Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule between the British and United States Empires, 1880–1910

Paul A. Kramer

For suggestions on how to use this article in the United States history survey course, see our "Teaching the JAH" Web site supplement at <http://www.indiana.edu/~jah/teaching>.
Setting out to address The Problem of Asia and Its Effect upon International Policies in 1900, the year of the joint expedition against the Boxers and one year into the Philippine-American War, the American navalist Alfred Thayer Mahan observed that "it would be an interesting study . . . to trace the genesis and evolution in the American people of the impulse towards expansion which has recently taken so decisive a stride." That study, he warned, "would be very imperfect if it failed clearly to recognize . . . that it is but one phase of a sentiment that has swept over the whole civilized European world within the last few decades." 1 Other builders of the U.S. empire would have agreed. Along different timelines, pursuing varied agendas, and mobilizing diverse discourses to defend them, Americans from varied political backgrounds came to recognize that the United States' new colonial empire—part of its much vaster commercial, territorial, and military empires—operated within a larger network of imperial thought and practice.	1
The factors that encouraged the overlap of empires were similar to those linking together the contemporary "Atlantic crossings" of welfare state ideas and institutions recently described by Daniel T. Rodgers. Foremost was the growing productive and geographic scale of industrial capitalism in the Atlantic world and its imperial outposts. Intensifying transportation technologies did not simply make possible the aggressive military expansion of European and U.S. power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They also made the consolidating colonial regimes in Africa and Asia stages for interacting and overlapping empires of commerce and evangelism, which drew "inter-imperial" communities together around both common and competitive projects.2 But even within the formal limits of imperial state building, colonial empires penetrated each other. Despite multiple pressures forcing empires conceptually apart, inter-imperial crossings played a central role in state building throughout the colonial world. In organization, policy making, and legitimation, the architects of colonial rule often turned to rival powers as allies, foils, mirrors, models, and exceptions.3	. . .