This series provides essential and authoritative overviews of the scholarship that has shaped our present understanding of the American past. Edited by eminent historians, each volume tackles one of the major periods or themes of American history, with individual topics authored by key scholars who have spent considerable time in research on the questions and controversies that have sparked debate in their field of interest. The volumes are accessible for the non‐specialist, while also engaging scholars seeking a reference to the historiography or future concerns.
A Companion to the American Revolution
Edited by Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole
A Companion to 19th‐Century America
Edited by William L. Barney
A Companion to the American South
Edited by John B. Boles
A Companion to American Women’s History
Edited by Nancy Hewitt
A Companion to American Indian History
Edited by Philip J. Deloria and Neal Salisbury
A Companion to Post‐1945 America
Edited by Jean‐Christophe Agnew and Roy Rosenzweig
A Companion to the Vietnam War
Edited by Marilyn Young and Robert Buzzanco
A Companion to Colonial America
Edited by Daniel Vickers
A Companion to American Foreign Relations
Edited by Robert Schulzinger
A Companion to 20th‐Century America
Edited by Stephen J. Whitfield
A Companion to the American West
Edited by William Deverell
A Companion to the Civil War and Reconstruction
Edited by Lacy K. Ford
A Companion to American Technology
Edited by Carroll Pursell
A Companion to African‐American History
Edited by Alton Hornsby
A Companion to American Immigration
Edited by Reed Ueda
A Companion to American Cultural History
Edited by Karen Halttunen
A Companion to California History
Edited by William Deverell and David Igler
A Companion to American Military History
Edited by James Bradford
A Companion to Los Angeles
Edited by William Deverell and Greg Hise
A Companion to American Environmental History
Edited by Douglas Cazaux Sackman
A Companion to Benjamin Franklin
Edited by David Waldstreicher
A Companion to World War Two (2 volumes)
Edited by Thomas W. Zeiler with Daniel M. DuBois
A Companion to American Legal History
Edited by Sally E. Hadden and Alfred L. Brophy
A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
Edited by Christopher McKnight Nichols and Nancy C. Unger
A Companion to U.S. Foreign Relations: Colonial Era to the Present (2 volumes)
Edited by Christopher R. W. Dietrich
Edited by
Christopher R. W. Dietrich
Volume I
This edition first published 2020
© 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
The right of Christopher R. W. Dietrich to be identified as the author of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with law.
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John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
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Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats and by print‐on‐demand. Some content that appears in standard print versions of this book may not be available in other formats.
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Name: Dietrich, Christopher R. W., author.
Title: A companion to U.S. foreign relations : colonial era to the present / Christopher R. W. Dietrich, ed.
Description: Hoboken, NJ : Wiley, 2020. | Series: Wiley Blackwell companions to American history | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Contents: v. 1. Colonial era to the present –
Identifiers: LCCN 2019037182 (print) | LCCN 2019037183 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119166108 (v. 1 ; hardback) | ISBN 9781119166108 (v. 2 ; hardback) | ISBN 9781119459408 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119459699 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: United States–Foreign relations.
Classification: LCC E183.7 .D474 2020 (print) | LCC E183.7 (ebook) | DDC 327.73–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019037182
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019037183
Cover Design: Wiley
Cover Image: © John Parrot/Stocktrek Images/Getty Images
Benjamin A. Coates is Associate Professor of History at Wake Forest University. He is the author of Legalist Empire: International Law and American Foreign Relations in the Early Twentieth Century (2016). He has published scholarly articles in Diplomatic History, Modern American History, and Journal of American History, the latter of which won the Binkley‐Stephenson Award.
Emily Conroy‐Krutz is Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University. She is the author of Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic (2015), and her articles have appeared in Journal of the Early Republic, Early American Studies, and Diplomatic History.
Andre Fleche is Professor of History at Castleton University. He is the author of The Revolution of 1861: The American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict (2012), which received the James A. Rawley Award from the Southern Historical Association. His scholarly articles have been published in Civil War History, Journal of the Civil War Era, and South Central Review.
David S. Foglesong is Professor of History at Rutgers University. He is the author of The American Mission and the “Evil Empire”: The Crusade for a “Free Russia” Since 1881 (2007) and America’s Secret War Against Bolshevism: U.S. Intervention in the Russian Civil War, 1917–1920 (1995).
Ronald Angelo Johnson is Associate Professor of History at Texas State University. He is the author of Diplomacy in Black and White: John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Their Atlantic World Alliance (2014). His articles have appeared in History Compass, Early American Studies, and Baptist History & Heritage.
Andrew Johnstone is Director of American Studies and Associate Professor in American History at the University of Leicester. He is the author or editor of four books, including U.S. Presidential Elections and Foreign Policy: Candidates, Campaigns, and Global Politics from F.D.R. to Bill Clinton (2017) and Against Immediate Evil: American Internationalists and the Four Freedoms on the Eve of World War II (2014).
Ross A. Kennedy is Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at Illinois State University. He is the editor of A Companion to Woodrow Wilson (2013) and the author of The Will to Believe: Woodrow Wilson, World War I, and America’s Strategy for Peace and Security (2009), which won the Scott Bills Prize in Peace History.
Charles Laderman is Lecturer in International History at King’s College London. He is the author of Sharing the Burden: The Armenian Question, Humanitarian Intervention, and Anglo‐American Visions of Global Order (2019) and co‐author of Donald Trump: The Making of a World View (2017). His articles have appeared in Diplomatic History and Orbis.
Phillip W. Magness is a Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research in Great Barrington, MA. He is the co‐author of Cracks in the Ivory Tower: The Moral Mess of Higher Education (2019) and of Colonization after Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement (2011). His articles have appeared in Social Science Quarterly, Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Slavery & Abolition, and Journal of the Early Republic.
Daniel Margolies is Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at Virginia Wesleyan University. He is the author or editor of four books, including Spaces of Law in American Foreign Relations (2011) and Henry Watterson and the New South: The Politics of Empire, Free Trade, and Globalization (2006). His work has appeared in Journal of American Culture, American Studies, and Southwestern Law Review.
Elspeth Martini is Assistant Professor of History at Montclair State University. She specializes in Native American and First Nations diplomacy and North American borderlands, and is the author of numerous articles and chapters in edited collections.
B. J. C. McKercher is Professor of History at the University of Victoria and the author and editor of 17 books, including Transition of Power: Britain’s Loss of Global Preeminence to the United States, 1930–1945 (1999). He is the editor of the journal Diplomacy & Statecraft.
David Narrett is Professor of History at the University of Texas at Arlington. He is the author of Inheritance and Family Life in Colonial New York City (1992) and Adventurism and Empire: The Struggle for Mastery in the Louisiana‐Florida Borderlands, 1762–1803 (2015), and his articles have appeared in The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, New York History, and The William and Mary Quarterly.
Meredith Oyen is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She is the author of The Diplomacy of Migration: Transnational Lives and the Making of U.S.–Chinese Relations in the Cold War (2015). Her articles have appeared in Diplomatic History, Journal of Cold War Studies, and Modern Asian Studies.
Marc‐William Palen is Senior Lecturer at the University of Exeter. He is the author of The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade: The Anglo‐American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalisation, 1846–1896 (2016). He is the editor of Imperial and Global Forum, and has published articles in Diplomatic History, Historical Journal, and Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History.
Kiran Klaus Patel is Professor of History at Ludwig Maximilian University Munich. He is the author of Project Europe: A History (2020); The New Deal: A Global History (2016) and Soldiers of Labor: Labor Service in Nazi Germany and New Deal America, 1933–1945 (2005).
Brian Rouleau is Associate Professor of History at Texas A&M University. His book, With Sails Whitening Every Sea: Mariners and the Making of an American Maritime Empire (2014), won the James Broussard Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. He is the author of articles in Diplomatic History, Journal of the Early Republic, and Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.
Peter A. Shulman is Associate Professor of History at Case Western Review University. He is the author of Coal and Empire: The Birth of Energy Security in Industrial America (2015) and has published articles in Journal of Global History, Journal of Policy History, and History and Technology.
Anelise Hanson Shrout is Assistant Professor of Digital and Computational Studies at Bates College. She is the editor of the Digital Almshouse Project and her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Journal of the Early Republic, and Early American Studies.
Sarah Steinbock‐Pratt is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Alabama. She is the author of Educating the Empire: American Teachers and Contested Colonization in the Philippines (2019), as well as scholarly articles in Gender & History and Women’s Studies.
Christy Thornton is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Latin American Studies at Johns Hopkins University. She received her PhD in history from New York University and has been a fellow in the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History at Harvard University. Her first book, Revolution in Development: Mexico and the Governance of the Global Economy is under contract with the University of California Press.
Robbie J. Totten is Associate Professor and Chair of the Politics & Global Studies Department at the American Jewish University. His articles have appeared in Diplomatic History, Diplomacy & Statecraft, the Georgetown Immigration Law Journal, the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, and the UC Davis Journal of International Law & Policy.
Katherine Unterman is Associate Professor of History at Texas A&M University. She is the author of Uncle Sam’s Policemen: The Pursuit of Fugitives Across Borders (2015) and has published articles in Law and History Review, South Central Review, and Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the last of which won the Fishel‐Calhoun Prize.
Colleen Woods is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Maryland. She is the author of Freedom Incorporated: Anticommunism and Philippine Independence in the Age of Decolonization (2020) and of articles in Journal of Contemporary History and LABOR: Studies of Working‐Class History.
Sonja Wentling is Professor of History and Global Studies at Concordia College. She is the co‐author of Herbert Hoover and the Jews: The Origins of the “Jewish Vote” and Bipartisan Support for Israel (2012) and the author of articles in Journal of the Historical Society, American Jewish Archives, and American Jewish History.
Christopher R. W. Dietrich is Associate Professor of History and Director of American Studies at Fordham University. His first book, Oil Revolution, tracks the rise of anticolonial political economic thought among elites from oil‐producing nations in the Middle East and Latin America from the 1950s to the 1970s. It was published by Cambridge University Press in 2017. He has won awards and fellowships from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the American Historical Association, the National History Center, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the International Studies Association, and others. He is currently completing a book on oil, U.S. foreign relations, and domestic society from World War I to the present. Originally from Decatur, Georgia, he resides in New York City.
Many Histories
What follows is a collection of highly informative essays on the writing of the history of the foreign relations of the United States. But historiography is always more than just a literature review. These volumes ask a series of crucial questions about the past: What have been the key moments and themes in the history of U.S. foreign relations? How do those moments reflect the broader nature of the nation's global interactions? How did the United States become a colonial power and a global superpower? Who has shaped and been shaped by major foreign‐policy decisions, at home and abroad? In short, why is the study of the history of U.S. foreign relations so fundamentally important?
The essays here represent the work of a new generation of scholars who pose these and other probing questions that reach to the heart of American national identity. A brief word on the field’s critics is useful here. Writing on the history of U.S. foreign relations has never really been restricted to the field of “diplomatic history” – the enlightening but sometimes cramped study of powerful officials and the outward‐looking policies they made. To depict diplomatic history as simply “the world according to Washington,” as some have, was always to build a bit of a straw man. But scholarship written in the past generation has included an ampler array of actors and ideas beyond conventional policymakers like presidents and secretaries of state, beyond conventional arguments about grand strategy and national security. Scholars of ideology and political economy have revealed the ways in which the formation and international rise of American power was entwined with imperial expansion and global integration. Historians of labor, migration, development, and human rights have examined international networks and the place of modernization, morality, and movement in the decisions of state and non‐state actors. The upsurge in cultural and social history in the past two decades has encouraged historians to weave U.S. foreign relations together with histories of race, gender, class, national identity, and religion. Scholars have increasingly unearthed the economic, racial, and patriarchal structures that undergirded U.S. power in the nineteenth century and after. Historians of popular culture and politics have helped us understand how social movements, media, and nongovernmental organizations shape the myriad interactions of the United States with other actors. Global and international historians have encouraged us to remember that American actors, while exceedingly powerful in the twentieth century, never operated in a vacuum. Americans did have a great deal of what historians call “agency” – the power to transform their own and other peoples' lives – but their possibilities were shaped by events beyond their control as often as not.
Such insights have allowed this generation of historians to write new histories that build on ongoing debates about the nature of American international power, rather than replace them. Such a roomy understanding of the history of U.S. foreign relations should be celebrated, and this collection serves as a snapshot of a dynamic field. The first volume contains essays that analyze the history of U.S. foreign relations from the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, a period in which the United States won independence, expanded its borders rapidly, fought major wars, and joined the ranks of the modern, industrial imperial powers. Readers will find much of interest in terms of traditional questions of power, expansion, and wealth. They will also find essays that cover topics from propaganda to philanthropy, that discuss the lives of people from legislators and diplomats to artists and missionaries. The contributors cover a wide variety of methodologies, drawing from fields of U.S. political, diplomatic, legal, and military history. They examine the links between U.S. foreign relations and the study of American culture, ideology, race, gender, and religion, as well as the study of migration, Native American history, the political economies of industrialization and imperialism, and U.S. interactions with a wide variety of characters at home and abroad.
Great new opportunities have opened up with the deeper integration of the history of U.S. foreign relations with other schools of study. The chapters of the second volume analyze a dizzying array of topics for the period dominated by the Cold War, decolonization, and U.S.‐led globalization. The volume begins with a series of essays on military bases, black internationalism, development, narcotics, public diplomacy, decolonization, and other topics. Subsequent chapters examine U.S. relations with different actors from Europe, Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The volume also features essays on the Vietnam War, nuclear politics and diplomacy, international political economy, and the end of the Cold War. As in the first volume, the chapters analyze older and newer currents of thought in the history of U.S. foreign relations, including the study of human rights, non‐state actors and non‐U.S. perspectives, modernization and development, natural resources, and the material and cultural worlds inhabited by U.S. actors and their interlocutors.
The result is wonderfully messy. Just as different pasts bleed into different presents, so too are the borders of the topography of the history of U.S. foreign relations not neatly parceled out. The study of diplomacy was and still is a question of how people used the levers of power and wealth, and diplomacy continues to provide a well‐defined center and periphery to the flourishing range of approaches discussed in the following pages. All the while, new approaches have helped us understand not only official decision‐making but also the wider world that informs it. This project is thus meant above all to help students, scholars, and the general public take in hand the challenging and fascinating scope not of the singular story but of the many histories of U.S. foreign relations. Its essays reveal the benefits of the inclusive spirit that should be at the core of modern historical scholarship. Different methods in historians' toolkits can congregate to provide us with a better understanding of the past.
Historical research in the last decade has drawn our attention to the many causes and consequences of crucial moments and trends in the history of U.S. foreign relations – from the American Revolution to the Cold War to the Global War on Terror. At the most fundamental level, the histories that follow remind us how the nation's interactions at home and abroad have shaped not just the practice of American power but the ways it has been understood over time: how people work out what values and interests drive U.S. foreign relations, what consequences derive from the practice of American power, what it means to be American. These are questions for yesterday, for today, and for all time.
Writing the acknowledgements for a project as large as this is a particularly formidable task. It has been a joy to learn from the contributors to these two volumes, and I thank them for sharing their time and expertise. Each has admirably surveyed their niche in this fascinating field, and all have linked their topics to the deeper questions of change and continuity over the course of the history of U.S. foreign relations. I am delighted with the marvelous intellectual work they have produced. I thank the authors for their perseverance and professionalism, for enduring endless updates and request for revisions, and for putting up with me.
The project emerged from conversations with Jeremi Suri at the University of Texas at Austin and Peter Coveney at Wiley‐Blackwell. It is an honor to join the Companions to American History series, and I am grateful to Peter for allowing me to run with the idea. Thanks to my current team at Wiley‐Blackwell, Jennifer Manias, Skyler Van Valkenburgh, Liz Wingett, Lesley Drewitt, and Sakthivel Kandaswamy, for working tirelessly in shepherding the project to completion. My colleagues at Fordham University – especially Asif Siddiqi, Kirsten Swinth, Silvana Patriarca, David Hamlin, Daniel Soyer, Wes Alcenat, Samantha Iyer, Magda Teter, Yuko Miki, David Myers, Magda Teter, Carl Fischer, Glenn Hendler, and Saul Cornell – have generously shared their wisdom.
My partner Verónica Jiménez Vega and my son Emiliano Dietrich‐Jiménez deserve many thanks and much love for their consistent support. Finally, I would like to thank our readers. To capture the motivations and beliefs of people in the past is the historian's trade, but you are the reason for our work.
This series provides essential and authoritative overviews of the scholarship that has shaped our present understanding of the American past. Edited by eminent historians, each volume tackles one of the major periods or themes of American history, with individual topics authored by key scholars who have spent considerable time in research on the questions and controversies that have sparked debate in their field of interest. The volumes are accessible for the non‐specialist, while also engaging scholars seeking a reference to the historiography or future concerns.
A Companion to the American Revolution
Edited by Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole
A Companion to 19th‐Century America
Edited by William L. Barney
A Companion to the American South
Edited by John B. Boles
A Companion to American Women’s History
Edited by Nancy Hewitt
A Companion to American Indian History
Edited by Philip J. Deloria and Neal Salisbury
A Companion to Post‐1945 America
Edited by Jean‐Christophe Agnew and Roy Rosenzweig
A Companion to the Vietnam War
Edited by Marilyn Young and Robert Buzzanco
A Companion to Colonial America
Edited by Daniel Vickers
A Companion to American Foreign Relations
Edited by Robert Schulzinger
A Companion to 20th‐Century America
Edited by Stephen J. Whitfield
A Companion to the American West
Edited by William Deverell
A Companion to the Civil War and Reconstruction
Edited by Lacy K. Ford
A Companion to American Technology
Edited by Carroll Pursell
A Companion to African‐American History
Edited by Alton Hornsby
A Companion to American Immigration
Edited by Reed Ueda
A Companion to American Cultural History
Edited by Karen Halttunen
A Companion to California History
Edited by William Deverell and David Igler
A Companion to American Military History
Edited by James Bradford
A Companion to Los Angeles
Edited by William Deverell and Greg Hise
A Companion to American Environmental History
Edited by Douglas Cazaux Sackman
A Companion to Benjamin Franklin
Edited by David Waldstreicher
A Companion to World War Two (2 volumes)
Edited by Thomas W. Zeiler with Daniel M. DuBois
A Companion to American Legal History
Edited by Sally E. Hadden and Alfred L. Brophy
A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
Edited by Christopher McKnight Nichols and Nancy C. Unger
A Companion to U.S. Foreign Relations: Colonial Era to the Present (2 volumes)
Edited by Christopher R. W. Dietrich
Edited by
Christopher R. W. Dietrich
Volume II
This edition first published 2020
© 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
The right of Christopher R. W. Dietrich to be identified as the author of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with law.
Registered Office
John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
Editorial Office
111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
For details of our global editorial offices, customer services, and more information about Wiley products visit us at www.wiley.com.
Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats and by print‐on‐demand. Some content that appears in standard print versions of this book may not be available in other formats.
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty
Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Name: Dietrich, Christopher R. W., author.
Title: A companion to U.S. foreign relations : colonial era to the present / Christopher R. W. Dietrich, ed.
Description: Hoboken, NJ : Wiley, 2020. | Series: Wiley Blackwell companions to American history | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Contents: v. 2. Colonial era to the present –
Identifiers: LCCN 2019037182 (print) | LCCN 2019037183 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119166108 (v. 1 ; hardback) | ISBN 9781119166108 (v. 2 ; hardback) | ISBN 9781119459408 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119459699 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: United States–Foreign relations.
Classification: LCC E183.7 .D474 2020 (print) | LCC E183.7 (ebook) | DDC 327.73–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019037182
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019037183
Cover Design: Wiley
Cover Image: © John Parrot/Stocktrek Images/Getty Images