Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World

Abstract

When U.S. historians begin to talk about empire, it usually registers the declining fortunes of others. The term's use among historians in reference to the United States has crested during controversial wars, invasions, and occupations, and ebbed when projections of American power have receded from public view. This periodicity—this tethering of empire as a category of analysis to the vagaries of U.S. power and its exercise—is one of the striking aspects of empire's strange historiographic career. When it comes to U.S. imperial history, one might say, the owl of Minerva flies primarily when it is blasted from its perch.1 Yet despite recurring claims to the contrary, the imperial has long been a useful concept in work that attempts to situate the United States in global history, and it continues to be so, as demonstrated by a wealth of emerging scholarship. To be sure, its use has varied from the superficial and invocatory to the substantive and analytical. In the latter category, two broad clusters of research stand out. First was the “New Left” school of U.S. foreign relations history, which dramatically critiqued inherited interpretations, identifying the United States' role in the world as imperial, and defined primarily by the global pursuit of export markets. A second, later body of work on the “cultures of United States imperialism,” based in American studies and literary criticism, treated imperial meaning-making, particularly with respect to the politics of racialized and gendered difference. The pathbreaking research carried out under each of these banners has made possible a new and exciting imperial historiography that overcomes some of its limitations.

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