430 THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONSready-made market to get its industry going and maintain it, and to
supply the inhabitants of the mother country—whether industrialists,
workers, or consumers—with increased profits, wages, or commodi
ties." So colonial expansion became a leitmotif of electoral blather. No
coy political correctness in those innocent times, but little accuracy ei
ther. Today's historians and political economists should know better
than to take these campaign promises seriously.
Must one take a country to make a market? Here, too, scholarship has
offered a reinterpretation. Where once historians wrote of (formal)
empire, now they began to look more closely at informal dominion.^9
Take the history of European presence and influence in the Middle
East. The region included the Ottoman empire, independent in name
but increasingly subject to European demands; and Egypt, under Ot
toman suzerainty but really in the European sphere of influence. No
history of nineteenth-century Egyptian economic and political devel
opment would make sense that did not attend to the impact of infor
mal, virtual controls.^10 The same for Persia, never a colony, but like the
Ottoman empire more independent in memory than in reality.
One could say the same of European dominion in Latin America.
Here an entire continent, once largely divided between Spain and Por
tugal, became formally independent by the 1820s except for a few
minor gores and islands in the Caribbean. What's more, the very pos
sibility of new territorial grabs in the western hemisphere was largely
excluded by the Monroe doctrine. Not that European powers were
absolutely cowed by this unilateral declaration of the president of the
American republic. One could perhaps get around it by using straw-
men, as the French tried with Maximilian in Mexico. But the threat of
American intervention now entered the calculus, a deterrent to impe
rialist ambitions. No matter. More money could be made by trade:
- The formal declaration was made by President James Monroe in 1823, but was in
fact written by John Quincy Adams and was foreshadowed by earlier statements of
George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. The immediate impetus came from the
successful revolt of the former Spanish colonies and the threats of European inter
vention to restore the status quo ante; also from hints of possible Russian expansion
along the Pacific coast of North America. The declaration was never formalized by an
act of Congress but it was accepted thereafter as an expression of American policy,
t The only reason that worked even for a short time was that the United States was
busy with its own Civil War. But once the Americans turned their attention to this in
terloper and gave aid to the native resistance, Maximilian was doomed. His own Eu
ropean sponsors wrung their hands but abandoned him to the firing squad—raison
d'état.