The United States was born in a revolution against Britain’s attempt to strengthen the control of the imperial government over its distant colonies. Yet once independence was achieved, the erstwhile colonists constructed a central state apparatus far more powerful and far costlier than anything Britain had envisioned in the 1760s and 1770s. This ironic development followed directly from American independence, which turned thirteen colonial dependencies into a sovereign nation within an intensely competitive transatlantic state system. Once the 1783 Treaty of Paris had secured nominal independence, the leaders of the new republic sought to replace the military and governmental institutions and the commercial and diplomatic policies that had allowed the North American colonies to thrive under the protection of the British Empire.

To situate colonies and empires in North America in a global context requires dismantling over a century of historiographic conventions that privilege the nation, the colony, and even the local community over broader perspectives. Historians have begun to erode these anachronistic and often artificial divisions through the study of Atlantic history, but even that field of inquiry cannot necessarily take us to a perspective on North America in the world. Indeed, Atlantic history frequently replicates various features of old colonial histories because many practitioners focus on single colonies and on the western Atlantic.

It has become second nature to see US borderlands as spaces of demarcation – with fences, walls, and patrols to mark continental divides. This is, however, a relatively recent view. We might trace its roots to 1910, when troops began patrolling the line following the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution; or to 1911, when the United States began to string up fence to keep tick-infested cattle in Mexico. Only by the 1920s and 1930s – with immigration quotas, a newly minted US Border Patrol, efforts to stem Prohibition-era flows of alcohol, and the repatriation of Mexicans in the Great Depression – did state-managed gate-keeping and partition become, in the words of historian Rachel St. John, “the defining feature of spatial organization along the border.”

Americans have historically characterized their nation as both Europe and anti-Europe: as the fulfillment of a quintessentially European political project and the vanguard of a shared transatlantic republican project, or as an unequivocal departure from Europe, embarking on its own mission and manifest destiny.

Three best-selling travel narratives – Richard Henry Dana Jr.’s Two Years before the Mast, William Wells Brown’s The American Fugitive in Europe, and Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad – provide the perfect signposts to a history of American engagement with the wider world during the nineteenth century. The first was published in 1840, the second in 1855, and the third in 1869. But while separated by the distance of only a few short years, each described wildly different realities. The intervening decades produced a critical shift in the country’s presence overseas, and when juxtaposed, the three authors help to embody and sharpen the contours of this transformation. This was, ultimately, a revolution in both mobility and modality; Americans dramatically revised how they moved through the world and the tropes through which they elected to describe their experiences overseas narratively.

In 1492 Europeans added another category to the peoples and religions of which they were in varying degrees aware: they knew of Catholic Christians in Western Europe, Orthodox Christians in Eastern Europe, Jews in those lands that had not expelled them (as Spain did that year), Muslims in North Africa, the Balkans, and the Middle East. They had heard of Buddhists and followers of other Eastern faiths following thirteenth-century expeditions by missionaries and merchants to the Mongol court in the Far East. They knew of “pagans,” those who appeared to worship many gods, a few remnants of whom could still be found in remote corners of Northeastern Europe, though the pagan rulers of Lithuania had converted to Catholicism a century earlier. They added the pagan Canary Islanders to this list as the Canary archipelago was explored from the mid-fourteenth century onwards; Grand Canary fell to its Spanish conquerors in 1483, though the conquest of the islands was only completed in 1496, with the capitulation of Tenerife.

By the time Herman Melville introduced American readers to Queequeg, the Polynesian harpooner in Moby Dick (1851), Pacific Islanders were an established presence in many maritime centers of the continent. They made up to 20 percent of the entire United States whaling fleet, most of them present on the west coast but with substantial numbers living around Melville’s own east coast environs. Hawaiians alone constituted one tenth of the population of San Francisco. Equally significant, by the middle of the nineteenth century up to 10 percent of some Pacific Island communities had experienced voyaging to American shores. Islanders’ adventures to the far eastern rim of the Pacific world were extensions of the seagoing spirit that had birthed their various societies in the first place.

This chapter explores the role of communication and technology in the post-Cold War period in shaping global landscapes of power between citizens, corporations, state, and non-state actors. The history of communication networking is the story of one of the largest infrastructure projects in global history, one spearheaded during Cold War military expansion in the United States but hardly controlled by it. Despite the size and scope of this infrastructure project, it became invisible to many users and cultural commentators as computing moved physically and conceptually into “the cloud.” Indeed, understanding communication technology requires analyzing not only the story of physical infrastructure, but also the history of what Fred Turner calls “cultural infrastructures,” constructs with both ideological and structural power. Many of these cultural infrastructures find their roots in pre-Cold War innovations, which set the precedents that shaped future technologies.

“America has never been an empire,” pronounced George W. Bush in his first foreign policy address. “We may be the only great power that had the chance, and refused – preferring greatness to power and justice to glory.”1

As presidential sentiments go, this was a cliché. Nearly every president in the twentieth century offered some platitude about how the United States does not covet territory. And yet the United States has had an empire, in the sense of possessing overseas territories, stretching from the Arctic to the South China Sea to the Caribbean. They ranged from the large landmass of Alaska to the small island of Guam, from populous territories (the Philippines) to sparse ones (American Samoa). They have been called many things: protectorates, possessions, territories, outlying areas. But at the turn of the twentieth century, when the bulk of them were acquired, there was little doubt what they were. As the leaders of the country put it plainly, they were colonies.

The years immediately prior to 1941 represented a time of great uncertainty for the United States as the nation struggled to negotiate its place in international affairs. As war crept closer in the 1930s, the American people struggled with a dilemma about how to engage with the world, which was not resolved until the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Despite great sympathy for victims of aggression in Europe and Asia, and despite close political, economic, and cultural ties to many of those victims, a clear majority of Americans were unwilling to go to war to help them. Strong popular antiwar sentiment limited the options available to President Franklin Roosevelt, as Americans found themselves increasingly torn between their desire to assist nations such as the United Kingdom, China, and even the Soviet Union, and their wish to avoid war. As a result, the period saw domestic pressures and politics play a crucial role in defining – and limiting – the place of the United States in the world as Americans failed to find a coherent response to growing world crises.

This volume of The Cambridge History of America and the World opens as World War II ends and the United States stands at the pinnacle of its power relative to the rest of the world. Indexes of that power abound: In 1950, for instance, the United States accounted for only 6.0 percent of the world population – but 27.3 percent of all economic activity (and a far larger share of industrial production), along with 66.3 percent of world military expenditure. Other forms of American global power were just as significant but harder to measure: the United States had taken the lead diplomatically, treating wartime allies like England and France as junior partners; it took a harsher attitude toward its other major wartime ally, the USSR. Economic and military strength, along with the ability to shape world politics – these very real and concrete forms of global power – were hardly the only dimensions of American power in the decades since World War II.

The energy crisis of the 1970s marked a crucial global transformation. Higher oil prices caused the greatest peacetime transfer of wealth and the largest single infusion of liquid capital into the global economy in history. Much changed after, but oil diplomacy also emerged out of the previous era. Since 1945, foreign policy and oil security had revolved around the well-being of first the domestic and then the global economy. A sense of impending danger to that well-being set the contours of policy and relations with different actors in the oil-rich Persian Gulf. American leaders saw a world in potential disarray and their concern over supply and price stability led the nation to greatly expand its military power in that region.

Physician and legislator, David Ramsay played an important if secondary role in South Carolina politics during the American Revolution. He achieved greater posthumous fame, however, as one of the first historians of the American Revolution, publishing his History of the American Revolution in 1789. In analyzing the meaning of the Revolution that same year, he offered what proved to be an enduring interpretation of one of the transformations at the heart of the independence movement. The colonies’ separation from Great Britain had, he said, fundamentally altered “the political character of the [American] people” by transforming them “from subjects to citizens.” The difference was profound: “Subjects look up to a master, but citizens are … equal,” and each enjoys a common share of sovereignty. Governments based on the limited grant of the people’s sovereignty to the state rested on citizens who collectively retained that sovereignty. Ramsay explained several ways one could become a citizen, all of which assumed that each “freeman” was “at liberty to choose his country,” and thus that citizenship, even citizenship that was presumptively conferred through birth or inheritance, rested on consent.1

On the morning of September 11, 2001, under memorably clear blue skies, two passenger planes bound for the West Coast were hijacked and flown into the World Trade Center’s twin towers in Lower Manhattan. Many sensed correctly at the time that the suicide bombings would forever change the course of American history. Within the hour, another passenger plane smashed into the Pentagon, home to the US Department of Defense, while a fourth plane, headed for an unknown target in Washington, DC, crashed to the ground due to the extraordinary efforts of its passengers who wrested control from the hijackers. The multi-target mission constituted the first and only attack on the mainland by a foreign enemy since the War of 1812; its 2,996 deaths exceeded those suffered at Pearl Harbor.

At the outset of the twentieth century, European imperial expansion had reached its height, and Europeans set the geographical terms of reference for most of the globe. But it was an American, the naval officer and geostrategic thinker Alfred Thayer Mahan who developed the concept of the “Middle East” in 1902. Europeans had historically drawn a loose distinction between the “East” and “Far East” to denote Asia’s different domains.