An Economic History of the United States: Conquest, Conflict, and Struggles for Equality by Frederick S. Weaver

Author:Frederick S. Weaver [Weaver, Frederick S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781442255203
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2015-11-11T23:00:00+00:00

AMBIVALENT COLONIALISM

The Louisiana Purchase (1803) and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that concluded the Mexican War (1846–1848) enabled the major expansions of U.S. territory. Both new areas were contiguous to the existing United States and regarded as empty. From the Mexican War, the cession was half the territory of Mexico but only 5 percent of its population. This was not an accident; when some U.S. politicians advocated taking more or even all the Mexican territory, opposition to incorporating into the United States a large population of mixed-race Mexicans torpedoed the more grandiose proposals.

The U.S. political leaders, reflecting their constituencies, were generally reluctant to take over nonwhite populations if the nonwhite populations had any chance of becoming voting citizens. The struggles over “the Negro Problem” in the South, the virulent anti-Chinese stance in California behind the Chinese Exclusion Acts (1882 and later), and the late nineteenth-century tidal waves of southern and eastern European immigrants, whom many believed were incapable of being assimilated into the U.S. (white) mainstream, hardened nativist and racist convictions among U.S. whites.

Although enjoying many of the same opinions about racial superiority and inferiority, Europeans did not have such strong reservations about taking over non-European peoples. While some European colonies in Africa and Asia went back centuries, Europeans’ scramble for new territorial acquisitions in Africa and Southeast Asia accelerated sharply in the last half of the nineteenth century. Europeans’ ravenous appetites for colonies meant that with a few minor exceptions, all of Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia (including present-day Indonesia and the Philippines), Australia, New Zealand, and the South Pacific islands had been carved into European colonies by 1914. Great Britain and France reigned over the largest colonial empires, but Belgium, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and Holland all administered substantial overseas colonies full of non-European peoples.

The pattern in East Asia was dissimilar and diverse, and U.S. aggressiveness there demonstrated that while wary about establishing colonies of nonwhite peoples, the United States was most interested in access to trade and investment opportunities irrespective of locals’ colors.1 But getting that access in colonized areas was difficult or impossible and was not easy even in parts of East Asia that were not colonized. From the seventeenth century, the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean governments restricted all contacts with Western powers. When the Chinese government moved against British merchants smuggling opium into China, Britain’s victory in the Opium War (1839–1840) led to a treaty in which China ceded the island of Hong Kong and generous commercial rights and privileges to the British. China soon extended these rights and privileges to the United States, France, and Russia, an arrangement that became formalized among the four Western powers (Open Door policy), giving equal access to the Chinese market. Despite the weakness of the Chinese central government, dissension among the Western powers and the Chinese people’s strong hostility toward Western intrusions, expressed in two large, bloody, and popular anti-Western rebellions—the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864) and the Boxer Rebellion (1900)—prevented westerners from dividing China into colonies.

The Japanese reaction to U.S. Admiral Matthew C.

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