The Analysis of the Eric T. Love’s Book “Race Over Empire”

December 23, 2020 by Essay Writer

Placing race at the center of his analysis, Eric T. Love’s book Race over Empire

Racism and U.S. Imperialism, 1865—1900 stands out among historians’ attempts to explicate the role of race in the nineteenth-century U.S. imperial enterprise. Preceding scholars have identified white supremacist racial ideologies, such as concepts of benevolent assimilation, racial uplift and “white man’s burden,” as the driving forces of late nineteenth-century U.S. imperialism and expansionism. In Race over Empire, however, Love presents an original and well-researched case that complicates and contradicts such a reading.In essence, Love denounces 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.

The truth, according to Love, is very nearly the antithesis. The racist “structures and convictions” of the time effectively bolstered anti-imperialist arguments, and imperialists largely shared the racist assumptions of their opponents. Far from 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). Although its subject is racism, this is not simply a hypothetical opus. Indeed, it concentrates unashamedly on “the thoughts, words and actions of policymakers” (p. xiv). Furthermore, Love pragmatically expresses the concept of racism as “exclusionary relations of power based on race”.

In making the case that racism worked against empire rather than for it, Love quotes extensively from race-baiting policy makers like Hamilton Fish (who, after seeing Cuba’s stunning landscape, resolved that in the Caribbean “only man is vile”), Charles Sumner, Carl Schurz, James A. Garfield, John Tyler Morgan, and naval officer and historian Alfred Thayer Mahan. These men reiterated the idea that tropical peoples were unassimilable and incapable of self-government. Because America had always extended citizenship and voting rights to inhabitants of newly acquired territories, annexation meant that “savages” newly weaned from cannibalism and human sacrifice would help mold American laws and elect the nation’s leaders. Love asserts that this prospect, rather than concern about deteriorating republican mores or escalating naval expenses, was the leading cause of anti-imperialism.Focusing on American policy-makers’ ideas and actions, Love narrates the history of four attempts between 1865 and 1900 to annex distant territories occupied mainly by non-white people. In his analysis, Love demonstrates how race and racism after the Civil War were central to political decisions affecting territorial expansion.

For instance, Love maintains that President Ulysses S. Grant’s 1870 proposal to annex Santo Domingo, today’s Dominican Republic, was not influenced by the concepts of “white man’s burden” or benevolent assimilation. Rather, it was based on his deliberately hidden hope of relocating African Americans in order to restore peace to the South. Nonetheless, Grant’s treaty failed; reluctant to associate with the “degenerate race[s],” non-white population in the tropics, his opponents rejected this proposed expansion (p. xvii). This same reasoning also played a significant part in the nation’s failed attempts to annex Hawaii in 1893. Love contends that Hawaii was eventually annexed in 1898 as a result of the prevailing racial rhetoric that situated Hawaii as a white nation, the international politics that necessitated annexation as a strategic move, and the policy-makers’ prospects of removing most of the non-white population from Hawaii after annexation. Tracing a similar trajectory, Love also examines how similar racial ideologies contributed to the U.S. annexation of the Philippines without granting its non-white population access to U.S. citizenship.

The author’s assertion that he is upending a long-held interpretation concerning racism in nineteenth-century diplomatic history, nevertheless, is a bit inflated. He contends that there is a remarkable level of consensus among historians, who assert that racial ideologies rooted in white supremacy gave expansionists a grand and compelling rationale for empire. These historians, according to Love, have seen social Darwinism and benevolent assimilation as factors moving the nation’s leaders, and he states that “In this interpretation, white supremacy became an indispensable feature of the Imperial project”. And yet the author concedes that historians such as Walter LaFeber, Charles S. Campbell, Michael Hunt, and so forth have recognized that white supremacist ideologies could be, and often were, drummed up both for and against imperialism, and that policy makers were habitually inconsistent in their racist attitudes.

Nevertheless, his work breaks new ground with its nuanced contributions that advance and complicate our understandings of imperialists’ and anti-imperialists’ relationships to race and racism, which, as Love reveals, were vital to the nation’s international policies of that era. Accordingly, Love’s evidence in these cases successfully challenges and complements previous scholarship on the racial ideologies underpinning expansionism and imperialism.

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