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Abstract
Debates about US empire have subsided somewhat in the aftermath of the George W Bush presidency but the issues underlying such debates have not gone away. In arguing that the history of the United States is an imperial one, this article proposes that US empire is the expression of an intersectional totality, one shaped by various vectors of power but reducible to none. To make this case, the article presents a sketch of US imperial history in order to show how this intersectional totality has evolved over time. Such an exercise can give useful context to the foreign policy initiatives of the Barack Obama administration, one that differs from that of its immediate predecessor but is not outside the structure of imperial history’s longer duration.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Jordan Camp, Sheyda Jahanbani, Nelson Lichtenstein, George Lipsitz, Alice O’Connor, Cedric Robinson, Howard Winant and Antoni Wysocki for helpful suggestions on earlier versions of this article. All errors are the author’s.
Notes
1. See, respectively, Go, Patterns of Empire; McCoy, “The Decline and Fall”; Kaplan, “In Defense of Empire”; and Hoffman, American Umpire. The best overview of the literature on US empire is Kramer, “Power and Connection.”
2. See, for example, Herring, From Colony to Superpower; and Immerman, Empire for Liberty. My approach here is closer, and indebted, to Hixson, The Myth of American Diplomacy; and Roediger, How Race Survived US History.
3. Parisot, “American Power,” 1159.
4. Some of the works that have most influenced my thinking here are Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement”; Hall et al., Policing the Crisis; Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection”; Collins, “The Social Construction”; and Chun et al., “Intersectionality.”
5. Winant, Racial Conditions, xiii; and Blackburn, “The Old World Background.”
6. Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 109–126.
7. Robinson, Black Marxism, 10–99; and Sweet, “The Iberian Roots.”
8. Fernández-Armesto, The Americas; Elliott, Empires; and Gould, “Entangled Histories.”
9. Quijano, “Coloniality of Power”; and Mignolo, Local Histories.
10. Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 32–33.
11. Karl Marx’s memorable description of primitive accumulation can be found in Volume I of Capital, esp. 915. See also the indispensible rethinking of Marx’s primitive accumulation in the context of North American colonialism in Coulthard, “From Wards of the State to Subjects of Recognition?”
12. Kupperman, “International at the Creation.”
13. Cronon, Changes in the Land; and Greer, “Commons and Enclosure.”
14. Maracle, “Racism, Sexism, and Patriarchy”; McClintock, Imperial Leather; and Smith, Conquest.
15. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 700; and Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness.
16. Robinson, Forgeries, 36.
17. Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny; Gould, The Mismeasure of Man; and Baum, The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race.
18. Morrison, Playing in the Dark.
19. Knight, Working the Diaspora.
20. Berlin, Many Thousands Gone.
21. Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic.
22. Woods, Development Arrested, 6, 41–45; Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade; and Hixson, American Settler Colonialism, 36–44.
23. Horne, The Counter-revolution of 1776.
24. White, The Middle Ground; Jennings, The Invasion of America, 220–225; Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, 90–105; and Taylor, The Divided Ground, 77–108.
25. Martin, Sacred Revolt; Dowd, A Spirited Resistance; and Hall, The American Empire.
26. Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest; and Roediger, Colored White, 121–137.
27. Brooks, Captives and Cousins; and Blackhawk, Violence over the Land.
28. Hämäläinen, “The Rise and Fall.”
29. Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier.”
30. Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction; and Furner, “Structure and Virtue.”
31. Quotation from Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 30. See also Blight, Race and Reunion.
32. Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire, 92–120; Hunt, Ideology, 46–91; and Robinson, Forgeries, 180–202.
33. Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba; Anderson, Under Three Flags; and Streeby, Radical Sensations.
34. Lee, At America’s Gates; and Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues.
35. Shah, Contagious Divides; and Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe.
36. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color; and Kramer, The Blood of Government.
37. See, for example, Jacobs, White Mother.
38. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood.
39. Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction, 419; Dawley, Struggles for Justice, 162–163; Robinson, Forgeries, 107–108, 118; James, Holding aloft the Banner of Ethiopia, 94–95, 42–43; and Manela, The Wilsonian Moment, 19–34.
40. Gilmore, Defying Dixie, 25.
41. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, 84.
42. Quoted in Powaski, Toward an Entangling Alliance, 18.
43. Westad, The Global Cold War, 8–109; and Prashad, The Darker Nations, 3–15.
44. Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy.
45. Judt, Postwar, 117; and Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 363.
46. Judt, Postwar, 17–18; Scott, Seeing like a State, 193–222; Lewin, The Soviet Century, 106–125; and Snyder, Bloodlands.
47. Maier, Among Empires, 156–157; and Duvall and Havercroft, “Taking Sovereignty out of this World.”
48. Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War, 540.
49. Lundestad, “Empire by Invitation?”; and de Grazia, Irresistible Empire.
50. Klein, Cold War Orientalism; Logevall, Embers of War; and Hunt and Levine, Arc of Empire, 120–250.
51. Yaqub, Containing Arab Nationalism; and McAlister, Epic Encounters.
52. Khalidi Resurrecting Empire, 34–35.
53. Rabe, The Killing Zone.
54. Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre; Rabe, US Intervention; and Field, “Ideology as Strategy.”
55. Gibbs, “Political Parties”; Kent, “United States Reactions”; and Thomas, “Innocent Abroad?”
56. Chafe, Never Stop Running; Anderson, “The Histories of African Americans”; Noer, Soapy; and Krenn, Black Diplomacy.
57. Said, Orientalism.
58. Saunders, The Cultural Cold War; and Simpson, Science of Coercion.
59. Gusfield, “Tradition and Modernity”; Mazrui, “From Social Darwinism”; Escobar, Encountering Development; Schiffrin, The Cold War; Latham, Modernization as Ideology; Gilman, Mandarins of the Future; and Engerman, “Social Science in the Cold War.”
60. Smith and Warrior, Like a Hurricane; Von Eschen, Race against Empire; Young, Soul Power; and Seymour, American Insurgents.
61. Chari and Verdery, “Thinking between the Posts.”
62. Singh, “Culture/Wars”; Chomsky, “A View from Below”; Sivanandan, “New Circuits”; Wilson, ‘“Race’, Gender and Neoliberalism”; and Prashad, The Poorer Nations.
63. Jameson, “Globalization and Global Strategy.” See also Amin, “Imperialism and Globalization.”
64. “Moe Fishman dies at 92.”
65. Harvey, The New Imperialism; Hopkins, “Capitalism”; Antoniades, “Recasting the Power Politics of Debt”; and Conway and Singh, “Radical Democracy.”
66. Such historically minded contextualisations can aid, I hope, in the kinds of reflections on the relationship between the United States and the world called for in Morefield, Empires without Imperialism.