The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America - Hardcover

Sexton, Jay

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0809071916 ISBN 13: 9780809071913

Verlag: Hill & Wang Inc.,U.S., 2011

Inhaltsangabe

President James Monroe’s 1823 message to Congress declaring opposition to European colonization in the Western Hemisphere became the cornerstone of nineteenth-century American statecraft. Monroe’s message proclaimed anticolonial principles, yet it rapidly became the myth and means for subsequent generations of politicians to pursue expansionist foreign policies. Time and again, debates on the key issues of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century foreign relations—expansion in the 1840s, Civil War diplomacy, the imperialism of 1898, entrance into World War I, and the establishment of the League of Nations—were framed in relation to the Monroe Doctrine.

Covering more than a century of history, this engaging book explores the varying conceptions of the doctrine as its meaning evolved in relation to the needs of an expanding American empire. In Jay Sexton’s adroit hands, the Monroe Doctrine provides a new lens from which to view the paradox at the center of American diplomatic history: the nation’s interdependent traditions of anticolonialism and imperialism.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Jay Sexton is University Lecturer in American History at Oxford University. He is the author of many works in the field of foreign relations, including Debtor Diplomacy: Finance and American Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era 1837-1873.

Jay Sexton is University Lecturer in American History, at Oxford University. He is the author of many works in the field of foreign relations, including Debtor Diplomacy: Finance and American Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era 1837–1873.

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1

Independence

The American Revolution was the first of what would be many struggles for independence from colonial rule in the Western Hemisphere. This “age of revolutions,” as it has been called, witnessed the gradual breakdown of the colonial empires that Old World powers had constructed in the preceding centuries. This process lasted throughout the nineteenth century (and, in some places, deep into the twentieth). It not only entailed the achievement of political independence from a colonial master, but also concerned the political arrangements that would replace centuries of colonial rule, which often were born out of the struggle for independence. In a broad sense, the dissolution of colonial rule in the Western Hemisphere also involved the much slower erosion of economic structures and cultural forms that had upheld colonial regimes, as well as their neocolonial successors. The multifaceted and protracted process of decolonization dominated the Western Hemisphere in the nineteenth century.1

The origins of what later became the “Monroe Doctrine” lay not just in the deliberations of the Monroe cabinet in 1823, but in this larger geopolitical context. The message of 1823 was rooted in the policies and principles of statecraft that early American statesmen formulated to guide their young republic through the rocky waters of the dissolution of the European colonial order. These principles and policies looked both inward and outward. American statesmen aimed to bind together the various states, sections, and factions of their union that had been established during the era of the American Revolution. They also looked beyond their borders, seeking to consolidate their independence from an increasingly powerful British Empire, as well as to advance their interests in regions of the crumbling Spanish Empire. The interrelated processes that defined the Monroe Doctrine all shaped American statecraft long before 1823: the ongoing struggle of the United States against persistent British power, the nation-building process within the American union, and the projection of American power over peoples excluded from their constitutional arrangements.

The Rising British Empire

Early Americans were not bashful about proclaiming their ambitions for their fledgling republic. George Washington spoke of “our rising empire”; Thomas Jefferson boasted of the expanding American “empire of liberty”; and Tom Paine predicted that American principles “will penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot; it will succeed where diplomatic management would fail … it will march on the horizon of the world and it will conquer.” In the twentieth century, American power would transform global politics, though perhaps not in the ways foreseen a century and more before. The global preeminence of the United States in our own time has given early American statesmen an aura of clairvoyance for predicting what one historian has called the “rising American empire.” Yet there was nothing preordained about the global rise of the United States. Though Americans predicted future greatness for themselves, they also were consumed with their vulnerabilities in an era in which their young and untested union faced challenges from within and without.2

The empire that was most dramatically rising in the nineteenth century was not the American but the British. Despite having lost her most important North American colonies in the 1783 Treaty of Paris that ended the American Revolution, the height of the British Empire lay in the future. The British Empire was larger and more powerful in 1820 than it had been in 1776. During the intervening decades, it tightened its grip on India; its resources and people poured into its settler colonies in Canada and Australasia; it acquired strategic way stations such as the African cape and Singapore; it increased its commercial and naval presence in distant markets in East Asia and in Latin America; its naval power became unrivaled; industrialization at home fueled economic growth and the expansion of overseas commerce; it developed a sophisticated and flexible financial system capable of both underwriting international trade and funding wars of unprecedented cost; and its political system weathered the ideological storm unleashed by the American and French revolutions. Even within North America, the British retained a position of great strength, holding Canada and the strategically important Caribbean islands of the British West Indies and maintaining relations with Native American tribes. Following the defeat of Napoleon’s France after nearly a quarter of a century of conflict (1793–1815), Britain stood atop the global hierarchy, a position of preeminence that it would consolidate as the nineteenth century progressed. By the early twentieth century, the British governed two-thirds of the world’s colonial territories and three-quarters of its colonial population. To be sure, Britain’s position of strength brought with it great anxiety stemming from the need to secure its many interests scattered around the globe, particularly as rivals emerged later in the century. This anxiety could serve as the rationale for retrenchment (as would be the case in North America) or could fuel further expansion (as would occur in Africa in the late nineteenth century).

The nineteenth-century British Empire was a multifaceted and dynamic entity. It included formal colonial possessions such as India and, in the late nineteenth century, large portions of Africa, governed through governmental structures originating in London. Settler colonies in Canada and Australasia functioned as a virtual “British West,” as the historian James Belich has recently put it, attracting capital and migrants from the home country much like the American West of the same period. The inhabitants of the settler colonies enjoyed increased self-government during the nineteenth century, though they increasingly viewed themselves as members of a “Greater Britain.”3 In Latin America and East Asia, the British largely refrained from formal colonial rule, instead pursuing their interests through the informal projection of commercial and cultural power. Central to the British Empire in both its formal and informal manifestations were so-called collaborating elites, the native peoples whose self-interest led them to associate with the British. Recent historians have emphasized the interconnectivity and dynamism of the British Empire, arguing that its power rested on the fusion of its component parts. The integration of formal colonial possessions, settler colonies, and a global commercial empire constituted an expansive and adaptable “British world-system,” as it has recently been called.4 The decentralization of the British Empire contributed to its power and, as the nineteenth century progressed, paradoxically fueled its integration. Far from being the product of simple military might, the nineteenth-century British Empire rested upon the interconnected foundations of commercial and financial power, naval supremacy, communication networks, technological innovation, and political cooperation with indigenous elites.

The expanding British Empire cast a long shadow over nineteenth-century America. The young United States remained entrapped in the webs of the British world-system long after achieving its political independence during the Revolution. “In the year of grace 1776, we published to the world our Declaration of Independence. Six years later, England assented to the separation,” wrote the American nationalist Henry Cabot Lodge in 1883. “These are tolerably familiar facts,” Lodge continued. “That we have been...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Hill & Wang Inc.,U.S.
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0809071916
• ISBN 13: 9780809071913
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 290
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar