From Isolation to EmpireFrom Isolation to Empire 22

CONTENTS

■American troops engage Filipino nationalists near Manila in 1899. The

gunboats that carried the soldiers appear in the distance.

585

American soldiers, “I would order all of you home right

away.” These vital interests in many ways originated dur-

ing the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Until then, Americans had given little thought to

foreign affairs. In 1888 Benjamin Harrison articulated a

widely held belief when he said that the United States was

“an apart nation” and should remain so. That year James

Bryce, the British political theorist, made the same point in

The American Commonwealth. “Happy America,” he

wrote, stood “apart in a world of her own... safe even

from menace.”

But sentiment was shifting. Intellectuals and many

others cited “Darwinian” principles, such as “survival of

the fittest,” to justify American expansion abroad.

Missionaries called on Americans to help impoverished and

ill-educated peoples elsewhere in the world. American

businessmen, increasingly confident of their own powers,

craved access to foreign resources and markets. Such fac-

tors converged in Cuba, prompting the United States to go

to war with Spain.

In 1898 tens of thousands of American troops were

dispatched to Cuba and, within a year, to the Philippines.

For years thereafter, Americans at home would struggle

to locate on globes and in atlases battle sites in places

such as Balangiga, Pulang Lupa, and Kandahar. They

still do.■

■Isolation or Imperialism?

■Origins of the Large Policy:

Coveting Colonies

■Toward an Empire in

the Pacific

■Toward an Empire in

Latin America

■The Cuban Revolution

■The “Splendid Little”

Spanish-American War

■Developing a Colonial Policy

■The Anti-Imperialists

■The Philippine Insurrection

■Cuba and the United States

■The United States in

the Caribbean and

Central America

■The Open Door Policy

in China

■The Panama Canal

■Imperialism without Colonies

■American Lives:

Frederick Funston

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