Week 7: Colony and Empire


Historian Willliam Williamson is famous for arguing that the United States was founded as an empire and that every activity before 1898 represented the North American expression, and everything that happened after the internaltional phase. This imperial mindset was predicated on the notion that the express route to American dominance and prestige would be reached by stoking American economic power via integration of new territory, markets, and resources. And this imperial drive constitutes the true nature of the American character.

William Robbin’s take on the transformation of the West via Capitalism, is not quite as radical as Williamson’s, but not by much. Robbins depicts the post civil war captains of industry as viewing the old west as typified by Indians, buffalo, and a blank horizon, and the new west as being all about railroads, cattle, mining, commercial farming…and above all: profits. These captains saw the old and the new as being mutally exclusive, and were determined to supplant the old, and in so doing, extract profits.

To do this, would require transportation, capital,a nd benign federal authority. All of these were present, but profit and problems would result. After the civil war, a massive speculation in railroad investiment translated into several decades of extensive railroad construction. This made possible a more complete form of east/west commercial interaction. It meant railroads had a large defacto influence on how/where settlement and commercial activity occurred. This influence was not always employed constructively or for the greatest good. It also meant that fluctuations in railroad fortunes would ripple dangerously through the communities they served.

Northern Banks, particulary those in New York City, were quite prepared to pump investiment capital, both directly and via their networks of subsidiaries, into western ventures. But with so much capital coming from one place, bank failures/stock market downturns would be transmitted to the leaf level, where endusers had the fewest options for enduring trouble.

Robbins tells us tha the federal government excercised an extraordinary amount of power over affaris in the west. This power was used to facilitate the gowth. This was done via supports for mineral development, transportation construction, expanded settlement, and management of resources. The big problem was the government had little experience doing this, and was conducting policymaking operations from a great distance. This meant frequent missteps.

Robbins tells us that in any economic conversion there are going to be winners and losers. Clearly the Indians, buffalo, and the open range lost out as the new west replaced the old, but Robbins arugues that the new west fared or marginally better, due to it’s position at the tailend of multiple networks who performance the west could little influence. From land use policy, to silver price supports, to railroad schedules, to wall street executive confidence, influence traveled one-way.