US relations with the Greater Caribbean – a region that includes the Gulf of Mexico, the arc of islands from Cuba to Trinidad, and the circum-Caribbean – continuously evolved during the late 1700s and through the 1800s. The expansion of US power in the region ran along two different tracks, territorial and commercial. These parallel manifestations were often intertwined but sometimes ran in opposition to one another. They responded to ever-changing Atlantic-wide geopolitical circumstances as well as regional and national US economic interests and politics.

The US role in the region progressed from defensive to offensive as it edged ever closer to hegemony in the late nineteenth century. This general trajectory can be broken down into a series of specific phases. Prior to independence, the British North American colonies were woven tightly with the British West Indies (BWI) under Great Britain’s mercantilist system.

The United States acquired a large overseas empire as a result of its quick victory in the War of 1898. The war had many causes, but for most Americans it began as a humanitarian intervention to liberate Cubans suffering under Spanish rule, a generous aim that made the war popular. If the cause of the war had to do with Cuba, the consequences went further. By war’s end, the United States also occupied Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and other Spanish territories in the Pacific. These possessions fell into the lap of the United States as a byproduct of the war in Cuba, and the United States did not let go of them, leading to resistance by people who had not imagined trading Spanish rule for American. Governing unwilling subjects soon led to “pacifying” them by coercive methods that took some of the shine off American self-regard and boosted anti-imperialist sentiment.

From the Puritans to President Ronald Reagan, many Americans have viewed their nation as a model for the rest of the world to emulate. In part they believed that the American people’s fervent religious commitments and their incorporation of religion into public life and policy made the United States exceptional among the world’s leading powers. Yet when the founders crafted the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights, they ensured that the federal government could not establish an official church, and they insisted that Americans maintain the right to exercise their faiths freely. Religious leaders, lacking state support, sought creative ways to remain relevant, to strengthen and expand the power and influence of religion in their nation and abroad. They sought new and innovative ways to make the United States the world’s “city on a hill.”1

This chapter connects neoliberalism, globalization, and US power. From the late 1970s, it argues, the international political economy shifted toward a neoliberal model of globalization. US power exerted significant influence on this remaking, but the United States was not the paramount architect of neoliberal globalization. Rather, the broad recourse to neoliberal solutions from the 1980s resulted from a basic misalignment between political order and economic activity under conditions of advanced globalization. In a world fragmented into a patchwork of territorial sovereignties, the transnational integration of markets will empower economic actors to escape the bonds of political control, loosening the governing capacities of nations. Neoliberal solutions, it follows, arose not from ideological imposition so much as from the structural determinants of the international system.

The middle decades of the nineteenth century witnessed the creation of a liberal North Atlantic that profoundly shaped America’s role in the wider world. State-to-state interaction did less to frame the contours of this era’s liberal ascendency than the discourse of travelers, reformers, and writers whose commitments and attitudes affirmed the century’s progressive tendencies. Observations published by Europeans sojourning in the United States offered early glimpses of an emerging conviction, shared within and beyond US borders, that mankind’s liberal future would boast an American pedigree.

John Stuart Mill stated a truism in his 1840 remark that “every book of travels in America had been a party pamphlet.” But while transatlantic travelogues of the colonial, revolutionary, and post-revolutionary periods had been “pressed into the service of one party or the other,” the appearance of Democracy in America (1835; 1840) by French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville shifted the dialogue. Thenceforth, popular government – its desirability, its extent, and its deficiencies – would be a touchstone for foreigners’ reflecting upon the American experiment.

War is simultaneously a destructive force and a powerful engine of political and social reform. In the early modern era, when colonization of the Americas stimulated the development of European overseas empires and the parallel process of state formation, warfare and imperial reform came to be tightly linked and closely related processes. From 1689 until 1815, warfare among the principal European colonizing powers became an endemic condition, and wars increasingly spilled over into American theaters. Warfare prompted imperial reforms; those reforms, in turn, prompted further conflicts. Between 1689 and 1815, imperial competition, overseas warfare, and reform unfolded in three long eras. In the first, which extended through the first half of the eighteenth century, European powers developed a sharpened sense of commercial and territorial rivalry in the Americas. Commercial rivalries heightened Spain’s efforts to defend its maritime interests, while territorial competition energized activities in borderlands regions and led to new patterns of alliance with Native American groups. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the second era of imperial conflict and reform unfolded.

America’s rise to global political power for much of the twentieth century was accompanied by – arguably even predicated on – its ascent to economic predominance. Replacing Britain globally and Germany and Japan as regional economic powers, this gradual changing of the guard marked a profound transformation of global capitalism. Aside from quantitative differences in the size of economies, volumes of trade, and the like, perhaps the clearest contrast between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ US-dominated regime was that the twentieth century saw an unprecedented proliferation of institutions designed to manage, or ‘govern’ global capitalism. Indeed, the United States in particular benefited from these institutions since, as the preeminent power involved in setting up such capitalist infrastructure after 1945, it was able to shape their design, influence staffing, and otherwise exert power.

International development saved Albert Hirschman, albeit indirectly. Already displaced, the young Jewish scholar made an escape from Vichy France in 1940 underwritten by streams of thought converging in the United States. He found a patron in John Bell Condliffe, a peripatetic New Zealand economist, whose research on the global economy in nongovernmental and international organizations had led him to the University of California at Berkeley. Having produced some sharp analysis for an international conference Condliffe organized, Hirschman warranted saving. Condliffe’s lobbying in Washington and with the Rockefeller Foundation produced a fellowship at Berkeley, meaning a visa could be issued and with it safety in the United States. This intervention was transformative, drawing Hirschman to the United States as well as into budding discussions about international development, which would both shape and be shaped by his career.1

When William Henry Seward reflected in 1854 on the vast geographic and material growth of his country, he echoed most Americans’ views of technological innovation. “He wanted machines for working up his forests, and he invented the saw-gang, and the grooving and planning machines,” Seward declared of his fellow American. He sought machines “for cleaning his cotton, and he invented the gin; for harvesting wheat, and he invented the reaper. He needed mechanical force to navigate his long rivers and broad lakes, and he converted the steam engine into a marine power. He needed dispatch in communicating intelligence, and he placed his lightning-rod horizontally, and beating it into a wire, converted it into a writing telegraph.”1 As secretary of state, Seward would be among the Americans to push technological innovation into the service of foreign policy.

Thomas Jefferson was not sure if Latin American Catholics could be virtuous, civic-minded republicans, but for the United States’ (and presumably humanity’s) sake, he certainly hoped so. Beginning around the time he bade farewell to the White House in 1809, Jefferson watched as independence wars flared throughout Mexico and South America. By the time he died on the nation’s fiftieth birthday on July Fourth of 1826, the entire Spanish American mainland had secured its republican independence, as had monarchical Brazil.

American encounters with the Islamic world began almost as soon as the first colonists arrived in the New World. The first known Muslim to arrive on American shores dates back to 1537, when a Spanish explorer brought his African Muslim slave, Estaban de Dorantes, also known as Esteban the Moor, to what is today Florida and Texas. By the early nineteenth century, Muslim slaves in the United States numbered in the thousands, although their religious beliefs drew scant attention from slaveowners. In contrast, theological beliefs about the Islamic faith played an important role in shaping American interactions with Muslims abroad, beginning with the Barbary Wars in 1805 and extending to American colonial governance of the Philippine Islands after the 1898 Spanish-American War and the arrival of the first Muslim immigrants to the United States.

What was the place of the United States in the world at the start of the nineteenth century? The American republic that emerged from the Revolutionary War was keenly aware of its fragility on the world stage and its particular vulnerability within North America. European nations retained vast territorial claims and chafed at the insolence of American independence; Native American nations confounded the boasts of early US politicians that the liberality of American statesmen was the only check on westward expansion. The political elite of the Founding era insisted that the United States would create a new order, but their visions of American development were keenly attuned to the emerging political systems of Europe and the wider world.

On February 9, 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt appointed a special Commission to oversee what would soon become the most prodigious engineering project undertaken to that time in human history. Having conspired to stage a near-bloodless coup with the support of local notables that compelled Columbia to cede its sovereignty over the Isthmus of Panama, the president cleared the way for the United States to construct a sea route between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans across the narrow waist that joined the two continents of the Western Hemisphere. The region’s dense rainforests and mountainous terrain contributed to the audacity of the enterprise that prompted many contemporary observers to predict that it would likely prove an extravagant failure. That expectation also appeared to be substantiated by the experience of the prestigious corps of French engineers, who under the direction of Ferdinand de Lesseps had built a canal across the Suez desert in the 1860s, but failed dismally in their attempt (also directed by Lesseps) to carve out a similar waterway across Panama between 1881 and 1889. But the pessimists failed to consider the remarkable advances in technology, the education and organization of engineers, and applied science – especially medicine – that had been made in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. These breakthroughs were essential for impressive increases in scale, organization, and productivity across the main sectors of the transcontinental economy that occurred in the first decades of the twentieth century, and the consequent improvement in living standards for ever-greater numbers of Americans. The technological and scientific advances that made for the success of the Panama Canal project provided the basis for further major innovations in the half century that followed. These undergirded the emergence of the United States as an engine of global material increase and a dominant military and political power.