An Informal Imperialism

In the fallout from America’s response to the 9/11 attacks, there has been a resurgence of literature pertaining to the topic of American Empire and Imperialism. The overriding theme has been that the Bush Doctrine led the United States down the path of unilateral warmongering, brazenly avoiding the wishes of the broader international community by ignoring the need for unanimous United Nations Security Council agreement. The narrative has been packaged as being a modern form of Empire and Imperialism, with the planet’s sole superpower embracing these concepts for the first time in its history. However, this master thesis seeks to highlight how that narrative is ultimately misleading and conveniently omits a key period in American history. This master thesis is in part, therefore, aimed at extinguishing the myth of American exceptionalism. It does this by addressing the period 1898-1912, thus encompassing the presidencies of William McKinley (1897-1901), Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909) and William H. Taft (1909-1913). Pivotal foreign policy ventures such as The Spanish American War of 1898 and the subsequent annexation of The Philippines, as well as the acquisition of the Panama Canal, are amongst the cases addressed during this process. The broader, overarching research question of ‘whether the United States conduct in this period was of an imperialistic nature’ is supplemented by further sub-questions. These include questions relating to the role of the navy as a decisive instrument of American foreign policy and the influence of rival rising powers, in particular Germany and Japan, as stimulants in an increasingly aggressive U.S. foreign policy which sought to safeguard existing spheres of influence and expand into new theatres. A section is also dedicated to the evolution of presidential powers in the role of foreign policy and asks whether Theodore Roosevelt’s tenure marked a significant shift in the role of the Chief Executive in the formation of foreign policy. The research also seeks to explore the question of if, and how, this brand of American imperialism differed from the preceding models of imperialism exhibited by the European metropoles, namely Great Britain’s classical 19th century phase. The research methods were qualitative and utilized a wide array of both primary and secondary sources.