US Empire and Implications for History

AHA Roundtable Proposal

 

Title: “US Empire and its Implications for History”

 

After 2001, when “empire talk” joined “globalization talk” in academic and public discourse,[1] it became even more obvious that historical research and teaching must now operate in spaces of material change and cultural meaning that national boundaries cannot contain. This new world now seems familiar, yet the historical profession still broadly embraces the very twentieth century idea that national histories, individually and collectively, comprehend history as a whole.

Historians have nonetheless developed frames, terms, and methods of study that supplement or complement national history, which never disrupt or displace it. We thus have elaborate literatures in comparative history, Third World history, post-colonial history, world history, and global history, but as “empire” becomes a hot topic, its expansive and deepening study implicitly disrupts and displaces national history. This critical implication itself has an intellectual history. In the 1990s, globalization debates had spawned research on US imperialism (mostly, it seems, in cultural studies), which located the nation in wider frames of power,[2] and a some historians had used “empire” to analyze America critically long before that.[3]  But now “US empire” is on many, many lips, in many disciplines and media, more than ever before, provoking historians to rethink an idea that for most had seemed permanently consigned to the national past. Empire is a specter haunting national history.[4]

The goal of this roundtable is to use the idea of “US empire” to explore histories of politics, culture, and geography embracing North and South America, Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia.  We seek to share ideas and information that are proliferating in dispersed sites of academic specialization. Our project is partly conceptual and theoretical, partly methodological, partly empirical, and in large part pedagogical. We hope this roundtable will generate future collaborations, most immediately and urgently, in teaching.

Replacing “globalization” with “empire” imparts a sharper analytic and geographical focus to a vast, indefinite set of interconnected historical processes, which transcend and challenge the intellectual reach of national territorialism. Using “empire” underlines power, inequality, and coercion, inside and across national boundaries; it questions assumptions about the composition of national heritage, as it also challenges received ideas about what constitutes empire[5]; and, it displaces the nation from history’s center stage; whereas “globalization” and its offspring, global and world history, do none of the above.

The idea of “US empire” provokes questions that histories of colonialism have not asked because of their exclusive focus on “old empires,” based in Europe. US empire implicates contemporary knowledge about both colonial and national history. For where, indeed, do we find the national identity of the US?  Does it infect world knowledge produced in the US in American terms? And where then does US history itself unfold? Only inside US boundaries, or anywhere that Americans exert power? If America’s empire began -- as almost everyone agrees it did -- before old European colonial empires ended, might we therefore imagine the modern world of national states as a temporary, contingent formation, bolstered by force, ideology, culture, and academic history, but crumbling before our eyes, inside an older, more powerful imperial formation, appearing now in new incarnations? 

With such problems in view, many analysts suggest the concept of “empire” needs reinterpretation, at the very least to accommodate today’s dispersed and spatially discontinuous patterns of imperial power, and thus to distinguish old from new imperial forms by drawing useful analytical boundaries among globalization, imperialism, and great power expansion.[6]  Such reinterpretations implicate modern history very broadly, across all epochs and world areas, because modern history almost by definition deploys the idea that the national state is history’s last foundation of political order, because the nation is modernity’s unassailably permanent form of identity and governance. How might a new understanding of empire’s enduring hegemony alter our sense of the nation?  Or might critical reflection on the changing forms of empire induce a rethinking of the ideational opposition between empire and nation, both of which might be subordinate historically to other, as yet untheorized formations of power?

Our panel will explore such issues to consider how we might study and teach history more effectively by keeping US empire in focus. Eight roundtable participants will speak for ten minutes each before we open up to general discussion. We will set up a webpage for posting online readings to inform our discussion.  We will invite a collection of specialists in various fields to join the audience prepared to participate. The roundtable will thus be an interdisciplinary workshop for sharing ideas, information, readings, syllabi, other teaching materials, and intellectual strategies. We want to form a nucleus for future collaborations crossing regions and disciplines to improve history education in various institutions, most immediately in the Philadelphia area, where many of us work, but also reaching out through the AHA to historical profession as a whole.  


 

Roundtable Participants and Presentation Abstracts:

1. Introductions: David Ludden, History, University of Pennsylvania.”

2. Anne Norton, Political Science, University of Pennsylvania. 
    "Where is the American Empire?"
This very simple question is not readily answered.  American imperial power can be located in space and time.
Location in each dimension has consequences for the other.  Thinking about the location of American imperial
power also draws attention to questions of placement, topography and circulation.  Where is imperial power
located?  What shapes does it take?  These questions lead to a reconsideration of Marx and other theorists of
commodities, embodiment and circulation.

3. Peter Gran, History, Temple University.

    “American Imperialism as a Subordinant Part of the `Rise of the Rich'".

American imperialism is taken here as a subordinant part of a phenomenon called `the Rise of the Rich', the discussion here concentrating on the role of the Trilateral Commission challenged in recent years by the entree of a number of new players into the world market and fearful as Wolfowitz wrote recently of a return to the era of world wars. In this context, the Trilateral Commission is allowing for a concentration of power in the U.S. military as an imposer of world order, this power in contrast to the much-diminished power of the U.S. economy and oddly-juxtaposed to the declining well-being of the American people."

4. Andrew Cayton. History, Miami University.

   "The Imperial Republic: War and the Expansion of an Empire of Liberty." 

I would discuss the ways in which numerous wars of conquest have focused the historical dynamic in the
United States between coercion and consent, between a pervasive fear of institutional power and a missionary
zeal to expand freedom, and between national interest and universal values--all issues that have both fueled and
constrained the use of state power in North America and the rest of the world for more than two centuries. In
short, my larger purpose would be to reflect on the historical origins of American imperialism. 
5. Ann Farnsworth-Alvear, History, University of Pennsylvnia
   “Learning from the Latin American Left: the ‘Internal Colonialism’ concept and its current usefulness.”
I plan to discuss the ways Latin American intellectuals have used and are still using the term "internal
colonialism," with my intention being to explore its possible wider utility.  Although most often associated with
critiques ofracism and genocidal practices visited upon the indigenous peoples of the Americas, the concept
grows out of Latin America's long and varied relationship to Empires of various stripes.  Both that long
relationship and this critical concept are instructive for scholars curious about current-day forms of both direct
and indirect U.S. power in the world.

6. Fred Dickinson, History, University of Pennsylvania

”Asia/Pacific Empire”
When in the late 1950s/early 1960s America’s New Left historians originally placed imperial conquest at the center of the American experience, their primary geographic focus was Asia/the Pacific.  Although the attempt to describe American imperialism as the consequence of an insatiable desire to secure an “open door” for
U.S. trade in the region met with mixed success, the principal truth upon which the argument stood, remains.  The Asia/Pacific basin has been the most important arena for the flexing of American muscle since the founding of the Republic.  From the 18th century China trade to the 19th century "opening" of Japan and acquisition of Hawaii and the Philippines to American military, political and economic preponderance in the Pacific from 1942, developments in Asia/the Pacific have played a pivotal role in the life of the nation.  I will contrast the pivotal importance of this region with the manner in which it has normally figured in the higher education curriculum and public discourse in the United States and suggest ways in which a history of the United States as an Asia/Pacific Empire offers refreshing new insight into our past, present and future.

7. Robert Nichols, History, Richard Stockton College

   "Mapping Power: Spatial Contours of Imperial Geography"

I will offer a comparative mapping of power projected into Asia and the world in the colonial and post-colonial periods. Over time have evolved and faded shifting overseas "archipelagos" of colonial centers, military bases, economic zones, embassies, shared enclaves, and a miscellany of airfields, naval stations, and other sites of influence and infrastructure. This project maps and compares specific historical moments on an Asian and world scale: the British Empire in 1935, the United States in 1970, the Soviet Union in 1980, and the United States in 2005. Crucial locations of historic interregional importance are re-inscribed by new missions and ideologies. New technologies, economies, and politics relocate nodes of power within regional networks of connection and competition.

8. Neil Smith, Anthropology and Geography, CUNY Graduate Center      
    "Spasms of Empire and the Threat of Freedom"

The United States has aspired to three moments of global empire during the "long twentieth century." We are currently living through the third of these moments and like the previous two, the resort to geopolitical calculation as a means to wider geoeconomic ambition (as in the wars in southwest Asia) in all likelihood signals the zenith and impending decline of this particular spasm of empire.  Among the many characteristics that distinguish this moment from earlier thrusts at empire is the extent of ideological appropriation of "freedom" as a far blunter weapon of imperial self-interest than ever before.  Masquerading as a promise, "freedom" is deployed as a threat.  This presentation highlights the deployment of "freedom" in the Bush administration compared especially with the global ambition of Woodrow Wilson.  

9. Thomas Ricks, Professor of History Emeritus, Villanova University, and Adjunct Professor, University of Pennsylvania.

   “Running with the Bad Boys and Global Free-Fire Zones: US Empire at Another Middle East Crossroad”

          Since 1945, the US has undergone a slow evolution in its policies and practices of empire in the Middle East world region. Initially focused on training programs, arms sales, and occasional covert actions to support, strengthen and finance “regional influentials” such as Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iran, the US military and civilian policy makers moved to another level following two events in 1979; that is, the Iranian peoples’ overthrow of Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, and the Wahhabi militant attack and seizure of the Ka’bah in the holy city of Mecca, Saudi Arabia during the annual hajj. Soon after, the Pentagon’s creation of a paramilitary force rivaling the CIA operatives, and the conviction that US forces alone can best maintain imperial interests and partnerships in the region came to dominate Washington’s thinking. By the late 1990s, regime changes and military interventions became more frequently discussed, and, under the right conditions, the only option to combating regional challenges to the empire and its regional partners.

          Following September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centers, and Washington DC, the urgency to press forward with interventionist policies practiced in Latin America and previously whispered about in the corridors of the Pentagon, CIA and White House emerged as the “war on terrorism” doctrine for the Bush administration. Now, with the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq behind them, the Pentagon has taken the lead on “running with the bad boys” and talk about the need for a “global free-fire zone” in still another shift to a higher playing field or “theatre” in the Middle East/West Asian region.

The often-used metaphor of the Middle East as a “crossroads” of trade and civilization is well worth re-examining as a “crossroads” for the new aggressive US military and civilian policies of “preemptive strikes” and occupations of the Middle East as a region. After sixty years of military training missions, US AID projects, and counter-revolutionary actions, the present “war on terrorism” and democracy building signal a new age empire in the making. Whether we are witnessing a dawn of a new age or the beginning of its fall, the US empire intends to redefine the region with popular support for the next decades, whether the peoples like it or not.  Iran as the next testing ground for the Bush doctrine may prove to be a fatal footfall given its 20th-century history.



[1] On September 26-27, 2003, the Social Science Research Council sponsored a conference entitled, "Lessons of Empire." Participants focused on whether currently prevalent "empire talk" provides a useful set of concepts for analyzing contemporary US economic, cultural, political and military power. See http://conconflicts.ssrc.org/lessonsofempire/

[2] For instance, Cultures of United States Imperialism Edited by Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease. Duke University Press, 1993.

[3] See William Appleman Williams, Empire as a Way of Life, New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.

[4] And not only in the US: for India, see Arundhati Roy, An ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire, Cambridge: South End Press, 2004.

[5] A concise account of this conceptual problem appears in Stephen Howe, Empire: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

[6] One of the most stimulating texts in this respect is Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.