U.S. imperialism in the Asia‐Pacific

The hundredth anniversary of the United States’ bursting into the Asia‐Pacific as an imperial power provides an opportunity to look more deeply at an imperialism that continues to be extremely dynamic. When the U.S. erupted into Asia, grabbing the Philippines from Spain in 1898, it was clear that this was not an old‐style imperial power. The U.S. had itself emerged from an anti‐colonial war against Great Britain a little over a century earlier, and this fact of its birth would greatly determine its ideology and practice of imperialism. Ideology would play an important role in the U.S. imperial enterprise, far greater than it did with the European colonial powers where mission civilatrice, as in the case of France, was an afterthought, an obvious fig leaf for economic interests. Imperialism had to be legitimized to the American people. The emergence of the “Anti‐Imperialist League” in the late 1800s—with which Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) was associated—served as a warning that neither the rationale of chri...