Empire by Imitation? US Economic Imperialism within a British World System

2018 ◽  
pp. 194-211
Author(s):  
Marc-William Palen
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
The United States ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Spanish Empire ◽  
Trade Policies ◽  
American Empire ◽  
Open Door ◽  
System P ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Economic Imperialism

Most comparative studies of the British and American empires focus on the pre-1945 British Empire and the post-1945 American Empire. The tendency to avoid contemporaneous studies of the two empires suggests that there may be more differences than similarities between them, particularly when examining their imperial trade policies from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. For those studies attempting such comparisons, the so-called Open Door Empire of the United States is commonly depicted as having copied the free-trade imperial policies of its estranged motherland by the turn of the century. Such studies then assert that these imitative imperial policies reached new Anglo-Saxonist heights following US colonial Caribbean and Pacific acquisitions from the Spanish Empire in 1898, followed closely by the fin-de-siècle Anglo-American ‘Great Rapprochement’. This chapter challenges this imitative imperial narrative by bringing to light the contrasting ways in which the American Empire grew in the shadow of the British Empire.

The Wilsonian Solution

2019 ◽  
pp. 111-139
Author(s):  
Charlie Laderman
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
British Empire ◽  
International System ◽  
The United States ◽  
Policy Choice ◽  
World War ◽  
System P ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
First World

This chapter examines Woodrow Wilson’s pragmatic decision not to declare war on the Ottoman Empire after American entry into the First World War. It explains why this policy choice offers important insights into Wilson’s attitude toward the Allied powers, particularly the British Empire. It evaluates Wilson’s broader attitude to Britain and his attitude toward an Anglo-American alliance. The chapter emphasizes the clash between Wilson and Roosevelt over whether the United States should declare war on the Ottoman Empire, and what this reveals about their humanitarian visions and broader conceptions of international order. In doing so, it traces the emergence of Wilson’s own solution to the Armenian question as part of a reformed, American-led international system.

The Joint Declaration on the colonies: an issue in Anglo-American relations, 1942–1944

1976 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 267-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. E. Williams
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
East Asia ◽  
British Empire ◽  
The United States ◽  
South East Asia ◽  
Joint Declaration ◽  
American Press ◽  
Anglo American

The collapse of the British Empire in south-east Asia in the early months of 1942 brought to the fore in Anglo-American relations the different attitudes of the two countries towards colonialism. Surprisingly, their long standing disagreement about the merits of colonialism was not pushed to one side by the need to defeat Japan. On the contrary, Britain's humiliating setbacks in Malaya and Burma reinforced doubts and confirmed prejudices in the United States about the probity of the British Empire – doubts and prejudices that were powerfully articulated throughout 1942 and succeeding years in the American press as well as in private exchanges between members of the Administration and their British counterparts.

Anglo-American Post-War Coöperation and the Interests of Europe

1942 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 656-666 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arnold Wolfers
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
The United States ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
The World ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Post War ◽  
Essential Prerequisite ◽  
Peace In Europe

Often it has been asserted that if the United States had stood by her allies after 1918 and joined the League of Nations, peace in Europe would have been secure. While this overstresses the point, it is certainly true that the lack of unity among the victors, both at Versailles and afterwards, deprived the world of anything like a center of coördination and leadership. Even the Concert of Europe of bygone days could claim greater authority than a League from which five out of seven great powers were either permanently or temporarily absent, and in which the two remaining powers, Britain and France, were rarely in agreement.In view of this experience, it makes sense to regard continued coöperation between at least some of the important allies of this war, assuming the defeat of Hitler and his partners, as being an essential prerequisite for a more durable peace. If at least the two great English-speaking powers could form between themselves a solid partnership, so it is argued, would not their combined strength and their supremacy of the seas quite naturally attract other nations into their orbit and thus enable them to preserve the order and peace of the world? Their rôle is envisaged as a kind of enlarged replica of that which the British Empire fulfilled with no little success throughout most of the nineteenth century.

scholarly journals BORDERLANDS AND ACCOMMODATION: SPANISH SOLDIERS AND AMERINDIAN NATIONS IN LOUISIANA AND FLORIDA (1763-1803)

Almanack ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Soizic Croguennec
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
Close Contact ◽  
The United States ◽  
Spanish Empire ◽  
Native Communities ◽  
War Of Independence ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
Treaty Of Versailles ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Anglo American

Abstract The treaty of Paris at the end of the Seven Years war meant the addition of Louisiana to the Spanish Empire in 1763 while the treaty of Versailles at the end of the United States war of Independence marked the return of the Floridas under Spanish control, thus making the end of the 18th century the largest expansion of the Spanish Empire in North America. Yet this large territory was only of marginal importance in the Spanish imperial structure even as it did represent a real geopolitical interest due to being essential for the control of the Gulf of Mexico and the protection of New Spain against growing British ambitions. This focus on the geopolitical and military function of Louisiana and Florida explains a very pragmatic management of the borderlands and lack of real economic and human investment by the Spanish crown. In this context, the outermost territories in close contact with both the confines of the Anglo-American colonies and the Native communities were places in which individual and collective survival was a constant struggle. The judicial and military records present in the Papeles de Cuba section of the Archivo de Indias offers a wide range of agencies, behaviors and strategies, revealing a permanent process of accommodation, negotiation, traffic and mobilities that create a remarkable social and identity fluidity. In the borderlands, the line between what was legal and what was illegal, or between loyalty and treason, was a very narrow and porous one.

Religion, Race, and American Empire

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sylvester Johnson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
American Empire ◽  
Constitutional Democracy ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
Indigenous Nations ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
The Relationship

The United States has been many things: a constitutional democracy, a settler state, a slavocracy, and a republic. Even prior to formally organizing as a nation-state, the antecedent Anglo-American colonies functioned veritably as a confederated empire in relation to Indigenous nations. Because it has simultaneously embodied these forms, the United States challenges facile conceptions of these categories. Its status as an empire, thus, has been repeatedly debated and even denied. This chapter foregrounds the relationship among religion, race, and the political order of colonialism in order to explain how US empire has been constituted through the intersection of these social formations.

Thinking About Scots Law

1996 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Rodger
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
Case Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
Memorial Lecture ◽  
University Of Edinburgh ◽  
The University

This article is the revised text of the first W A Wilson Memorial Lecture, given in the Playfair Library, Old College, in the University of Edinburgh, on 17 May 1995. It considers various visions of Scots law as a whole, arguing that it is now a system based as much upon case law and precedent as upon principle, and that its departure from the Civilian tradition in the nineteenth century was part of a general European trend. An additional factor shaping the attitudes of Scots lawyers from the later nineteenth century on was a tendency to see themselves as part of a larger Englishspeaking family of lawyers within the British Empire and the United States of America.

Building an American Empire

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Frymer
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
American Empire ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Population Movements ◽  
Westward Expansion ◽  
White Settler ◽  
Settlement Policies ◽  
Federal Land ◽  
The Government ◽  
Land Policies

This book examines the politics of the United States' westward expansion, showing how the government's regulation of population movements on the frontier, both settlement and removal, advanced national aspirations for empire and promoted the formation of a white settler nation. The book details how a government that struggled to exercise plenary power used federal land policies to assert authority over the direction of expansion by engineering the pace and patterns of settlement and to control the movement of populations. At times, the government mobilized populations for compact settlement in strategically important areas of the frontier; at other times, policies were designed to actively restrain settler populations in order to prevent violence, international conflict, and breakaway states. The book examines how these settlement patterns helped construct a dominant racial vision for America by incentivizing and directing the movement of white European settlers onto indigenous and diversely populated lands. The book pays close attention to the failures as well, from the lack of further expansion into Latin America to the defeat of the black colonization movement. It reveals the lasting and profound significance government settlement policies had for the nation, both for establishing America as dominantly white and for restricting broader aspirations for empire in lands that could not be so racially engineered.

The Child Protection System

2019 ◽  
pp. 391-414
Author(s):  
Richard J. Gelles
Keyword(s):  
Child Protection ◽  
The United States ◽  
Family Preservation ◽  
Child Protective Service ◽  
Protective Service ◽  
System P ◽  
Abuse And Neglect ◽  
Protective System ◽  
The Common ◽  
Home Placement

This chapter examines the child protective system in the United States by first examining the scaffolding created by federal legislation and federal funding. Next, it reviews three significant Supreme Court decisions that bear on the operation of child protective service systems. Lastly, it examines the common process and flow of individual cases of child abuse and neglect from initial reporting, through investigation, service response, possible out-of-home placement, and finally decisions regarding when and why to close the case. The conclusion discusses the three core goals of the child protective service system: safety and wellbeing of children; permanency of caregiving; and family preservation.

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