‘American Empire’ Review: Signing Up for the Imperial Club

The Wall Street Journal

Overseas territories that the U.S. acquired in the late 19th century became a “forgotten empire.”

PHOTO: GRANGER / THE GRANGER COLLECTION

By 

Wm. Roger Louis

March 23, 2018 4:44 p.m. ETExcerpt:Tarzan and Captain America may seem like an unlikely pair to offer insights into the colonial empire of the United States, but they appear midway through “American Empire: A Global History,” where the historian A.G. Hopkins provides a breathing space. Tarzan, he writes, is “the symbol and savior of Anglo-Saxon manhood” who subdues “primitive and dangerous people.” Captain America, the patriotic hero who fought the Axis powers in the 1940s, defends fundamental American values of liberty and democracy. The question is whether he will continue to lead military forces to secure freedom throughout the world or whether he will slowly comprehend “the root causes of global discontents” and work toward ameliorating them. Tarzan, perhaps with a yodel, grapples with the problems of a colonial empire. Captain America faces the challenges of a post-colonial era in which the dilemmas are now global.

The quixotic interlude emphasizes one of the themes of Mr. Hopkins’s large and vigorously argued book. America’s acquisition and administration of an “insular empire” in the Pacific and the Caribbean in the late 19th century posed a challenge to the way in which Americans regarded their sense of purpose in the world. Many at the time believed that American expansion would reaffirm values of “duty, honor and courage” and create “a sense of national identity.” Linked with the book’s overall theme, the war of 1898 led a half-century later to America’s emergence as a superpower.

AMERICAN EMPIRE: A GLOBAL HISTORY

By A.G. Hopkins

Princeton, 980 pages, $39.95

Mr. Hopkins doesn’t hesitate to describe the territorial dependencies of the United States as an empire. As European powers were expanding their territorial claims in Africa and Asia, the U.S. after 1898 annexed the Philippines and Hawaii (and the small island of Guam, which had the strategic value of a deepwater port) and, in the Caribbean, Puerto Rico. In the author’s words, “the acquisition of colonies made the Republic a member of the imperial club.” The methods of administration were similar to those used in European colonies, but the financing of America’s island empire and the establishing of its place in national public life diverged from Old World models. 

Mr. Hopkins is an economic historian with a background in African studies. He has the invaluable perspective of viewing empires from the vantage point of the colonized as well as the colonizers. He is among the first historians to make the transition from what is regarded as old-fashioned colonial history to global history. “Globalism” is a phenomenon that began to take place in the 1950s and continues to the present. He comments on Americans’ pride at being the foremost global power today but also on the anxiety of “decline” and, in passing, on “what it means to ‘make America great again.’ ” ...

The most original and useful part of “American Empire” is a composite study of the dependent territories in the Caribbean and the Pacific. (Inexplicably, Micronesia—the Marianas, the Carolines and the Marshalls—is omitted; their tiny size belies their outsize strategic significance after World War II.) Regarding the conquest of the Philippines, the quotations that Mr. Hopkins provides leave no doubt of American leaders’ belief in white racial supremacy. Theodore Roosevelt thought the Filipinos to be “savages no better than our Indians”; one of his contemporaries referred to the Cubans as “degenerates absolutely devoid of honor and gratitude.” To have assimilated them into the United States would have endangered “the racial purity of the homeland.”

After annexation, the Pacific and Caribbean dependencies dropped from public view. They became an invisible empire, despite having a combined population of 23 million. An uninterested Congress refused to fund development projects. The U.S. never established a Colonial Office or the equivalent of British District Officers. American dependencies became an embarrassment to a country that had fought for equality against the British.

Especially in dealing with the management of the “forgotten empire,” Mr. Hopkins gives a brilliant account. He provides economic and social detail, together with an understanding of the indigenous populations. No one before him has analyzed the administration of the American dependencies on such a scale and with such exactitude. The United States fared no better than Britain or France in ruling and decolonizing. Hawaii was an exception, “incorporated as a state of the Union.” The Philippines became an authoritarian state and descended into “kleptocratic indulgence.” Cuba, “the protectorate that could not be bludgeoned or bought,” was eventually expelled “into outer darkness.”

This is a book of prodigious knowledge, compressed into only 980 pages.

—Mr. Louis is a professor of history at the University of Texas and editor in chief of the Oxford History of the British Empire.