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It might seem strange to those of you who
are very interested in international affairs, international relations,
whether you live inside the United States or outside the United States,
to hear that, as late as the early 1890s, most people in the United States
and indeed many others around the world thought of the United States
as a relatively isolated country, a country that did not involve itself
deeply in the affairs of the rest of the world.
Now, it's true that the United States was closely
linked by economic relationships, the movement of goods
and of credit across both of the big oceans that walled it
from the rest of the world, the Atlantic and Pacific, but at the same time,
the US was not involved in the wars and political conflicts of Europe and much
of the rest of world.
In the 50 years that followed 1890, all of that would change.
The United States would become, by many measures, an empire, and certainly
the United States federal government, which
had been heavily involved in promoting the development of capitalism
within its claimed borders, that government
would turn to using its power, its new-found power,
to expand the reach of American capitalism around the world
and start to reshape the global economy in a much more active way.
The late 19th century is a time of incredible economic growth.
In Europe and in North America, industrializing nations
are transforming at an incredible rate.
Millions of people are moving to the cities,
leaving behind their rural lives and going to work in factories.
They're moving across oceans, and they're
transforming their own lives as well as the lives of the millions of consumers
who are buying the new products that they make.
Now, other lives are being transformed as well,
as this is also an era of expanding European empire.
In particular, we see this in Africa, where,
in a process called the scramble for Africa,
European nations literally divide up the African map,
move in, take over the societies that they find there,
turn them into producers of raw materials and suppliers of labor.
Watching from the shores of the United States,
Americans have two sets of reactions to this process.
One comes from the longstanding sense, the longstanding story
that Americans had told themselves as the first post-colonial nation,
that we are somehow different.
We are not colonizers.
We are not empire builders.
Now, this might be belied by the fact that the US has just
conquered a large portion of the North American continent
over the previous 100 years.
But, at the same time, that is the belief
that many Americans have of themselves.
On the other hand, there are other Americans
who see the process of the world's resources
being divided up and allocated, it seems, to just a few nations.
And they don't want to see the United States be left behind.
Now, all of these desires come to a head in the conflict with Spain
and within the United States over the fact
that Cuba, just a few miles from the shore of Florida,
has been embroiled for the last three decades
in a conflict with its imperial power, Spain.
Many Cubans want to achieve independence from Spain.
Spain doesn't want to let this profitable colony go.
And the fact of this conflict hits Americans right in the sweet spot
as it were, lines up both those realists and expansionists on the one hand
and some of the isolationists on the other.
Because the isolationists, the anti-colonialists,
see Cuba as a nation that's a lot like the United States back in 1776.
It's trying to achieve independence, and so they
can justify some sort of intervention in that way.
And on the other hand, those who want to see the United States become a great
power cannot fathom how the US could allow another empire to hold a colony
just off the coast of the United States.
When the American battleship Maine, visiting Havana,
blows up mysteriously in 1898, killing hundreds of sailors,
there's a perfect pretext.
And soon, the United States has declared war against Spain
and is planning an invasion of Cuba and other Spanish colonial possessions.
So the 1898 war between Spain and the United States is, in many ways,
not a particularly interesting war.
It's not a particularly big war on the scale of wars.
Of all the wars that are fought by the US in the 19th and 20th centuries,
this is one of the smallest in terms of casualties.
But the outcomes are pretty significant all the same,
and not just because one of the heroes who emerges from the war
is the Secretary of Navy, Theodore Roosevelt,
who actually goes and enlists as an officer, leads a famous charge in Cuba
and catapults himself to even greater national fame, fame
that he will use to become vice president and then, ultimately,
president.
And he'll be one of the major forces shaping the course of US capitalism
in the first two decades of the 20th century.
But that's not the sole reason why the war is significant.
It's significant, in part, because the US gains huge quantities of territory,
overseas possessions, which provoke a debate.
And that debate and how it comes out is really significant for the way
that US capitalism will develop into a truly global force, a force that
is linked to the expansion and the growth of US military
and political power throughout the world over the next century.
Now, when the war ends and the US signs a treaty with Spain,
the US ends up with control over Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines.
Cuba will become independent, at least officially,
although the US will continue to intervene directly in its affairs.
Puerto Rico will become a US territory, which it remains today.
And the Philippines will first be a US colonial possession
and, ultimately, become both independent and a close ally of the United States,
closely linked by economic as well as political relationships.
But the debate over how we get to that point
is really significant because the sides at least
seemed to break down between those who want to keep those nations,
or those places, those societies, at sort of an arm's length
and those that want to incorporate them closely, maybe
even ultimately as states, into the United States itself.
Those who want to incorporate these nations as states don't seem to win,
but those that want to incorporate the societies of Cuba,
and Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, and, ultimately, other societies,
into the wider US economic empire do actually win.
Now, there are dissenting voices.
There are those who say, the US should hold no colonial possessions at all,
should help these countries become independent
and then let them go on their own way.
These include figures like Jane Addams or Mark Twain.
Those voices ultimately do not win.
They do not control and shape the future of the US relationship
to the rest of the world.
It is those who, on the one hand, don't want to incorporate the Philippines
or Puerto Rico or Cuba as states but do want to incorporate them into the US
economic empire-- those people do win the day.
And in part they do so because there is broad agreement throughout most
of the American elite, Mark Twain and Jane Addams
aside, that the US does need to expand as an economic force in the world.