms, practices, and institutions. The first half-century of American national history after independence is to a very great degree the story of the Americans attempting to wrest themselves from the grip of imperial power and to carve out the capacity for action free from those imperial powers. Yet even here, a story that for all the world looks avowedly anti-imperial, the Americans were in fact engaged in creating the greatest empire in world history. How and why this happened is the story I hope to explore in this blog.​

This is not just a foreign relations story, though such relations obviously figure prominently. U.S. foreign policy rarely receives the attention it should in popular memory. From the beginning, the country’s increasing power and presence in regional and global affairs made foreign policy consequential and significant in the lives of ordinary Americans and led to fierce political debate at every turn. Lack of attention to foreign affairs produces misunderstanding about domestic history. Many Americans still relegate American foreign affairs to a background wherein dramas over national governance, westward expansion, the formation of a national culture, and fierce debates over slavery are perceived as matters of domestic concern only. The great national dramas of early U.S. history were nearly always forged in international crucibles: the American national government, in both tradition and law, was established against the background of intense concern over French involvement and French corruption (think the XYZ affair, the Genet affair, and the “phony war”); Westward expansion (and with it, conflict over the extension of slavery) became an overriding concern only because of intense, and often fraught, diplomacy with France, Spain, and Great Britain, often carrying the possibility of war. The imperial perspective helps to restore the interplay of foreign and domestic forces in shaping American life; the essential entanglements of the foreign and the domestic are a primary focus of this blog.

Even when foreign relations does occupy center-stage, debate about such momentous issues as war and peace, isolationism and entanglement, and commerce and trade, have rarely been offered in terms of “empire.” Critics could and did fire the word in polemics against American policy of which they disapproved, earlier, for example, in the war against Spain in 1898, and later perhaps most famously during the Vietnam War. In that era, the charge of “empire” was frequently heard, but from critics outside the conventional political framework; Senator Fulbright made the charge in print, but only after he left office. Even during those heated debates over Vietnam, in other words, empire was not a word for the mainstream. But by the turn of this century, owing to the increased accumulation of scholarship, often from writers outside conventional perspectives, and widespread unease with, if not outright opposition to, the George W. Bush administration’s war in Iraq, the label “empire” increasingly seems to fit not only our present situation, but helps elucidate as well key parts of our long, fraught history. This blog is an attempt to present, but also to understand and amplify, this scholarship and the new perspectives that stand to be learned from it.

Empires are complicated. They express no conventional form or structure. They pursue no standard repertoire of tactic or strategy. They are creative, often improvisational, and driven by powerful ideas and interests often in conflict with themselves. We will address many dimensions of American empire, often in comparison with well-known analogs in other places and times. We will take deep dives into American culture and history. At issue are questions about how empires govern, what imperial aims might or could be, how empires are structured at home and abroad, the political and cultural consequences of living in or being subject to imperial power (with or without democratic input), the flexible modes and modalities of formal and informal empires, how empires extend their power and influence, and more.

We will encompass not only formal diplomatic history, international relations, commerce and alliance-making, and American military excursions, but also American society, governance and politics, and American political economy as well, all of which, it increasingly appears, contribute to and are conditioned by, imperial structures and outlooks. More than that, we will also explore the American popular culture in which imperial themes are readily discernible and which does so much to normalize empire and imperial modes among the Americans who readily consume it.

What does it mean to live in an empire, especially an empire with such self-professed democratic commitments as Americans have often proclaimed? What does it mean to be subject to imperial power at home and abroad? I hope this blog, over time, can help to illuminate such pressing questions.