| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton. The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500–2000. New York: Viking. 2005. Pp. xxiv, 520. $27.95.
Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton seek to challenge a long-standing master narrative that casts the United States and its colonial predecessors as peace-loving states that resorted to wars only in defense and to preserve freedom. Inverting this familiar story, they press the case that the "dominion of war" has been an active tool of expansion and empire. They seek to make readers rethink wars of conquest waged in the name of liberty and republicanism by examining how wars so often breed unintended consequences.	1
Nearly fifty years ago, the historian William Appleman Williams also argued that empire was an "American way of life," and his interpretation influenced a generation of foreign policy historians. Like Williams, whose work they acknowledge, Anderson and Cayton plumb the contradictions inherent in the supposedly benevolent extension of imperial power. Whereas Williams was concerned with economic forces and the ideology of the "open door," however, Anderson and Cayton focus on the centrality of wars of conquest over land and resources. And where Williams grounded his interpretation in the somewhat impersonal forces of production and commerce, Anderson and Cayton emphasize the role of individuals, focusing each chapter around the biography of a particular soldier-politician: Samuel de Champlain, George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Antonio López de Santa Anna, Ulysses S. Grant, Arthur and Douglas MacArthur, and Colin Powell. (There is also a chapter on the anti-soldier William Penn.)	. . .

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