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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 37.3 (2007) 471-472


Reviewed by
Gerald Horne
University of Houston
Race Over Empire: Racism & U.S. Imperialism, 1865–1900. By Eric T. L. Love (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2004) 245 pp. $55.00 cloth $19.95 paper

The author contends that previous scholarship erroneously argued that the late nineteenth-century drive toward imperialism by the United States—as evidenced in Hawaii, the Philippines, etc.—was motivated by the desire to assume the "white man's burden," to uplift the supposed benighted indigenes. The author contends that racism certainly was implicated in this process but not in the way that scholars once maintained. For example, Hawaii was seized by the United States not because of an urge toward "benevolent assimilation" or the like but because of "white racial brotherhood" (xvii).

In referring to President Grant's efforts to annex Santo Domingo, Love writes that this president, "like those before him and after, justified empire not for the benefit and uplift of people of color but rather for the advancement of the nation, specifically a white [emphasis-original] nation [End Page 471] in which African Americans were reduced to a source of 'anxiety', a word that directly reflects the period's obsession with the so-called Negro problem" (71).

About a period marked by Jim Crow, lynching, Chinese exclusion, and immigration restriction, Love suggests that no pragmatic politician wanted to place "peoples of color" at the center of an already controversial project. Similarly, he asks readers to "set aside assumptions, implicit in much recent work, that any past exercise of American imperial power abroad was morally wrong" (11).

In that light, though "questioning the inhumanity of the Philippine-American war," Love maintains that "regardless of what the United States did, the predatory maneuverings of rivals Germany and France, Britain, Japan and Russia would have collided with the desires of the Filipinos. Here was an impressible conflict. The only thing worse we can imagine than the calamity of the two-sided war that did occur would have been the three-, four-, five-, six-, or seven-sided conflict that annexation almost certainly prevented" (14). This notion is highly speculative. Such conjecture would have benefited from a closer engagement with the scholarship of generations of Filipino historians whose writings are not necessarily in accord with the author's hypothesis.

Engagingly written and deftly argued, this book relies heavily on a rich corpus of materials that long has invigorated the field of diplomatic history. In addition to records of the U.S. Department of State, Love utilizes memoirs, manuscript collections of key figures—for example, the Henry Cabot Lodge Papers, the Grover Cleveland Papers, and the Carl Schurz Papers—and numerous books and articles that have addressed these pressing issues.

This book concerns a significant issue—the origins of modern U.S. foreign policy—and its focus on "racism" at a time when this powerful word has been supplanted by the misleading and unscientific term "race" is a healthy corrective. Indeed, it would have been useful if the author in his enlightening epilogue had sought to update his insights to shed light on the current dispensation, which involves a quagmire in Iraq no less distressful than the conflict in the Philippines that energized a generation of anti-imperialists more than a century ago. Nonetheless, this brief book is indispensable for those seeking to understand and influence the contours of U.S. foreign policy.

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