| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

David M. Pletcher. The Diplomacy of Involvement: American Economic Expansion across the Pacific, 1784–1900. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. 2001. Pp. xi, 379. $44.95.

The latest installment in David M. Pletcher's long-running scholarly engagement with American expansionism in the nineteenth century rounds out the geographical reach of his scholarship. Just as his earlier works (The Diplomacy of Annexation: Texas, Oregon, and the Mexican War [1973] and The Diplomacy of Trade and Investment: American Expansion in the Hemisphere, 1865–1900 [1998]) provided a useful and meticulously crafted overview of the United States' expanding administrative bailiwick across the North American continent and over points south in the Western Hemisphere, this book delivers a treasure trove of information and statistical data on parallel multidirectional movements traversing the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean. The work is based on English-language records and secondary literature and, thus, is not an interactive account of the historical forces emanating from various points of American encounters with denizens of the pan-Pacific world. Yet it speaks to a number of issues raised by new scholarship into American overseas expansion by historians such as Emily Rosenberg and Eileen Scully, and Pletcher's close examination of the intricacies of the mixed currency exchanges and non-currency-based transactional mechanisms used in the pan-Pacific transnational commercial networks connects with important new works by foreign scholars as well. For example, if one reads Kazuko Furuta's illuminating study of the emergence of an East Asian regional trade network in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Shanhai Netto Waku to Kindai Higashi Ajia [The Shanghai Network in Modern East Asia] (2000), together with Pletcher's study, one is left with the image of a vibrant zone of free enterprise encompassing the Pacific Ocean: a world throbbing with individual entrepreneurship and ambition, untamed by the administrative regimes of the modern nation-state system.

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