American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization

13. Toward Development: Shaking Loose the Colonies

On the eve of World War II, more than 60 percent of foreign direct investment from the developed capitalist world was targeted at the developing world.As anomalous as this was historically, it fostered the assumption that postwar economic expansion would focus on what came to be known as the third world. Indeed, with the Marshall Plan not yet dreamed of, it was an article of faith among American economic and political leaders in 1941 that European economies would maintain considerable barriers against U.S. foreign direct investment and that opportunities for the country’s economic expansion after the war would emphasize “dependent territories,” predominantly in Africa and Asia. These territories were deemed dependent politically , as in the case of colonies, or economically, as in the case of “backward ” countries (the term still used at that time), and they were referred to as territories in recognition of their lack of independent status as nationstates . But the nomenclature “territories” also disguised a real shift in U.S. ambitions. In 1919 the issue at the Paris Peace Conference concerned who would have territorial control over “dependent” areas and under what kinds of administrative arrangements and, therefore, who would have access to their resources, whereas by 1941 the question was expressed more in terms of investments and markets. Where the colonial system was taken for granted in 1919, albeit often critically, U.S. policy by the 1940s aimed at dissolving as far as possible the territorial claims implied by colonialism. This had the paradoxical result that the dependent territories were more on the 13 TOWARD DEVELOPMENT: SHAKING LOOSE THE COLONIES agenda in 1940s postwar planning than in 1919, but less so as territories per se, at least from the U.S. perspective. The American Lebensraum was a resolutely global vision, and the “dependent territories” were increasingly integrated into it. Franklin Roosevelt’s avoidance of public territorial pronouncements—the banter about Bowman and bananas notwithstanding—applied as much to Asia and Africa as to Europe, but here, too, highly secret territorial discussions were underway almost before the first shells were fired. Especially in the U.S. State Department but also in British and to a lesser extent Soviet Foreign Offices, personnel eagerly anticipated the postwar map of the world. A tangled web of colonial preferences, tariffs, quotas, subsidies, and tax agreements governed economic access to these areas, often to the detriment of the United States, and so the State Department sought to sweep these away in the name of “free trade.” Undersecretary of State Edward Stettinius, the former chairman of General Motors, voiced the expansive U.S. vision succinctly: The question of greatest importance before us at this time is . . . the negotiation of an International Commercial Policy Convention which all the countries of the world would be invited to join. . . . The convention would deal with all important aspects of trade relations such as the reduction of tariffs, the abolition of preferences (those between the British Empire countries, for example), the abolition of quantitative restrictions , the prohibition of export subsidies, and the principles to govern relations between state-trade and free-enterprise countries.1 The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were established in this period to regulate postwar financial flows and direct capital investment into the dependent territories. These organizations were the brainchildren of the U.S. Treasury Department, but it was the State Department’s job to winkle loose as wide an array of colonial and other dependent territories as possible and to establish the most expansive conditions for their integration into the postwar economic order. While Roosevelt was as ever his own maverick in foreign policy affairs, the State Department had a more decisive control over the campaign for decolonization than it did over the disposition of Germany. Shaking loose the colonies and opening economic access to the entire underdeveloped world was a central pillar of the new global economic geography of the American Lebensraum. At root it was not only trade and the export of U.S. goods that were at stake but also the economic engagement of these territories in a U.S.-dominated global capitalism. National economic expansion and survival were widely believed to depend on it. But the U.S. 348 / toward development allies Britain and the USSR had their own ambitions, which provoked periodic clashes in negotiations over postwar planning—indeed, some of the sharpest inter-Allied exchanges outside the contest over the...