Expansionism

About: Expansionism is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 979 publications have been published within this topic receiving 11169 citations.

This Inglorious War: The Second Seminole War, the Ad Hoc Origins of American Imperialism, and the Silence of Slavery

Abstract: Daniel Scallet, "The Second Seminole War, the Ad Hoc Origins of American Imperialism, and the Silence of Slavery," Ph.D. Washington University in St. Louis, December 2011 My dissertation examines the national context of the Second Seminole War and argues that it was begun at the behest of Deep South slaveholders and represented a vital national shift toward violent expansionism. However, due to tacit agreements among public officials to refrain from debating the influence of slavery on federal policy, the fundamental arguments of the war - why it was undertaken, how it was to be fought, why it had to be won - occurred wholly outside of public view, if they occurred at all. As a result, the nation abandoned older Jeffersonian ideals of national expansion predicated upon ideological conversion and instead embraced violent conquest, without a real debate, let alone a fight. This project has two main focuses. In the first, I examine how disparate people in Florida, including generals, volunteers, soldiers, Seminoles, and Black Seminoles, viewed the war and, through the use of diaries, letters, personal narratives, and professional reports, demonstrate the centrality of competing conceptions of slavery and race relations to the everyday struggles of the conflict. Several times, American generals proposed peace treaties that would allow the Seminoles to remain in southern Florida. In each case, vociferous opposition from both southern slaveholders determined to eradicate autonomous nonwhite enclaves on their frontiers and national politicians who characterized agreement with Indians on any grounds as inimical to national honor, left every treaty stillborn. This slaveholder influence on the war effort was largely invisible to the rest of the country. In this work's second focus, I detail the war's national context, utilizing newspaper accounts, Congressional debates, and published manuscripts, to examine how a refusal among politicians of both parties to question the place of slavery in national politics dramatically stunted the breadth of what is commonly called Jacksonian democracy. As Democrats increasingly articulated ambitions over the rest of the continent - John Quincy Adams disgustedly condemned their agenda as promulgating a "culture of conquest" - mainstream Whigs remained largely silent over this radical alteration of American foreign policy, though only a few years before, they had steadfastly opposed Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act. Only isolated groups of antislavery activists led by Joshua Giddings, David Lee Child, and Harriet Martineau, themselves especially attuned to the rhythms of domination and subjugation, had the foresight to perceive the course of their nation: indeed the course of empire) and oppose the Second Seminole War for what it truly was. In 1835, in their failure to grapple with the war's radical underpinnings, elite Americans from every region of the country freely adopted, without contestation, the priorities of the Slave Power: the colonization of native populations and the…

Manifest Destiny and Empire: American Antebellum Expansionism

Abstract: Six scholars consider important aspects of American antebellum expansion in this collection of studies newly available in paperback.Robert W. Johannsen of the University of Illinois at Urbana offers fresh insight into the meaning of the term ""manifest destiny,"" arguing for a broader definition.John M. Belohlavek of the University of South Florida takes a close look at the expansionist attitudes of Caleb Cushing, a Massachusetts politician, diplomat, reformer, and intellectual.Thomas R. Hietala of Grinnell College examines the complicated clash of cultures (the result of Manifest Destiny) and how it was viewed by observant individuals such as George Catlin, a painter who traveled and lived among Native Americans just prior to the expansionist surge of the 1840s.Winner of the Webb essay competition for 1996, Samuel J. Watson of Rice University studies U.S. Army officers' responses to territorial expansionism between 1815 and 1846. Sam W. Haynes uncovers the social and political complexities, including a widespread fear of Great Britain, that made Texas' annexation the most divisive issue of its day. Finally, Robert E. May of Purdue University offers a compelling examination of American filibustering during the Manifest Destiny era.

Climate crises and crypto-colonialism: conjuring value on the blockchain frontiers of the Global South

Abstract: In this commentary we explore how international development, disaster relief and climate change mitigation credentials are being called upon to justify ‘crypto-colonialism’, whereby blockchain technology is used to extract economic benefits from those suffering the scars of colonial expansionism in the Global South. These benefits include land, labour and resources needed to facilitate local ‘crypto-utopian’ developments, or a ‘green economy’ elsewhere. As with past neoliberal development agendas imposing structural economic reforms, the contemporary crypto-colonial exercises discussed here are driven in pursuit of a common good – to protect the global commons and improve people’s lives. Within spaces where crypto-colonialism manifests, the governance frameworks of the associated technology is heavily entangled with social-spatial relations in multiple ways. We argue that despite being distributed, techno-ecological fixes are never placeless. How people engage with, resist or reconfigure a crypto-economy is geographically contingent. This commentary argues for more situated critical analysis of actually existing case-studies to reveal the inequitable terrain of project benefit distributions, and to expose the likely winners and losers within each. The success or failure of use-cases is less dependent on technical viability, but rather mediated through reactions to colonial contexts and historical experiences of various economic and climate crises.

Manifest and Other Destinies: Territorial Fictions of the Nineteenth-Century United States

Abstract: "Manifest and Other Destinies" critiques Manifest Destiny's exclusive claim as an explanatory national story in order to rethink the meaning and boundaries of the West and of the United States' national identity. Stephanie LeMenager considers the American West before it became a trusted symbol of U.S. national character or a distinct literary region in the later nineteenth century, back when the West was undeniably many wests, defined by international economic networks linking diverse territories and people from the Caribbean to the Pacific coast. Many nineteenth-century novelists, explorers, ideologues, and humorists imagined the United States' destiny in what now seem unfamiliar terms, conceiving of geopolitical configurations or possible worlds at odds with the land hunger and "providential" mission most clearly associated with Manifest Destiny. "Manifest and Other Destinies" draws from an archive of this literature and rhetoric to offer a creative rereading of national and regional borders. LeMenager addresses both canonical and lesser-known U.S. writers who shared an interest in western environments that resisted settlement, including deserts, rivers, and oceans, and who used these challenging places to invent a post-western cultural criticism in the nineteenth century. Le Menager highlights the doubts and self-reckonings that developed alongside expansionist fervor and predicted contemporary concerns about the loss of cultural and human values to an emerging global order. In "Manifest and Other Destinies", the American West offers the United States its first encounter with worlds at once local and international, worlds that, as time has proven, could never be entirely subordinated to the nation's imperial desire. Stephanie LeMenager is an assistant professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.