Building an Uncertain Empire?: The U.S. Politics of Hegemony in the Early Twentieth Century

In creating an empire in the first decades of the twentieth century, U.S. politicians and the population alike looked to a myriad of ways to justify its growing possessions, territories, and occupations. That racist and sexist understandings of global hierarchies undergirded these justifications is hardly a new point; however, seeking to interrogate the variegated arenas in which U.S. imperial policies played out for citizens and colonial subjects in the first three decades of the twentieth century presents an important and growing field in the history of foreign relations. April Merleaux’s Sugar and Civilization and Ellen Tillman’s Dollar Diplomacy by Force demonstrate the possibilities of revisiting U.S. empire building with fresh and innovative approaches. Both studies respond in differing ways to scholarly demands beginning in the early 1990s that American Studies incorporate “the multiple histories of continental and overseas expansion, conquest, conflict, and resistance which have shaped the cultures of the United States and the cultures of those it has dominated within and beyond its geopolitical boundaries.”¹ However, Merleaux and Tillman also capably advance many of the scholarly perspectives that have come since that original call as they look to the ways such empire building is often at once flawed and contradictory, local and global, and inextricably bound into understandings of race, class, and gender. Finally, both works demonstrate that returning to foundational approaches of economics and military force can be engaging and, more importantly, enlightening of sometimes neglected narratives.

In Sugar and Civilization, April Merleaux presents a multistranded analysis of the politics of sugar and sweetness between the U.S. declaration of empire in 1898 and the early 1940s. The work is firmly grounded in the interdisciplinary approach of American Studies and relies on a wide array of sources to accomplish the aim of broadening “our understanding of which nation-state actions we interpret as imperial in the U.S. context” (p. 14). Merleaux argues that sugar serves not only as a lens on empire, but in fact was the very vehicle in which many decisions about the nation’s multiple occupations and territories were made; as such, sugar in its varied forms, “had a starring role in the ongoing spectacle of empire” (p. 1). The breadth of Merleaux’s analysis is impressive; she deconstructs tariff regulation, labor-reform efforts, the interplay of the discourse of race and civilization, consumption, and the very life of sugar itself. As she notes at the end of the book, sugar and its connection to the development of refined, processed, and cheap food continues to plague discussions about the well-being of U.S. society; understanding how it came to be a key player in the nation’s domestic and international affairs becomes, then, a crucial project.

Sugar and Civilization builds on several works that center sugar—in production and consumption—at the core of U.S. imperial politics. Sidney Mintz’s classic work, Sweetness and Power, understandably serves as a key touchstone for this study, and Merleaux argues that both books look at the “parallel development of agricultural and urban modernities” and view “international and imperial trade policies as a crucial link connecting workers and consumers across oceans and continents” (p. 21). In addition to looking to the U.S. case rather than the British and moving the analysis temporally forward to the twentieth century, Merleaux argues that, in contrast to Mintz’s case, “the most significant increase in U.S. sugar consumption occurred during a period of extreme trade protectionism” (p. 21). Throughout her study, Merleaux demonstrates that the “sugar habit” across the United States and its possessions may have had multiple meanings but nonetheless connected the politics and practices of imperialism. However, Merleaux also...