This voluminous essay collection is based on an ambitious “five-year collaborative effort” (p. xiii) of academics from the United States and those countries that have been touched by “formal” U.S. imperialism (Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and the Philippines). The result is an impressive collection of 42 essays on the American empire. About six contributions are broad-ranging conceptual pieces, asking whether “empire” is an appropriate and indeed useful term for the study of U.S. foreign relations, whereas most other articles are tightly focused empirical studies. The sheer number of essays raises the question of coherence but, although a few contributions seem out of place, the editors have gone to great lengths to mold these essays into a coherent whole. For this purpose, they have split the collection into nine thematic blocs, each of which is prefaced by an introduction that seeks to highlight common themes.

More importantly, coherence is conveyed in the shared research interests that guide this collaborative effort. With the exception of Jeremi Suri, all contributors agree that “empire” is an appropriate category to make sense of U.S. international relations, but that this empire needs to be well defined. Secondly, most authors pursue cultural approaches as they tackle such divergent topics as policing, education, race, administration, the military, or “environmental management”. Some authors, particularly the editors, also acknowledge their debt to William A. Williams’s revisionist “Wisconsin School” of U.S. foreign relations.1 The most significant common thread in the collection, however, is an interest in “imperial reciprocities” (p. 10), the question of how far developments on the periphery and in the metropolis interacted.

While Paul Kramer cautions us that these connections are very complicated and multifaceted in his short “transnational history of imperial race making” (p. 200), most authors examine whether the periphery served as an incubator and a testing ground for social and political reforms of the Progressive era, which were subsequently implemented back home, where they often faced a much more constraining environment. This has been a hypothesis in the relevant literature since William Leuchtenburg speculated on the intellectual affinities between imperialism and Progressivism.2 Significantly, though, the contributors to Colonial Crucible furnish hard evidence for this proposition. The most unequivocal examples of this approach can be found in the section on law enforcement – perhaps one reason why the editors chose this as the first empirical section. Michael Salman relates the story of a successful experiment in prisoner self-government in the Philippines, which fared significantly worse when introduced in Sing Sing. Alfred McCoy considers policing and intelligence in the Philippines as the beginnings of “the world’s first ‘surveillance state’” (p. 107), which entered the domestic sphere during and after the First World War, whereas Anne Foster discovers the roots of American anti-drug legislation and indeed the modern “war on drugs” in the prohibition of opium in the Philippines. In quite a different context, Greg Bankoff examines how “environmental management”, in the form of Gifford Pinchot’s forest “conservation”, first thrived in the Philippines where it could prove itself against much less opposition than back home. These articles, but also others on education and health policies, tell similar stories of a colonial periphery that facilitated and even required political and social engineering. Successful experiments were “re-imported” into the United States, contributing to the rise of a more powerful and centralized Progressive state. Occasionally, though, the focus seems exaggerated, particularly since domestic and intrinsic factors also contributed to the rise of the modern state.3

Another strength of this collection is its analysis of the impact of the colonizers on the colonized, which is expertly addressed by the large number of non-American academics. Their contributions remind us that the consequences of empire were multilayered, disparate, and sometimes even contradictory, ranging from a pernicious legacy of executive prerogative in Philippine government (Anna Castañeda) to public health policies, which were designed to benefit the conquerors’ health and prestige (Warwick Anderson, Mariola Espinosa, and Paul Sutter), but which sometimes ended up benefiting the “natives” as well (cf. Daniel Doeppers). This ambiguity is perhaps best captured in Vicente Rafael’s contribution on the legacy of American ideologies, which simultaneously buttressed authoritarian ideas of sovereignty and the liberating potential of revolutions.

At the same time, a number of authors emphasize the room for agency and resistance that colonial subjects possessed. In contributions on education in Puerto Rico, Solsirée del Moral, Amílcar Antonio Barreto, and Pablo Navarro-Rivera demonstrate how Puerto Rican teachers undermined Americanization policies, conveying nationalist messages instead. Yet, del Moral adds, Americanization was hard to escape: These elite teachers also wanted “to consolidate their authority and status within the colonial social hierarchy” (p. 138). Paradoxically, “the racial and class implications” of this agenda “resonated, though uncomfortably, with the broader intentions of Americanization policies” (p. 136). In a less complicated story, James Warren describes how American and “native” or Spanish interests could coincide, as they did in the almost unchanged preservation of the Jesuit Philippine meteorological service.

In sum, this collection provides a multifaceted picture of the concrete “life” of and under American imperialism, a life that was incredibly ambiguous and contradictory. Yet, the collection does contain some minor problems. Despite the care that went into the creation of coherent sections, crucial differences between some texts remain unacknowledged. There is, for example, the problem of chronology. Whereas a majority of the texts focuses on the early formative period of U.S. colonialism in the periphery, other articles deal with later decades, but little effort is made to reconcile or even acknowledge changed historical circumstances. The most glaring example, at least partially conditioned by different time frames, is the contradiction between Castañeda’s and Paul Hutchcroft’s articles on the legacy of U.S. administration in the Philippines. Castañeda focuses on the impact of a highly centralized and executive-dominated colonial government and the New Deal era in the Philippines, whereas Hutchcroft claims that Jeffersonian ideals of decentralized government dangerously strengthened entrenched local elites early on. While Hutchcroft may also have exaggerated the influence of ideology and underestimated American domestic pressures to “devolve” municipal power to the Filipinos, the more important point is that the implicit contradiction between the two articles remains unaddressed in the section’s introduction.

Another analytical question that hovers in the background without being fully explored is that of American exceptionalism. In their introductory essay, the collection’s editors seem to intimate that the American empire was exceptional (p. 7: “a unique imperial state”; p. 25: on the “distinctive” nature of the imperial enterprise), but they do not really address empirical evidence from their own collection that complicates these claims. It would have been particularly interesting to discuss articles pointing to continuities with other empires, even the Spanish empire, which the Americans had set out to displace in 1898. Josep Fradera (p. 56) and Kelvin Santiago-Valles emphasize aspects of continuity and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara highlights how Puerto Ricans mobilized the heritage of Spanish colonialism because they preferred it to the supposedly superior American variety. A more explicit discussion of such evidence or even the addition of comparative articles on contemporary empires could have been highly enlightening.

Finally, this reader was slightly puzzled by the discussion of whether the United States has an imperial past. Suri is the only author who questions the value of “empire” as an analytical category, while certainly the editors, as well as Nancy Tomes and Ian Tyrrell, emphasize their country’s imperial heritage and consider the “thick description” of this empire as the historian’s primary task. As important and long-standing as this debate is and as much as it dominates our discussion of contemporary U.S. foreign policy, it seems to be less material to the empirical articles in the collection. After all, these articles do not deal with an “informal” American empire, which one could contest, but with the very real, formal American empire that existed between 1899 and the aftermath of the Second World War. In this regard, the conceptual pieces and the empirical articles are not well related to one another.

Nevertheless, these critical remarks should not detract from an impressive achievement. At the very least, every scholar of American imperialism will find one or more articles of immediate interest. More importantly, though, the editors of this collection have made an admirable effort to craft a coherent empirical survey of the impact of American domination on its colonies and of its repercussions on the home front.

Notes:
1 Most notably William A. Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 1959, 3rd ed., New York 1988. Specifically for the period of American empire, compare Walter LaFeber, The New Empire. An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898, Ithaca 1963.
2 William E. Leuchtenburg, Progress and Imperialism. The Progressive Movement and American Foreign Relations, in: Mississippi Valley Historical Review 49 (1952), pp. 483-504; compare Gerald E. Markowitz, Progressivism and Imperialism. A Return to First Principles, in: Historian 37 (1975), pp. 257-275.
3 Compare Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State. The Expansion of National Administrative Capabilities, 1877-1920, Cambridge 1982.