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The nature of “empire,” particularly as embodied in the modern United States, has been a prominent topic of public discussion in recent years. The September 11 terrorist attacks, followed by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, have stimulated a wave of anxious reflection about America’s place in the world. The historian Charles S. Maier noted in 2006 that “empire has displaced civil society as the fashionable political concept for the new decade.” In recent years, the best-seller list has featured big books with imposing titles on the subject, among them Empire, Colossus, and Are We Rome? Politicians, journalists, and academics engage in lively debates about whether the United States is an empire and, if so, how it compares to empires of the past. Does the United States dominate primarily by means of hard power (military intervention, authoritarian rule) or soft power (economic power, cultural influence)? Is the American empire in decline, following the pattern of the Roman or the British empires, or is it capable of regeneration? Is it, and has it been, a “good” empire or a “bad” one?1 This volume also takes as its subject the American imperial state, but, unlike the big books mentioned above, Colonial Crucible is not the work of one or two authors trying to use history to shape contemporary foreign policy debates. Rather it is what the coeditors describe as a“multivocal”reflection,representing the work of over forty historians not just of the United States but of the other nations that share its imperial history, including Spain, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Cuba. Moreover, this book is primarily a work of history, not policy debate. Although the contributors are certainly concerned about contemporary issues, their goal is to acquire a fuller sense of the nation’s imperial past not its future. To that end, this collection focuses on a pivotal era in our imperial past, namely, the turn of the last century: the early years of formal empire, when the flow of ideas and practices between the United States and its colonies first Crucibles,Capillaries,and Pentimenti Reflections on Imperial Transformations nancy tomes 532 became both highly visible and deeply significant. And, while the work of many authors, those of us involved in the writing of this book had the special good fortune to be able to present our work to each other and to revise our final essays in accordance with what we heard. Thus, more so than in many edited collections, there is a real sense of dialogue in these pages because the essays gathered here were forged in conversation. In conducting this conversation, the volume’s organizers and participants took some assumptions as givens. There was virtually no discussion, at the conference or in the completed essays, of whether or not the United States was an imperial power. Participants started with the premise that there was an American imperial state whose evolution was worth serious analysis. In addition, they started with a commitment to look not only at the rhetorical meanings of empire but also at its concrete manifestations in the form of power relations and institutional practices. While deeply influenced by the cultural turn of the 1990s, with its attention to the language of empire, participants also expressed a need to foreground the material consequences of imperial expansion as well. The central themes arrived at in this multivocal collaboration are reflected in the images of crucibles and capillaries that recur throughout the essays. Colonies served as crucibles where mainland theories and practices regarding matters as diverse as policing, constitution writing, eugenics, and agronomy could be hardened and refined. Through what Alfred W. McCoy, Francisco A. Scarano, and Courtney Johnson refer to as the“capillaries of empire,”these overseas experiences filtered back to the mainland where they reacted with domestic currents of change. This “imperial dialectic,” as they term it, meant that even the “little” empire acquired by the United States after 1898 produced far-reaching transformations , profoundly changing both the ruler and the ruled. In exploring these transformations, it is fair to say that the participants, particularly the American historians, felt a sense of trepidation as well as excitement. Compared to historians of other countries, Americanists have been relative latecomers to the new imperial history and postcolonial studies, both of which have concentrated on Europe and its former colonies in Africa, South Asia, and East Asia. As a case in point, the enormously influential 1997...

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