America’s Global Empire – Tony Hopkins

We were very glad to see that so many people have turned out to welcome Tony
Hopkins back to the British Studies Seminar, and we
have a lot of refugees from the history department that we haven’t seen
recently and we’re very glad to see them as well. I should mention
that a couple of weeks ago, The Wall Street Journal called me up and asked me whether I would review
Tony’s book. But they said, we have a question for you. We know
that he’s an old friend and a colleague. Would you be favor? Would you be willing to give it an
unfavorable review? And I said no problem.
So there are several jokes in this. More or less at Tony’s expense. But he’s a good sport.
There are several parables. But all that I’ll mention here is that
I said right away that I thought this would be a better and more
manageable book at half the length. And then I retracted
and said that for Tony’s purposes, it had to be a book
this size. I won’t say any more about this, but accept that the
central chapters are really a magnificent historical
account of the dependencies of the United States in the Pacific and
the Caribbean. No one has ever done this before. And it’s to Tony’s great credit
that he’s managed to carry on with this great historical work.
So I concluded that this is a book of prodigious
knowledge condensed into only seven nine hundred and seventy pages.
Tony. Thank you.
Well, thank you very much, Roger. I’d like to begin by saying what a splendid and generous start that was.
But in view of the criticisms, I can see this is going to be an uncomfortable and possibly unpleasant
occasion. I’m relying on those of you who have been paid to attend this session
to do your duty, I think is the phrase I’m sorry about the weight
of the pork and the implied criticism. There isn’t a word that is superfluous.
But I should take this opportunity to say that Princeton University Press are going to
issue a disclaimer, because already there have been legal action
threatened by those by on behalf of those people who bought the book and have attempted
to lift it with one hand. A new disease known as
instant carpal tunnel syndrome has been spotted from New York down
to here. And I would advise you in that case, either to use both hands
or better still, buy several copies so you don’t have the labor of moving around,
has one in every location. Go.
Let me say that this is a very subtle book tour that you may not have gathered so far.
But I must return to my text if we are to keep within the three hours that I’ve
been allocated. And so I should say, in all seriousness,
it is a very great pleasure to come back from what it may well be my fourth and possibly final.
We rehearsed this, for heaven’s sakes, get the timing right. Final appearance.
The others have been blotted from my mind, not by Sherry, but by the various disasters
that have occurred in the course of the talks of this kind where one is nearly always stretched beyond
limit. And on this occasion, I have gone beyond all provinces
and frontiers and will pay the price. But it is a pleasure to be back to meet Roger
and Dagmar again, to be in this room, which has hosted so many
distinguished speakers. And I am. I understand that Roger didn’t put it like this.
A warm up man for a very big name. He’ll be coming to you next week. And I am honored
to precede Karl Rove, one of the great historians
of the 1890s.
And now today, I have set myself, as I said, an absurd
task, which you will see from the book. Every sentence I’m uttering
now is amplified in the book without a redundant word. What I
want to do is to have a scamper through several centuries of US
and euro history in order to try to convey to you as crudely
as possible. And crudity and overgeneralization are some of the hallmarks of my specialization
over many years. What the purpose and the argument
of the book are, you will not have any definitions. You will not have
much evidence, and I apologize for that. Only
with qualification, because as I say, it would take far too long. And it’s one reason why I’ve written the book.
So what I’ve done is to produce a synthesis which offers an approach
to US international history that I hope since novelty escapes us all is at least
fresh. And the outcome of this
basically is to try to show that the United States has been part of an
imperial system over the past three centuries. I will say I’m using the
word imperial here to refer to a set of characteristics. It’s not an ideological
term as I’m using it, at least today. This argument has
three building blocks. Globalization is the first one. Oh, it’s
boring, I know, because everyone is into it. And I remember and some of my ex-students
here will remember about 2006 when I was talking to them about the next phase that’s coming.
Where is history going? I said, well, for once I know where it’s going. Everyone’s gonna be taught about globalization
and they are. And there’s even a sense in which this subject might be played out because it’s so
familiar to us. It’s mandatory in books, titles of articles and dissertations.
However, there is an oddity. There’s a strange gap which we historians are responsible
for because there is as yet no developed historya graphical argument
about whether globalisation was basically one thing that got bigger with stops and starts
or whether it can be decided into different phases or categories on what basis
of those might be. And I’m taking the second view, and I will present to you three
phases which will cover the centuries. The second building block
is the notion of a dialectic. That is to say, one phase leads to another
through the processes of expansion. And you might say even the success of one phase
which throws up forces which will transmute or even overturn lead
to a new phase. And that goes right through to the present. And the third
building block is that the prime agents of this process of globalization
in the past few centuries have been empires, not the only agent. Many others, of course,
but the prime agents. So what I’m trying to do then is
to draw the US into the mainstream of at least Western history. I know
this could be extended, but I did four or five hours to include India and China and so on. But that
is a start. And the first phase is that of what I call Proteau globalisation,
which I’m using the label simply to describe a
phase of euro history which is familiar to you. A phase in
which the economies were agricultural with commerce, with dynastic
states. And this, of course, is a characteristic that runs over many centuries,
but which in the 17th and 18th century reached a high point, not
a terminal point, but a high point in the military fiscal states of specialists
call them that came into being and reached something of an apogee.
In the late 18th century, and indeed, these military fiscal states
were brought down, though not counted out at the end of the
century. As a result of a major fiscal crisis which affected all of them,
Montesquieu, who saw many things, saw this in 1748.
Even before the Seven Years War, I give myself time, just excite this
because I made the mistake of going to an archive, you see. And I it’s the only quote I’ve got and
just one more, which I might as well give it to you. A new distemper has spread itself
over Europe, infecting our princes and inducing them to keep up an exorbitant
number of troops. It has its redoubling and of necessity becomes contagious
for as soon as one prince augments his forces. The rest, of course,
do the same so that nothing is gained thereby. But the public ruin
now this fiscal crisis had a very well-known political dimension to it.
In terms of the rise of reformist and radical movements, seeking greater transparency,
seeking greater accountability across Europe, and at times
seeking to express themselves outside the Constitution.
And the American Revolution he scampered on in the last quarter of the 19th century.
As you well know, can be seen, I think as an offshoot
of this central euro crisis, the mainland call it is being
in a manner of speaking outer provinces. Everything you see taking place
in UK with regard to the fortune of the military, fiscal
state, the financial crisis, the political upheaval is also
manifested, of course, in the United States, but not solely in the United States.
As I’ve tried to point out, by the last quarter of the century, Britain’s
military fiscal state had extended to the mainland colonies. And the West did this, as we very
well know. But it had reached the limits of its ability to control the
mainland for two reasons technological difficulties which weren’t overcome for another hundred
years. And of course, because the mainland colonies themselves had become more powerful. Population
had increased. And as we know from the work of Geoffrey Williamson, .com loss and others, living standards
had risen too. So there was the power, the heft to respond,
if not aggressively, at least sternly, to depredations
or other unwelcome policies by the Imperial Center.
And again, as is well known, I must keep on saying that because until we lock the
door, you can still access exit. But as also is well known,
the fiscal crisis hit particularly after 1763
with the end of the Seven Years War, and the solution there
was to shift the burden of taxation to the colonies. It was really one of the first
of several episodes that the British became quite adept at applying to the colonies in 1848
and actually after 1945. If one choice is to tax people at home
who already existing, it seems a more pleasing option to those in power to try and do
the same thing a long way away, where retaliation might be more difficult or less and less well felt.
What we have gained in recent work and here I must mention the work of James
Vaughan. If you don’t know whether he’s here or not, is an insight into
the politics of imperial policy at the crucial moment of the 1760s.
And without this work, which James very kindly allowed me to have in his dissertation form,
I would not have the confidence to make the calculated political calculations
that I have made and the historical conclusions. And this actually leads me much
beyond the 1760s. It provides a basis for my understanding of the first half
of the nineteenth century. We now know that the politics of the 1760s
sure saw a division between roughly a pit tight group
of wigs and reformist wigs, I should say. And on the other hand,
Grenville Buit North, who wanted to have an extractive empire.
Here was the battle. And if you think of those things, the choice between extracting from an empire
a delicate developing trade to increase revenues. That way you have in the 1760s
a precursor of the kinds of development that would come up in India in the 19th century
and elsewhere in the colonies of the 20th century. So much begins as I have belatedly
come to realize in the eighteenth century and this battle was carried
out. The conservative extractive wing of politics won, and so
they went first to India. Here is the first global indication of this
argument attempting to gain from advancing into India. The revenues
of the Nawab and other ways to raise revenues there in order to solve the problem.
And that solution had its limits. The government, British government had to step in
and take over to a degree the East India Company. The costs of doing that, of acquiring
the revenues were exceeded, the benefits that came from it. It was
in those global circumstances that Britain turned to the Unite the
mainland colonies with all of the consequences that, you know, before you conclude
with a yawn that you know all this. I just want to say
in concluding I have several conclusions, by the way, so don’t get too excited. The last count
there are probably in double figures so you can tick off one. It’s true.
What I’m trying to do is to revive the economic theme. I’m
not going to say economic interpretation is not total. The economic theme in the understanding
of the big moves which led to the revolution, if you recall those, you know this inside
out that the intellectual historians have really captured the field for
a long time. So I’m trying to go back to that. But this is an argument of much more than
about taxation and representation, which used to be conceived within one set of colonies.
This is an argument that goes to the base of the power structure in Europe.
In the second half of the 18th century.
When independants came, he said hurriedly in 1783,
something very odd happens. It’s odd, but it’s understandable. He has the understandable
bit in 1783. U.S. historians begin to write
the national saga. Let me put it that way I dont use that to the pejorative way or national history.
This is not only understandable, it’s actually very conventional. Every independent country from Nigeria
to New Zealand does exactly the same thing off with the imperial yoke. Let’s talk about
the domestic story that basically is still the story of the 19th
century and in fact, you could push that on into at least the First World War period.
As I said, I’m speaking grossly, but you get the sense of this. So you have this understandable
story, understandable if you are familiar with what happens to studies
of decolonization in other parts of world. It’s also odd because
my argument here is that the continuities far outweigh
the elements of change. And it’s odd because especially in the settler colonies,
the elements of continuity Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc. are always very
pronounced. So we should at least pause before assuming that very many things
change in 1783. They do eventually, but not
at this time, I think. And if you if you look at the main headings
of the constituents of history during that period, you can see that you can recast
them a little bit. So instead of a struggling through from the Jeffersonian
revolution to the era of good feelings to the Jacksonians and then the
second party system and it is break down. So all of which is highly relevant. And I am actually being very
dismissive of very serious arguments. You can actually just recap centralise
the political debates of the time as essentially not about
the acquisition of liberty and democracy, but about the acquisition or creation of
viability and development. And if you look at it that way, you can see the arguments
about what elements of the military fiscal state to incorporate and whether it is possible
to have an agrarian set of republics, on the other hand,
which will meet the needs of viability and development. Those are
the main themes of that period. Actually, frederich
List, whose famous book The National System, was published in
countries that were becoming independent later and which were also
struggling with how to get economic development in a situation of continuing colonial
subordination. Frederick List actually was in the United States in the 1820s,
as many of you will know. And it was a formative experience for him. And if you look
not only at the ideas of what kind of state there should be, which were very much the ideas that
were talked about in Britain in the 70s, 70s and 80s in those different circumstances.
If you look at the economy of the time, what do you see? Bentham had got it right
in 1793 as early as that, when he said with reference the discussion
about what was going to change with the independence. United States said people have said that it’s all gonna be a disaster.
We’re going to lose trade and so on and so on. And he 1793, he said, has it happened? No.
He said our trade is much bigger now than it was before. And if
you fast forward a bit to the 1820s, 30s for 50s with the expansion of cotton, you can
see that that seem he got it right and that trade expanded.
We know that finance expanded. What a rapid turnaround. Barings helping
to finance the Louisiana Purchase in 18 02 and the
and subsequently going on to fund the railways, the state building activities
of states, as well as of the federal government, just as Barings were doing in the Latin
American Republic. So that influence was predominant.
And in terms of culture, scholars of decolonization make
play of the phrase counter-culture, by which they mean to achieve cultural
independence. All ex colonial states have got to try to distance themselves
from the culture of the home country, especially, of course,
in the case of settlers who come from that. If they cannot say in the United
States, as the uraba can say, we came from a hole in the ground. The origins,
of course, were very tangible and ever present. So the problem of creating
a counter-culture was also one that was seen by
contemporaries. Emerson’s famous 1837 lecture on
the Declaration of Literary Independence is notable as an aspiration,
and it aroused much comment because it had not been achieved.
And if you look at Fenimore Cooper and Longfellow,
even though Whitman was very unfair when he dismissed Longfellow as somebody
a kind of feudal resit, you nevertheless you can see that
these are authors who writing in a kind of Wolter Scottish way and importing
much more from Britain than would be the case later on. Now, as
the national story is being written by a new set of authors,
note, nobody goes beyond 1812 or 1815. If you’re starting in the mainland colonies
and many people finish up exhausted in 1783 and one can understand it, you’ve got it not you get
the insular story that is, say, the mainland story being told by a new set of authors.
Now, you might think that we imperial historians being highly competitive
would object to this, but of course we don’t because we’re getting over the defeat at Yorktown. That’s
very tough to face. But also, of course, fortuitously or not, imperialist
ones have got so much on their hands. They’ve got to occupy India. There’s Australia to be settled.
Then there’s a French wars. We getting Singapore and Cape Town, you know, it’s too much going on. So
you have this parting of the ways. But the reality is that these political,
economic and cultural ties remained not just important, they became even
more important. How that’s the oddity that the Atlantic complex, which
historians of the 18th century have done so much to reveal to us,
is subtle network of connections across the place. It’s as if it had disappeared
and it has disappeared, but there is no evidence for why it should have disappeared. On the contrary,
it should have greater emphasis at this time in the books. Britain was better off
without the colonies than with them.
I mustn’t give you too many quotes, but pass of time. But in case you think
that this is the burbling of an ancient amateur in your field, you’re right.
But selective quotations may help.
Here’s Henry Clay in 1820. Britain’s aim, he
said, was to maintain the United States as, quote, independent colonies
of Britain, politically free, commercially slaves.
And 12 years later, he still thought the United States had not yet broken free
from the British colonial system. Henry Carey writing
later, a foremost economist, of course, thought that the free trade policy of the
southern states and home and then a Britain in 1846 would lead substantially,
quote, to the recolonization of these states under the commercial dominion
of Great Britain. And there are many quotes of this part of this
of this kind. And you see, if you look at it like that, the United States
during this period has a new distinctiveness, which is of immense
importance for historians who are trying to deal with decolonization, because
the United States was the first major ex colonial state,
followed by the republics of Latin America, of course, to grapple with these problems.
And yet we’ve missed it with all the work done on so-called third world countries
in the 20th century and the ex-colonial states dilemmas. It should begin with the
study of the US in the first half of the 19th century.
One more point about this period, you’ll be glad to know you may feel that
the euro side of this story has been missing a bit, but it isn’t
because as the United States can be conceived in its politics as having
increasingly a struggle between forgive the crudity conservatives
and progressives, especially from the thirties, with the rise of the anti-slavery temperance movement, etc.,
etc. This is paralleled in Europe after 1815 by a great
struggle between conservatives and progressives. Was the military fiscal state to
be reinstalled? The dynasty is going with it. Victor Hugo was quite clear in 1815.
He said Waterloo is a real counter-revolution
and Biron villified Wellington for the same purpose. They saw it as setting back
the cause of reform and putting in these MAYNOT monarchs and other dynasties at the same time.
And there is another parallel because Europe too was deep colonizing. Doesn’t
that sound odd? But it’s true. We dont think of this. Nor do the European specialists.
Very largely after 1815, the states that had been trampled
on by Napoleon were trying to work out how they were
going to become viable and have some development. It led, of course, later
to the unification of Germany and to the unification of Italy. So there’s a decolonization
story which is untold in Europe to.
The War of Independence. William Seward said writing in 1853
was the first act in the great drama of decolonization
on this continent. And I think that’s the first time I know
of that phrase decolonization being used in this context.
I would very much like to be have that improved on, in fact, that colonies as your. Was
invented in the 1830s by the French. So it may be a little earlier than that,
but I think it’s very telling that he actually saw the evolution of the states in 1783
in those terms. And now my second phase, I haven’t offered you another
finally let. I’ll try and put one in in a minute for you. The second
phase, again, speaking with all the subtlety that has marked my words so far.
The second phase I’m calling with, what even I will have to say is Leadon originality.
Modern globalization from 1850 to 1950. There
is there reserve a basis to this modernity?
The phrase is attributed to Baudelaire writing at exactly this time. And of course, he had
one view of what modernity was. And Walt Whitman in his poetry had a very spacious
view of what the modern was going to be. So contemporaries were
thinking like this in various dimensions, and I’m using the phrase
simply to put together many things that are familiar to everybody
standing behind the things that we read about in the books. Is this momentous
shift from land to industry? Town and country
had been struggling for centuries. But from 1850 through to a point in the 20th
century, 1914 sees many of them hammered into the ground. The
military fiscal state with its landed political base and it’s landed political
economy, was giving way to a new form of state.
And modern globalization consists of two things essentially the creation
of nation states. And the creation of power driven machinery
as opposed to handicrafts and what you have in Europe during this time is this
process getting underway. I know Britain was a bit in advance, but third quarter,
second quarter of the 19th century, little Belgium was extraordinarily an outlier,
which started industrializing about the same time, but very small country, of course. But
most countries in in the West began their process of nation building
and industrialization after 1850.
Now the US is more or less excluded from this wider story.
You look at the Oxford history of the United States. I know it’s of the United States and their wonderful books.
The last one. Roger, I’m glad you didn’t follow through on your rather cruel criticism of the length of my book.
But the last volume in the Oxford history of the United States has
is as long as mine and it covers 30 years.
I rest my case. So but most
of those volumes and many others in a splendid series is wonderful scholarship.
Do not, as they might say, reach out to look further afield.
So I’m emphasizing that the US is excluded in the treatment of most
studies from this big process that I have referred to.
And yet, of course, as you know, this is the substance of what’s going on after
must be counted to be an unprecedented decade. The formation
of Germany, the form 1860 to 70, the formation of Germany 1870 71,
the formation of Italy 1860 to 70. The reforms in the Austro-Hungarian
Empire, the reforms in France after the defeat at, say, Dall in
and even the laggardly British had to go as far as having a real reform as opposed
to 1832 in 1867 when they really did significantly widen the franchise.
And as one cynical conservative politician said somewhat bitterly,
what are we going to do? We must educate our masters. In other words,
people were in the air, the more people were in the political arena, and they had to start thinking about what to do
to maintain some form of elite control. So what was going
on after 1865 in the states in the deliberate creation,
think of Native American policy and sort of a deliberate creation of a nation state parallels
and also Mitt fits the chronology of what is going on in Europe,
in industry, too, as I mentioned, Germany, France, the Netherlands, the United
States after 1850. And you have this cascade,
a continuum, because this transition from Proteau globalization to modern globalization,
of course, was not just taking place a deed of the night. It was something that was
stretched out over generations. And that gives you a clue to the differential
state of the formation of both nation states and of their industrializing process.
And that in turn I won’t go into it gives you an angle on attributing motives
to imperialism in the late 19th century, some being economic, some being politically political.
And this is where in the United States, the real market revolution takes place, it’s
not the one in the books. I think in the first half of the century, it’s after 1850
that you get these major structural change. And of course,
these changes integrated the advanced economies in the cyclical movements
of international trade, which affected the late 19th century in particular
in many adverse ways. With these changes called forth, new social
forces, towns and urban work working force, the agricultural
controls of of the land owners was was weakened by the increasing
visibility of the power of of states. And so there was
a real test for the emerging elites of the late 19th century,
poised between the land and some form of modern man,
educated, perhaps making his money in business or the professions and so on.
And you see this across Europe. And when an economic crisis struck, as we know it did
in the United States in the 80s and 90s. You get these series of of
riots. You got the Haymarket riots, you’ve got the Pullman strike, many others. You have the
railway unions being formed. You also have the first Socialist Party. It’s
boring. It’s exactly the same as what’s going on in Europe. We’re almost to the letter almost
to the date. And the reaction of elites in Europe
was to try to come together because they saw
two things. Firstly, they didn’t want to go back to couldn’t go back
to a pre-modern era. Secondly, they recognized that the framework
of the polity was being altered. It was being pushed out, is being pushed down. It
was under threat from disruptive forces, which industrialization
itself had thrown up. This is a time when
the great thinkers like, well, just after the turn of the century, Perito, Moscow
and Michelle, they’re all thinking about elites and what is the basis of political power.
And this is another indication that this is not just a post, a re a retrospective
view of the past, but it actually exists. So basically, what all of them did and
you have these alliances in Europe, which are known in shorthand is the alliance of
Rye and Ion in Germany, the alliance of wheat and iron in France and
the role in the case of France, of the Catholic Church. This was secular and
spiritual interests coming together to try and formulate a national
policy that would hold Fizi Petraeus elements within
the polity and out of that. So this this movement of the
broadly Kwesi liberal conservative elites throughout
the late 19th century was an attempt to save the emerging
capitalism from its own excesses. And as you know, when the dust settled
after nineteen hundred, what happened was that the survivors, because
they came through, turn to some form of amelioration, recognizing
that the new modern state had to shift from a warfare state of the military
fiscal state to becoming a welfare state. So you have Bismarckian reforms
jollity in Italy. Lloyd George in Britain. And you have the progressive’s
in the United States looking for and Roosevelt’s attack on the trusts and so on. Looking
for a more I won’t say a kinder capitalism, but a capitalism with a bolt
on ameliorative element. Now, imperialism
can be thought of from this perspective as a form of compulsory
globalization. There were many reactions to these crises
that I’ve referred to, and most of them were domestic. But imperialism. Was
this arisk a response to these problems, which, as I said earlier,
drew upon different motives in different countries. And having this sense of
uneven development through the late 19th century, you can see that, say
the British, who are heavily dependent on foreign trade and finance, had predominantly economic
motives. And then you turn at the other end of the continuum to Italy, which
had very little external trade and finance connections. And there the the
rather puny imperialism in North Africa and elsewhere was an attempt
to build the nation first and then hope that economic development would follow
between 1880 and 1914. Everything that was not more or less
already colonized was brought under European control. So that is a big
argument that the Latin American republics and China were in fact in some way semi colonies.
By 1914, even the Penguins of Antarctica had been brought under
international supervision. So there wasn’t much left. And this was exactly the time in
when the United States finished up with an odd empire in the sense that
much of it was inherited. And that’s very rare, all consisting largely of
part of Philippines and Hawaii in the Pacific and of
Puerto Rico. And I have included Cuba as the best example of a protectorate in the Caribbean.
So, again, what you have is the timing of the acquisition of the Empire of the United
States is identical with that of the big push to imperialism
elsewhere by the European powers and the run of motives. I won’t go into it here.
I would love to, by the way, but I won’t go into the run of motives can be identified
by the same procedure. I won’t go into it because having decided
that he said going into it that that the old La Faber argument
about the search for markets simply wouldn’t work. I then had a brilliant idea.
Which was of looking at the return trade. That is the export of sugar to the United
States. There is much more important is not to search for markets. What market is there in Puerto Rico
and Cuba? War torn and all the rest of it and poverty stricken. But what about the sugar,
which was a major importer and you import into the United States contributed hugely
to the federal revenues that looked much more promising six months later. I
worked out that the key figure in this Henry have my
I have a Maya who ran the sugar trust from 1887 and was a huge
contributor to Republican the Democratic parties in 1890.
Whenever it was. And a the biggest single supplier
to the next election, I can’t subtract 4 from 1896. OK, so
he was at this. He was very influential. Right. It’s not markets. It’s sugar. You got it.
Hopkins a star at last. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work out because
Atkin’s. I’m sorry. Is there a bit of detail I give you? Just showing off, so to speak, at
kids who was have my as agent in Cuba said back off. We’re doing
all right. Here, he said the Spain will give Cuba autonomy. We can work with that. You don’t have
to take any action. He was wrong, but have my. I believed him. And then the other thing
that happened. Life is so hard for these capitalists. You know, you can’t.
Your heart bleeds. The other thing that happened was that sugar beet began to be developed
in the Midwest, right at this time, 80, 97, 98. And of course, the sugar beet
people didn’t want free entry to shift to raw sugar from abroad, which would have suited
Havemeyer. And of course, the swing states were politically very sensitive. Naturally in the Midwest
and so on. So he was stymied for that. So that was 6 months gone.
Anyway, I thought I’d share my pain with you.
By nineteen hundred it of course, the United States had achieved effective
independence. Politically, it’s quite clear economically.
The US was a manufacturing power penetrating British markets. Wall Street
and the City of London co-operated of the various crises to bail one another
out. And of course, if we turned to culture, you can see that
you’ve got a different set of people coming to the fore in the late 19th century. The vernacular
voices of Walt Whitman, of Mark Twain and one of my favorites, Emily
Dickinson, become very pop. This is a different world. It’s a world that is homegrown,
rather, and imported. William Stead, a noted British commentator in 1984,
said the old, almost pathetic humility with which American writers
listen to the criticisms. Europe has disappeared and all of this
was celebrated by the new flag. The Pledge of Allegiance Veterans
Associations. Here is my last quotation, and that is from
Woodrow Wilson, speaking at the commemoration of
the hundred twenty first anniversary of the Battle of Trenton in 1931.
No war ever transformed us quite as the war with Spain transformed. It goes on like that
for a bit. And then it says that little confederation has now massed
and organized its energies. A confederation is transformed
into a nation. I’ll leave you with a Gallic rhetorical
question. When I say leave you, I’ve still got a little more to say. But Gallic rhetorical question,
could this have been said before 1898? And if so, what date?
How far back could you push a statement like that? A confederation is transformed
into a nation. Now I’m coming. This is my second finally.
And there’s only one more. All right. My second finally is that we’re still with this modern
state. And something very odd happens, which it
compliments the elimination of Anglo American relations between 1783
and 1961. The insular empire I’ve mentioned
acquired with such enthusiasm and banging of drums and hymns
and so on, being written and popular songs as it disappears, as
Roger said, although I will just underline it. The last book
written on ruling the Empire in the 20th century was published
in 1962 by a fine scholar. I’m very happy to
give him as much possible credit as I can. Those were the days when titles were simple,
short sentences were short, and authors did not have to claim
more about themselves than was warranted. You see, I too have a sense of looking back
to a golden age which didn’t exist. So the oddity
is that there’s nothing there except, of course, wonderful research
that has come forward in the last 20 years or so on the indigenous history of individual
islands. But this is really captures an island,
but very rarely are the cross references putting it broadly. The people working on the Caribbean
very rarely look at the Pacific and vise versa. And then Hawaii is a bit of an oddity because it wasn’t
in the Spanish Empire. So, you know, the the Spanish guys are not sexually interested in it. So what I’ve tried
to do, it is very simple is to put this together. And if we
look at that very quickly, we can see that
it would be very easy to dismiss this island, just a few islands. You know how many people were
there were twenty five million people in 1940. That’s sizeable, but it’s still small in relation
to Britain and France. Does it matter? Is it important? Well. I think you can
treat this empire as being a microcosm of the big empires.
Size is not the only consideration. This empire had all
the characteristics that the much bigger empires also displayed.
It had var. it. It was an empire of setlists. It was an empire of concessions.
It was an empire of smallholders. The three big categories that cover the British and French
empires. It was constitutionally diverse. Imperial overlords
have this gradation of obscure terms to try to obfuscate the real relationships
between the center and the various peripheries, new dominions, condominiums
and things like protectorates and so on. You’ve got incorporated and unincorporated. All
of that is present to the administrative techniques employed
in direct rule, direct rule, a simulation association. All of these things
are found in the in the American empire and of course, the ideology of rule.
The concept of white supremacy justifying a civilizing
mission to uplift the fallen or those who had never risen.
And the colonial economy, identical raw materials, notably sugar, but Barker
and a few other things coming in exchange for manufactured goods. And finally
and tellingly, I think the trajectory of this empire was just the same as that in the British
and French empires. Nineteen hundred of the First World War, a phase of occupation,
something of a boom in produce prices, which actually assisted the the rulers.
And in the case of the United States, this was a first phase, actually last phase of
enthusiasm for empire. First World War. She was a test for these empires across
the world, 1920s. We’re not going to let them shake us off. We’ll get
back to business as normal. Then the 1930s came riots,
objections, protests across all of these empires, including the United
States. And finally, of course. Oh, it’s my second. Finally, I’ve got one more left. Finally,
of course, after World War 2, I anticipate myself a little bit here.
You’ll see that the D colonizing process of the US insular empire
occurred at exactly the same time as the British and French empires.
So to my. There are differences we can come to. To my third phase.
And we’re getting towards my final finally now, which I have called again
an originally post-colonial globalisation from 1950 to the present.
And what I argue there is that the after this in this period, not appearing immediately,
but developing right through the second half of the twentieth century, there was a transformative shift
in the character of globalisation, world opinion.
Civil rights, a new form of world morality which embraced not just civil rights but
human rights, a wider sense of entitlement to health
and education of welfare, broadly, an assault on concepts
of no racial supremacist new institution and new international institutions.
The United Nations and its many affiliates which were advertising an increasingly to
police policing. This new morality. There was also what
historians of decolonization refer to as a green uprising, not
a green revolution. That’s Wheaten, India, but a green uprising, which is that point
in the anti-colonial movements where a more restrained, elitist
urban sense of opposition gives way to the incorporation of
the peasantry, of the farmers, and indeed of the urban workers into
political movements. If I had time, I would have pointed out that this actually is the
shift from Adams to Jackson in the 1820s. In
that decolonize phase, which then came up again in the 20th century elsewhere,
and that was taking place throughout the colonial period,
propelled by expanded means of communication, motor transport, radios,
etc. And finally
and finally. Yes, I better I better use my lost finally now, otherwise I will deceive you even more. And
I’ve tried to do so far. There were changes in the world. Economy is fundamental.
The old links between sending manufacturers for raw materials began to weaken.
And if you look at the world increasing in the late 20th century, it’s a world into
industry trade. That is that’s why you exchange parts with China and so on
and so on. The big already developed economies trade among
themselves. And then the other important change was the outsourcing, so to speak,
of manufacturing. Today, Asia accounts for something like
And out of that, too, you have new regional blocs, no longer a center and a periphery,
but regional blocs which may run from north south, as in the case of NAFTA or in the case
of New Zealand and Japan and China. And these are conditions,
I think, which justify a major change in the nature of globalization. And
of course, it’s the change in the nature of globalization that provides the real
entry into an understanding of decolonization after World War 2. I say
a real entry because if you treat it in that way, you can do things which are not done so
far. You can include China as a semi colony. The 1949
revolution, for instance, can be thought of as a colonial nationalist
revolution. So you can have a much broader picture of decolonization and redefine
the subject. So it’s not just a question of what happened to formal empires in Asia
and in Africa. And if you look at the period of decolonization,
historians of decolonization shift have divided it approximate into two phases
from about forty five to fifty five. There was a period there was a phase of holding
on the the Western powers had not fought the war to give up empires,
but rather to revive them. And when nationalism became
difficult, violent, even protests turned into violence
and so on. The nationalists were put down right the way through to Kenya, Malmo,
Malayan Emergency, the HOK rebellion in Philippines, which nobody really
knows about, a major rebellion over 10 years and so on, which required a big US
input to put up the same sequence of things. And then from about 1955
onwards, a phase of working with the nationalists instead of against the nationalists,
as the changes that I’ve outlined began to work their way through
into policy as the costs of holding an empire against its will made
themselves felt. And as Europe Western interests themselves shifted away
from the need to hold onto empire as well as from the impossibility
of doing so. And here is a final
puzzle. That’s my fourth final, but it’s the final final finally, just
as the US was becoming a de colonizing power. That is to say,
giving up what I’m terming its territorial empire. But you can put your feet on a walk all
around it and integrate. This is the moment when commentators start calling it an empire.
We the new Rome on all these books that we had after 2003 coming to the fore.
But this is a misnomer. If you accept and you may not, my definition
of an empire is being essentially one territorial and integration.
Of course, the US wielded huge power after 1945, and especially in the period
where most scholars would agree it was at its peak. If that’s the right word, when
Europe and Japan were flat on their backs and so in the early period through
to the early 70s. But it was not an empire of a kind
that justifies comparison with the empires I’ve been describing. It’s. I don’t
have a good term for it. So I have probably mistakenly borrowed from
the very ambiguous term which I are specialists use hedging hedgeman and had
Germany with ambigous because you don’t know whether that just means leadership of a soft
kind or whether it means putting the boot in.
And in my view that even during this period as a hedgeman, the US
had limits to its power, which are not readily recognized, and
you’ll be happy to know I won’t discuss that now. And this was certainly the case
even when Europe and Japan were flattened and it became more so during
the 1990s when the unipolar moment was said to have arrived
and all things were in the grasp of men of action and imperfect
vision. Rarely has Nemesis followed hubris so swiftly
or decisively, yet haeju moms are reluctant to abandon
their illusions. Aspirations become more precious as the prospect
of attaining them recedes in this matter, as in so many others
since the 18th century, the US and the UK continue to move
in complementary fashion. Making America Great Again is
echoed in Brexit. Yet the age of great empires has passed,
which shows that the nostalgia for Germany is, in reality,
evidence of her Germany of nostalgia.