Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State

On the Tropic of Cancer: Transitions and Transformations in the U.S. Imperial State

3 On the Tropic of Cancer Transitions and Transformations in the U.S. Imperial State alfred w. mccoy, francisco a. scarano, and courtney johnson Among the colonial empires that once ruled the globe, the United States was an elusive, even paradoxical power. All the usual imperial labels that attach so readily to Great Britain or France seem to require qualification when applied to America. By 1900, Britain’s empire covered a quarter of the earth’s entire surface; America’s skipped along a string of small islands dotting the Tropic of Cancer from the Caribbean to the Western Pacific. Europe’s empires expanded relentlessly for five centuries to rule a full third of humanity; the United States held most of its larger colonies for just a few decades and governed only a few million people. Yet empire left an indelible imprint on the United States.1 Colonialism was a crucible that plunged Washington’s raw bureaucracy into the white heat of nationalist revolution and great power rivalry, forging new, heretofore unimagined state capacities. Indeed, the ramifications of this early American empire were far wider than anyone has yet imagined: a marked expansion in the role of the federal government for more activist domestic administration, and the formation of an agile, transnational imperial state for more effective global governance. From the perspective of the present, the American experience of empire is not only the least understood but arguably the most significant legacy of the high imperial age—creating a void that this volume seeks to fill. Challenging America’s post-imperial denial, this volume probes the central paradox surrounding the U.S. imperial experience. How could a fragmentary empire of island colonies have had such a profound impact upon this large continental nation? We seek to answer this question by assaying the ways that innovations in discrete areas of American colonial governance—from police and prisons to education and environmental management—migrated homeward to influence U.S. state formation in the early decades of the twentieth century. To examine the twin processes of colonial governance and imperial information 4 Part 1. Exploring Imperial Transitions transfer, these essays offer empirically based, analytically informed case studies that explore the deeper dynamics at work across this broad range of institutions governing the relationship between state and society. Tracing these now established elements of foreign and domestic policy to their inception in an imperial praxis, this volume represents a first step toward exploring the pervasive, persistent effects of the early-twentieth-century American empire—not only on the social fabric of its island colonies, or even on geopolitical relations among imperial rivals, but, crucially, on American strategies of international influence and, indeed, on the practice of statecraft in the United States itself. The transformative processes engendered by American colonial rule in the Caribbean and Pacific after 1898 gradually radiated far beyond these small islands at the edge of empire. Over time, these changes, articulated through a distinctive alliance of public and private sectors, percolated homeward through the invisible “capillaries of empire,” ultimately shaping the metropolitan American state and its society in subtle yet profound ways. To be sure, empire was only one of several important factors in the formation of the modern American state. But it is one whose considerable , even catalytic role remains obscured by the current literature’s focus on domestic, endogenous factors. In discussing the United States as an imperial power, we need to make it clear at the outset that empire is not an epithet. It is a form of global governance in which a dominant power exercises control over the destiny of others through direct territorial rule (e.g., colonies) or indirect influence (e.g., military, economic , or cultural leverage). Whether we use the word empire, bloc, alliance, commonwealth, or world order, such dominion has persisted for much of the past four thousand years and is likely to continue, in some form, into the foreseeable future. Many have been brutal, some beneficent, and most a mix of both, but empires are an undeniable, unremitting fact of human history. After counting seventy empires in world history, Niall Ferguson notes wryly, “To those who would still insist on American‘exceptionalism,’ the historian of empires can only retort: as exceptional as all the other sixty-nine empires.”2 Most empires over the past two millennia have grown, as Hannah Arendt famously observed, via continental or overseas expansion. Continental empires (Hapsburg Europe...