President McKinley, War and Empire: President McKinley and the Coming of War, 1898 by Richard F. Hamilton

Author:Richard F. Hamilton [Hamilton, Richard F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, 19th Century, 20th Century, Europe, Spain & Portugal, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780765803290
Google: K2VnAQAACAAJ
Goodreads: 258200
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2006-01-15T12:50:36+00:00

4

The New Empire in the Twentieth Century

With the ratification of the 1899 Treaty of Paris the United States acquired an overseas empire, an achievement “writ large” in the leading history textbooks of later decades. Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, in The Rise of American Civilization (1927), described the events in a chapter entitled “Imperial America.” In Samuel E. Morison, Henry S. Commager, and William E. Leuchtenburg, The Growth of the American Republic, the empire is introduced in a chapter entitled “Imperialism and World Power.” In John D. Hicks, George E. Mowry, and Robert E. Burke, The American Nation, the development is reviewed in a chapter entitled “The Path to Empire.”1

Those textbook accounts and many of those that followed dramatize the nation’s new international position but they do not, typically, indicate the magnitude of the achievement. One possibility would be to report how much territory was gained. Another option would be to tell how much population was added. Something else is missing: the textbooks typically say little about the use made of the “New Empire.” What was changed as a result of this new “imperial” status?

Most of the American empire, roughly four-fifths of that non-contiguous property, was acquired three decades earlier with the Alaska purchase. How much additional territory was gained in the “great aberration” of 1898-1899? The achievement added a total of 138,187 square miles to the empire, most of that being the Philippine Islands. For sake of comparison, Lord Salisbury is said to have added 2,069,000 square miles to the British Empire between 1887 and 1891. That would be fifteen times the size of the American achievement.2

Another measure, one borrowed from the world of sport, would be the United States’ “standing” among the world’s empires. The American overseas empire in 1910, including Alaska, had 728,987 square miles of territory. Following the most frequent accounting procedure, that would make it seventh among the world’s empires after Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Portugal, and the Netherlands. Effectively, the outcome of the 1898 war brought a change in position—the United States replaced Spain in the seventh-place “slot” (Table 4.1). In relative terms the American empire was equal to 6.4 percent of the British holdings and 15.2 percent of France’s empire. It stood better next to the others, for example, at 70.9 percent of Germany’s holdings and nearly equal to the Dutch empire in size. Alaska plus the Philippines were roughly the same size as the Dutch East Indies, today’s Indonesia.

Judged in terms of population the American empire was probably the smallest of the seven.3 With just over nine million persons, the American empire amounted to only 2.6 percent of Britain’s 352 million-person total. In short, whether judged in terms of territory or population, the American empire was a modest undertaking, not what one would expect of a “world power.”4

Another anomaly in the reporting on empires should be noted. That “frequent accounting procedure” defines “empires” in terms of overseas holdings thus excluding the Russian empire, easily the second largest after the British.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.