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An Interpretation of American Imperialism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2010

Robert Zevin
Robert Zevin
Affiliation:
Lincoln, Massachusetts
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Extract

There are few words whose mere employment is capable of throwing American listeners into such paroxysms of righteous or offended indignation as the words “American imperialism.” This reaction is largely a reflection of the fact that “imperialism” is one of those words whose implicit domain of meaning is very large and even encompasses mutually contradictory elements as revealed by single user's notions of the world let alone different users' notions. In addition, the word conveys a strong connotation of ethically undesirable behavior to almost all users and readers.

Type
Papers Presented at the Thirty-first Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , March 1972 , pp. 316 - 360
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1972

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References

This article was originally presented to the University Seminar in Economic History at Columbia University in April, 1971. The present version has benefited at several points from comments and letters received from members of that Seminar. Although the article is a long work for this Journal, it is merely an outline of a larger work on which the author is engaged. In consequence the details of argument and evidence are often inadequately indicated.

1 Guralnik, David B., ed., Webster's New. World Dictionary, of the. American Language (Second College Edition; Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Co., 1970),.p. 704.Google Scholar

2 Ibid.

3 Schumpeter, Joseph, “The Sociology of Imperialism,” Imperialism, Social Classes (New York: Meridian Books, 1955), p. 6.Google Scholar

4 Descriptions of virtually all of the events described in this section can be found in any standard history of the United States or encyclopedia. Only the exceptions to this rule have been documented.

5 Rodman, Selden, Quisqueya (New York: University of Washington Press, 1964), pp. 108–19.Google Scholar

6 Nearing, Scott and Freeman, Joseph, Dollar Diplomacy (New York: Arno, 1966), pp. 151–54Google Scholar; there is a more thorough treatment in an unpublished paper by a former student of mine, Stephen Mark, “The Conquest of Nicaragua,” 1969.

7 I am indebted to Edward Nell for demonstrating to me that the word “Marxist” in this section should really be “Leninist.” The force of Professor Nell's point is not merely that Lenin and subsequent “Marxist” writers developed a theory which was not explicit in the works of.Marx; but, that much of Marx's historical writing contained an analysis consistent with later sections of this paper and in conflict with the Leninist view of imperialism. A distinction similar to Nell's and an analysis sometimes parallel to my own is contained in a book which appeared a few weeks after this paper was first presented: Lichtheim, George, Imperialism (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1971).Google Scholar I persist in employing the term “Marxist” since that is the common self-appellation employed by all of the writers whose views are here under attack. This usage has propelled the apocryphal dictum attributed to Marx—”I am not a Marxist.”—into widespread credence and citation.

8 Callman, Robert E., “Gross National Product in the United States, 1834–1909,” Output, Employment and Productivity in the United States after 1800, Studies in Income and Wealth, XXX (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1966), 11.Google Scholar

9 Ibid., p. 9.

10 Macaulay, Frederick R., The Movements of Interest Rates, Bond Yields and Stock Prices in the United States since, 1856 (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1938), pp. A108–09.Google Scholar

11 Ibid., Appendix A. See also: U. S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1957 (Washington: G.P.O., 1960), pp.654–56; hereafter cited as Historical Statistics.Google Scholar

12 Historical Statistics, p. 115.

13 Ibid., p. 117.

14 Kuznets, Simon, Capital in the American Economy (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1961), p. 65.Google Scholar All of the trends distinguished in Table I would not be materially affected by substituting Kuznets' calculations of gross capital stock or Gross National, Product. I have selected the series which seemed conceptually most suitable. All of Kuznets calculations have subsequently been refined by Gallman, Lebergott and others. These refinements also have no material impact on the trends of the six columns in Table 1. I have used Kuznets' original calculations because of their conceptual suitability and their comparability over the entire period.

15 Fishlow, Albert, “Productivity and Technological Change in the Railroad Sector, 1840–1910,” Output, Employment and Productivity in the United States after 1800, Studies in Income and Wealth, XXX (New York: NBER, 1966), p. 611.Google Scholar

16 LaFeber, Walter, The New Empire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963).Google Scholar

17 Gallman, “Gross National Product …,” p. 26.

18 Historical Statistics, pp. 537–8.

19 Ibid., p. 542; Economic Report of the President (Washington: G.P.O., 1971), pp. 197,298.Google Scholar

20 The sources of these statistics are cited above in footnotes 18 and 19.

21 Historical Statistics, pp. 565–8; Survey of Current Business (Washington, D.C.: G.P.O., 1970).Google Scholar

22 Historical Statistics, p. 151. See also, Kuznets, pp. 118–41. The national wealth measure, basically due to Raymond Goldsmith, includes reproducible tangible assets, land and net claims against foreigners. For years subsequent to 1956, I have extrapolated Goldsmith's estimate by subtracting the cumulated differences between Gross and Net National Product, adding cumulated gross investment and construction and multiplying the new total by the ratio of the respective GNP deflators.

23 Historical Statistics, pp. 565–6.

24 Ibid.

25 Simon, Matthew and Novack, David E.“Some Dimensions of the American Commercial Invasion of Europe, 1871–1914,” The Journal of Economic History, XXIV.(Dec, 1964), 591–605. Also unpublished papers by the same authors presented at the 1963 Purdue Conference on the use of Mathematics in Economic History. Historical Statistics, pp. 550–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26 Historical Statistics, p. 566 and sources cited for p. 565.

27 This calculation is based on the “crude materials” category of imports; Historical Statistics, pp. 544–45; Economic Report of the President (1971), p. 300.

28 LaFeber, pp. 128–30.

29 Callcott, Wilfred HardyThe Caribbean Policy of the United States, 1890–1920 (Baltimore: Octagon, 1942), p. 279.Google Scholar

30 The following discussion contains distinct echoes of the Marxist analysis linking imperialism to monopoly. I did not pursue this aspect of the Marxist model in the previous section for want of a satisfactory measure of the incidence of concentration over the past century. It does appear that there was a significant increase in concentration after the beginning of the first wave of imperialism [Ralph L. Nelson, Merger Movements in American Industry, 1895–1956 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959)]. During this century there does not appear to have been a major shift. In this section I speak of micro-monopoly motivations which are. parallel to the macromonopoly behavior contemplated in the Marxist model.

31 Prospect for America: The Rockefeller Panel Reports (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1961).Google Scholar

32 Ibid., pp; 92–256.

33 For the most thorough description and analysis of this episode see Lieuwin, EdwinArms and Politics in Latin America (New York: Praeger, 1961), pp. 208–43.Google Scholar

34 The result of these reforms is also to proliferate and enlarge the Federal bureaucracies responsible for administering them. They display the natural imperialist tendencies of all bureaucracies. In particular professional managers and planners quite naturally seek to incorporate and control originally exogenous parameters of their decisions. A similar derived motivation flows from the scientific management of large corporations or fortunes. For an identical analysis of the imperialist motivaton of National Socialism (and by implication the U. S. S. R. or China) see Aron, RaymondThe Century of Total War (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), esp. p. 71.Google Scholar