Journal Article The Monroe Doctrine in an Age of Global History Get access Jay Sexton Jay Sexton E-mail: sextonj@missouri.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Diplomatic History, dhad043, https://doi.org/10.1093/dh/dhad043 Published: 07 July 2023

Reviewed by: The Greek Fire: American-Ottoman Relations and Democratic Fervor in the Age of Revolutions by Maureen Connors Santelli, and: Newest Born of Nations: European Nationalist Movements and the Making of the Confederacy by Ann L. Tucker Jay Sexton (bio) Greek rebellion, Nationalist movements, Independence, European revolutions The Greek Fire: American-Ottoman Relations and Democratic Fervor in the Age of Revolutions. By Maureen Connors Santelli. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020. Pp. 264. Cloth, $45.00.) Newest Born of Nations: European Nationalist Movements and the Making of the Confederacy. By Ann L. Tucker. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020. Pp. 272. Cloth, $45.00.) These two books belong to the fast-growing second generation of scholarship from the U.S. global turn. The first generation of this historiography, which often took the form of call-to-arms essays and overview sketches, sought to establish the significance of cross-border phenomenon to U.S. history. Second-generation scholarship, such as these two books under review, get on with the job of re-interpreting national history through a cosmopolitan lens. Under the microscope in these two fine studies are the contested responses of Americans to revolutions in Europe. Maureen Connors Santelli shows that the struggle for Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire in the 1820s became a popular sensation in America. Initially taking its cue from the romantic Philhellenism of Lord Byron, what contemporaries called "the Greek fire" quickly spread throughout the early republic, in the process taking a distinctive American form. Sympathy for the Greeks in the United States was widespread, not least because American observers came to see the rebellion in relation to their own revolution against imperial oppression in 1776. The Greek cause ignited interest from across the social spectrum: Elite intellectuals like Harvard's first professor of Greek literature Edward Everett might have been the most well-known American Philhellenes, but Santelli's meticulous research unearths significant interest in the Greek cause from those of all social ranks and geographic regions. It is here that the book takes an interesting turn, as we learn how the rhetoric and networks of the "Greek fire" eventually came to be repurposed by abolitionist activists, including David Walker and William Lloyd Garrison, as well as early advocates of women's rights. It is a testament to the range of The Greek Fire that Santelli extends her analysis beyond the transnational story of the reception of the Greek [End Page 165] rebellion in America to consider the trans-imperial and geopolitical dimensions of this episode. Here, the domestic "Greek fire" presented problems to American commercial interests and diplomats, who sought access to the Black Sea and a commercial agreement with the Ottoman state. This was the unfolding of a different legacy of the American Revolution than that of simply equating the Greek rebels with the American Founding Fathers. The United States zealously attempted to break down Ottoman commercial barriers, to secure access to markets, and to achieve parity with the British and European empires in the region. Ottoman officials were open to cutting some type of deal with the United States, but not if the nation supported the insurgent Greeks. The Monroe administration was of two minds about how to proceed, with the president sympathetic to the Greeks and Secretary of State Adams inclined to prioritize a commercial agreement with the Ottomans, building on the informal U.S. commercial bridgehead that had been established in Smyrna. In the end, officials pursued a compromise policy: The U.S. state would not recognize Greek independence but would do nothing to inhibit legal actions of private groups of American Philhellenes, who redoubled efforts to extend humanitarian aid to the struggling Greek rebels. As with so many compromise policies, the result alienated both sides—with Greek rebels disappointed in the lack of U.S. support and Ottoman officials complaining of the allegedly pro-Greek tilt of U.S. policy. Nonetheless, the United States eventually saw its desired objectives come to fruition. By the early 1830s, the United States had a commercial treaty with the Ottoman Empire, and Greece had earned its independence (though Santelli acknowledges that this outcome had little to do with U.S. private...

Historians traditionally have interpreted the nineteenth century colonization movement, which sought to geographically separate peoples of African descent from the white populations of the United States, in national terms. In this telling, colonization was an outgrowth of the domestic political conflicts concerning slavery and the future position of African Americans in the United States. Brendon Mills’ new study of the colonization movement, in contrast, situates the story in an imperial context. Throughout this clearly structured and written book, Mills argues that colonization was inextricably entwined with the imperial formation and expansion of the United States. “The colonization movement gained so much traction, in part, because it spoke to American aspiration toward empire and connected this vision of expansion abroad with ideas about race at home” (2). This study covers much ground, both chronological and geographic. The story begins at the end of the eighteenth century, which witnessed the bloody revolution...

Gregory Downs advances two broad arguments in this concise but rich book. First, he contends that the sectional crisis in the mid-nineteenth-century United States was a “revolutionary situation” that ultimately led to “the fall of the First American Republic and the rise of a Second Republic founded on a Second Constitution created in a Second American Revolution” (p. 4). Downs details the Republican party's turn toward “bloody constitutionalism” during a decade that saw secession crushed, the end of slavery, and transformative political and social changes during Radical Reconstruction. The revolutionaries of this period downplayed their accomplishments, “whitewashing” their revolution to normalize their achievements and forestall further instability (p. 51). Rather than viewing the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s as an “unfinished revolution,” Downs counters that it was a “finished revolution” that had reached its political limits by the late 1870s (pp. 134–35). Downs's second argument, which might have been more fully integrated with the first, concerns the international dimensions of the Civil War. The contention here is that the U.S. story “was part of a set of interconnected rebellions that spread from Cuba and Spain to the United States” before then reverberating back into these Spanish-speaking realms in the 1860s and 1870s (p. 57). This section of the book is the freshest, particularly when discussing the shifting tactics of Cuban revolutionaries, the expansionist impulses within the ranks of antislavery Republicans in the United States, and the complex policy choices confronting the United States once both Cuba and Spain entered a period of revolutionary instability in the late 1860s.

Political Science QuarterlyVolume 136, Issue 4 p. 782-784 Book Review The Picky Eagle: How Democracy and Xenophobia Limited U.S. Territorial Expansion by Maass, Richard W.. Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2020. 312 pp. $39.95. Jay Sexton, Jay Sexton University of MissouriSearch for more papers by this author Jay Sexton, Jay Sexton University of MissouriSearch for more papers by this author First published: 14 December 2021 https://doi.org/10.1002/polq.13272Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume136, Issue4Winter 2021Pages 782-784 RelatedInformation

The fourth volume of The Cambridge History of America and the World examines the heights of American global power in the mid-twentieth century and how challenges from at home and abroad altered the United States and its role in the world. The second half of the twentieth century marked the pinnacle of American global power in economic, political, and cultural terms, but even as it reached such heights, the United States quickly faced new challenges to its power, originating both domestically and internationally. Highlighting cutting-edge ideas from scholars from all over the world, this volume anatomizes American power as well as the counters and alternatives to 'the American empire.' Topics include US economic and military power, American culture overseas, human rights and humanitarianism, third-world internationalism, immigration, communications technology, and the Anthropocene.

Where does the United States fit into global histories of modern empire? This essay contends that A.G. Hopkins's depiction of nineteenth century America as the modern world's first postcolonial polity not only imaginatively advances the project of globalising U.S. history, it also reveals the ongoing significance of America to the expansion and development of the British Empire itself. Viewing the British Empire through its deep and diverse connections to postcolonial America underscores the integration, dynamism, power, and vulnerability of the British imperial system in its Victorian heyday.

The imperial turn in the study of the nineteenth century has made an endangered species of scholars that deny the existence of U.S. empire. But with the closure of the old “was the United States in the nineteenth century an empire” debate has come a host of new questions and research avenues. One such line of scholarship seeks to better understand and unpack the U.S. empire’s constitutive parts, geopolitical logic, and political economy. Enter Lindsay Schakenbach Regele, whose Manufacturing Advantage persuasively argues that the stunning growth of the U.S. empire in the early nineteenth century was fueled by a dynamic and innovative political economy that fused state power to industrial development. The book charts more than a half century of federal policies that primed the pump of two industries central to the survival and expansion of the early republic: textiles and arms. At the heart of the study is the concept of “national security capitalism,” which is defined as “a mixed enterprise system in which government agents and private producers brokered solutions to the problems of international economic disparities and war” (2). National security capitalism was the creation of the executive department, which emerges as a more significant player in this study than does the legislative branch: “Congress declared war, but the executive made war” (5).

It is a privilege to have the opportunity to address you all today. I would like to start with a shout-out to Stuart L. Bernath. I have been a big fan of Bernath ever since I was hunting for a transatlantic Civil War dissertation topic back in grad school. It was then that I first came across Squall Across the Atlantic: American Civil War Prize Cases and Diplomacy, a meticulously researched and perceptive study of maritime law during the Civil War.1 Half way through reading it I concluded that I better look for a different way into my topic of choice, such was the quality of Bernath’s study. Since we are here in Chicago, I also want to give a shout-out to the Midwest, my home. I was born and raised in Salina, an I-70 town in central Kansas. After a great run in the UK, I was lucky to have the opportunity to repatriate to Columbia, Missouri, some four hours east on the same interstate where I grew up. Spanning from the rolling Flint Hills of Kansas to the great river basin of mid-Missouri, this corridor of I-70 includes the first section of interstate built in America in the 1950s. I think it is the world’s most beautiful stretch of motorway.

This essay examines how William H. Seward adapted the imperial vision and policies of the United States in light of the steam revolution of the mid-nineteenth century. Historians rightly have viewed Seward as his era's most significant U. S. architect of U. S. empire. But what they have not appropriately emphasized is how his legacy lay less in continuity with his predecessors and successors, than in how he sought to reconfigure U. S. policy in relation to one of the revolutionary developments of his time - the emergence of steam transport.

Este artículo analiza la manera en que William H. Seward adaptó la visión imperial y las políticas de Estados Unidos a la luz de la revolución de la tecnología de vapor a mediados del siglo XIX. La historiografía ha visto a Seward como uno de los arquitectos más importantes del imperio estadounidense, pero lo que no se ha enfatizado de manera apropiada es cómo su legado fue menos en su continuidad con sus antecesores y sucesores y más en cómo intentó reconfigurar la política estadounidense alrededor de uno de los desarrollos más revolucionarios de su época: la aparición del transporte de vapor.

There are few if any topics fitting under the broad rubric of “the United States and the world” that are more in need of scholarly attention than the history of the encounters between the U.S. and Islamic societies in the long nineteenth century. Despite the obvious contemporary importance of the topic, the historiography remains surprisingly sparse, though part of the explanation for this can be found in the quality of those works that do exist on the topic, by historians such as James A. Field, Ussama Samir Makdisi, Barbara Reeves-Ellington, and Heather J. Sharkey. Karine V. Walther enters this field with a wide-ranging work that will inspire further scholarship. The scope of the book’s argument is ambitious: Walther suggests that such was the continuity in U.S. attitudes toward Islamic societies in different places and in different times that it is appropriate to speak of an invented “Islamic world” within U.S. discourse and policymaking. Sacred Interests: The United States and the Islamic World, 1821–1921 is based on a series of case studies of U.S. involvement in and reactions toward the revolutions in Greece and Crete, the colonial administration of the Moro population in the Philippines, the massacres in Armenia, and the geopolitics of the Great War era. In a section somewhat awkwardly wedged between those topics, there is an exploration of Jewish American activism in Morocco in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth. Though Walther might have more fully explained the rationale for the selection of these episodes (as well as their running order—the chapter on the Armenian massacres occurs out of sequence), the author should be applauded for seeking to explore the connections and common denominators between such a broad range of topics.