The American Empire – Fall Term 2014
Institute for North American Studies
King’s College London
Tutor: Dr. Joshua Simon
Contact:
Course Description:
One often hears the claim made, in both academic and popular debate, that the United States is an empire, unrivalled in the contemporary world and perhaps in history for its global reach and influence. This course considers three broad questions related to this claim: First, what is an empire? Second, is the United States now, or has the United States ever been, an empire? And third, if the United States were an empire, what should the world think, or do, about it?
Each week, we will read works written by scholars and public intellectuals that have tried to answer one or more of these questions using social scientific, historical, critical, and philosophical methods. In class, we will discuss the English ideas and practices underlying the colonization of what is now the United States, the role of imperialism in the American Revolution, the political institutions developed during the country’s westward expansion, relationships between Americans and Latin Americans, the origins of overseas imperialism, internationalism, anti-communism, humanitarianism, and the future of the American empire.
Course Structure:
Week 1 / What is an Empire?Week 2 / Imperialism before America
Week 3 / Empire and Independence
Week 4 / Empire and the Indians
Week 5 / Empire and the Americas
Week 6 / READING WEEK
Week 7 / The New Imperialism
Week 8 / From Imperialism to Internationalism
Week 9 / An Empire of Liberty
Week 10 / A Humanitarian Empire
Week 11 / The Future of the American Empire
Reading:
Each week’s reading is divided between required and recommended texts. Students should read all of the required readings each week and as many of the recommended readings as time allows. All required readings will be available in electronic format, on the course’s KEATS page. If you encounter any problem in acquiring the reading for a given week, alert me immediately. Do not wait until our class meeting.
Beyond the required and recommended readings for each week, the following books may be consulted at any time as general, historical surveys of American expansionism and foreign policy:
Walter MacDougal, Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World since 1776 (New York, 1997).
Frank Ninkovich, The Wilsonian Century: U.S. Foreign Policy since 1900 (Chicago, 1999).
Robert Kagan, Dangerous Nation: America and the World, 1600-1898 (New York, 2006).
David C. Hendrickson, Union, Nation, or Empire: The American Debate over International Relations, 1789-1941 (Lawrence, 2009).
Participation:
Weekly seminar discussions are a central component of this class, a chance for all of us to refine our understanding of required readings, to think critically about the arguments they make and the evidence they offer, and to develop possible essay topics. Students must come to each of our meetings having read the required texts closely, located and considered further primary and secondary sources as appropriate, and ready to ask questions and offer their perspective on what they’ve read.
In order to facilitate participation, all students will be asked to submit a brief reflection on the readings to a KEATS forum by midnight on the day before each of our meetings. These reflections should be 3-4 sentences long, and take the form of an argument or a question. On the day of class, all students should take an hour or so to read and think about the posted reflections. No reflections are required for the first class meeting.
Assessment:
Assessment for the course will be based on one 4000-word essay on a topic of your own design Essays should take one of two forms: (1) a ‘position paper’, in which you clearly state a thesis early on and provide support for that thesis, drawing upon both primary and secondary resources or (2) a ‘literature review’, in which you put forward a research question and describe the existing scholarly literature relevant to that question, then conclude by pointing to gaps in our current understanding and proposing a research project that would help fill these gaps.
Essays should be submitted electronically, through KEATS.
Week 1: What is an Empire?
Required Reading:
Michael Doyle, Empires, chapter 1.
Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World, chapter 1.
Recommended Reading:
Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, 2010).
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass., 2000).
Week 2: Imperialism before America
Required Reading:
Nicholas Canny, “The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America,” William and Mary Quarterly.
Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny, chapter 1.
Recommended Reading:
David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000).
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550-1700 (Palo Alto, 2006).
Week 3: Empire and Independence
Required Reading:
Aziz Rana, The Two Faces of American Freedom, chapter 1.
Recommended Reading:
Eliga Gould, Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (Cambridge, Mass., 2012).
Daniel Hulsebosch, Constituting Empire: New York and the Transformation of Constitutionalism in the Atlantic World, 1664-1830 (Chapel Hill, 2005).
Week 4: Empire and the Indians
Required Reading:
Paul Frymer, “A Rush and a Push and the Land is Ours: Territorial Expansion, Land Policy, and U.S. State Formation” Perspectives on Politics.
Pekka Hämäläinen “The Politics of Grass: European Expansion, Ecological Change, and Indigenous Power in the Southwest”, The William and Mary Quarterly.
Recommended Reading:
Ned Blackhawk, Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge Mass., 2006).
Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York, 1987).
Week 5: Empire and the Americas
Required Reading:
Jay Sexton, The Monroe Doctrine, chapter 2.
Michel Gobat, “The Invention of Latin America: A Transnational History of Anti-imperialism, Democracy and Race” American Historical Review.
Recommended Reading:
Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, The United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York, 2006).
Peter Smith, Talons of the Eagle: Dynamics of U.S.-Latin American Relations (Oxford, 2000).
Week 5: Reading Week
Week 6: The New Imperialism
Required Reading:
Emily Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream, chapter 3.
Michael Patrick Cullinane, Liberty and American Anti-Imperialism, chapter 2.
Recommended Reading:
Perry Anderson, “Imperium”, New Left Review, no. 83 (Sept.-Oct., 2013).
Alfred McCoy, Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Madison, 2005).
Week 7: From Imperialism to Internationalism
Required Reading:
Frank Ninkovich, The Wilsonian Century, chapter 2.
Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law, chapter 3.
Recommended Reading:
Thomas J. Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (Princeton, 1992).
Patrick Hearden, Architects of Globalism: Building a New World Order During World War II (Lafayetteville, 2002).
Week 8: An Empire of Liberty
Required Reading:
John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan, chapter 5.
Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War, chapter 5.
Recommended Reading:
Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins (New York, 1967).
Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (New York, 2003).
Week 9: A Humanitarian Empire
Required Reading:
Samantha Power, “Genocide and America”, New York Review of Books.
Michael Ignatieff, “Human Rights as Politics”, from Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry.
Recommended Reading:
J.L. Holzgrefe and Robert Keohane, eds., Humanitarian Intervention: Ethical, Legal, and Political Dilemmas (Cambridge, 2003).
Nicholas Wheeler, Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International Society (Oxford, 2000).
Week 10: Decline and Fall of the American Empire?
Required Reading:
Giovanni Arrighi, “Hegemony Unravelling—1”, New Left Review.
Giovanni Arrighi, “Hegemony Unravelling—2”, New Left Review.
Recommended Reading:
Anne-Marie Slaughter, A New World Order (Princeton, 2004).
Charles Kupchan, No One’s World: The West, the Rising Rest, and the Coming Global Turn (Oxford, 2012).