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In 1893, at the famed World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, a young historian from the University of Wisconsin offered what might still be considered the most influential history lecture ever given in America. Titled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Frederick Jackson Turner laid out a compelling political and cultural anthropology of the frontier in American life and a lament for its apparent passing. Basing his analysis in the 1890 census, Turner argued that the frontier was now, for all intents and purposes, filled up. Sparse population in some regions there may be, but the tide of settlement had nevertheless run the continent, and all was being brought under the control of barbed wire and the telegraph. No more wilderness was left to be claimed and tamed. For Turner, this carried enormous implications for American society. An era had passed, and with it the capacity of the frontier to generate what was unique about the Americans. What became known as Turner’s “frontier thesis” enthralled a generation of leading American opinion makers, such as Theodore Roosevelt, who feared for the sake of the country’s future, and, in particular, for the fate of American manhood.
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 In American pop culture, empire is a signifier of tyranny. We knew everything we needed to know about the Klingons because they were part of a Klingon empire. Likewise the Romulans. It was enough to place Darth Vader at the head of an intergalactic empire; no further backstory was needed to comprehend him fully. Anti-imperialism seems to be hard-baked into our freedom-loving republican sensibilities. Yet empires still persist in the contemporary world, and this blog asserts that the United States is one of them. Clearly there remains some enthusiasm for empire, perhaps more widespread than what at first glance appears. What is happening here? Are the Americans alone in their disdain for empire? Or are Americans deluded? Why would anyone want an empire if, as Americans continually tell themselves, empires are engines of bondage, blood, and anguish?
The aim of this blog is to examine the question whether the United States is an empire, and if so, what the consequences of that reality are for our foreign relations--and even more, for our civic and cultural life. We cannot both address those questions and detail them at length even in several blog posts. So, still in our early days, let’s sketch out in broad strokes what we might be talking about, like a prosecutor making an indictment. Let us say yes, the U.S. is an empire, and state the case as baldly as possible, for ongoing elaboration and amplification. Here, in brief, is an imperial sketch of American history. Most of these descriptions are, I believe, uncontroversial:
Americans generally deny that the United States is an empire, even after achieving a position of global prominence that would be envied by any other empire-building people in history. But is it true that the United States is not an empire, and does it matter if it is?
At least two crucial features in the American experience are clarified when we understand U.S. history as imperial. Is the domain presided over by Alexander the Great quite the same thing as the British empire of millennia later? The empires of the great Khans seem a rather different phenomenon than the law-bound Roman empire, do they not? Do maritime empires follow the same set of rules as landed empire? What, really, are we talking about when we talk about empire? And what does the United States have in common with any of this? We don’t intend to settle the matter with one blog post, but we have to start somewhere. And if we are contending, as we are, that the United States is in fact an empire, perhaps it will do for the moment to lay down a few markers.
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.
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