Geography is History

Neil Smith.American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. xxvii + 462 pp. Maps, notes, and index., $39.95.

A century ago, the completion of the telegraph and the advent of flight prompted many to speculate that the nature of spatial relationships had fundamentally changed. In Drift and Mastery, Walter Lippmann wondered whether transportation advances would make geography itself obsolete, or whether some day governments might no longer organize themselves around territory. Over the last few decades, the explosion of global capitalism and telecommunications has sparked another flurry of declarations about the "end of geography." Claims about a borderless world, where the mobility of capital, information, and people weakens traditional nation-states, have become commonplace. The United States has long been at the vanguard of these changes—whether rhetorical, material, or both—and American Empire explores the effect these ideas have had on the nation's foreign policy in the first half of the twentieth century. Strictly speaking, Smith's subject is the career and work of Isaiah Bowman, a geographer and statesman whom he has researched for many years, and earlier versions of some chapters were published in geographical journals during the 1980s. Yet this book goes far beyond the category of biography toward a more general indictment of American power abroad and takes special aim at what Smith considers a uniquely American vision of world geography.

Smith is a geographer who has long been interested in problems of globalization and development, and here he extends that interest backward in order to connect the world of Bill Gates and multinational corporations with earlier moments of "American imperial assertion" (p. 9). While the growth of American economic power abroad in the twentieth century has a well- documented history, Smith is primarily concerned with the way this change involved a departure from traditional patterns of imperial power. Paramount to Smith is that we understand how American global power depended upon contradictory, confused, and arrogant assumptions about world geography that historians have overlooked. This is a thesis that some historians will find provocative and others may dismiss as speculative and somewhat polemical. In either case it is an attempt to think systematically about the elusive and understudied relationship between historical change and geographical knowledge.

Smith's argument involves variants of American exceptionalism, such as the claim that Americans were exposed to peculiarly narrow ideas about space because of their relatively late arrival onto the imperial scene. While nineteenth-century forms of colonial power involved military occupation and civil administration alongside economic extraction, the United States became involved in the world beyond its borders primarily through trade, and so was interested in accessing markets rather than acquiring colonies (though this presumes that one does not characterize the conquest of the west as a form of colonialism). Instead of pursuing direct political control of territory—which accompanied the British East India Company and the Massachusetts Bay Company, for instance—American corporations "led with trade, financial, and direct investment agreements while governmental involvement increasingly focused on establishing broad legal and policy conditions" (p. 19). Smith emphasizes this distinction because the world market involved a more "abstract geography" that allowed Americans to downplay the importance of territorial demarcation and in its place to entertain a more "spaceless" concept of geography. As a result, the economic and cultural power wielded by the United States, especially since World War Two, has been assumed by Americans to transcend the traditional limitations of boundaries, territory, and difference. As Smith puts it, the American empire has for at least the past half-century conceived of itself as simply beyond geography.

This is an elusive concept, and Smith pushes it in two directions. First, he suggests that this peculiar relationship to space helps to explain American geographical ignorance. Without a traditional empire, Americans did not need to learn about these very real locations, and "this loss of vacant, conquerable space has provided an enduring wellspring for the antispatial imagination of the American...