| 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

Eric T. L. Love. Race over Empire: Racism and U.S. Imperialism, 1865–1900. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2004. Pp. xx, 245. Cloth $55.00, paper $19.95.
Eric T. L. Love has written a brief, clearly argued, thesis-driven study of U.S. imperialism in the late 1800s. Love upbraids mainstream historiography for asserting that "white supremacy ... armed the imperialists of 1898 with a nearly impenetrable rationale" for seizing territory in the Caribbean and Pacific (p. xi). The truth, according to Love, is very nearly the contrary. The racist "structures and convictions" of the time powerfully buttressed anti-imperialist arguments, and imperialists largely shared the racist assumptions of their opponents. Far from calling for uplift or trumpeting "the white man's burden," annexationists "reacted with silences, disingenuous evasions, and denials that race had anything to do with their ... projects" (pp. xi-xii).	1
Although its subject is racism, this is not a theoretical work. Indeed, it focuses unabashedly on "the thoughts, words and actions of policymakers" (p. xiv). Love defines racism pragmatically as "exclusionary relations of power based on race" (p. 17). On occasion he notes the mutability of racial categories—the Portuguese in Hawaii were white to annexationists, "scum" to their opponents—but Love is not interested in the construction of race along the lines of historians like Matthew Frye Jacobson. Race here remains monolithic and inert rather than contested and mercurial. "The arguments that were set against imperialism at the start of the 1890s," Love notes of racist opposition to empire, "were not only familiar but ... had also not evolved much since 1870" (p. 106).	. . .

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