In the fall of 1845, Second Lieutenant John J. Peck boarded the Pacific with a carpetbag, several trunks, a crate of liquor and cigars, and a gray dapple horse named Pete. Although he regretted giving up his comfortable post as an artillery commander in New York, he was certain that his decision to join General Zachary Taylor’s army in Texas was “for the best.” The United States Congress had voted to annex the Republic of Texas earlier that year, and the war that was likely to result with Mexico would, in Peck’s view, prevent the United States “from falling to pieces by internal causes and convulsions” over “trivial difficulties about the tariff, slaves &c.”

Between 1900 and 1945, the United States became one of the world’s leading providers of international humanitarian assistance. Collectively, and often in close partnership, US citizens, American voluntary associations and private firms, and US governmental and military officials delivered considerable aid abroad. This assistance – in the form of money, food, material supplies, and logistical support – reached millions of people in dozens of different countries and colonies. Among these recipients of US aid were survivors of a diverse array of humanitarian crises, including war, political and social upheaval, famine, and natural disasters. Across these forty-five years, US officials and citizens routinely imagined and defined these aid efforts as untarnished demonstrations of American goodwill. The reality, however, was more complex. Domestic and international politics, cultural assumptions and racial stereotypes, and uneven economic and power dynamics between American donors and aid recipients, as this chapter will show, regularly limited the humanitarian and diplomatic potential of US foreign assistance.

Reports of the United States’ rise to a lead role on the global stage in the early twentieth century have been greatly exaggerated. As many Americans at the time recognized, the United States continued to have less capacity for overseas power projection and remained far more dependent on the world’s reigning hegemon, Great Britain, than is generally now realized. The United States, it is true, acquired an overseas empire in 1898. But it lacked basic attributes of economic sovereignty, naval power, and domestic consensus on the desirability of global great-power status. Even after World War I, a better candidate than the Spanish-American War as the moment when the United States became a leading global power, both the material and the cultural basis of that power remained fragile.

This chapter examines the intersection between immigration policy, which is often regarded as a domestic matter, and international relations. The US government must negotiate with other nations concerning key aspects of immigration including the citizenship status of people who have moved and the protections and rights due to migrants of various nationalities when they travel in areas governed by other sovereign nations. Because differential rights of entry signal friendships and respect between nations, or disdain and hostility for other countries and their peoples, unacceptably discriminatory restrictions on mobility and residence can damage international friendships. A sovereign nation’s capacities to enforce its immigration restrictions and secure rights of safe travel for its citizens abroad also signal its international standing.

Studying “America and the World” in the period before the advent of the United States carries a different meaning than it does after 1776. As used by historians of the modern United States, as in the other volumes in this series, America and the world usually refers to the foreign policy and global interactions of the American republic, with the United States occupying the role of an independent power and, increasingly, an empire. This volume calls for a different agenda: to understand how the United States emerged out of a series of colonial interactions, some involving Indigenous empires and communities that were already present when the first Europeans reached the Americas; others the adventurers and settlers dispatched by Europe’s imperial powers to secure their American claims; and still others men and women brought as slaves or indentured servants to the colonies that European settlers founded. For most of the 300 years after the first European voyages of discovery, we use America to refer not to a single political entity, much less an empire, but rather to a space within which other states, peoples, and empires, many of them centered outside the Western Hemisphere, interacted and vied for supremacy and control.

When we think about law and empire, it is most accurate, if inelegant, to pluralize everything: empires, colonies, peoples, cultures, sources of law. The transnational turn has dramatic implications for the history of law in the Americas. Most obviously, especially for the period from 1500 to 1812, scholars have become increasingly sensitive to the role of European empires – including the British, French, and Spanish – in shaping America’s legal cultures. Groups of colonists from across Europe brought a multiplicity of understandings of law and social order with them, encountering Indigenous nations with their own rich legal traditions. Colonists used law to justify their wars, govern their settlements, and express their politics. They also used law to forge relationships with the polities around them, including Indigenous nations and rival colonies. During this period of legal superabundance, the questions of whose law, and what law, applied in colonial jurisdictions were always live, and often impossible to answer with certainty. Law changed as it traveled across oceans, plains, and mountains, incorporating local traditions here and obliterating them there, sometimes deliberately, sometimes by accident.

On August 9, 1945, President Harry S. Truman alerted the country to a change in US relations with the rest of the world. That night, in his radio address, Truman began not with recent negotiations at Potsdam or the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but with his plans to secure postwar overseas military bases. Truman had just returned from Berlin where the devastation of war was everywhere apparent. “It is a ghost city,” he informed his audience. To spare Americans such a fate, and to protect the world from “the ravages of any future breach of the peace,” Truman continued, the United States had to “maintain the military bases necessary for the complete protection of our interests and of world peace.”

Like other belligerents in World War II, the United States planned to annihilate the enemy, civilians as well as soldiers. Especially in the Pacific theater but in Europe as well, Americans drew on the experience of their own horrible Civil War. Victory would be accomplished through the utter destruction of evil, often going beyond moral boundaries and evoking moral qualms. Americans would defend the soldiers fighting a supposedly “good war,” as commentators later called it, against murderous ideologies. But in decades of reflection afterward, the American way defied notions of goodness. Surely, there were no panaceas, noted author Paul Fussell, to win a war but through killing.1 The war was a necessary fight against genocide and aggression. Yet tens of millions needlessly perished, and the United States shared responsibility for this outcome.

On August 26, 1942, Wendell L. Willkie, who had been Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Republican opponent in the 1940 presidential election, took off from Mitchell Field on Long Island in a converted B-24 four-engine Liberator bomber. The bomber, called the “Gulliver” and flown by a crew of US Army officers, took Willkie on an extraordinary forty-nine day, 31,000-mile tour around a world engulfed in war. Not only did he circle the globe but, as Willkie made a point of noting after he landed back in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on October 14, for the bulk of his journey he flew around the equator, making numerous stops in South America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia and looping back home through Siberia and over the Arctic Ocean (Map 30.1). En route, he toured Cairo, Egypt, and made a trip to El Alamein in the country’s Western Desert to confer with the Allied commander there, General Bernard “Monty” Montgomery, just as the Allied forces had stopped the German advance in North Africa and were planning for the final of defeat of their forces there. In Beirut, Lebanon, Willkie met with the exiled leader of the Free French, General Charles de Gaulle, in his villa in the city. In Jerusalem he received both Jewish and Arab representatives and contemplated the conflict between them, wondering presciently whether “the only solution to this tangled problem must be as drastic as Solomon’s.”1

This chapter analyzes the relationship between US foreign relations and the non-human world from the late 1960s through the 1990s in two ways. First, it charts the rise of US international environmental policy. It argues that US leaders often assigned low priority to environmental diplomacy and that non-state actors often played an important role in setting policy agendas, lobbying for policy change, and trying to enforce policy follow through. When leaders did embrace environmental issues, they did so to garner domestic and international goodwill without incurring any additional strategic or financial responsibilities. Yet policymakers struggled to achieve this balance. Environmental diplomacy often exacerbated international tensions over economic, political, and social issues, such as the trade in endangered species in the 1970s to biodiversity conservation in the 1980s to curbing global carbon emissions from the 1990s to the present day.

Long before the emergence of the United States, the early modern Atlantic world played host to a bewildering variety of polities. Beyond the orbits of the vast, powerful Aztec and Inka empires, North America’s Indigenous peoples inhabited authoritarian city-states the likes of Coosa and Cofitachequi, confederacies such as the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) and Wyandot (Huron), and the modest chiefdoms that predominated from the New England coast deep into the continent’s heart. In the West African interior, the gold-rich empires of Mali and Songhay gave way to the Kingdom of Kongo and its tributary Ndongo, while the Atlantic littoral teemed with mini-states that both embraced and transcended the bonds of kinship. For its part, Europe was a shatter zone of kingdoms perched uneasily atop an ancient landscape of counties, duchies, and fiefdoms, all of it undergirded by Latin Christianity, a faith hell-bent on policing its boundaries and bubbling with discord.

Rather than undertake an almost impossible task to render a coherent history of three oceans between the years of 1500 to 1800, this chapter seeks to address three interrelated issues. It first explores the novelty of aquatic historiography and its contestations. Second, it investigates the interrelationship between imagined and physical manifestations of oceanic and terrestrial space. Lastly, the chapter considers how Europeans sought to integrate and project hegemony over oceanic space.

In 1909, W. E. B. Du Bois devoted part of a single chapter of a slim biography to the “dazzling dream of empire” pursued by “slave barons” more than half-a-century earlier. His vignette of Southern expansionism heroicized John Brown’s victory over those who had launched “an imperial stake in defiance of modern humanity and economic development.” Dubois’s Southern villains realized as early as the 1820 brawl over Missouri statehood that to “hesitate or pause” was to yield to Northern supremacy. A quest for parity in the Union drove the barons’ fixation on “the spoils of raped Mexico” and their efforts not just to “enslave all territory of the Union” but to look abroad for even more. Political defeats hardly lessened the slave South’s rapacious thirst for land. The pro-slavery vanguard of the 1850s gazed toward the Caribbean, as headline-grabbing filibusters encouraged Deep South Congressmen to push for tropical acquisitions.

Two interrelated processes of integration conditioned the development of the United States in the late nineteenth century. The first was the incorporation of the West and South into a Union that had been transformed by the American Civil War. The second was the ongoing integration of the world economy. Both were products of broader globalization in this period, and both were uneven and contested. Americans did not call the shots about the nature, pace and extent of this globalization, though politicians sought whenever they could to harness them toward their own ends. The US economy quintupled in size as the population of the United States rapidly expanded, especially in the trans-Mississippi West, where the dispossession of Native Americans and the construction of transcontinental railroads attracted new settlers and brought new lands into the world economy. In this the United States was not exceptional.

Many professors find when they teach the first half of the survey of women’s history in early North America and the United States, that Pocahontas is one of the few women whom students can mention by name at the beginning of the semester. They may know that she was a Native woman who was the daughter of a powerful leader in what the English called Virginia and that “Pocahontas” was her nickname. Some may also know that her given name was Matoaka. If they have not been overly influenced by the Disney film, they may also be aware that she was still a girl when she first encountered the English, and that she married John Rolfe, not John Smith. Depending on students’ educational background and personal history, they initially tend to interpret her marriage to an English man, conversion to Christianity, and adoption of an English name in one of two ways. Either they see that series of events as an example of European violence against Indigenous cultures, or they have an ingrained sense that she willingly joined a “superior” culture and society.

The first use of aerial surveillance in the Americas was recorded in the French colony of Saint-Domingue in the waning years of the eighteenth century. The device, a manned hot air balloon, was launched at the Gallifet plantation, a thriving center of the colony’s sugar economy. Hovering above the island’s north coast, French colonial passengers gained a sprawling vantage point from which the world could be both seen and imagined: a conquest of air to complement the conquest of land. But in 1791, things were not so clearly visible. After months of quiet planning, Haitian rebels emerged from the thick woods onto that same Gallifet plantation, setting fire to buildings and fields, choking the night sky with smoke. Despite its omnipotent heights, colonial surveillance had failed to prevent an uprising of enslaved African people in this, the world’s most productive colony, the economic engine of the French empire, and largest market for the European slave trade.