The American Archipelago

As any European schoolchild from the late 19th or early 20th century would have known, imperial rule had precise geographic expression. World maps were colored accordingly, the best known probably being that of the British Empire, with swathes of red stretching across Asia, Africa, and the Western Hemisphere. Political, military, and even economic authority, in other words, could be plotted visually. Maps and projections varied, of course, and the colors occasionally blurred along the margins; but the existential power of maps was indisputable. Imperial rule did not count for much unless it appeared on paper.

To Americans the importance of maps presented a curious problem. The popular basis for American nationalism—not only in the United States, but throughout the Americas—was for much of the 19th century a renunciation of the “Old World” of Europe and an affirmation of a romantic conception of what had been known since the age of exploration as the “New World.” With the American revolutions, the New World obtained meaning as a political project alongside its earlier incarnations as a religious and social experiment. The New World was not only different, it was also superior; not only a refuge or sanctuary, but also, and more importantly, a source of geopolitical and ideological salvation. It was up to America, in other words, to preserve what was right, just, and powerful for the future of humankind. But this mission was less uniform or universal in practice than its rhetoric would suggest; in reality it evolved piecemeal and haphazardly over time, and came more to resemble a multicolored archipelago than a single tide. Yet there are few maps that show this vividly.

The British, of course, had also once conceived of their empire as an integrated chain of islands, but this had much to do with Britain’s own place as “island Goddess” at the center of this particular constellation. By contrast, the United States, like its other larger American counterparts—notably Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico—emerged initially as a would-be continental empire, more like Russia or China than Britain. This fact makes its transformation into a global archipelago over the course of the late 19th and 20th centuries especially interesting. But, with the exception of D.W. Meinig’s four-volume history of the United States, a spatial perspective, particularly one that explores the intersection of geography and ideology, is underrepresented in the vast literature on American (here and subsequently meaning U.S.) power and influence in the world.¹ It is worth revisiting.

“Columbia’s Easter Bonnet,” Puck, April 6, 1901. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-USZC4-6550].

The American power that spread globally after the Civil War could not be mapped in the traditional way. There was no color for mere influence or affinity, let alone for spiritual promise. America sought followers, adherents, and friends, but not, in principle, overseas territory. In this sense, American globalists not only promoted their vision as exceptional but also, by necessity, depicted their aims as superior to other forms of transnational penetration.

In the United States the claim to superiority had long taken the dual forms of republicanism and imperialism. There was some early ambivalence, of course, over whether republicanism could apply to people besides citizens of the United States. The various views on this question, however much they borrowed from Montesquieu and other Enlightenment figures during the debates over the American Constitution, rarely challenged the desirability of republicanism itself. America had a few monarchists, but not many. Republicanism was regarded as so special, in fact, that many Americans promoted its exportation, joining with French and other ideologues in the 19th century to urge republican revolutions around the world. The movement was called Young Americanism. It came to have far more political impact at home than abroad.² But that ought not to detract from its symbolic value as a proto-global phenomenon. The ideology of Young Americanism recognized few permanent geopolitical limitations; in theory it was applicable to any people, anywhere. Republicanism, at least in its latest American incarnation, became imperialistic. As its revolutionary ideology merged with the...