Empire State of Mind

Historians of American foreign policy and diplomacy have long debated when the United States entered its age of empire. Did it begin in the 1890s, with 1898 as a watershed moment, or were there preludes to this turn beginning as early as the 1860s? To move the clock back even further, were not the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican-American War part and parcel of a project to make an American continental empire? In this debate, such questions look at the United States after it was the United States, and almost always after 1815. If we are to find empire prior to 1815, we could look to the colonial period, where empire has a starring role in the context of colonization and European contests for dominance in North America, or in the ties that bound colonists to the British imperial network. Where empire seems to exit the stage is in the early national period.

It is this lacuna in American historiography that Edward Larkin addresses in The American School of Empire, a study of the ways in which empire, as a concept, persisted in American thought decades after the Revolution. It is important to underscore that Larkin is interested in empire’s place in the American imagination, rather than as a specific project of conquest and colonization. Using political writings and case studies in art and literature, Larkin demonstrates that empire was a compelling political unit of organization for 18th-century Americans, both during the Revolution and after. He argues that the Founding Fathers conceived of the United States as an empire rather than a nation, and that they saw empire as a way to preserve the thirteen states’ independence and individuality in relation to the central government. Without the nation’s demand for undivided loyalty and its attendant impulse towards homogeneity, the United States as empire would possess a greater capacity to hold the states’ diversity of peoples and traditions. In this telling, Hamilton, Madison and Jefferson’s understanding of empire has more in common with earlier forms of empire discussed in Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper’s Empires in World History—a geopolitical unit that could hold difference—than it does with the forms of empire unleashed by Europe in the 1860s and 70s.

By locating empire-as-a-concept in the years between the American Revolution and early 19th-century westward expansion, Larkin connects two distinct halves—and schools—of American imperial history: that of empire in the colonial period, and that of empire during the United States’s territorial growth. As Larkin rightly observes, the Revolution interrupts the course of empire in our understanding of US history: we have, currently, a “narrative in which the American colonies move from an imperial colonial moment to a nationalist phase and then return to a new imperial mode” (16). By tracing the persistence of empire in American thought, Larkin provides a missing link that can give coherence to these two accounts of empire.

Having established that the United States was imagined as an empire rather than a nation in the first chapter, Larkin dedicates subsequent chapters to charting the movement from one imperial mode—links to Britain, specifically—to the other, with empire as westward continental expansion. For this task he employs an analysis of novels and history paintings as these were “crucial genres across the Atlantic world for the exploration of empire in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries” (3). Chapter 2 provides an especially intriguing reading of Letters from an American Farmer that shatters the notion that Crevecoeur’s affinities lay firmly in a distinct American identity and instead reveals the French-American promoted continued ties with England and Europe, even after the Revolution. (This may come as no surprise for those who recall that Crevecoeur was a loyalist.) Chapter 3 limns the paintings of Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley and finds in their depictions criticisms of British empire. Rather than denouncing empire, though, West and Copley, Larkin argues, use their paintings to offer suggestions for strengthening the British Empire. Finally, in Chapter 4, Larkin leaves the Atlantic world and moves to the frontier with a look at James Fenimore Cooper and Samuel F.B. Morse. Ultimately, Larkin finds in Cooper and Morse’s works the persistence of the Old World in the new, despite the “national” age in which they appear, as well as anxieties about the United States’ future continental empire.

The American School of Empire offers an exciting interpretation of the United States’ early political organization, as well as elegant and richly rendered readings of visual and written texts. At times, however, the chapters that focus primarily on the novel and history painting tend to veer towards a study of loyalism rather than empire.  Additionally, while the book provides a crucial link between two historiographies of empire in American history, its primary undertaking is to show continuity—empire never left the American imagination—rather than to trace transformations. The question of how one imperial mode turned into another still remains, and that may be the task of a different kind of study. Given the title, one also wonders what is particularly “American” about the American school of empire. Nonetheless as a contribution to the history of ideas and the history of empire, The American School of Empire brings renewed attention to the Revolution and the decades after and asks scholars to reconsider this time as not only a period of nation-making, but of empire as well.