Review Essay

Empire as a Way of Life:
Gender, Culture, and Power in
New Histories of U.S. Imperialism

Christopher Capozzola
Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Wexler, Laura. Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. xii + 363 pp. Introduction, illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index, $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8078-2570-0; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 0-8078-4883-2.

Renda, Mary A. Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. xvi + 414 pp. Introduction, illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index, $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8078-2628-6; $19.95 (paper), ISBN 0-8078-4938-3.

In 1980, toward the end of his career, the historian William Appleman Williams published a short book entitled Empire as a Way of Life. In it, Williams distilled the history of U.S. foreign relations into a unified interpretation that highlighted imperialism's central place in American politics and culture since the time of conquest. It was the final work of one of American history's most important, if also most controversial, thinkers. Yet, for nearly two decades after 1983, in my unscientific study of the library of a major northeastern research university, copies of Empire as a Way of Life ceased to circulate altogether.1	1
Meanwhile, in the last five years, imperialism has returned to the center of cultural and political history, a move marked by a notable increase in the study of America's burst of territorial acquisition after 1898. An intellectual backwater has turned into one of the most dynamic fields in the historical profession. And the most dramatic aspect of this change is that twenty years ago, almost no one would have imagined that historians of women and gender would be found at the forefront of this re-evaluation of turn-of-the-century American expansion.	2
All three works under review here tell the history of U.S. imperialism as a way of life: a multifaceted social process of economics, politics, and culture; circulating commodities, proliferating discourses, and brute force. Moreover, all three demonstrate that imperialism was specifically a gendered way of life. They are vivid examples of the best historical scholarship on gender and culture in early twentieth-century U.S. overseas imperialism. But they also raise important theoretical questions about the relationship between culture and power that historians must continue to examine.	. . .