Building an American Empire

Building an American Empire PDF

Author: Paul Frymer

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2019-07-16

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 0691191565

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How American westward expansion was governmentally engineered to promote the formation of a white settler nation Westward expansion of the United States is most conventionally remembered for rugged individualism, geographic isolationism, and a fair amount of luck. Yet the establishment of the forty-eight contiguous states was hardly a foregone conclusion, and the federal government played a critical role in its success. This book examines the politics of American expansion, showing how the government's regulation of population movements on the frontier, both settlement and removal, advanced national aspirations for empire and promoted the formation of a white settler nation. Building an American Empire details how a government that struggled to exercise plenary power used federal land policy to assert authority over the direction of expansion by engineering the pace and patterns of settlement and to control the movement of populations. At times, the government mobilized populations for compact settlement in strategically important areas of the frontier; at other times, policies were designed to actively restrain settler populations in order to prevent violence, international conflict, and breakaway states. Paul Frymer examines how these settlement patterns helped construct a dominant racial vision for America by incentivizing and directing the movement of white European settlers onto indigenous and diversely populated lands. These efforts were hardly seamless, and Frymer pays close attention to the failures as well, from the lack of further expansion into Latin America to the defeat of the black colonization movement. Building an American Empire reveals the lasting and profound significance government settlement policies had for the nation, both for establishing America as dominantly white and for restricting broader aspirations for empire in lands that could not be so racially engineered.

British culture and the end of empire

British culture and the end of empire PDF

Author: Stuart Ward

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2017-03-01

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 1526119625

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This book is the first major attempt to examine the cultural manifestations of the demise of imperialism as a social and political ideology in post-war Britain. Far from being a matter of indifference or resigned acceptance as is often suggested, the fall of the British Empire came as a profound shock to the British national imagination, and resonated widely in British popular culture. The sheer range of subjects discussed, from the satire boom of the 1960s to the worlds of sport and the arts, demonstrates how profoundly decolonisation was absorbed into the popular consciousness. Offers an extremely novel and provocative interpretation of post-war British cultural history, and opens up a whole new field of enquiry in the history of decolonisation.

Regeneration Through Empire

Regeneration Through Empire PDF

Author: Margaret Cook Andersen

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2015-01-01

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 0803244975

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Following France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870–71, French patriots feared that their country was in danger of becoming a second-rate power in Europe. Decreasing birth rates had largely slowed French population growth, and the country’s population was not keeping pace with that of its European neighbors. To regain its standing in the European world, France set its sights on building a vast colonial empire while simultaneously developing a policy of pronatalism to reverse these demographic trends. Though representing distinct political movements, colonial supporters and pronatalist organizations were born of the same crisis and reflected similar anxieties concerning France’s trajectory and position in the world. Regeneration through Empire explores the intersection between colonial lobbyists and pronatalists in France’s Third Republic. Margaret Cook Andersen argues that as the pronatalist movement became more organized at the end of the nineteenth century, pronatalists increasingly understood their demographic crisis in terms that transcended the boundaries of the metropole and began to position the French empire, specifically its colonial holdings in North Africa and Madagascar, as a key component in the nation’s regeneration. Drawing on an array of primary sources from French archives, Regeneration through Empire is the first book to analyze the relationship between depopulation and imperialism.

Anglo-India and the End of Empire

Anglo-India and the End of Empire PDF

Author: Uther Charlton-Stevens

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-12-01

Total Pages: 537

ISBN-13: 0197676510

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The standard image of the Raj is of an aloof, pampered and prejudiced British elite lording it over an oppressed and hostile Indian subject population. Like most caricatures, this obscures as much truth as it reveals. The British had not always been so aloof. The earlier, more cosmopolitan period of East India Company rule saw abundant 'interracial' sex and occasional marriage, alongside greater cultural openness and exchange. The result was a large and growing 'mixed-race' community, known by the early twentieth century as Anglo-Indians. Notwithstanding its faults, Empire could never have been maintained without the active, sometimes enthusiastic, support of many colonial subjects. These included Indian elites, professionals, civil servants, businesspeople and minority groups of all kinds, who flourished under the patronage of the imperial state, and could be used in a 'divide and rule' strategy to prolong colonial rule. Independence was profoundly unsettling to those destined to become minorities in the new nation, and the Anglo-Indians were no exception. This refreshing account looks at the dramatic end of British rule in India through Anglo-Indian eyes, a perspective that is neither colonial apologia nor nationalist polemic. Its history resonates strikingly with the complex identity debates of the twenty-first century.

Settlers at the end of empire

Settlers at the end of empire PDF

Author: Jean P. Smith

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2022-07-12

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1526145472

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Settlers at the end of empire traces the development of racialised migration regimes in South Africa, Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) and the United Kingdom from the Second World War to the end of apartheid in 1994. While South Africa and Rhodesia, like other settler colonies, had a long history of restricting the entry of migrants of colour, in the 1960s under existential threat and after abandoning formal ties with the Commonwealth they began to actively recruit white migrants, the majority of whom were British. At the same time, with the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, the British government began to implement restrictions aimed at slowing the migration of British subjects of colour. In all three nations, these policies were aimed at the preservation of nations imagined as white, revealing the persistence of the racial ideologies of empire across the era of decolonisation.

Ending Empire

Ending Empire PDF

Author: Hendrik Spruyt

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-05-31

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 1501717871

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At the dawn of the twentieth century, imperial powers controlled most of the globe. Within a few decades after World War II, many of the great empires had dissolved, and more recently, multinational polities have similarly disbanded. This process of reallocating patterns of authority, from internal hierarchy to inter-state relations, proved far more contentious in some cases than in others. While some governments exited the colonial era without becoming embroiled in lengthy conflicts, others embarked on courses that drained their economies, compelled huge sacrifices, and caused domestic upheaval and revolution. What explains these variations in territorial policy? More specifically, why do some governments have greater latitude to alter existing territorial arrangements whereas others are constrained in their room for maneuver? In Ending Empire, Hendrik Spruyt argues that the answer lies in the domestic institutional structures of the central governments. Fragmented polities provide more opportunities for hard-liners to veto concessions to nationalist and secessionist demands, thus making violent conflict more likely. Spruyt examines these dynamics in the democratic colonial empires of Britain, France, and the Netherlands. He then turns to the authoritarian Portuguese empire and the break-up of the Soviet Union. Finally, the author submits that this theory, which speaks to the political dynamics of partition, can be applied to other contested territories, including those at the heart of the Arab–Israeli conflict.

Living the End of Empire

Living the End of Empire PDF

Author: Jan-Bart Gewald

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2011-08-25

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 9004209867

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Building on the foundational work of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, the essays contained in Living the End of Empire offer a more nuanced and complex picture of the late-colonial period in Zambia than has hitherto been presented in nationalist histories.

Unfinished Empire

Unfinished Empire PDF

Author: John Darwin

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2013-02-12

Total Pages: 497

ISBN-13: 1620400391

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John Darwin's After Tamerlane, a sweeping six-hundred-year history of empires around the globe, marked him as a historian of "massive erudition" and narrative mastery. In Unfinished Empire, he marshals his gifts to deliver a monumental one-volume history of Britain's imperium-a work that is sure to stand as the most authoritative, most compelling treatment of the subject for a generation. Darwin unfurls the British Empire's beginnings and decline and its extraordinary range of forms of rule, from settler colonies to island enclaves, from the princely states of India to ramshackle trading posts. His penetrating analysis offers a corrective to those who portray the empire as either naked exploitation or a grand "civilizing mission." Far from ever having a "master plan," the British Empire was controlled by a range of interests often at loggerheads with one another and was as much driven on by others' weaknesses as by its own strength. It shows, too, that the empire was never stable: to govern was a violent process, inevitably creating wars and rebellions. Unfinished Empire is a remarkable, nuanced history of the most complex polity the world has ever known, and a serious attempt to describe the diverse, contradictory ways-from the military to the cultural-in which empires really function. This is essential reading for any lover of sweeping history, or anyone wishing to understand how the modern world came into being.

Ecology and Empire

Ecology and Empire PDF

Author: Tom Griffiths

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780295976679

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Ecology and Empire forged a historical partnership of great power -- and one which, particularly in the last 500 years, radically changed human and natural history across the globe. This book scrutinizes European expansion from the perspectives of the so-called colonized peripheries, the settler societies. It begins with Australia as a prism through which to consider the relations between settlers and their lands, but moves well beyond this to a range of lands of empire. It uses their distinctive ecologies and histories to shed new light on both the imperial and the settler environmental experience. Ecology and Empire also explores the way in which the science of ecology itself was an artifact of empire, drawing together the fields of imperial history and the history of science.

Empire of the Summer Moon

Empire of the Summer Moon PDF

Author: S. C. Gwynne

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2010-05-25

Total Pages: 394

ISBN-13: 1416597158

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*Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award* *A New York Times Notable Book* *Winner of the Texas Book Award and the Oklahoma Book Award* This New York Times bestseller and stunning historical account of the forty-year battle between Comanche Indians and white settlers for control of the American West “is nothing short of a revelation…will leave dust and blood on your jeans” (The New York Times Book Review). Empire of the Summer Moon spans two astonishing stories. The first traces the rise and fall of the Comanches, the most powerful Indian tribe in American history. The second entails one of the most remarkable narratives ever to come out of the Old West: the epic saga of the pioneer woman Cynthia Ann Parker and her mixed-blood son Quanah, who became the last and greatest chief of the Comanches. Although readers may be more familiar with the tribal names Apache and Sioux, it was in fact the legendary fighting ability of the Comanches that determined when the American West opened up. Comanche boys became adept bareback riders by age six; full Comanche braves were considered the best horsemen who ever rode. They were so masterful at war and so skillful with their arrows and lances that they stopped the northern drive of colonial Spain from Mexico and halted the French expansion westward from Louisiana. White settlers arriving in Texas from the eastern United States were surprised to find the frontier being rolled backward by Comanches incensed by the invasion of their tribal lands. The war with the Comanches lasted four decades, in effect holding up the development of the new American nation. Gwynne’s exhilarating account delivers a sweeping narrative that encompasses Spanish colonialism, the Civil War, the destruction of the buffalo herds, and the arrival of the railroads, and the amazing story of Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah—a historical feast for anyone interested in how the United States came into being. Hailed by critics, S. C. Gwynne’s account of these events is meticulously researched, intellectually provocative, and, above all, thrillingly told. Empire of the Summer Moon announces him as a major new writer of American history.