|
|
|
Book Reviews
Top of the World
| SCHOONOVER, THOMAS. Uncle Sam's War of 1898 and the Origins of Globalization. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2003. xv + 180 pp. Introduction, illustrations, notes, index. $30.00 (cloth), ISBN 08131-2282-1.
|
|
Accounts of the "American empire" as a thing apart from the allegedly more predatory species of imperialism practiced by competitor European nations in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere have not found general favor for quite a long time. Perhaps the most obvious reason is that the story of U.S. interactions with the world is thick with tales of violence, sin, bigotry, and exploitation. Shattering the paradigm of American innocence and exceptionalism did not take much effort, but neither did it answer the question: how did the U.S. and its relations with the world come to be what they are? |
1
|
|
To Thomas Schoonover's reckoning, globalization holds the answer. He begins by fixing the United States and its development in the evolution of global processes that predated its founding by nearly three centuries. His trajectory begins with Columbus, who wanted only to make landfall in Asia, access its markets, and take control of the enormous wealth that promised to flow out of it. Generations of monarchs, explorers, priests, and settlers (both voluntary and involuntary) inherited the Columbian mission. The next stage, contiguous with the first, witnessed the exploration of Oceana. Its unfolding and the eventual division among the Great Powers brought peoples and societies into contact which had been separated for millennia. |
2
|
|
Peoples, nations, their ideas, faiths, technologies and missions encircled the globe in roughly the span of four centuries—an accomplishment of immeasurable significance—but the work of linking the West to Asia was, by the standard of the industrial-imperial age, still not complete. The key to solving this problem was eventually forged, according to Schoonover, in the Gulf-Caribbean basin, where a thin tendon of land separated the two great oceans. That a canal would someday exist there was a given; the impact it would have on the western powers, Oceania, and Asia was one of the great and most perilous unknowns of the age. By the 1890s, however, the Caribbean became a place of endings (of the Spanish empire) and beginnings (of the American). However events unfolded, the facts of geography, climate, demand for resources, the weight of tradition and belief, and extant technologies determined that the Caribbean would become the critical meeting place of empires still intent in their drive toward Asia. |
. . . |
There are about 505 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
