Continuities

Hi, everybody.

J Sexton here from the University of Missouri here to

talk to you about late 19th century American foreign policy.

The United States in the world. Um, in the late 19th century as America is becoming,

um, uh, an important player on the world stage and don't say for a second.

Oh, what a boring topic. This is not a boring topic.

This is one of the most exciting ones, both for historians writing about US history.

But also, I found in my experience,

old students can really get into this because there's a lot of exciting

things happening to the United States and to the world in this period.

And that's what we're going to talk about today.

But let me frame this and introduced this topic in, uh in two different ways.

Um, the first is from our vantage, our perspective, um,

as students and historians of the United States,

and when we step back and look at what's happening in this period,

what we see is that the United States and

its position in the world is being read revolutionised

No longer is America this kind of small,

experimental republic clustered along the eastern

Atlantic seaboard of North America,

as it had been when it was founded in the early 19th century.

No, no, no.

Now the United States is this continental BMS, this large country,

this large nation

that is new, reunified after the Civil War.

Of course, in the 18 sixties and beyond, that is beginning

to exert its presence in a very haphazard and ad hoc way

far beyond its shores.

So we're going to talk about that process.

We're gonna think about how the United States, from our vantage today,

how we can see its role in the world changing.

But there's another interesting bit to the story,

and we'll also keep our view on that.

And that is what did Americans and foreign observers.

What did they think about this at the time,

as this new nation was becoming a rising imperial presence

and the big headline, I suppose, and we think about in that way,

What did our historical actors think at the time?

The big headline is that they were admired in debate,

debate and controversy about how the United States should relate

to foreign peoples to foreign markets.

Um, and two foreign nations, um,

and empire so It's a story of contest station in a story, uh,

indeed of ambivalence of how this new rising power should relate to the wider world.

And what we're going to see and where we're going to end up is, of course,

that fateful critical moment of 18 98

18, 98 at the end of the 19th century.

This is when the United States goes to war with Spain and comes out of that war.

Um, with a new cluster of overseas colonies, Um, in other words,

the United States has transformed itself from a continental Republican empire

in North America to a colonial empire with a global reach.

So what we're gonna do is we're gonna say, Hey,

what's new in this period in the second half of the 19th century?

Um, what's not new?

We should always be aware of both continuity, um, in history as well as change.

Um,

and then we're going to end with that moment in 18 98

when the United States is on the precipice of becoming that overseas,

um, global colonial power.

Okay, so the first point we're gonna talk about, um, actually is,

um though Americans in 18 98

thought that they were on the precipice of a new moment in American history.

Um, actually, we can step back and look at 19th century America as a whole and say, uh,

some things were new, but actually, there is a series of important continuity.

Ease,

um, and I'll give you three. Important continuity is from the late 19th century

to the earlier 19th century.

The first is the idea of American Empire itself.

Um, this is an idea deeply rooted in the history of the United States.

Um, this is an idea that is discussed and debated, Um,

as early as the founding fathers, at the very beginning of the national experiments

like Thomas Jefferson writes about how

the United States is an empire of liberty. More on that in a second.

What he means by that,

But the idea of the United States is an empire is not new,

and we can certainly see that when we look at

America's dealings with the indigenous peoples of North America,

there's really no other term to encapsulate or to

describe how the United States deals with native peoples,

then of empire, and indeed of of colonialism

and as in 18 98.

The question of how to,

um interface and interact with indigenous peoples

caused great political and moral controversy.

Um, in the United States.

So you might think here about the debates over Indian removal

in the days of Andrew Jackson in the 18 thirties.

A question about what to do with the five civilised tribes

of the Southeast United States or South East North America,

and one group of white Americans saying

it was the responsibility of the United States to uphold its

its agreements with those native peoples to honour their

commitments to allow them to stay on their lands

in what was the state of Georgia,

whereas others said, no, no, no.

It was the duty of the United States to remove the

native populations both because it would open up those lands to

white settlers who were deemed to be more worthy of the

lands in the racialised thinking of the time but also also,

um, important because, um,

for the preservation of the native societies themselves.

So we see this question about what, in essence, is colonialism.

We see this, um, popping up earlier in the 19th century,

something which I think foreshadows on what's happening later on.

Second continuity I would point to,

and something we've kind of already alluded to was the significance of race.

Um um, and racial hierarchies in the structuring of US relations,

both with a variety of peoples and with the wider world here.

We would talk, of course, about slavery.

Um, and later, after the Civil War, the emergence of racial segregation

in the racist structures of Jim Crow.

One set of rules for white Americans. Another set of rules for the freed people

the freed African Americans

from the days of the Civil War racial hierarchy

was intrinsic to 19th century America.

That debate had been long running,

and it's not new when we get to the late 19th century,

as the United States is interacting with other peoples of

different of different races and indeed of different religions.

It's not new to think of how those racial structures might impact and

determine how the United States develops

formal political relations with different peoples.

The third thing I would say that's important, um,

from the early 19th century to the late 19th century

is that there was great debate and contest station,

um, over the formulation of American foreign policy.

Okay, Americans have never agreed on how they should relate to the wider world.

Certainly not in the 19th century.

Even those, um,

putative symbols of national unity and

national foreign policy were deeply contested.

And the classic example here would be the Monroe Doctrine

of 18 23 the Monroe Doctrine, which announced that the New World,

the Western Hemisphere, was no longer, um,

to be the subject of European colonisation or political intervention.

And the myth would have us believe that all Americans

of different parties and regions believed in the Monroe doctrine.

And of course, on one level they did.

But when they invoked the Monroe Doctrine, they meant very different things.

Indeed.

So if you were a pro slavery Southerner

when you were talking about the Monroe Doctrine,

what you were really talking about was a foreign policy

that would protect your interests as a slave state.

Whereas if you were a New England merchant and

exporter when you talked about the Monroe Doctrine,

you wouldn't be talking about protecting slavery.

In fact, you might very well be anti slavery.

Instead, you would be talking about a way to promote your interests as an exporter.

Okay,

So lots of different Monroe doctrines and lots

of different perspectives on how the United States,

um, would interface with the wider world.

And I would just say here that this idea, um,

this myth that domestic politics stops at the water's edge That's really, uh,

an idea from the days of the Cold War and the mid 20th century.

And it's projected back in time by historians writing in that period.

And it probably still appears in many of the textbooks that you're

that you're reading. It's a myth.

And indeed it's all all the easier to see it as such now that we're in our own era

of profound conflict

over how the United States relates to the world.

Okay, so lots of continuity is that's my That's my first point.

So when Americans are debating in 18 98 when

they're on the precipice of becoming an imperial power,

they're actually harkening back and drawing

back to long running deep seated debates

in American political culture