ABSTRACT

Historians of the United States are making increasing use of the term empire to describe and analyse U.S. expansion in the nineteenth century. But this process is better captured by the term incorporation, which is used by Antony Hopkins in his American Empire. Nineteenth-century U.S. statesmen strove to people outlying territories with white settler-colonies that could be incorporated into the American federal union as sovereign and equal republics. They avoided acquiring territories with large non-white populations due to their belief that these were not fit for incorporation in the Union but had to be ruled as imperial dependencies. The American mode of territorial expansion was ultimately shaped by the organisation of the United States as a federal union of republics that rejected imperial rule. Neither republican government nor federal union were compatible with the jurisdictional and ethnic heterogeneity typical of empires. For this reason, American territorial expansion tried to reproduce on a continental scale the white republics of the Atlantic seaboard. The dispossession and exploitation of ethnic ‘others’ that characterised nineteenth-century territorial expansion therefore originated in American republicanism and American federalism, principles that can be traced back to the nation’s point of origin, rather than in imperial legacies or borrowings.

摘要

美国历史学家越来越多地使用帝国一词来描述和分析美国在 19 世纪的扩张。但是这个过程更好地用术语“公司化”来描述，安东尼霍普金斯在他的美国帝国中使用了这个术语。. 19 世纪的美国政治家努力争取拥有白人定居者殖民地的边远地区的人们，这些人可以作为主权和平等的共和国加入美国联邦联盟。他们避免获得拥有大量非白人人口的领土，因为他们认为这些领土不适合并入联邦，而必须作为帝国附属国进行统治。美国的领土扩张模式最终是由美国作为一个拒绝帝国统治的联邦共和国联盟形成的。共和政府和联邦联盟都不符合帝国典型的管辖权和种族异质性。出于这个原因，美国领土扩张试图在大陆范围内复制大西洋沿岸的白色共和国。