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  • Uncle Sam's War of 1898 and the Origins of Globalization
  • Akira Iriye
Uncle Sam's War of 1898 and the Origins of Globalization. By Thomas Schoonover (Lexington, University Press of Kentucky, 2003) 180 pp. $30.00

Volumes have been written about the Spanish-American War of 1898. Is there room for another? Much will depend on the perspective that the author brings to the familiar story. In this book, Schoonover seeks to put the war in the context of international history, especially the history of globalization. Arguing that the 1898 war was a culmination of the United States' long quest for establishing its economic hegemony over the Caribbean and for opening the markets of Asia, the author views the conflict with Spain as the catalyst that ensured the success of these efforts, [End Page 150] thereby catapulting the nation to the front rank of forces promoting globalization, turning it into a "metropole state" (59).

The book's overarching framework is global. Rather than viewing the Spanish-American war as a response to the Cuban revolt—which somehow came to entail fighting in the Philippines, as most accounts note, thereby stressing the accidental nature of the conflict and the subsequence emergence of the United States as a colonial power—Schoonover sees an inexorable march of history in which the nation was a primary mover. Since early in the Republic, he contends, Americans had been anxious to expand, commercially if not territorially, southward and eastward, thereby establishing a connection with both the Caribbean and East Asia. The United States would be at the center of this huge Pacific–West Indies region, integrating it into the world economy and in the process accumulating its own wealth and power.

This is a rather sweeping generalization, and a book consisting of only 122 pages of text could not ordinarily be expected to provide detailed data to amplify it. But the treatment works well in Schoonover's hands. A specialist in the history of U.S.-Latin American affairs who is also conversant with European history, he has now added an East Asian dimension to his body of knowledge. Admittedly, virtually all of it comes from secondary sources, but he amplifies his account by utilizing U.S. and European archival material.

One serious reservation concerns the relationship between imperialism and globalization. This book is based on the assumption that they were interchangeable phenomena, that the United States sought to promote globalization through imperial expansion. Domestically, the author stresses social imperialism, contending, as others have done, that social and economic ills were such that the nation's leaders sought to alleviate the problem by undertaking expansionist programs overseas. Since the economy benefited from its integration into the globalizing world, it follows that imperialism and globalization were two sides of the same coin. Such a generalization may be contested, however. Imperialism was not the only pervasive phenomenon in international affairs during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. Internationalism, too, was spreading in Europe, the Americas, and Asia. Such internationalist projects as economic interdependence through free trade, cooperation among nations in solving disputes, and cultural and educational exchanges that were being promoted with vigor at the time were just as important a development, if not more so, than imperialism.

Akira Iriye
Harvard University
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