mahan frontier thesis

Chapter 22: Age of Empire: American Foreign Policy, 1890-1914

Turner, Mahan, and the Roots of Empire

Learning objectives.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Explain the evolution of American interest in foreign affairs from the end of the Civil War through the early 1890s
• Identify the contributions of Frederick Jackson Turner and Alfred Thayer Mahan to the conscious creation of an American empire

During the time of Reconstruction, the U.S. government showed no significant initiative in foreign affairs. Western expansion and the goal of Manifest Destiny still held the country’s attention, and American missionaries proselytized as far abroad as China, India, the Korean Peninsula, and Africa, but reconstruction efforts took up most of the nation’s resources. As the century came to a close, however, a variety of factors, from the closing of the American frontier to the country’s increased industrial production, led the United States to look beyond its borders. Countries in Europe were building their empires through global power and trade, and the United States did not want to be left behind.

AMERICA’S LIMITED BUT AGGRESSIVE PUSH OUTWARD

On the eve of the Civil War, the country lacked the means to establish a strong position in international diplomacy. As of 1865, the U.S. State Department had barely sixty employees and no ambassadors representing American interests abroad. Instead, only two dozen American foreign ministers were located in key countries, and those often gained their positions not through diplomatic skills or expertise in foreign affairs but through bribes. Further limiting American potential for foreign impact was the fact that a strong international presence required a strong military-specifically a navy-which the United States, after the Civil War, was in no position to maintain. Additionally, as late as 1890, with the U.S. Navy significantly reduced in size, a majority of vessels were classified as “Old Navy,” meaning a mixture of iron hulled and wholly wooden ships. While the navy had introduced the first all-steel, triple-hulled steam engine vessels seven years earlier, they had only thirteen of them in operation by 1890.

Despite such widespread isolationist impulses and the sheer inability to maintain a strong international position, the United States moved ahead sporadically with a modest foreign policy agenda in the three decades following the Civil War. Secretary of State William Seward, who held that position from 1861 through 1869, sought to extend American political and commercial influence in both Asia and Latin America. He pursued these goals through a variety of actions. A treaty with Nicaragua set the early course for the future construction of a canal across Central America. He also pushed through the annexation of the Midway Islands in the Pacific Ocean, which subsequently opened a more stable route to Asian markets. In frequent conversations with President Lincoln, among others, Seward openly spoke of his desire to obtain British Columbia, the Hawaiian Islands, portions of the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and other territories. He explained his motives to a Boston audience in 1867, when he professed his intention to give the United States “control of the world.”

Most notably, in 1867, Seward obtained the Alaskan Territory from Russia for a purchase price of $7.2 million. Fearing future loss of the territory through military conflict, as well as desiring to create challenges for Great Britain (which they had fought in the Crimean War), Russia had happily accepted the American purchase offer. In the United States, several newspaper editors openly questioned the purchase and labeled it “Seward’s Folly” (Figure 22.3). They highlighted the lack of Americans to populate the vast region and lamented the challenges in attempting to govern the native peoples in that territory. Only if gold were to be found, the editors decried, would the secretive purchase be justified. That is exactly what happened. Seward’s purchase added an enormous territory to the country-nearly 600,000 square miles-and also gave the United States access to the rich mineral resources of the region, including the gold that trigged the Klondike Gold Rush at the close of the century. As was the case elsewhere in the American borderlands, Alaska’s industrial development wreaked havoc on the region’s indigenous and Russian cultures.

Seward’s successor as Secretary of State, Hamilton Fish, held the position from 1869 through 1877. Fish spent much of his time settling international disputes involving American interests, including claims that British assistance to the Confederates prolonged the Civil War for about two years. In these so-called Alabama claims, a U.S. senator charged that the Confederacy won a number of crucial battles with the help of one British cruiser and demanded $2 billion in British reparations. Alternatively, the United States would settle for the rights to Canada. A joint commission representing both countries eventually settled on a British payment of $15 million to the United States. In the negotiations, Fish also suggested adding the Dominican Republic as a territorial possession with a path towards statehood, as well as discussing the construction of a transoceanic canal with Columbia. Although neither negotiation ended in the desired result, they both expressed Fish’s intent to cautiously build an American empire without creating any unnecessary military entanglements in the wake of the Civil War.

BUSINESS, RELIGIOUS, AND SOCIAL INTERESTS SET THE STAGE FOR EMPIRE

While the United States slowly pushed outward and sought to absorb the borderlands (and the indigenous cultures that lived there), the country was also changing how it functioned. As a new industrial United States began to emerge in the 1870s, economic interests began to lead the country toward a more expansionist foreign policy. By forging new and stronger ties overseas, the United States would gain access to international markets for export, as well as better deals on the raw materials needed domestically. The concerns raised by the economic depression of the early 1890s further convinced business owners that they needed to tap into new markets, even at the risk of foreign entanglements. As a result of these growing economic pressures, American exports to other nations skyrocketed in the years following the Civil War, from $234 million in 1865 to $605 million in 1875. By 1898, on the eve of the Spanish-American War, American exports had reached a height of $1.3 billion annually. Imports over the same period also increased substantially, from $238 million in 1865 to $616 million in 1898. Such an increased investment in overseas markets in turn strengthened Americans’ interest in foreign affairs.

Businesses were not the only ones seeking to expand. Religious leaders and Progressive reformers joined businesses in their growing interest in American expansion, as both sought to increase the democratic and Christian influences of the United States abroad. Imperialism and Progressivism were compatible in the minds of many reformers who thought the Progressive impulses for democracy at home translated overseas as well. Editors of such magazines as Century, Outlook, and Harper’s supported an imperialistic stance as the democratic responsibility of the United States. Several Protestant faiths formed missionary societies in the years after the Civil War, seeking to expand their reach, particularly in Asia. Influenced by such works as Reverend Josiah Strong’s Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis (1885), missionaries sought to spread the gospel throughout the country and abroad. Led by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, among several other organizations, missionaries conflated Christian ethics with American virtues, and began to spread both gospels with zeal. This was particularly true among women missionaries, who composed over 60 percent of the overall missionary force. By 1870, missionaries abroad spent as much time advocating for the American version of a modern civilization as they did teaching the Bible.

Social reformers of the early Progressive Era also performed work abroad that mirrored the missionaries. Many were influenced by recent scholarship on race-based intelligence and embraced the implications of social Darwinist theory that alleged inferior races were destined to poverty on account of their lower evolutionary status. While certainly not all reformers espoused a racist view of intelligence and civilization, many of these reformers believed that the Anglo-Saxon race was mentally superior to others and owed the presumed less evolved populations their stewardship and social uplift-a service the British writer Rudyard Kipling termed “the white man’s burden.”

By trying to help people in less industrialized countries achieve a higher standard of living and a better understanding of the principles of democracy, reformers hoped to contribute to a noble cause, but their approach suffered from the same paternalism that hampered Progressive reforms at home. Whether reformers and missionaries worked with native communities in the borderlands such as New Mexico; in the inner cities, like the Salvation Army; or overseas, their approaches had much in common. Their good intentions and willingness to work in difficult conditions shone through in the letters and articles they wrote from the field. Often in their writing, it was clear that they felt divinely empowered to change the lives of other, less fortunate, and presumably, less enlightened, people. Whether oversees or in the urban slums, they benefitted from the same passions but expressed the same paternalism.

Lottie Moon, Missionary

Lottie Moon was a Southern Baptist missionary who spent more than forty years living and working in China. She began in 1873 when she joined her sister in China as a missionary, teaching in a school for Chinese women. Her true passion, however, was to evangelize and minister, and she undertook a campaign to urge the Southern Baptist missionaries to allow women to work beyond the classroom. Her letter campaign back to the head of the Mission Board provided a vivid picture of life in China and exhorted the Southern Baptist women to give more generously of their money and their time. Her letters appeared frequently in religious publications, and it was her suggestion-that the week before Christmas be established as a time to donate to foreign missions-that led to the annual Christmas giving tradition. Lottie’s rhetoric caught on, and still today, the annual Christmas offering is done in her name.

We had the best possible voyage over the water-good weather, no headwinds, scarcely any rolling or pitching-in short, all that reasonable people could ask…. I spent a week here last fall and of course feel very natural to be here again. I do so love the East and eastern life! Japan fascinated my heart and fancy four years ago, but now I honestly believe I love China the best, and actually, which is stranger still, like the Chinese best. -Charlotte “Lottie” Moon, 1877

Lottie remained in China through famines, the Boxer Rebellion, and other hardships. She fought against foot binding, a cultural tradition where girls’ feet were tightly bound to keep them from growing, and shared her personal food and money when those around her were suffering. But her primary goal was to evangelize her Christian beliefs to the people in China. She won the right to minister and personally converted hundreds of Chinese to Christianity. Lottie’s combination of moral certainty and selfless service was emblematic of the missionary zeal of the early American empire.

TURNER, MAHAN, AND THE PLAN FOR EMPIRE

The initial work of businesses, missionaries, and reformers set the stage by the early 1890s for advocates of an expanded foreign policy and a vision of an American empire. Following decades of an official stance of isolationism combined with relatively weak presidents who lacked the popular mandate or congressional support to undertake substantial overseas commitments, a new cadre of American leaders-many of whom were too young to fully comprehend the damage inflicted by the Civil War-assumed leadership roles. Eager to be tested in international conflict, these new leaders hoped to prove America’s might on a global stage. The Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Theodore Roosevelt, was one of these leaders who sought to expand American influence globally, and he advocated for the expansion of the U.S. Navy, which at the turn of the century was the only weapons system suitable for securing overseas expansion.

Turner (Figure 22.4) and naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan were instrumental in the country’s move toward foreign expansion, and writer Brooks Adams further dramatized the consequences of the nation’s loss of its frontier in his The Law of Civilization and Decay in 1895. As mentioned in the chapter opening, Turner announced his Frontier Thesis -that American democracy was largely formed by the American frontier-at the Chicago World’s Colombian Exposition. He noted that “for nearly three centuries the dominant fact in American life has been expansion.” He continued: “American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise.”

Although there was no more room for these forces to proceed domestically, they would continue to find an outlet on the international stage. Turner concluded that “the demands for a vigorous foreign policy, for an interoceanic canal, for a revival of our power upon our seas, and for the extension of American influence to outlying islands and adjoining countries are indications that the forces [of expansion] will continue.” Such policies would permit Americans to find new markets. Also mindful of the mitigating influence of a frontier-in terms of easing pressure from increased immigration and population expansion in the eastern and midwestern United States-he encouraged new outlets for further population growth, whether as lands for further American settlement or to accommodate more immigrants. Turner’s thesis was enormously influential at the time but has subsequently been widely criticized by historians. Specifically, the thesis underscores the pervasive racism and disregard for the indigenous communities, cultures, and individuals in the American borderlands and beyond.

Click and Explore

Explore the controversy associated with Turner’s Frontier Thesis at U.S. History Scene.

While Turner provided the idea for an empire, Mahan provided the more practical guide. In his 1890 work, The Influence of Seapower upon History, he suggested three strategies that would assist the United States in both constructing and maintaining an empire. First, noting the sad state of the U.S. Navy, he called for the government to build a stronger, more powerful version. Second, he suggested establishing a network of naval bases to fuel this expanding fleet. Seward’s previous acquisition of the Midway Islands served this purpose by providing an essential naval coaling station, which was vital, as the limited reach of steamships and their dependence on coal made naval coaling stations imperative for increasing the navy’s geographic reach. Future acquisitions in the Pacific and Caribbean increased this naval supply network (Figure 22.5).  Finally, Mahan urged the future construction of a canal across the isthmus of Central America, which would decrease by two-thirds the time and power required to move the new navy from the Pacific to the Atlantic oceans. Heeding Mahan’s advice, the government moved quickly, passing the Naval Act of 1890, which set production levels for a new, modern fleet. By 1898, the government had succeeded in increasing the size of the U.S. Navy to an active fleet of 160 vessels, of which 114 were newly built of steel. In addition, the fleet now included six battleships, compared to zero in the previous decade. As a naval power, the country catapulted to the third strongest in world rankings by military experts, trailing only Spain and Great Britain.

The United States also began to expand its influence to other Pacific Islands, most notably Samoa and Hawaii. With regard to the latter, American businessmen were most interested in the lucrative sugar industry that lay at the heart of the Hawaiian Islands’ economy. By 1890, through a series of reciprocal trade agreements, Hawaiians exported nearly all of their sugar production to the United States, tariff-free. When Queen Liliuokalani tapped into a strong anti-American resentment among native Hawaiians over the economic and political power of exploitative American sugar companies between 1891 and 1893, worried businessmen worked with the American minister to Hawaii, John Stevens, to stage a quick, armed revolt to counter her efforts and seize the islands as an American protectorate (Figure 22.6). Following five more years of political wrangling, the United States annexed Hawaii in 1898, during the Spanish-American War.

U.S. History Copyright © 2014 by OpenStax is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Frederick Jackson Turner

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

• Wisconsin Life - Frederick Jackson Turner and the History of the American West
• Weber State University - Biography of Frederick Jackson Turner
• National Humanities Center - The Significance of the Frontier in American History 1893
• Frederick Jackson Turner - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)

Frederick Jackson Turner (born November 14, 1861, Portage , Wisconsin , U.S.—died March 14, 1932, San Marino , California) was an American historian best known for the “ frontier thesis.” The single most influential interpretation of the American past, it proposed that the distinctiveness of the United States was attributable to its long history of “westering.” Despite the fame of this monocausal interpretation, as the teacher and mentor of dozens of young historians, Turner insisted on a multicausal model of history , with a recognition of the interaction of politics, economics , culture , and geography. Turner’s penetrating analyses of American history and culture were powerfully influential and changed the direction of much American historical writing.

Born in frontier Wisconsin and educated at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Turner did graduate work at Johns Hopkins University under Herbert Baxter Adams . Awarded a doctorate in 1891, Turner was one of the first historians professionally trained in the United States rather than in Europe. He began his teaching career at the University of Wisconsin in 1889. He began to make his mark with his first professional paper, “ The Significance of History” (1891), which contains the famous line “Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time.” The controversial notion that there was no fixed historical truth, and that all historical interpretation should be shaped by present concerns, would become the hallmark of the so-called “New History,” a movement that called for studies illuminating the historical development of the political and cultural controversies of the day. Turner should be counted among the “progressive historians,” though, with the political temperament of a small-town Midwesterner, his progressivism was rather timid. Nevertheless, he made it clear that his historical writing was shaped by a contemporary agenda.

Turner first detailed his own interpretation of American history in his justly famous paper, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” delivered at a meeting of historians in Chicago in 1893 and published many times thereafter. Adams, his mentor at Johns Hopkins , had argued that all significant American institutions derived from German and English antecedents . Rebelling against this view, Turner argued instead that Europeans had been transformed by the process of settling the American continent and that what was unique about the United States was its frontier history . (Ironically, Turner passed up an opportunity to attend Buffalo Bill ’s Wild West show so that he could complete “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” on the morning that he presented it.) He traced the social evolution of frontier life as it continually developed across the continent from the primitive conditions experienced by the explorer, trapper, and trader, through maturing agricultural stages, finally reaching the complexity of city and factory. Turner held that the American character was decisively shaped by conditions on the frontier, in particular the abundance of free land, the settling of which engendered such traits as self-reliance, individualism , inventiveness, restless energy, mobility, materialism, and optimism. Turner’s “frontier thesis” rose to become the dominant interpretation of American history for the next half-century and longer. In the words of historian William Appleman Williams, it “rolled through the universities and into popular literature like a tidal wave.” While today’s professional historians tend to reject such sweeping theories, emphasizing instead a variety of factors in their interpretations of the past, Turner’s frontier thesis remains the most popular explanation of American development among the literate public.

For a scholar of such wide influence, Turner wrote relatively few books. His Rise of the New West, 1819–1829 (1906) was published as a volume in The American Nation series, which included contributions from the nation’s leading historians. The follow-up to that study, The United States, 1830–1850: The Nation and Its Sections (1935), would not be published until after his death. Turner may have had difficulty writing books, but he was a brilliant master of the historical essay. The winner of an oratorical medal as an undergraduate, he also was a gifted and active public speaker. His deep, melodious voice commanded attention whether he was addressing a teachers group, an audience of alumni, or a branch of the Chautauqua movement . His writing, too, bore the stamp of oratory; indeed, he reworked his lectures into articles that appeared in the nation’s most influential popular and scholarly journals.

Many of Turner’s best essays were collected in The Frontier in American History (1920) and The Significance of Sections in American History (1932), for which he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1933. In these writings Turner promoted new methods in historical research, including the techniques of the newly founded social sciences , and urged his colleagues to study new topics such as immigration , urbanization , economic development , and social and cultural history . He also commented directly on the connections he saw between the past and the present.

The end of the frontier era of continental expansion, Turner reasoned, had thrown the nation “back upon itself.” Writing that “imperious will and force” had to be replaced by social reorganization, he called for an expanded system of educational opportunity that would supplant the geographic mobility of the frontier. “The test tube and the microscope are needed rather than ax and rifle,” he wrote; “in place of old frontiers of wilderness, there are new frontiers of unwon fields of science.” Pioneer ideals were to be maintained by American universities through the training of new leaders who would strive “to reconcile popular government and culture with the huge industrial society of the modern world.”

Whereas in his 1893 essay he celebrated the pioneers for the spirit of individualism that spurred migration westward, 25 years later Turner castigated “these slashers of the forest, these self-sufficing pioneers, raising the corn and livestock for their own need, living scattered and apart.” For Turner the national problem was “no longer how to cut and burn away the vast screen of the dense and daunting forest” but “how to save and wisely use the remaining timber.” At the end of his career, he stressed the vital role that regionalism would play in counteracting the atomization brought about by the frontier experience. Turner hoped that stability would replace mobility as a defining factor in the development of American society and that communities would become stronger as a result. What the world needed now, he argued, was “a highly organized provincial life to serve as a check upon mob psychology on a national scale, and to furnish that variety which is essential to vital growth and originality.” Turner never ceased to treat history as contemporary knowledge, seeking to explore the ways that the nation might rechannel its expansionist impulses into the development of community life.

Turner taught at the University of Wisconsin until 1910, when he accepted an appointment to a distinguished chair of history at Harvard University . At these two institutions he helped build two of the great university history departments of the 20th century and trained many distinguished historians, including Carl Becker , Merle Curti, Herbert Bolton , and Frederick Merk, who became Turner’s successor at Harvard. He was an early leader of the American Historical Association , serving as its president in 1910 and on the editorial board of the association’s American Historical Review from 1910 to 1915. Poor health forced his early retirement from Harvard in 1924. Turner moved to the Huntington Library in San Marino, California , where he remained as senior research associate until his death.

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Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Explain the evolution of American interest in foreign affairs from the end of the Civil War through the early 1890s
• Identify the contributions of Frederick Jackson Turner and Alfred Thayer Mahan to the conscious creation of an American empire

During the time of Reconstruction, the U.S. government showed no significant initiative in foreign affairs. Western expansion and the goal of Manifest Destiny still held the country’s attention, and American missionaries proselytized as far abroad as China, India, the Korean Peninsula, and Africa, but reconstruction efforts took up most of the nation’s resources. As the century came to a close, however, a variety of factors, from the closing of the American frontier to the country’s increased industrial production, led the United States to look beyond its borders. Countries in Europe were building their empires through global power and trade, and the United States did not want to be left behind.

AMERICA’S LIMITED BUT AGGRESSIVE PUSH OUTWARD

On the eve of the Civil War, the country lacked the means to establish a strong position in international diplomacy. As of 1865, the U.S. State Department had barely sixty employees and no ambassadors representing American interests abroad. Instead, only two dozen American foreign ministers were located in key countries, and those often gained their positions not through diplomatic skills or expertise in foreign affairs but through bribes. Further limiting American potential for foreign impact was the fact that a strong international presence required a strong military—specifically a navy—which the United States, after the Civil War, was in no position to maintain. Additionally, as late as 1890, with the U.S. Navy significantly reduced in size, a majority of vessels were classified as “Old Navy,” meaning a mixture of iron hulled and wholly wooden ships. While the navy had introduced the first all-steel, triple-hulled steam engine vessels seven years earlier, they had only thirteen of them in operation by 1890.

Despite such widespread isolationist impulses and the sheer inability to maintain a strong international position, the United States moved ahead sporadically with a modest foreign policy agenda in the three decades following the Civil War. Secretary of State William Seward, who held that position from 1861 through 1869, sought to extend American political and commercial influence in both Asia and Latin America. He pursued these goals through a variety of actions. A treaty with Nicaragua set the early course for the future construction of a canal across Central America. He also pushed through the annexation of the Midway Islands in the Pacific Ocean, which subsequently opened a more stable route to Asian markets. In frequent conversations with President Lincoln, among others, Seward openly spoke of his desire to obtain British Columbia, the Hawaiian Islands, portions of the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and other territories. He explained his motives to a Boston audience in 1867, when he professed his intention to give the United States “control of the world.”

Most notably, in 1867, Seward obtained the Alaskan Territory from Russia for a purchase price of $7.2 million. Fearing future loss of the territory through military conflict, as well as desiring to create challenges for Great Britain (which they had fought in the Crimean War), Russia had happily accepted the American purchase offer. In the United States, several newspaper editors openly questioned the purchase and labeled it “ Seward’s Folly. ” They highlighted the lack of Americans to populate the vast region and lamented the challenges in attempting to govern the native peoples in that territory. Only if gold were to be found, the editors decried, would the secretive purchase be justified. That is exactly what happened. Seward’s purchase added an enormous territory to the country—nearly 600,000 square miles—and also gave the United States access to the rich mineral resources of the region, including the gold that trigged the Klondike Gold Rush at the close of the century. As was the case elsewhere in the American borderlands, Alaska’s industrial development wreaked havoc on the region’s indigenous and Russian cultures.

Seward’s successor as Secretary of State, Hamilton Fish, held the position from 1869 through 1877. Fish spent much of his time settling international disputes involving American interests, including claims that British assistance to the Confederates prolonged the Civil War for about two years. In these so-called Alabama claims, a U.S. senator charged that the Confederacy won a number of crucial battles with the help of one British cruiser and demanded $2 billion in British reparations. Alternatively, the United States would settle for the rights to Canada. A joint commission representing both countries eventually settled on a British payment of $15 million to the United States. In the negotiations, Fish also suggested adding the Dominican Republic as a territorial possession with a path towards statehood, as well as discussing the construction of a transoceanic canal with Columbia. Although neither negotiation ended in the desired result, they both expressed Fish’s intent to cautiously build an American empire without creating any unnecessary military entanglements in the wake of the Civil War.

BUSINESS, RELIGIOUS, AND SOCIAL INTERESTS SET THE STAGE FOR EMPIRE

While the United States slowly pushed outward and sought to absorb the borderlands (and the indigenous cultures that lived there), the country was also changing how it functioned. As a new industrial United States began to emerge in the 1870s, economic interests began to lead the country toward a more expansionist foreign policy. By forging new and stronger ties overseas, the United States would gain access to international markets for export, as well as better deals on the raw materials needed domestically. The concerns raised by the economic depression of the early 1890s further convinced business owners that they needed to tap into new markets, even at the risk of foreign entanglements.

As a result of these growing economic pressures, American exports to other nations skyrocketed in the years following the Civil War, from $234 million in 1865 to $605 million in 1875. By 1898, on the eve of the Spanish-American War, American exports had reached a height of $1.3 billion annually. Imports over the same period also increased substantially, from $238 million in 1865 to $616 million in 1898. Such an increased investment in overseas markets in turn strengthened Americans’ interest in foreign affairs.

Businesses were not the only ones seeking to expand. Religious leaders and Progressive reformers joined businesses in their growing interest in American expansion, as both sought to increase the democratic and Christian influences of the United States abroad. Imperialism and Progressivism were compatible in the minds of many reformers who thought the Progressive impulses for democracy at home translated overseas as well. Editors of such magazines as Century , Outlook , and Harper’s supported an imperialistic stance as the democratic responsibility of the United States. Several Protestant faiths formed missionary societies in the years after the Civil War, seeking to expand their reach, particularly in Asia. Influenced by such works as Reverend Josiah Strong’s Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis (1885), missionaries sought to spread the gospel throughout the country and abroad. Led by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, among several other organizations, missionaries conflated Christian ethics with American virtues and began to spread both gospels with zeal. This was particularly true among women missionaries, who composed over 60 percent of the overall missionary force. By 1870, missionaries abroad spent as much time advocating for the American version of a modern civilization as they did teaching the Bible.

Social reformers of the early Progressive Era also performed work abroad that mirrored the missionaries. Many were influenced by recent scholarship on race-based intelligence and embraced the implications of social Darwinist theory that alleged inferior races were destined to poverty on account of their lower evolutionary status. While certainly, not all reformers espoused a racist view of intelligence and civilization, many of these reformers believed that the Anglo-Saxon race was mentally superior to others and owed the presumed less evolved populations their stewardship and social uplift—a service the British writer Rudyard Kipling termed “the white man’s burden.”

By trying to help people in less industrialized countries achieve a higher standard of living and a better understanding of the principles of democracy, reformers hoped to contribute to a noble cause, but their approach suffered from the same paternalism that hampered Progressive reforms at home. Whether reformers and missionaries worked with native communities in the borderlands such as New Mexico; in the inner cities, like the Salvation Army; or overseas, their approaches had much in common. Their good intentions and willingness to work in difficult conditions shone through in the letters and articles they wrote from the field. Often in their writing, it was clear that they felt divinely empowered to change the lives of other, less fortunate, and presumably, less enlightened, people. Whether overseas or in the urban slums, they benefitted from the same passions but expressed the same paternalism.

Lottie Moon, Missionary

Lottie Moon was a Southern Baptist missionary who spent more than forty years living and working in China. She began in 1873 when she joined her sister in China as a missionary, teaching in a school for Chinese women. Her true passion, however, was to evangelize and minister, and she undertook a campaign to urge the Southern Baptist missionaries to allow women to work beyond the classroom. Her letter campaign back to the head of the Mission Board provided a vivid picture of life in China and exhorted the Southern Baptist women to give more generously of their money and their time. Her letters appeared frequently in religious publications, and it was her suggestion—that the week before Christmas be established as a time to donate to foreign missions—that led to the annual Christmas giving tradition. Lottie’s rhetoric caught on, and still today, the annual Christmas offering is done in her name.

We had the best possible voyage over the water—good weather, no headwinds, scarcely any rolling or pitching—in short, all that reasonable people could ask. . . . I spent a week here last fall and of course feel very natural to be here again. I do so love the East and eastern life! Japan fascinated my heart and fancy four years ago, but now I honestly believe I love China the best, and actually, which is stranger still, like the Chinese best. —Charlotte “Lottie” Moon, 1877

Lottie remained in China through famines, the Boxer Rebellion , and other hardships. She fought against foot binding, a cultural tradition where girls’ feet were tightly bound to keep them from growing, and shared her personal food and money when those around her were suffering. But her primary goal was to evangelize her Christian beliefs to the people in China. She won the right to minister and personally converted hundreds of Chinese to Christianity. Lottie’s combination of moral certainty and selfless service was emblematic of the missionary zeal of the early American empire.

TURNER, MAHAN, AND THE PLAN FOR EMPIRE

The initial work of businesses, missionaries, and reformers set the stage by the early 1890s for advocates of an expanded foreign policy and a vision of an American empire. Following decades of an official stance of isolationism combined with relatively weak presidents who lacked the popular mandate or congressional support to undertake substantial overseas commitments, a new cadre of American leaders—many of whom were too young to fully comprehend the damage inflicted by the Civil War—assumed leadership roles. Eager to be tested in international conflict, these new leaders hoped to prove America’s might on a global stage. The Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Theodore Roosevelt, was one of these leaders who sought to expand American influence globally, and he advocated for the expansion of the U.S. Navy, which at the turn of the century was the only weapons system suitable for securing overseas expansion.

Turner and naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan were instrumental in the country’s move toward foreign expansion, and writer Brooks Adams further dramatized the consequences of the nation’s loss of its frontier in his The Law of Civilization and Decay in 1895. As mentioned in the chapter opening, Turner announced his Frontier Thesis —that American democracy was largely formed by the American frontier—at the Chicago World’s Colombian Exposition. He noted that “for nearly three centuries the dominant fact in American life has been expansion.” He continued: “American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise.”

Although there was no more room for these forces to proceed domestically, they would continue to find an outlet on the international stage. Turner concluded that “the demands for a vigorous foreign policy, for an interoceanic canal, for a revival of our power upon our seas, and for the extension of American influence to outlying islands and adjoining countries are indications that the forces [of expansion] will continue.” Such policies would permit Americans to find new markets. Also mindful of the mitigating influence of a frontier—in terms of easing pressure from increased immigration and population expansion in the eastern and midwestern United States—he encouraged new outlets for further population growth, whether as lands for further American settlement or to accommodate more immigrants. Turner’s thesis was enormously influential at the time but has subsequently been widely criticized by historians. Specifically, the thesis underscores the pervasive racism and disregard for the indigenous communities, cultures, and individuals in the American borderlands and beyond.

While Turner provided the idea for an empire, Mahan provided the more practical guide. In his 1890 work, The Influence of Seapower upon History , he suggested three strategies that would assist the United States in both constructing and maintaining an empire. First, noting the sad state of the U.S. Navy, he called for the government to build a stronger, more powerful version. Second, he suggested establishing a network of naval bases to fuel this expanding fleet. Seward’s previous acquisition of the Midway Islands served this purpose by providing an essential naval coaling station, which was vital, as the limited reach of steamships and their dependence on coal made naval coaling stations imperative for increasing the navy’s geographic reach. Future acquisitions in the Pacific and Caribbean increased this naval supply network. Finally, Mahan urged the future construction of a canal across the isthmus of Central America, which would decrease by two-thirds the time and power required to move the new navy from the Pacific to the Atlantic oceans. Heeding Mahan’s advice, the government moved quickly, passing the Naval Act of 1890, which set production levels for a new, modern fleet. By 1898, the government had succeeded in increasing the size of the U.S. Navy to an active fleet of 160 vessels, of which 114 were newly built of steel. In addition, the fleet now included six battleships, compared to zero in the previous decade. As a naval power, the country catapulted to the third strongest in world rankings by military experts, trailing only Spain and Great Britain.

The United States also began to expand its influence to other Pacific Islands, most notably Samoa and Hawaii. With regard to the latter, American businessmen were most interested in the lucrative sugar industry that lay at the heart of the Hawaiian Islands’ economy. By 1890, through a series of reciprocal trade agreements, Hawaiians exported nearly all of their sugar production to the United States, tariff-free. When Queen Liliuokalani tapped into a strong anti-American resentment among native Hawaiians over the economic and political power of exploitative American sugar companies between 1891 and 1893, worried businessmen worked with the American minister to Hawaii, John Stevens, to stage a quick, armed revolt to counter her efforts and seize the islands as an American protectorate. Following five more years of political wrangling, the United States annexed Hawaii in 1898, during the Spanish-American War.

The United States had similar strategic interests in the Samoan Islands of the South Pacific, most notably, access to the naval refueling station at Pago Pago where American merchant vessels as well as naval ships could take on food, fuel, and supplies. In 1899, in an effort to mitigate other foreign interests and still protect their own, the United States joined Great Britain and Germany in a three-party protectorate over the islands, which assured American access to the strategic ports located there.

Section Summary

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, after the Civil War, the United States pivoted from a profoundly isolationist approach to a distinct zeal for American expansion. The nation’s earlier isolationism originated from the deep scars left by the Civil War and its need to recover both economically and mentally from that event. But as the industrial revolution changed the way the country worked and the American West reached its farthest point, American attitudes toward foreign expansion shifted. Businesses sought new markets to export their factory-built goods, oil, and tobacco products, as well as generous trade agreements to secure access to raw materials. Early social reformers saw opportunities to spread Christian gospel and the benefits of American life to those in less developed nations. With the rhetoric of Fredrick J. Turner and the strategies of Alfred Mahan underpinning the desire for expansion abroad, the country moved quickly to ready itself for the creation of an American empire.

https://www.openassessments.org/assessments/1024

Review Question

• Why were the Midway Islands important to American expansion?

Answer to Review Question

• The Midway Islands provided a more stable path to Asian markets and a vital naval coaling station, which steamships needed in order to travel further afield.

Frontier Thesis  an idea proposed by Fredrick Jackson Turner, which stated that the encounter of European traditions and a native wilderness was integral to the development of American democracy, individualism, and innovative character

Seward’s Folly  the pejorative name given by the press to Secretary of State Seward’s acquisition of Alaska in 1867

US History II Copyright © by Lumen Learning is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Alfred Thayer Mahan: “The Influence of Sea Power Upon History” as Strategy, Grand Strategy, and Polemic

No book has had greater effect on the composition of and justification for industrial navies than Alfred Thayer Mahan’s 1890 The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 . [1] Indeed, it is likely true that no other piece of “applied history” has been as successful (for better or for worse) in the making and shaping of U.S. national security policy; George F. Kennan’s 1947 “X Article” comes to mind as a comparable example. Written during a period of U.S. naval reform and expansion, Mahan’s research is at once a parochial argument about the need to revitalize U.S. “sea power,” and a broader account of the relationships between the ocean, trade, and national strength. Many critics have read Influence as transparent propaganda for a domestic audience or a set of dated prescriptions about naval strategy. True, the book is both of those things, but Mahan’s account of Atlantic imperial rivalries is also more valuably an “estimate of the effect of sea power upon the course of history and the prosperity of nations.” [2] That form of comparative and nomological history makes Influence a strategic classic of enduring relevance.

This essay leverages Mahan’s personal correspondence, archival sources, and an extensive body of commentary to explore the content, creation, and reception of Influence . In doing so it encourages readers to consider the text through three lenses: polemic, naval strategy, and grand strategy. Like a piece of stained glass held up to the light, the Mahanian concept of “sea power” is many things at once, depending on one’s perspective. In a narrow sense, Influence is a specific argument—a polemic—aimed at fin de siècle “navalists” about the necessity of expanding the United States Navy (USN). As an analysis of purely naval strategy, it is also a thesis emphasizing concentrated battle fleet engagements as a means of achieving command of the sea. Most importantly, however, it is an outline of a grand strategy bound up in a national turn toward the maritime world.

Mahan’s Argument and Its Moment

  Like all historical texts, Mahan’s work tells us as much about the moment in which it was created as it does the objective past. Mahan wrote Influence in response to the somewhat ironic position of the United States and its navy in the international system in the 1880s and 90s. The irony was chiefly with respect to the gap between growing U.S. economic power and the comparative weakness of the USN. Consider the context: By the 1880s, railway lines knit together the United States continental empire from the Atlantic to the Pacific. New and expanding corporations had built industrial productivity to rival that of the North Atlantic “Great Powers.” Commercial interests increasingly looked overseas, eyeing opportunities in Latin American and East Asia, as well as the territorial infrastructure (the Panama Canal and coaling stations) necessary to exploit them.

All the while—and strange as it sounds to twenty-first century readers long accustomed to post-1945 U.S. maritime preponderance—U.S. naval power lagged far behind that of its European peers, not to mention a handful of Latin America nations. [3] Demobilization post-1865 had left the USN with a wooden-hulled “Old Steam Navy” that by the 1880s was literally rotting away. Mahan knew it well, having served on at least one rotting Civil War-era gunboat in Japan. [4] All the while, the U.S. Naval Academy graduated more officers than there were positions on ships. [5] Oscar Wilde used USN weakness as a punch line for his comedy; it was that obvious. [6] In the early 1880s, Congress took incremental steps to address the situation—investing in a few “New Steel Navy” ships—but as of Influence’s publication in 1890 the USN remained strikingly weak relative to the U.S. industrial base and national identity. Alfred Thayer Mahan’s mediocre and often frustrated career as a USN officer spanned exactly this nadir of U.S. naval capabilities.

Largely in response to these circumstances, Mahan took matters into his own hands, making a historical argument (or polemic) for naval expansion. While serving as a professor at the newly founded (1884) U.S. Naval War College, in 1890 he selectively compiled lecture notes into the body-text of Influence . Extrapolating from the history of Northern Europe in the 17 th and 18 th centuries, Mahan concluded that sea power—naval superiority rooted in commercial vitality, shipping, and foreign territorial acquisitions—was the key to national power and influence. Foreseeing a not-so-distant day when an Isthmian Canal would transform the Caribbean Basin (like the Mediterranean) into a hub of trade routes and a site of great power conflict, he advocated for the construction of a sea-going U.S. fleet of battleships designed to compete with the dominant powers in the North Atlantic (Britain above all). A growing “navalist” movement in the United States capitalized on Influence’s publication to argue for investments in a blue-water, battleship navy. [7] In doing so these navalists spurred on what one historian has called the “American Naval Revolution”: the radical re-making of the U.S. Navy and with it the entry of the United States into the ranks of the North Atlantic maritime powers as an empire among empires, in 1898. [8]

As a matter of naval strategy, Mahan’s argument is relatively straightforward. The purpose of a navy, Mahan notes, is to protect trade routes and seaborne communications between points. Naval forces, as the American naval strategist Wayne P. Hughes later agreed, are fundamentally “in the links business,” assuring: “1) our own goods and services are safe and 2) that an enemy’s are not.” [9] Mahan believed (and used history to demonstrate) that navies are best able to provide this protection through a decisive, concentrated engagement with an adversary fleet. [10] Mahan disagreed with many of his compatriots—and a competing set of French thinkers—who argued for comparably cheaper investments in coastal defense technologies and commerce raiding ships. [11] These ideas, Mahan insisted, were dangerously misguided. Fragmented groups of ships dispersed across the sea were vulnerable to attack and destruction by a larger, unified fleet. His reading of history also demonstrated, time and again, that attacks on adversary merchant vessels by raiders—a guerre de course —were never as effective as a decisive battle with the enemy that drove his force from the sea or at least allowed it “to appear only as a fugitive.” [12] Toward that end, the construction of a fleet of armored battleships was an essential condition of national power.

Mahan claimed that these lessons on force composition and employment transmitted across the ages and were effectively immutable. [13] In fact, technological advances in the 20 th century rendered many of his conclusions suspect or at least out of step with weapons like submarines and aircraft. If the test of theory is experience, then Mahan as a purely naval strategist has suffered many indignities. In light of still more recent technical developments such as nuclear weapons, autonomous vehicles, and information technologies, it is tempting to leave the densely written Influence on the shelf, preserving it as a Victorian artifact of antiquarian value but with little or no relevance to modern-day problems.

Mahan, however, as a historian and a grand-strategic proponent of geopolitics (to say nothing of his role as a polemicist for institutional prerogatives) remains both insightful and significant. Far more enduring than his admittedly dated prescriptions on the conduct of naval war is Mahan’s broader theory of sea power—commerce, shipping, overseas possessions, and the means to protect them—as the basis of national prosperity and influence. Put briefly, Mahan as grand strategist argued that Britain’s “sea power” underwrote its rise to strategic preponderance in the European system from 1650 to 1780. In a virtuous cycle, physical access to the sea, commercial trade, and colonial possessions created national wealth. That wealth, reciprocally, financed and justified a powerful navy capable of protecting the trade routes that linked colonies, markets, and the national base. Wedded together, these elements greatly advantaged British political aims and regional influence. As Mahan concludes: “The overwhelming sea power of England was the determining factor in European history during the period mentioned.” [14] When reading Influence today it is useful, even imperative, to differentiate sea power as a narrow military strategy from this latter, more capacious, and (I argue) Mahanian  understanding of the term as a form of “grand strategy” for the organization of national resources and objectives. Sea power—a slippery term from its inception—has diverse meanings with different applications. I consider some of these below.

Mahan’s Theories of s/Sea p/Power as Naval Strategy and Grand Strategy

It reflects the appeal of Mahan’s argument that “sea power” as a slogan or bumper sticker has traveled so widely in the 130 years since Influence’s publication. The term itself entered the English language in the 1840s via the British classicist George Grote’s History of Greece , which described the Minoans as a seapower or, alternately, “thalassocracy.” [15] Mahan split that word into its component parts for effect (“maritime power” was apparently “too smooth” for his liking) and then spread the concept with nearly religious zeal. [16] As what Margaret Sprout called an “Evangelist of Sea Power,” he was remarkably successful: The Mahanian phrase has been appropriated by all the other branches of the armed services with varying degrees of fidelity (land power, air power, and surely space power is not too far off in the future). [17]

But given the concept’s prevalence in military and strategic jargon, Mahan fails to define “sea power” with any real precision. Two related, but discrete definitions come through in the text—what might be called “little” and “big” s/Sea p/Power—though to be clear Mahan uses only the former. In an immediate sense, Mahan’s concept or strategy of “sea power” (lower case “s”; lower case “p”) refers to naval preponderance or military command of the sea. Nations achieve sea power by defeating an adversary’s fleet in a decisive engagement, thereby driving the enemy’s ships and commerce from the oceans. [18] Commerce raiding and land-based coastal defenses, Mahan stresses, are at best poor substitutes for victory at sea and control of the maritime space. The ghost of Nelson at Trafalgar hangs over the concept, as it does over much of Mahan’s work—see his hagiographical The Life of Nelson: The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain . [19]

This form of “little” sea power—and its rules for naval strategy—is widely read, but ultimately peripheral to Mahan’s core purpose. Stipulating his consistent skepticism of “commerce raiding” as a viable policy, Mahan’s text actually has relatively little to say about tactics (though he sometimes digresses) or even strategy qua naval strategy. [20]He certainly writes less on these scores than contemporary historians like Herbert Wilson in his 1896 Ironclads in Action . [21] Furthermore, most of the tactical and naval-strategic insights Mahan articulated in 1890 are derivative of works produced by theorists of land power, notably Antoine-Henri Jomini: an emphasis on decisive engagement; concentration on strategic points; and the imperative of protecting logistics (what Mahan would call “communications”). These are not fatal deficiencies. Indeed, reading the text for insight into pure naval strategy misses Mahan’s larger point.

Real Mahanian Sea Power (capital “S”; capital “P”), is not exclusively or even primarily a function of military force. Sea Power as an organizing principle or even a grand strategy stems from a more holistic calculation of economic and geographic factors as well as contingent political choices. For Mahan, ephemeral superiority in ship tonnage, technology, or proficiency is only a chimerical form of security. With a broader understanding of Sea Power in mind, Influence’s aim is to identify the mutually reinforcing relationships between geography, commerce, and military or commercial shipping—as well as to explain why individual states do or do not mobilize Sea Power to pursue national goals.

In Influence , Mahan offers two possible formulas for grand strategic Sea Power. The first is the confluence of “(1) Production; (2) Shipping; (3) Colonies and Markets,—in a word, sea power.” [22] A strong national economy is the foundation of Sea Power, and that foundation grows (Mahan believes) in large part through the movement of trade over the sea. Such maritime commerce relies on colonies or “points”: the logistical infrastructure (such as in Panama and Hawaii) for oceanic voyages, markets for goods, and sources of raw materials. With trade routes established, overt military power follows almost as an afterthought. An armed force at sea, Mahan writes with serene confidence, “naturally and healthfully springs” from the need to defend seaborne commerce. [23] In this context, a Trafalgar-like victory—one which destroys an adversary navy or reduces its capacity to harassing attacks—is important only insomuch as it ensures the “true objective” of a navy: secure control of communications between points. [24]

Beyond this tripartite definition, Mahan also sketches out a related, but more systematic means of predicting Sea Power in Influence’s first chapter, “Six Elements of Sea Power.” This list is unusually explicit and does not necessarily track across the text’s empirical core. Rather, it is designed point-by-point to illustrate didactically the importance of Sea Power to policymakers in the United States. This effort to encourage U.S. policy was, after all, Mahan’s main political project—as Joshua Boucher’s 2015 Classics of Strategy and Diplomacy essay on The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future demonstrates. Even having acknowledged Mahan’s political bias, nonetheless the six elements identified in Influence are useful signposts marking out the relationships between geography, trade, public policy, and power. The elements in question are: 1) geographical position; 2) physical conformation; 3) extent of territory; 4) population; 5) national character; and finally, 6) the character and policy of governments. [25] These divide naturally into two subfields: territory and people.

Territory . While it is crude to see Mahan as a geographic determinist, he does stress the geostrategic features of the North Atlantic as key determinants of sea power. That stress is the reason Influence is so often paired with later work by geopolitical thinkers such as Halford Mackinder and Nicholas Spykman. [26] Note that element one of Mahan’s scheme—in pride of place—is the “geographical position” of the “home base,” that is, the territorial nation-state. [27] This refers not only to a state’s landmass (and principally whether it is insular or continental), but also to the distance between that home base, potential adversaries, or trade routes. Great Britain—an island nation with free access to the high seas—had strong geographic incentives and advantages in the race for Sea Power vis-à-vis its continental rivals France and later Germany. [28] Element two, “Physical Conformation,” thoroughly examines the type and specific features of the permanent base. Naturally, states with numerous and deep harbors enjoy advantages over those without them. Less intuitively, poor soil and climate often encourage Sea Power because domestic inadequacies force commercial interests abroad in search of resources and profits. [29] Element three is the extent of territory. Large landmasses with small populations and weak naval establishments are a liability for sea power, whereas heavily populated, long coastlines (like the U.S. East Coast) are a source of strength. For Sea Power to work, the “garrison must be proportioned” to the territory. [30] Drawing from his experience in the Civil War, Mahan noted that the sparsely populated inlets and harbors of the Confederacy were not a source of strength, but rather highways for riverine penetration by Union gunboats. [31] (Semi-)Colonial peoples the world over could no doubt empathize.

People . These geographical features, while foundational to Mahan’s theory, are not destiny. Mahanian Sea Power varies in accordance with decidedly human elements and contingent political decisions. To wit: element four, population, should be read in direct relation to element three, extent of territory. The number of people in a country obviously influences the “garrisoning” of a given space. [32] But the relationship of population to Sea Power is not a matter of raw numbers. What might be called the “human resources” of Sea Power are generally employed in peacetime by the merchant marine and related industries, making for a ready reserve that can be drawn on by the navy. [33] Without the former, the latter rests on weak foundations. Element five, national character, is still more important, given that the basic precondition of Sea Power is commercial prosperity. Mahan—a product of his times—takes for granted that nations have innate and often racialized characteristics. Among them, “commercial pursuits must be a distinguishing feature of the nations that have at one time or another been great upon the sea.” [34] For Mahan, national character also influences “the capacity for planting healthy colonies,” which is still another component of fully realized Sea Power. [35] Lastly comes national policy. Mahan is suspicious of democratic societies because they may struggle to maintain naval funding during peacetime (witness U.S. demobilization after the Civil War). Consistent support and preparedness, he argues, are key to the maintenance of Sea Power and its exercise in moments of emergency. Incredibly enough, Mahan argued the position so often that in 1897 the New York Times erroneously attributed to him the etymology of the word “ preparedness .” [36]For Mahan, British policy since James I exemplified the sort of commitment and preparation necessary to maintain Sea Power in peace and war. As he generalizes, “amid all the fluctuations of continental politics in a most unsettled period … the eye of England was steadily fixed on the maintenance of her sea power:” military command of the ocean as a result of economic productivity, commercial shipping, and foreign territorial infrastructure. [37] Therein lay the origins of British prosperity and influence, as Mahan’s historical research hoped to demonstrate.

Mahan’s Historical Argument

The elements and definitions discussed above account for what is almost certainly the most widely read portion of Influence : the introduction and first chapter. Mahan, as a historian, (and roughly three-quarters of Influence’s actual text) is concerned chiefly with applying these basic principles and definitions to the 18 th century and the rise of Great Britain to a position of what the historian Paul Kennedy called “naval mastery.” [38] Conversely, but of equal importance, Mahan is interested in why France failed to build enough Sea Power to upset Britain’s position in the North Atlantic. Influence in this respect is as much a warning to the United States of what happens when continental states neglect to build Sea Power.

As a narrative history, Influence’s temporal and geographic scope—as well as Mahan’s penchant for Victorian flair—makes the book difficult to read. Stylistically, Mahan rarely uses one word when ten will do. Exacerbating matters, he originally wrote the text as a series of lectures at the War College. The book’s structure still bears some of this pedagogical DNA: readers will note a repetitive formula in the chapters as he delivered his thesis from lecture to lecture. Anyone curious about the period in question should save time and energy by turning to N.A.M. Rodger’s magisterial The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649-1815 . [39] What distinguishes Influence as grand strategy, strategy, and polemic—and why it is worth reading today—is the neat thread throughout weaving evidence around Mahan’s central thesis: that Britain rose to preeminence in the European system as a result of Sea Power.

Mahan’s evidentiary base consists of several case studies, beginning with the Anglo-Dutch Wars in the 17 th century. In many ways, the Dutch Provinces make for an awkward departure point for Mahan’s comparative project. After all, he notes that the Anglo-Dutch peoples were not only “radically of the same race,” but also shared a common interest in commerce. [40] Why did one succeed at sea and not the other? Despite these similarities, Mahan affirms that the Dutch lost out in the competition for Sea Power because of a lack of political consensus and the need to divert resources against continental threats from France and Spain. Most critically, William (of Orange) and Mary’s ascent to the British throne in 1688 reconfigured Dutch strategic concerns toward France at the expense of the navy. [41]

Influence then shifts focus to a century-long Anglo-French competition, punctuated by war. Sea Power explains victory throughout. Britain was successful in the War of the League of Augsburg (1688-1697) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), chiefly as a result of its ability to maintain overseas trade and finance armed conflict on the Continent. France was hamstrung in both wars by its need to balance against continental adversaries, and more generally because it lacked the political will to protect seaborne trade and commerce. [42] Even Louis XIV’s “great French fleets” could be maintained only briefly “owing to the expense of that continental policy which [Louis XIV] had chosen for himself.” [43] In the rare moments where British policy fell short—as in the American War of Independence—it did so because it failed to follow the principles of Sea Power. [44] American independence, as it turned out, was a function of the one instance in which continental France effectively deployed sea power (if not Sea Power) against the British Empire, winning a determinative victory at the Battle of the Chesapeake (1781).

Mahan’s subsequent work, The Influence of Sea Power Upon the French Revolution and Empire (1892), carried this argument forward in an almost wholly derivative encore. [45] The final triumph of British Sea Power was (predictably) the defeat of the Napoleonic Empire through command of the sea after Trafalgar—the Salamis or Armada of its age.

Origins and Reception

Influence’s origins date to the 1880s, though its exact genesis is obscured by retrospective sentimentality. Mahan had no formal training as a historian, and he claimed to have been moved by a sort of divine intervention. He recalled that the book’s basic thesis “dawned first on my inner consciousness. I owed it to no other man.” [46] Mahan was deeply religious, and so perhaps it should come as no surprise that his conversion to Sea Power has a Road-to-Damascus feel to it. [47] It would be more accurate to say that he was inspired by classical example. Mahan conducted his basic research for Influence in the library of the English Club of Lima, Peru while he was stationed (sullenly) patrolling the Pacific coast of South America. While there, Mahan took to Theodor Mommsen’s account of the “Hannibalic episode” in The History of Rome . [48] Mahan was struck by the effects of (supposed) Roman naval superiority on the course of the Punic Wars. [49]In asking what lessons might flow from the “influence” of Roman sea power on the fall of the Carthaginian Empire, Mahan arrived at the germ of his project.

It makes for a compelling origin story—of principles transmitted from Rome, to Britain, to the United States—but Mahan need not have searched so far back for inspiration. Discussions of Sea Power were common in the late-19 th century—often motivated by the naked institutional self-interest of naval officers and their political backers. [50] South America proves the point. Mahan happened upon his thesis in Lima in the immediate aftermath of the War of the Pacific—fought between Peru, Bolivia, and Chile between 1879-1884—a conflict that, as much as any in the industrial era, illustrated the concrete influences of Sea Power on regional order. [51] After defeating Peru in a decisive naval battle in 1879, Chile leveraged its maritime preponderance to cut off Peruvian trade, finance war spending, and move amphibious armies along the Peruvian coast. In 1885 (five years before Influence ) the Chilean Revista de Marina caught the spirit, crowing: “‘The trident of Neptune is the scepter of the world’ and the history in the support of this truth shows to us that the peoples who have taken hold of the empire of the sea surpass all the others in their riches, power and civilization.” [52] Mahan’s failure to grapple seriously with this contemporaneous example of Sea Power in practice reflected either his racially motivated condescension toward Latin America or else his shocking lack of investigative talent. Either is possible. Mahan was a middling sailor and a still worse intelligence collector. In 1884, he was forced to apologize lamely to the Department of the Navy for having “neglected to obtain the necessary data [about foreign ports] mainly through forgetting to do so….” [53]

In 1886, Mahan was recalled from his Pacific posting—likely the best case for all involved—to assume a position at the freshly christened Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island by his mentor and patron Stephen B. Luce. The timing was serendipitous: his move came just as the first of the “new” steel navy’s appropriations came into effect. Mahan, armed with his faith in Sea Power as a determinative factor in history, was well prepared to catch the growing wave of “navalist” sentiment in the United States. Four years after arriving in Newport, he published Influence , ensuring his lasting contribution to history and navies alike.

The book was an immediate hit—at least overseas. Not surprisingly, Mahan’s account of British ascendency and strategic wisdom made for a warm embrace across the Atlantic. In London, he was fêted as a hero—even if some of his biggest supporters confessed confusion over how exactly to pronounce his last name. Was it, Ma-HAN, the naval historian Sir John Knox Laughton wondered, “like the bleating of an anxious ewe”? [54] Methodological critiques aside (“taken rather too exclusively from French sources” *sniff*), the text earned him honorary degrees from Cambridge and Oxford, among other laurels. [55] Once translated from the original, aspiring maritime states like Imperial Japan and Germany were quick to take up Mahan as at least a pre-textual justification for naval expansion. Kaiser Wilhelm II ostensibly absorbed from Mahan the need to construct an ocean-going High Seas Fleet to compete with the Royal Navy. [56] In the Pacific, Mahan claimed (self-consciously) that more of his works were translated into Japanese than any other language (though his precise impact on Imperial Japanese Navy policy is a contested one; note work by Sadao Asada, who is careful to acknowledge that Mahan’s theory was often more justification for ongoing Japanese naval expansion than genuine inspiration). [57]

Influence’s effect on the U.S. Navy took longer to register, much to Mahan’s disappointment. Harrison Administration (1889-1893) Secretary of the Navy Benjamin Franklin Tracy read it approvingly, seeing the book as evidence in favor of naval investment. His 1889 Report of the Secretary of the Navy toyed with many of the arguments made implicitly and explicitly by Mahan. Once published in 1890, Tracy was quick to appeal to Influence as a source of intellectual authority (see the Classics of Strategy and Diplomacy essay on Tracy’s report for more detail). [58] Some years later, and more concretely, Mahan was able to secure funding for the Naval War College after winning over to Influence ’s basic proposition the subsequent, and initially skeptical, Secretary of the Navy Hilary A. Herbert. As the decade wore on, Mahan found an increasingly receptive U.S. audience for his polemic—especially in positions of power. Most famously, Theodore Roosevelt—a naval historian in his own right—took from Mahan a vocabulary and rationale for naval power and U.S. foreign policy. [59] Whatever the exact influence the book had on Roosevelt, it is hard to argue with the results: Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet (1907-1909) and the Panama Canal (1914) neatly reflected Mahan’s ambitions for U.S. Sea Power made good.

Criticisms and Alternative Geopolitical Models

For all of its success, critics—and there have been many—have found ample fault with Mahan’s method and conclusions. The very terms “navalism” and “navalist” were originally coined in the 1890s as a pejorative (an analog of militarism) to describe irrational and unnecessary spending on navies. [60] More systematically, subsequent geopolitical thinkers were quick to raise alternate foundations of national and international “power,” even as they borrowed Mahan’s fundamental interest in the nexus of geography, economics, and policy.

The best known competing geopolitical model to Mahan’s is Halford Mackinder’s 1904 “Heartland” or “World Island” theory: a theoretical and historical argument that control of the landmass of Eurasia underwrote a continental (or land power) that no maritime state could effectively challenge. [61] Mackinder believed that the momentary dominance of European warships and seaborne commerce (from roughly 1500-1900) was largely an accident of technology and not an immutable fact. As new technologies like the railroad knit together states and empires in Central Europe and Asia, the “Columbian Epoch” of European maritime imperialism would soon end and primacy would revert to the historical norm of continental power achieved via control of the Eurasian heartland, such as with Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, and the like. [62] As Mackinder conceived it, the Eurasian heartland is surrounded by an “Inner Crescent” of Western Europe, the Middle East, and South and North East Asia. Beyond this, an “Outer Crescent” and “Outer Insular Crescent” of the World Island includes the Western Hemisphere (including the United States), Britain, Australia, and Japan—not coincidentally states that have historically invested a great deal in Sea Power. Nations in these outer rings were, by Mackinder’s definition, peripheral to the “pivot” of history in central Eurasia.

Between Mackinder and Mahan, the Dutch-American thinker Nicholas Spykman struck something of Solomonic balance. Writing during the interwar period and World War II, he argued that the real contest for power in the 20th century would take place in the “rimland” around Eurasia (what Mackinder called the “Inner Crescent”) where Sea Power and Land Power meet in a sort of geopolitical estuary. [63] Rather than controlling the sea or retreating behind it, Spykman argued for consistent engagement with the “rimlands” of Western Europe, the Middle East, and the Asian “Monsoon lands” as a means of balancing power and controlling potential hegemons. As he stressed, “the safety and independence of [the United States] can be preserved only by a foreign policy that will make it impossible for the Eurasian landmass to harbor an overwhelmingly dominant power in Europe and the Far East.” [64] Though critical of what he called the “extraordinary Anglo-Saxon predilection for thinking that only naval warfare is important,” Spykman agreed that a pillar of this balancing act was sufficient maritime power to sustain relations on either end of Eurasia. [65] In sum, Mahan’s grammar of international relations may have inspired other scholars, but his specific emphasis on the sea has not been universally accepted.

Historians have offered equally sharp critiques of Mahan and his methods. During the interwar period, Charles Beard famously saw the Mahanian navy as more portent of war than authentic defense. [66] By the 1960s and 70s, still more historians, led by Walter LaFeber, portrayed Mahan as an arch-imperialist, consciously designing maritime empire across the Pacific and the Caribbean. [67] While this school of criticism was right to stress Mahan’s pervasive racism and interest in overseas possessions, LaFeber and the “revisionists” overestimated Mahan’s pre-1895 influence as well as the scope of his explicit imperial ambitions—which were always more pointillist than territorial. [68] In fact, the network of overseas ports and depots Mahan advocated is mostly akin to the sort of “hidden” empire detected by Daniel Immerwahr in How to Hide an Empire (2019). [69]

Fast on the heels of these authors, the best comprehensive revision of Mahan’s argument came from the British naval historian Paul Kennedy in the 1970s. Compared to Mahan, Kennedy placed a great deal more emphasis on the “central economic factor” of industrial productivity in the making of naval power. [70] Mahan mentions “production,” Kennedy acknowledges, but he is more interested in seaborne commerce as the driving source of wealth; a significant distinction even if the concepts of “trade” and “production” routinely overlap in practice. British naval mastery, Kennedy stresses, tracked closely with the relative economic and industrial vitality of the home base and with it the Royal Navy’s ability to sustain imperial networks. It was a basic thesis that Kennedy expanded in 1987 to “the Rise and Fall of Great Powers,” a landmark text in which he identified a similar pattern of economic prosperity, imperial overstretch, and decline. [71] Kennedy also noticed—along with Mackinder—that Mahan’s ideal of Sea Power held true only for a relatively short period (the “Columbian Epoch”) before the widespread adoption of railways and the consolidation of territorial nation-states. [72] Factors like size and population might matter to sea power, but are far more relevant to calculations of raw geopolitical or “landpower” strength—as anyone contemporaneously counting Soviet infantry divisions in Eastern Europe could attest. In this sense Kennedy largely reflected Mackinder’s argument: Railways and the consolidation of nation states like Germany, Russia, and the United States in the late-19 th century once again made land-powers the dominant actors in the international system. Sea Power could contend only if used peripherally and strategically.

More recent critics—interested in culture and ideology—have highlighted the function of Influence as less historical project than deliberately crafted advocacy for a battleship-dominated U.S. Navy. [73] Andrew Lambert’s ambitious and engaging Seapower States (2018) is the most critical and provocative of this vein (though Lambert’s larger project is much more than a refutation of Mahanian sea power). Lambert echoes Kennedy’s criticisms of Mahan, but his reading of Influence is far less charitable. Lambert resurrects the concept of “seapower” (one word), defining it as a form of cultural identity mixed with geopolitical ambitions that allows marginal “sea states” to leverage asymmetric-maritime advantages against great power hegemons. [74] Major continental powers can build naval force (or sea power, two words) but are unlikely to become “seapowers” because they lack an identity anchored in maritime traditions. Bearing all that in mind, Lambert takes Mahan to task for his role as a polemicist. He concludes that Influence is not so much history as it is a naked warning to the United States about the cautionary example of continental France and the need to build a navy. [75]

That last charge is true up to a point, and Mahan the historian—president of the American Historical Association (AHA) in 1902, no less—would have likely acknowledged it. Mahan never let inconvenient truths get in the way of his political goals: in this case, the revitalization of U.S. Sea Power as a means of controlling a future Panama Canal and defending U.S. coastlines. As he noted in his 1902 Presidential Address to the AHA, the “artistic unity” of a historical project often necessitated the subordination of contradictory evidence around a central theme, lest a more subtle argument mislead lay readers. Critics of the “use and misuse of history in American foreign policy,” as the Harvard historian Ernest May put it, could find a great deal to fault in Mahan’s method. [76]

Nonetheless, Mahan as a historian could actually be quite sensitive, particularly in his use of analogy and comparison. Mahan is skeptical, for example, of the galley as an analogy to steam-powered vessels. Though steamships, like galleys, could travel against the wind, oared galleys in early-modern Europe lacked cruising range and guns, making them poor comparative examples. [77] As such, rather than a vulgar set of transferable analogies about tactics, Mahan saw history as a font for principles. “From time to time,” he wrote, “the superstructure of tactics has to be altered or wholly torn down; but the old foundations of strategy so far remain, as though laid upon a rock.” [78] The strategic principles of concentration, decisive engagement, control of communications, and offensive action all translated from the Age of Sail, while specific tactics required revision as a result of technical advances.

Even this seemingly intuitive distinction between evergreen strategies and shifting tactics, however, has been questioned. Mahan’s most effective inquisitor in this regard has been American naval officer and educator Wayne P. Hughes. [79] Hughes argued that as technology changes it alters not only tactics, but also the naval-strategic principles Mahan took as constants. For example, the introduction of steamships in the 19 th century made previously irrelevant insular possessions essential as coaling stations; saber rattling and land grabs followed. [80] Hughes also tracked tactics that endured across waves of technological innovation from ships-of-the-line to battleships to the missile age. The upshot, he asserted, was that tactical principles like maneuver, firepower, the value of surprise and “anti-scouting” all translated across the centuries. [81]

For those interested in a more granular assessment of tactics and operations, Mahan pairs well with his British contemporary Julian Corbett. The two thinkers are often read in contrast, but in fact they are basically complimentary. At base, Mahan is a historian of Sea Power in a broad political and grand strategic sense. Corbett is far more interested in naval tactics, operations, and their various applications to limited war. He wrote his treatise in 1911 specifically toward that end, balancing (like Clausewitz) the ways, means, and ends of naval war. [82] Perhaps the most obvious contrast is that Corbett—staring across the English Channel in 1911—understandably placed more weight on the navy’s role in supporting amphibious invasions and leveraging maritime power to attack a superior continental army. [83] To put it bluntly, Mahan saw naval war as a game of checkers, matching equal pieces (in this case battleships) in one attritional battle for sea control. Corbett, by contrast, played chess: Though using the same board, he was quick to recognize the importance of specialized assets, maneuvering in concert, often toward limited ends. In this sense, Corbett is less a repudiation of Mahan than a refinement of Mahanian logics. [84]

Influence’s Enduring Influence

When Mahan died in 1914, Influence was the literal headline of his New York Times obituary: “Admiral Mahan, Naval Critic, Dies: Gained Fame from Book.” [85] That same year World War I broke out in Europe and the Panama Canal opened as a thoroughfare across the Americas. In his last months, Mahan took an understandable interest in both events; friends declared that “over study” of the war contributed to his death. [86] Perhaps it was for the best. Festivities for the canal were delayed in deference to the crisis in Europe. Jutland (1916)—what should have been a new Trafalgar—failed to produce a decisive impact on the war. Admiral John Jellicoe’s “turn away” from the retreating German High Seas Fleet would have been an acute disappointment for the offensively minded Mahan. [87]

Nonetheless, even without a climactic battle, it is clear that the Mahanian historical method could have accommodated WWI and its outcome. The German Navy’s adoption of U-boat operations in 1917 reflected the eighteenth-century French reliance on cruisers, as did the failure of both efforts to cripple British shipping. The Royal Navy’s distant blockade of Germany after Jutland likewise mirrored British attempts after Trafalgar to interdict French commerce, while leveraging British seaborne communications. Most importantly, Anglo-U.S. Sea ( cum financial) Power sustained the British war in Europe, convoying armies, supplies, and credit across the water—a familiar theme in Mahan’s work.

Tactical questions aside, in the 100 years since its publication, Influence’s basic contentions have held up remarkably well. Some have argued that twentieth-century inventions like the submarine and the aircraft carrier make Mahan and his overwhelming emphasis on surface-capital ships irrelevant, but this is far too narrow a reading of the text. While the aircraft carrier replaced the battleship as the “Queen of the Seas” in the 1940s, the centralized battle fleet remains—for now at least. [88] Likewise, though World War II was not settled in a single fleet encounter, decisive naval engagements were key to winning whole theaters of the war. Allied command of the South and Central Pacific after Coral Sea and Midway (respectively), as well as the attritional Battle of the Atlantic, were critical to victory. German commerce raiding without sea control in WWI and WWII—as with eighteenth-century France—was not strategically determinative. By contrast, with sea control in hand, the U.S. Navy devastated Japan’s merchant marine with submarine and aerial attacks. Since 1945, the maintenance of “Freedom of the Seas” through a preponderant navy and a vast archipelago of overseas bases has remained a consistent feature of the U.S.-led post-war order. Those commitments are not-so-distant descendants of Mahan’s insistence on overseas trade and logistical stations as a means of securing Sea Power, and with it, national strength.

In the 21 st century, even as technologies advance, the core insights of Mahan and his method remain fundamental. Methodologically, his interest in “applied history” has imitators across the academy. [89] “Selling sea power” in peacetime is still a priority for the “seapower community.” [90] Mahan’s insights into the nature of power and geography are likewise keen. As the People’s Liberation Army Navy—to name one obvious example—builds an increasingly capable force, the tension between China’s identity as a continental and maritime power is an issue of global importance. Mahan’s argument for how and why the nineteenth-century continental United States should build a great-power navy mirrors a long running “great policy debate” in China. [91] Control of “points,” too, remains a vital consideration, justifying Freedom of Navigation Operations from the South China Sea to the Persian Gulf. In 1890, Mahan called the sea a “wide common.” [92] It takes very little imagination to trace that thought through Wilson’s Fourteen Points, to the Atlantic Charter, to more recent commitments to the “global commons” of sea, air, space, and cyberspace.

It is worth repeating, in closing, that Sea Power is not naval power or the capacity to wage war. In any case, as a history of naval war Influence makes for dull reading. Rather, Mahan is interested in the more fundamental relationship between national primacy and the sea. Without commerce, territorial infrastructure, and political will, naval preponderance is unsustainable. Momentary superiority in tonnage or deployable warships often masks a deeper brittleness. As Mahan puts it when discussing the War of the Spanish Succession: “The sea power of England therefore was not merely in the great navy, with which we too commonly and exclusively associate it; France had had such a navy in 1688, and it shriveled away like a leaf in the fire.” [93] In this respect, Mahan actually shares a great deal with later critics who highlight the importance of a dynamic economy as the ultimate source of national or imperial power. Today, U.S. strategists concerned with the vulnerability of sea lines of communication, a retreat from global commitments, or the hollowing out of the domestic industrial base, could find common cause with Mahan’s logic. Without those elements of Sea Power, pure military or naval strength is a colossus with feet of clay.

Thomas “Tommy” Jamison is  a military historian and assistant professor of strategic studies in the Defense Analysis Department at the Naval Postgraduate School. He holds a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University (2020) and has served as a USN Intelligence Officer (2009-2014).

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Further Reading:

A.T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History 1660-1783 (Boston, Little Brown and Company, 1898). Though originally published in 1890, this essay has cited the 1898 version throughout—the edition most readily available via Google.

A.T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon the French Revolution and Empire , Vol I-II (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1892).

• A.T. Mahan, The Interest of America in Sea Power (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1897).

A.T. Mahan, The Life of Nelson: The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1897).

A.T. Mahan, From Sail to Steam: Recollections of a Naval Life (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1907).

Mahan on Naval Warfare: Selections from the Writings of Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan , ed. Allan Westcott (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1918).

Letters and Papers of Alfred Thayer Mahan , Vol I-III, ed. Robert Seager II and Doris Maguire (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1975).

B.J. Armstrong, 21st Century Mahan: Sound Military Conclusions for the Modern Era (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2013).

Charles Beard, The Navy: Defense or Portent? (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1932).

Dirk Bonker, Militarism in a Global Age: Naval Ambitions in Germany and the United States Before World War One (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012).

Julian S. Corbett, Some Principles of Maritime Strategy (London: Longmans, Green and Co. 1918).

Philip Crowl, “Alfred Thayer Mahan: The Naval Historian,” in Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age , ed. Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986).

Suzanne Geissler, God and Sea Power: The Influence of Religion on Alfred Thayer Mahan (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2015).

Wayne P. Hughes, Fleet Tactics (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1986/2000/2018).

The Influence of History on Mahan: The Proceedings of a Conference Marking the Centenary of Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783, ed. John Hattendorf (Newport, RI: Naval War College Press, 1991).

Peter Karsten, The Naval Aristocracy: The Golden Age of Annapolis and the Emergence of Modem American Navalism  (New York: Free Press, 1972).

John Keegan, The Price of Admiralty: The Evolution of Naval Warfare (New York: Viking, 1988).

Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (New York: Penguin, 2017), originally, (New York: Scribner, 1976).

Andrew Lambert, Seapower States: Maritime Culture, Continental Empires, and the Conflict that Made the Modern World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018).

Halford J. Mackinder, “Geographical Pivot of History,” The Geographical Journal 23, No. 4 (1904): 421-437.

Kevin D. McCranie,  Mahan, Corbett, and the Foundations of Naval Strategic Thought  (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2021).

Scott Mobley, Progressives in Navy Blue (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2018).

N.A.M. Rodger, Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1659-1815 (New York: Norton, 2005).

Robert Seager, Alfred Thayer Mahan: The Man and his Letters (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1977).

Robert Seager, “Ten Years Before Mahan: The Unofficial Case for the New Navy, 1880-1890,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review (December 1953), 491-512.

Mark Russell Shulman, Navalism and the Emergence of American Sea Power (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1995).

Ronald Spector, Professors at War: The Naval War College and the Development of the Naval Profession (Newport, RI: Naval War College Press, 1977).

Margaret Tuttle Sprout, “Mahan: Evangelist of Sea Power,” in Makers of Modern Strategy: Military Thought from Machiavelli to Hitler , ed. Edward Mead Earle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1943).

Nicholas J. Spykman, The Geography of the Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1944).

Nicholas J. Spykman, “Geography and Foreign Policy,” I-II, The American Political Science Review , 1938.

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[1]           A.T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History 1660-1783 [hereafter Influence ] (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1898). NB: Influence was published in 1890, but I have cited throughout the 1898 version because it is the one most widely available on Google Books c. 2022.

[2]           Ibid , v-vi.

[3]           Kenneth Hagan, American Gunboat Diplomacy and the Old Navy (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973), 140; George Davis, A Navy Second to None: The Development of Modern American Naval Policy (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1940), 32.

[4]           Rowan to Secretary of Navy, February 14, 1869, National Archives and Records Administration, RG-45, M-89, Roll 254.

[5]           Lee McGiffin, Yankee of the Yalu: Philo Norton McGiffin, American Captain in the Chinese Navy (1885-1895) (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1968), 35. Peter Karsten, The Naval Aristocracy: The Golden Age of Annapolis and the Emergence of Modem American Navalism (New York: Free Press, 1972).

[6]           Oscar Wilde, “The Canterville Ghost,” The Court and Society Review (1887).

[7]           Mark R. Shulman, Navalism and the Emergence of American Sea Power (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1995); Scott Mobley, Progressives in Navy Blue (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2018).

[8]           Walter Herrick, The American Naval Revolution (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967). Borrowing a phrase from: Charles Maier, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).

[9]           Wayne Hughes, Fleet Tactics and Coastal Combat (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2000), 9.

[10]          Mahan, Influence , 288.

[11]         Hugues Canuel, “From a Prestige Fleet to the Jeune Ecole,” (2018) Naval War College Review : Vol. 71: No. 1, Article 7; Arne Roksund, The Jeune Ecole: The Strategy of the Weak (Boston: Brill, 2007); Theodore Ropp, The Development of a Modern Navy: French Naval Policy 1871-1904 , ed. Stephen Roberts (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1987).

[12]          Mahan, Influence , 138.

[13]          Ibid , 88.

[14]          Ibid , 209.

[15]         See also: George Grote, A History of Greece , Vol II, 2 nd Edition (London: John Murray, 1849), 152; Andrew Lambert, Seapower States: Maritime Culture, Continental Empires, and the Conflict that Made the Modern World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 2. Though Grote apparently applies it to Minoan civilization, see: Lambert, Seapower States , 334, n. 2.

[16]         A.T. Mahan, Letters and Papers of Alfred Thayer Mahan [hereafter LPATM ] Vol I-III, ed. Robert Seager II and Doris Maguire (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1975), Vol II, 494.

[17]         Margaret Sprout, “Mahan: Evangelist of Sea Power,” in Makers of Modern Strategy: Military Thought from Machiavelli to Hitler , ed. Edward Mead Earle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1943). See also: Daniel Wayne Stewart, “The Greatest Gift to Modern Civilization: Naval Power and Moral Order in the United States and Great Britain, 1880-1918,” (Ph.D. Diss., Temple University, 1999).

[18]          Mahan, Influence , 288.

[19]         A.T. Mahan, The Life of Nelson: The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1897).

[20]          Mahan’s only book dedicated to strategy and tactics as such was, by his own admission, the worst writing he ever produced. A.T. Mahan, Naval Strategy Compared and Contrasted with the Principles and Practice of Military Operations on Land , (London: Sampson Low, Marston and Company, 1911). For suspicion of Commerce Raiding, see: Mahan, Influence , 288. Consider the strategic indecisiveness of Confederate cruiser warfare during the U.S. Civil War.

[21]          Herbert Wilson, Ironclads in Action: A Sketch of Naval Warfare from 1855 to 1895 (London: Low, Martson and Company, 1896).

[22]          Mahan, Influence , 71. See also: 28, 510.

[23]          Ibid , 28.

[24]          Ibid , 8.

[25]          Ibid , 30-88

[26]          Halford J. Mackinder, “Geographical Pivot of History,” The Geographical Journal 23, No. 4 (1904): 421-437; Nicholas Spykman’s “Geography and Foreign Policy,” I-II, The American Political Science Review , Vol XXXII, Issue I, Vol XXXII, Issue II, (1938).

[27]          Though the metropole of an imperial network applies as well.

[28]          Mahan, Influence , 30-34.

[29]          Ibid , 38.

[30]          Ibid , 43.

[31]          Ibid , 44.

[32]          Ibid , 46.

[33]          Ibid , 49.

[34]          Ibid , 50.

[35]          Ibid, 55.

[36]          “On Preparedness,” New York Times , March 18, 1897.

[37]          Mahan, Influence , 62.

[38]          Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (New York: Penguin, 2017), originally, (New York: Scribner, 1976). 9.

[39]         N.A.M. Rodger, Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1659-1815 (New York: Norton, 2005).

[40]          Mahan, Influence , 52.

[41]          Ibid , 68-69.

[42]          Ibid , 54, 75.

[43]          Ibid , 179.

[44]          Ibid , 394.

[45]          A.T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon the French Revolution and Empire, 1793-1812 (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1892).

[46]         Mahan, From Sail to Steam , 276.

[47]         Suzanne Geissler, God and Sea Power: The Influence of Religion on Alfred Thayer Mahan (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2015).

[48]       Mahan, From Sail to Steam , 277; Theodor Mommsen, The History of Rome , tr. William P. Dickson (London: R. Bentley, 1862-1866).

[49]          Mahan, Influence , 15.

[50]          Robert Seager, “Ten Years Before Mahan: The Unofficial Case for the New Navy, 1880-1890,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 40, No. 3 (1953): 491-512.

[51]          William Sater, Andean Tragedy: Fighting the War of the Pacific, 1879-1884 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007).

[52]          Revista de Marina , No. 1, July. 1885.

[53]          A.T. Mahan, LPATM , Vol I, 563-564.

[54]          “Obituary,” Letters and Papers of Professor Sir John Knox Laughton, 1830-1915 , ed. Andrew Lambert, Navy Records Society, 259-260; King’s College (London) to A.T. Mahan, March 11, 1893, Mahan Papers, Library of Congress, Box 2, Reel 2.

[55]          John Laughton to S.B. Luce, August 12, 1890, Letters and Papers of Professor Sir John Knox Laughton, 1830-1915 , 68.

[56]         For an account of the parallels and interplay see: Dirk Bonker, Militarism in a Global Age: Naval Ambitions in Germany and the United States Before World War One (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012).

[57]          Sadao Asada, From Mahan to Peral Harbor: The Imperial Japanese Navy and the United States (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2006), 26-27. See also: Dingman, “Japan and Mahan” in The Influence of History on Mahan: The Proceedings of a Conference Marking the Centenary of Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 , ed. John Hattendorf (Newport, RI: Naval War College Press, 1991).

[58]          Benjamin Cooling, Benjamin Franklin Tracy: Father of the Modern American Fighting Navy (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1973).

[59]         Richard W. Turk, The Ambiguous Relationship: Theodore Roosevelt and Alfred Thayer Mahan , 1987; Forging the Trident: Theodore Roosevelt and the United states Navy , ed. William Leeman and John B. Hattendorf, (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2020).

[60]          E.L. Godkin, “Navalism,” Nation , Vol. 54.

[61]         Mackinder, “Geographical Pivot of History,” 421-437.

[62]          John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000 (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008).

[63]         Nicholas Spykman, The Geography of the Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1944), 40-41.

[64]          Ibid , 60.

[65]          Ibid , 49.

[66]          Charles Beard, The Navy: Defense or Portent? (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1932).

[67]          Walter LaFeber, The New Empire : An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963), 91. See also: David Healy, US Expansionism: The Imperialist Urge in the 1890s (Madison:

University of Wisconsin Press, 1970), 67.

[68]          Mahan, LPATM , Vol II, 590.

[69]         Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019).

[70]          Kennedy, Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery , 8.

[71]          Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987).

[72]          Kennedy, Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery , 7-8.

[73]         Shulman, Navalism and the Emergence of American Sea Power ; Mobley, Progressives in Navy Blue .

[74]          Lambert, Seapower States, 333.

[75]          Ibid , 4.

[76]          Ernest May, Ernest May, “ Lessons” of the Past: The Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).

[77]          Mahan, Influence , 4.

[78]          Ibid , 88.

[79]         Wayne P. Hughes, Fleet Tactics and Coastal Combat (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1986/2000/2018).

[80]         Peter A. Shulman, Coal & Empire: The Birth of Energy Security in Industrial America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015); David Allan Snyder, “Petroleum and Power: Naval Fuel Technology and the Anglo-American Struggle for Core Hegemony, 1889-1922,” Ph.D. Diss., Texas A&M University, 2001.

[81]          Hughes, Fleet Tactics 226-227.

[82]          Julian Corbett, Some Principles of Maritime Strategy , (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1918). NB originally published in 1911, pre-WWI.

[83]          Corbett, Principles , 51-56.

[84]          Kevin D. McCranie,  Mahan, Corbett, and the Foundations of Naval Strategic Thought  (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2021).

[85]          “Admiral Mahan,” New York Times , December 2, 1914.

[86]          Ibid .

[87]          Mahan, Influence , 184.

[88]          See: Wayne Hughes, Fleet Tactics and Coastal Combat , 1986/2000/2018.

[89]          See examples like the Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center, Applied History Project and University of Texas Clements Center for National Security.

[90]          Ryan Waddle, Selling Sea Power Public Relations and the U.S. Navy, 1917-1941 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019).

[91]          Immanuel C.Y. Hsu, “The Great Policy Debate in China, 1874: Maritime Defense Vs. Frontier Defense,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies , 1964-1965, Vol 25, pp. 212-228.

[92]          Mahan, Influence , 25.

[93]          Ibid , 225.

Milestones: 1866–1898

Mahan’s the influence of sea power upon history: securing international markets in the 1890s.

In 1890, Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan , a lecturer in naval history and the president of the United States Naval War College, published The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783, a revolutionary analysis of the importance of naval power as a factor in the rise of the British Empire. Two years later, he completed a supplementary volume, The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire, 1793–1812 .

Mahan argued that British control of the seas, combined with a corresponding decline in the naval strength of its major European rivals, paved the way for Great Britain’s emergence as the world’s dominant military, political, and economic power. Mahan and some leading American politicians believed that these lessons could be applied to U.S. foreign policy, particularly in the quest to expand U.S. markets overseas.

The 1890s were marked by social and economic unrest throughout the United States, which culminated in the onset of an economic depression between 1893 and 1894. The publication of Mahan’s books preceded much of the disorder associated with the 1890s, but his work resonated with many leading intellectuals and politicians concerned by the political and economic challenges of the period and the declining lack of economic opportunity on the American continent.

Mahan’s books complemented the work of one of his contemporaries, Professor Frederick Jackson Turner , who is best known for his seminal essay of 1893, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” An American history professor at the University of Wisconsin, Turner postulated that westward migration across the North American continent and the country’s population growth had finally led to the “closing” of the American frontier, with profound social and economic consequences. While Turner did not explicitly argue for a shift towards commercial expansion overseas, he did note that calls for a “vigorous foreign policy” were signs that Americans were increasingly looking outside the continental United States in order to satiate their desire for new economic opportunities and markets.

Mahan was one of the foremost proponents of the “vigorous foreign policy” referred to by Turner. Mahan believed that the U.S. economy would soon be unable to absorb the massive amounts of industrial and commercial goods being produced domestically, and he argued that the United States should seek new markets abroad. What concerned Mahan most was ensuring that the U.S. Government could guarantee access to these new international markets. Securing such access would require three things: a merchant navy, which could carry American products to new markets across the “great highway” of the high seas; an American battleship navy to deter or destroy rival fleets; and a network of naval bases capable of providing fuel and supplies for the enlarged navy, and maintaining open lines of communications between the United States and its new markets.

Mahan’s emphasis upon the acquisition of naval bases was not completely new. Following the Civil War, Secretary of State William Seward had attempted to expand the U.S. commercial presence in Asia by purchasing Alaska in 1867 , and increasing American influence over Hawaii by concluding a reciprocity treaty that would bind the islands’ economy to that of the United States. Seward also attempted to purchase suitable Caribbean naval bases. Finally, he attempted to ratify a treaty with the Colombian Government that would allow the United States to build an isthmian canal through the province of Panama. In the wake of the Civil War, however, Congress became preoccupied with Reconstruction in the South, and the Senate rejected all of Seward’s efforts to create a network of American naval bases.

In the 1890s, Mahan’s ideas resonated with leading politicians, including Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt, and Secretary of the Navy Herbert Tracy. After the outbreak of hostilities with Spain in May 1898, President William McKinley finally secured the annexation of Hawaii by means of joint resolution of Congress. Following the successful conclusion of the Spanish-American War in 1898 , the United States gained control of territories that could serve as the coaling stations and naval bases that Mahan had discussed, such as Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. Five years later, the United States obtained a perpetual lease for a naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba .

Turner, Mahan, and the Roots of Empire

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• 2 - AMERICA’S LIMITED BUT AGGRESSIVE PUSH OUTWARD
• 3 - BUSINESS, RELIGIOUS, AND SOCIAL INTERESTS SET THE STAGE FOR EMPIRE
• 4 - TURNER, MAHAN, AND THE PLAN FOR EMPIRE
• 5 - Section Summary
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TURNER, MAHAN, AND THE PLAN FOR EMPIRE

The initial work of businesses, missionaries, and reformers set the stage by the early 1890s for advocates of an expanded foreign policy and a vision of an American empire. Following decades of an official stance of isolationism combined with relatively weak presidents who lacked the popular mandate or congressional support to undertake substantial overseas commitments, a new cadre of American leaders—many of whom were too young to fully comprehend the damage inflicted by the Civil War—assumed leadership roles. Eager to be tested in international conflict, these new leaders hoped to prove America’s might on a global stage. The Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Theodore Roosevelt, was one of these leaders who sought to expand American influence globally, and he advocated for the expansion of the U.S. Navy, which at the turn of the century was the only weapons system suitable for securing overseas expansion.

Turner ( Figure ) and naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan were instrumental in the country’s move toward foreign expansion, and writer Brooks Adams further dramatized the consequences of the nation’s loss of its frontier in his The Law of Civilization and Decay in 1895. As mentioned in the chapter opening, Turner announced his Frontier Thesis —that American democracy was largely formed by the American frontier—at the Chicago World’s Colombian Exposition. He noted that “for nearly three centuries the dominant fact in American life has been expansion.” He continued: “American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise.”

Although there was no more room for these forces to proceed domestically, they would continue to find an outlet on the international stage. Turner concluded that “the demands for a vigorous foreign policy, for an interoceanic canal, for a revival of our power upon our seas, and for the extension of American influence to outlying islands and adjoining countries are indications that the forces [of expansion] will continue.” Such policies would permit Americans to find new markets. Also mindful of the mitigating influence of a frontier—in terms of easing pressure from increased immigration and population expansion in the eastern and midwestern United States—he encouraged new outlets for further population growth, whether as lands for further American settlement or to accommodate more immigrants. Turner’s thesis was enormously influential at the time but has subsequently been widely criticized by historians. Specifically, the thesis underscores the pervasive racism and disregard for the indigenous communities, cultures, and individuals in the American borderlands and beyond.

Explore the controversy associated with Turner’s Frontier Thesis at U.S. History Scene.

While Turner provided the idea for an empire, Mahan provided the more practical guide. In his 1890 work, The Influence of Seapower upon History , he suggested three strategies that would assist the United States in both constructing and maintaining an empire. First, noting the sad state of the U.S. Navy, he called for the government to build a stronger, more powerful version. Second, he suggested establishing a network of naval bases to fuel this expanding fleet. Seward’s previous acquisition of the Midway Islands served this purpose by providing an essential naval coaling station, which was vital, as the limited reach of steamships and their dependence on coal made naval coaling stations imperative for increasing the navy’s geographic reach. Future acquisitions in the Pacific and Caribbean increased this naval supply network ( Figure ). Finally, Mahan urged the future construction of a canal across the isthmus of Central America, which would decrease by two-thirds the time and power required to move the new navy from the Pacific to the Atlantic oceans. Heeding Mahan’s advice, the government moved quickly, passing the Naval Act of 1890, which set production levels for a new, modern fleet. By 1898, the government had succeeded in increasing the size of the U.S. Navy to an active fleet of 160 vessels, of which 114 were newly built of steel. In addition, the fleet now included six battleships, compared to zero in the previous decade. As a naval power, the country catapulted to the third strongest in world rankings by military experts, trailing only Spain and Great Britain.

The United States also began to expand its influence to other Pacific Islands, most notably Samoa and Hawaii. With regard to the latter, American businessmen were most interested in the lucrative sugar industry that lay at the heart of the Hawaiian Islands’ economy. By 1890, through a series of reciprocal trade agreements, Hawaiians exported nearly all of their sugar production to the United States, tariff-free. When Queen Liliuokalani tapped into a strong anti-American resentment among native Hawaiians over the economic and political power of exploitative American sugar companies between 1891 and 1893, worried businessmen worked with the American minister to Hawaii, John Stevens, to stage a quick, armed revolt to counter her efforts and seize the islands as an American protectorate ( Figure ). Following five more years of political wrangling, the United States annexed Hawaii in 1898, during the Spanish-American War.

The United States had similar strategic interests in the Samoan Islands of the South Pacific, most notably, access to the naval refueling station at Pago Pago where American merchant vessels as well as naval ships could take on food, fuel, and supplies. In 1899, in an effort to mitigate other foreign interests and still protect their own, the United States joined Great Britain and Germany in a three-party protectorate over the islands, which assured American access to the strategic ports located there.

Alfred Thayer Mahan papers

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Scope and Contents

This collection consists of letters Mahan sent primarily to his daughter, Helen E. Mahan, copies of Mahan family photographs, and research notes and materials compiled by Mahan from 1897-1914 on a variety of subjects including the Spanish American War and the War of 1812. Also of note are two sets of lectures written by Mahan that he delivered at the Naval War College as well as a journal and some writings he kept while serving on the U.S.S. Iroquois in China and Japan.

• Creation: 1814-1914 and undated
• Mahan, A. T. (Alfred Thayer), 1840-1914 (Person)

Conditions Governing Access

Access is open to all researchers, unless otherwise specified.

Conditions Governing Use

Material in this collection is in the public domain, unless otherwise noted.

Biographical Note

Alfred Thayer Mahan was born at West Point, New York, the son of Professor Denis Hart Mahan, who taught at the United States Military Academy. The atmosphere of his family home undoubtedly played a role in his future work, and helped to mold his later interests. Although his father hoped that Alfred would pursue a civilian career, the boy joined the Navy after only a year at Columbia University. As a line officer in the U.S. Navy, Mahan had a rather uneventful career, but saw active service in the Civil War and went on to command three ships. In 1885, Rear Admiral Stephen B. Luce selected him as an instructor in naval history and tactics at the Naval War College. Having served nearly 25 years in the Navy at this point, Mahan found a new direction and new purpose in his life at the age of 45. Building on the vision that Luce had laid out for him, Mahan went on to a remarkable career as a naval historian and propagandist, writing more than 20 books, 160 journal articles and 100 newspaper articles. His work was translated into a variety of languages, including Russian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, French, Spanish, Italian, Swedish and Dutch. Throughout the world his work had immense influence in the development of navies and in laying the ground work for the development of naval theory and strategy. His works continue to be read and republished today. His first sea power book, The Influence of Sea Power on History , 1660-1783, has appeared in at least 50 editions and has been translated into 6 languages.

Career Outline

2.85 Linear Feet (3 archival boxes, 2 half archival boxes, 1 oversize box)

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Additional description.

This collection consists of lectures, letters, and other documents kept by Alfred T. Mahan, naval officer, renowned maritime historian, and past president of the Naval War College.

Arrangement

This collection is arranged in alphabetical order by folder title.

Custodial History

These materials were retained by the Mahan family after Mahan’s daughters donated the bulk of his papers to the Naval Historical Foundation Collection in the Library of Congress.

Immediate Source of Acquisition

The grandson of Alfred Thayer Mahan, Alfred T. Mahan, II, donated these materials to the Naval War College Foundation in 1971. Since then, this collection has been on indefinite loan to the Naval Historical Collection by the NWCF.

Related Materials

A.T. Mahan papers, MSS31062, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Please search the NHC online catalog for additional materials relating to Alfred T. Mahan.

Separated Materials

This finding aid supersedes the “Register of the Alfred Thayer Mahan Papers, Compiled by John B. Hattendorf, D. Phil. Ernest J. King Professor of Maritime History, Manuscript Register Series, No. 15,” 1990.

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This collection was originally processed and described by Dr. John Hattendorf and Evelyn M. Cherpak in 1990. In the time following, portions of the collection were sent to the Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC) for preservation and conservation treatment. While at NEDCC the collection was microfilmed and parts were cleaned, repaired, and housed into acid free folders and additional archival boxes. Following this work, the 1990 register was not updated. In 2019, Elizabeth Delmage reprocessed this collection to address the disparities between the 1990 register and the contents of the 8 boxes that comprised the collection. In most cases, the old box and folder numbers from the 1990 register can be found on the reserve side of the folders and in a note in the updated finding aid to assist researchers using superseded citations.

Related Names

• Mahan, Helen Evans, 1873-1963 (Person)
• Quill, Berkeley C. (Person)
• Naval War College (U.S.) -- History (Organization)

Genre / Form

• letters (correspondence)
• Photographs
• Research notes
• United States -- History -- War of 1812
• Naval education
• Naval strategy
• Seven Years' War, 1756-1763
• Spanish-American War, 1898

Finding Aid & Administrative Information

Repository details.

Part of the Naval War College Archives Repository

Collection organization

Author, “Title,” Page or Date. Alfred Thayer Mahan papers, MSC-017, Box number, Folder number. NWC Archives, U.S. Naval War College, Newport, R.I.

Cite Item Description

Author, “Title,” Page or Date. Alfred Thayer Mahan papers, MSC-017, Box number, Folder number. NWC Archives, U.S. Naval War College, Newport, R.I. https://www.usnwcarchives.org/repositories/2/resources/50 Accessed August 10, 2024.

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American Imperialism: Turner, Mahan, Spencer, and Fisk

Introduction.

Frederick Jackson Turner, Alfred T. Mahan, Herbert Spencer, and John Fiske were all important intellectuals who influenced American imperialism from 1890 to 1914. Frederick Jackson Turner started The Frontier Thesis, which is about an argument for the American democracy that was formed by the American Frontier. Alfred Thayer Mahan was a Captain in 1890, and he published a book called The Influence of Sea Power upon History, then a book after that called The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire.

The Ideas and Philosophies of Intellectuals

Herbert Spencer was a British philosopher and sociologist; he contributed a very large part of his intellectual life in the Victorian era. He was one of the key ingredients in making the evolutionary theory in the mid-nineteenth century. Herbert was looked upon as Charles Darwin. John Fiske supported the structuralist perspective that the consciousness was constructed by a historical, social, and cultural element. He was concerned with how culture promoted meanings that reflected ideologies.

Frederick’s philosophies were very significant at the beginning of American Imperialism. His thesis is very important because it not only ended the American Frontier but also took two important forces and made it the new frontier. He made the new frontier to create liberty and to get rid of old ways of doing things. The new thesis had made individualism and rough justice into the ideas of many individuals.

Herbert Spencer was much like Charles Darwin in a way. Charles Darwin came up with the natural selection theory, and Herbert came up with the theory to justify imperialism and racist policies. They completed the thesis by saying that the fittest individuals had competed for where they were in the social hierarchy spectrum. This one idea had made the ideas of imperialists bigger and stronger. This theory made the spectrum between rich and poor bigger than ever.

Alfred Thayer Mahan wrote a book in the 1890s claiming that sea power over nations made them better throughout the course of time. He had declared that naval power was the main ingredient to dominance and the expansion of imperialism. John Fiske believed that if individuals spoke English, they would be superior characters. Many people believed John Fiske’s ideas were like the ideas of Manifest Destiny.

Frederick Jackson Turner had said that American Democracy was formed by the American frontier. In today’s world, you can figure out that democracy was not founded by the American frontier. The earliest democracy was named after an individual called Cleisthenes. You could say it came to light by an individual called Thomas Patterson. His philosophy is not used much in today’s world.

Alfred T. Mahan’s philosophy is still used today. The thought of the sea having power is great in this nation today. The United States fights on water; the water can be peaceful, and because of his philosophy, today, our naval officers are ready and prepared. Herbert Spencer’s philosophy is still used today. The theory of evolution is still being taught today. He developed and applied the theory of evolution to philosophy and the study of psychology.

Frederick Jackson Turner, Alfred T. Mahan, Herbert Spencer, and John Fiske were all great philosophers. Each one contributed to the world with their individual theories. Each individual, regardless of their theories, contributes to today’s world. They, at one point in time, were believed to be true.

• Turner, F. J. (1893). The significance of the frontier in American history. Annual Report of the American Historical Association, 227-238.
• Mahan, A. T. (1890). The influence of sea power upon history, 1660-1783. Little, Brown.
• Mahan, A. T. (1892). The influence of sea power upon the French Revolution and Empire, 1793-1812. Little, Brown.
• Spencer, H. (1855). Principles of psychology. D. Appleton and Company.
• Fiske, J. (1897). The idea of God as affected by modern knowledge. Houghton, Mifflin.

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American Imperialism: Turner, Mahan, Spencer, and Fisk. (2023, Aug 27). Retrieved from https://edusson.com/examples/american-imperialism-turner-mahan-spencer-and-fisk

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Edusson Blog. (2023). American Imperialism: Turner, Mahan, Spencer, and Fisk . [Online]. Available at: https://edusson.com/examples/american-imperialism-turner-mahan-spencer-and-fisk [Accessed: 10 Aug. 2024]

"American Imperialism: Turner, Mahan, Spencer, and Fisk." Edusson Blog, Aug 27, 2023. Accessed August 10, 2024. https://edusson.com/examples/american-imperialism-turner-mahan-spencer-and-fisk

"American Imperialism: Turner, Mahan, Spencer, and Fisk," Edusson Blog , 27-Aug-2023. [Online]. Available: https://edusson.com/examples/american-imperialism-turner-mahan-spencer-and-fisk . [Accessed: 10-Aug-2024]

Edusson Blog. (2023). American Imperialism: Turner, Mahan, Spencer, and Fisk . [Online]. Available at: https://edusson.com/examples/american-imperialism-turner-mahan-spencer-and-fisk [Accessed: 10-Aug-2024]

Mahan’s influence on naval strategy has yet to ebb

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Looking aft, it’s solid history. But it’s also a telescope to national policy today.

Mahan’s two volumes, “The Influence of Sea Power Upon History and Upon the French Revolution and Empire,” spanned the great years of fighting sail, 1660-1812.

In them he showed that the flag follows trade on a watery globe to insure national security and prosperity. From Europe’s history, Mahan derived six elements that determine maritme — and thus national — strength.

First is geographical position, by which he meant that of a country forced neither to extend nor defend itself contiguously by land.

Second is physical conformation — climate, number of harbors, ports near trade routes.

Next is length of coastline.

Fourth and fifth are demographic: the number of men “following the sea” and the population’s aptitude for commerce.

Last is the form of government, mainly one whose taxes would finance the navy and whose practical sense allowed merit promotions in the fleet.

Meeting all these conditions splendidly, Mahan showed, England prospered from the Royal Navy’s command of the oceans by large warships deployed for fleet combat. He noted that these same elements prevailed in America.

Mahan is still a good read with stirring chapters on the epic sea battles. — “Howe and the Glorious First of June,” “Rodney at the Battle of the Saints,” “Nelson at the Nile,” “Trafalgar” and many more. He writes a flowing prose, with images and elegant epigrams. sparkling like sunlight on rolling waves of history.

And he has the power to crystallize an era in a sentence, as when he writes of Nelson’s squadrons plowing the Atlantic and Mediterranean:

“Those far-distant storm-beaten ships on which [Napoleon’s] Grand Army never looked, stood between it and the dominion of the world.”

With his anchor deep in history, Mahan splices his sea battles with political and economic contexts, always inferring from the facts and never sailing to the fog of abstract theory.

But Mahan is an important read as well, for he helped drive — and still does — national policy.

At the turn of the century, his books lent the firepower of history to the capital-ship race of Britain, Germany and Japan. In England, they became instant classics. Kaiser Wilhelm ordered copies for every ship in the the German High Seas Fleet. The Japanese government put translations in schools, libraries and imperial bureaus. Other translations followed fast into French, Italian, Russian and Spanish.

And before the century was out, American sea power had made the Monroe Doctrine Mahan’s Law in Cuba and Puerto Rico, and had extended Yankee dominion to Hawaii, the Philippines, Guam and American Samoa.

With Teddy Roosevelt as Mahan’s disciple, another huge naval shipbuilding program began. In 1903, with U.S. support, Panama declared independence and signed the treaty that would soon join two vast oceans via a U.S. waterway.

Then the Great White Fleet, with 12,000 officers and men, cruised the globe to impress the world with America’s might. Here was sea power as a major premise of peace policy.

Mahan had become the naval Clausewitz.

What are called chief flaws in the Mahanian thesis — the reliance on overseas colonial bases, the need for dreadnoughts and the blindness to air power — are, in fact, accommodated by technology. Nuclear carriers and subs are mobile bases (and diplomatic stations), modern capital ships are platforms for planes and missiles.

So Mahan’s words are still in the wind, for America is a maritime nation on a globe that’s two-thirds water.

The silent but awesome presence on and under the waves of the 600-ship Navy of the 1980s was a crucial weapon in bringing down the Soviet Union without the firing of a single Tomahawk or torpedo. A replication of the Great White Fleet of 1907, it helped to topple Moscow bloodlessly in an arms race too expensive in rubles.

Today the Navy’s new white paper emphasizing littoral warfare, ” . . . From the Sea,” bears Mahan’s watermark. Even with its de-emphasis of a blue-water fleet, “forward presence” and “power projection” are main themes, for most 20th century battles have been no more than 200 miles inland. Thus, carrier-borne air power, amphibious operations and missile decks are high priorities.

It’s Mahan again: Sea power is crucial to national interests .

And now he’s heard in Asia. With the chronic rivalries — trade and cultural — between many Asian countries, naval implications bristle. And in all of their expanding forces, says Commodore Sam Bateman, Royal Australian Navy (Ret.), “Mahan [ideas are] alive and well.”

Any conflict in the Asian pacific, he adds, “is likely to have a significant maritime dimension.”

Like that other classic historical interpretation from the 1890s, Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis of American history, Mahan’s work transformed the way we saw ourselves. But unlike Turner, Mahan trumpeted a global manifest destiny; for unlike continents, oceans are indivisible, without frontiers; they are a vacuum that power abhors and will fill.

If, as Shelley said, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” Mahan is a great poet indeed, as his books drove — and still drive — national policies.

H. George Hahn II is an English history professor at Towson State University.

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Turner, Mahan, and the Roots of Empire

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Explain the evolution of American interest in foreign affairs from the end of the Civil War through the early 1890s
• Identify the contributions of Frederick Jackson Turner and Alfred Thayer Mahan to the conscious creation of an American empire

During the time of Reconstruction, the U.S. government showed no significant initiative in foreign affairs. Western expansion and the goal of Manifest Destiny still held the country’s attention, and American missionaries proselytized as far abroad as China, India, the Korean Peninsula, and Africa, but reconstruction efforts took up most of the nation’s resources. As the century came to a close, however, a variety of factors, from the closing of the American frontier to the country’s increased industrial production, led the United States to look beyond its borders. Countries in Europe were building their empires through global power and trade, and the United States did not want to be left behind.

AMERICA’S LIMITED BUT AGGRESSIVE PUSH OUTWARD

On the eve of the Civil War, the country lacked the means to establish a strong position in international diplomacy. As of 1865, the U.S. State Department had barely sixty employees and no ambassadors representing American interests abroad. Instead, only two dozen American foreign ministers were located in key countries, and those often gained their positions not through diplomatic skills or expertise in foreign affairs but through bribes. Further limiting American potential for foreign impact was the fact that a strong international presence required a strong military—specifically a navy—which the United States, after the Civil War, was in no position to maintain. Additionally, as late as 1890, with the U.S. Navy significantly reduced in size, a majority of vessels were classified as “Old Navy,” meaning a mixture of iron hulled and wholly wooden ships. While the navy had introduced the first all-steel, triple-hulled steam engine vessels seven years earlier, they had only thirteen of them in operation by 1890.

Despite such widespread isolationist impulses and the sheer inability to maintain a strong international position, the United States moved ahead sporadically with a modest foreign policy agenda in the three decades following the Civil War. Secretary of State William Seward, who held that position from 1861 through 1869, sought to extend American political and commercial influence in both Asia and Latin America. He pursued these goals through a variety of actions. A treaty with Nicaragua set the early course for the future construction of a canal across Central America. He also pushed through the annexation of the Midway Islands in the Pacific Ocean, which subsequently opened a more stable route to Asian markets. In frequent conversations with President Lincoln, among others, Seward openly spoke of his desire to obtain British Columbia, the Hawaiian Islands, portions of the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and other territories. He explained his motives to a Boston audience in 1867, when he professed his intention to give the United States “control of the world.”

Most notably, in 1867, Seward obtained the Alaskan Territory from Russia for a purchase price of $7.2 million. Fearing future loss of the territory through military conflict, as well as desiring to create challenges for Great Britain (which they had fought in the Crimean War), Russia had happily accepted the American purchase offer. In the United States, several newspaper editors openly questioned the purchase and labeled it “ Seward’s Folly ” ( [link] ). They highlighted the lack of Americans to populate the vast region and lamented the challenges in attempting to govern the native peoples in that territory. Only if gold were to be found, the editors decried, would the secretive purchase be justified. That is exactly what happened. Seward’s purchase added an enormous territory to the country—nearly 600,000 square miles—and also gave the United States access to the rich mineral resources of the region, including the gold that trigged the Klondike Gold Rush at the close of the century. As was the case elsewhere in the American borderlands, Alaska’s industrial development wreaked havoc on the region’s indigenous and Russian cultures.

Seward’s successor as Secretary of State, Hamilton Fish, held the position from 1869 through 1877. Fish spent much of his time settling international disputes involving American interests, including claims that British assistance to the Confederates prolonged the Civil War for about two years. In these so-called Alabama claims, a U.S. senator charged that the Confederacy won a number of crucial battles with the help of one British cruiser and demanded $2 billion in British reparations. Alternatively, the United States would settle for the rights to Canada. A joint commission representing both countries eventually settled on a British payment of $15 million to the United States. In the negotiations, Fish also suggested adding the Dominican Republic as a territorial possession with a path towards statehood, as well as discussing the construction of a transoceanic canal with Columbia. Although neither negotiation ended in the desired result, they both expressed Fish’s intent to cautiously build an American empire without creating any unnecessary military entanglements in the wake of the Civil War.

BUSINESS, RELIGIOUS, AND SOCIAL INTERESTS SET THE STAGE FOR EMPIRE

While the United States slowly pushed outward and sought to absorb the borderlands (and the indigenous cultures that lived there), the country was also changing how it functioned. As a new industrial United States began to emerge in the 1870s, economic interests began to lead the country toward a more expansionist foreign policy. By forging new and stronger ties overseas, the United States would gain access to international markets for export, as well as better deals on the raw materials needed domestically. The concerns raised by the economic depression of the early 1890s further convinced business owners that they needed to tap into new markets, even at the risk of foreign entanglements.

As a result of these growing economic pressures, American exports to other nations skyrocketed in the years following the Civil War, from $234 million in 1865 to $605 million in 1875. By 1898, on the eve of the Spanish-American War, American exports had reached a height of $1.3 billion annually. Imports over the same period also increased substantially, from $238 million in 1865 to $616 million in 1898. Such an increased investment in overseas markets in turn strengthened Americans’ interest in foreign affairs.

Businesses were not the only ones seeking to expand. Religious leaders and Progressive reformers joined businesses in their growing interest in American expansion, as both sought to increase the democratic and Christian influences of the United States abroad. Imperialism and Progressivism were compatible in the minds of many reformers who thought the Progressive impulses for democracy at home translated overseas as well. Editors of such magazines as Century , Outlook , and Harper’s supported an imperialistic stance as the democratic responsibility of the United States. Several Protestant faiths formed missionary societies in the years after the Civil War, seeking to expand their reach, particularly in Asia. Influenced by such works as Reverend Josiah Strong’s Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis (1885), missionaries sought to spread the gospel throughout the country and abroad. Led by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, among several other organizations, missionaries conflated Christian ethics with American virtues, and began to spread both gospels with zeal. This was particularly true among women missionaries, who composed over 60 percent of the overall missionary force. By 1870, missionaries abroad spent as much time advocating for the American version of a modern civilization as they did teaching the Bible.

Social reformers of the early Progressive Era also performed work abroad that mirrored the missionaries. Many were influenced by recent scholarship on race-based intelligence and embraced the implications of social Darwinist theory that alleged inferior races were destined to poverty on account of their lower evolutionary status. While certainly not all reformers espoused a racist view of intelligence and civilization, many of these reformers believed that the Anglo-Saxon race was mentally superior to others and owed the presumed less evolved populations their stewardship and social uplift—a service the British writer Rudyard Kipling termed “the white man’s burden.”

By trying to help people in less industrialized countries achieve a higher standard of living and a better understanding of the principles of democracy, reformers hoped to contribute to a noble cause, but their approach suffered from the same paternalism that hampered Progressive reforms at home. Whether reformers and missionaries worked with native communities in the borderlands such as New Mexico; in the inner cities, like the Salvation Army; or overseas, their approaches had much in common. Their good intentions and willingness to work in difficult conditions shone through in the letters and articles they wrote from the field. Often in their writing, it was clear that they felt divinely empowered to change the lives of other, less fortunate, and presumably, less enlightened, people. Whether oversees or in the urban slums, they benefitted from the same passions but expressed the same paternalism.

Lottie Moon was a Southern Baptist missionary who spent more than forty years living and working in China. She began in 1873 when she joined her sister in China as a missionary, teaching in a school for Chinese women. Her true passion, however, was to evangelize and minister, and she undertook a campaign to urge the Southern Baptist missionaries to allow women to work beyond the classroom. Her letter campaign back to the head of the Mission Board provided a vivid picture of life in China and exhorted the Southern Baptist women to give more generously of their money and their time. Her letters appeared frequently in religious publications, and it was her suggestion—that the week before Christmas be established as a time to donate to foreign missions—that led to the annual Christmas giving tradition. Lottie’s rhetoric caught on, and still today, the annual Christmas offering is done in her name.

We had the best possible voyage over the water—good weather, no headwinds, scarcely any rolling or pitching—in short, all that reasonable people could ask. . . . I spent a week here last fall and of course feel very natural to be here again. I do so love the East and eastern life! Japan fascinated my heart and fancy four years ago, but now I honestly believe I love China the best, and actually, which is stranger still, like the Chinese best.* * *

—Charlotte “Lottie” Moon, 1877</q>

Lottie remained in China through famines, the Boxer Rebellion , and other hardships. She fought against foot binding, a cultural tradition where girls’ feet were tightly bound to keep them from growing, and shared her personal food and money when those around her were suffering. But her primary goal was to evangelize her Christian beliefs to the people in China. She won the right to minister and personally converted hundreds of Chinese to Christianity. Lottie’s combination of moral certainty and selfless service was emblematic of the missionary zeal of the early American empire.

TURNER, MAHAN, AND THE PLAN FOR EMPIRE

The initial work of businesses, missionaries, and reformers set the stage by the early 1890s for advocates of an expanded foreign policy and a vision of an American empire. Following decades of an official stance of isolationism combined with relatively weak presidents who lacked the popular mandate or congressional support to undertake substantial overseas commitments, a new cadre of American leaders—many of whom were too young to fully comprehend the damage inflicted by the Civil War—assumed leadership roles. Eager to be tested in international conflict, these new leaders hoped to prove America’s might on a global stage. The Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Theodore Roosevelt, was one of these leaders who sought to expand American influence globally, and he advocated for the expansion of the U.S. Navy, which at the turn of the century was the only weapons system suitable for securing overseas expansion.

Turner ( [link] ) and naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan were instrumental in the country’s move toward foreign expansion, and writer Brooks Adams further dramatized the consequences of the nation’s loss of its frontier in his The Law of Civilization and Decay in 1895. As mentioned in the chapter opening, Turner announced his Frontier Thesis —that American democracy was largely formed by the American frontier—at the Chicago World’s Colombian Exposition. He noted that “for nearly three centuries the dominant fact in American life has been expansion.” He continued: “American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise.”

Although there was no more room for these forces to proceed domestically, they would continue to find an outlet on the international stage. Turner concluded that “the demands for a vigorous foreign policy, for an interoceanic canal, for a revival of our power upon our seas, and for the extension of American influence to outlying islands and adjoining countries are indications that the forces [of expansion] will continue.” Such policies would permit Americans to find new markets. Also mindful of the mitigating influence of a frontier—in terms of easing pressure from increased immigration and population expansion in the eastern and midwestern United States—he encouraged new outlets for further population growth, whether as lands for further American settlement or to accommodate more immigrants. Turner’s thesis was enormously influential at the time but has subsequently been widely criticized by historians. Specifically, the thesis underscores the pervasive racism and disregard for the indigenous communities, cultures, and individuals in the American borderlands and beyond.

While Turner provided the idea for an empire, Mahan provided the more practical guide. In his 1890 work, The Influence of Seapower upon History , he suggested three strategies that would assist the United States in both constructing and maintaining an empire. First, noting the sad state of the U.S. Navy, he called for the government to build a stronger, more powerful version. Second, he suggested establishing a network of naval bases to fuel this expanding fleet. Seward’s previous acquisition of the Midway Islands served this purpose by providing an essential naval coaling station, which was vital, as the limited reach of steamships and their dependence on coal made naval coaling stations imperative for increasing the navy’s geographic reach. Future acquisitions in the Pacific and Caribbean increased this naval supply network ( [link] ). Finally, Mahan urged the future construction of a canal across the isthmus of Central America, which would decrease by two-thirds the time and power required to move the new navy from the Pacific to the Atlantic oceans. Heeding Mahan’s advice, the government moved quickly, passing the Naval Act of 1890, which set production levels for a new, modern fleet. By 1898, the government had succeeded in increasing the size of the U.S. Navy to an active fleet of 160 vessels, of which 114 were newly built of steel. In addition, the fleet now included six battleships, compared to zero in the previous decade. As a naval power, the country catapulted to the third strongest in world rankings by military experts, trailing only Spain and Great Britain.

The United States also began to expand its influence to other Pacific Islands, most notably Samoa and Hawaii. With regard to the latter, American businessmen were most interested in the lucrative sugar industry that lay at the heart of the Hawaiian Islands’ economy. By 1890, through a series of reciprocal trade agreements, Hawaiians exported nearly all of their sugar production to the United States, tariff-free. When Queen Liliuokalani tapped into a strong anti-American resentment among native Hawaiians over the economic and political power of exploitative American sugar companies between 1891 and 1893, worried businessmen worked with the American minister to Hawaii, John Stevens, to stage a quick, armed revolt to counter her efforts and seize the islands as an American protectorate ( [link] ). Following five more years of political wrangling, the United States annexed Hawaii in 1898, during the Spanish-American War.

The United States had similar strategic interests in the Samoan Islands of the South Pacific, most notably, access to the naval refueling station at Pago Pago where American merchant vessels as well as naval ships could take on food, fuel, and supplies. In 1899, in an effort to mitigate other foreign interests and still protect their own, the United States joined Great Britain and Germany in a three-party protectorate over the islands, which assured American access to the strategic ports located there.

Section Summary

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, after the Civil War, the United States pivoted from a profoundly isolationist approach to a distinct zeal for American expansion. The nation’s earlier isolationism originated from the deep scars left by the Civil War and its need to recover both economically and mentally from that event. But as the industrial revolution changed the way the country worked and the American West reached its farthest point, American attitudes toward foreign expansion shifted. Businesses sought new markets to export their factory-built goods, oil, and tobacco products, as well as generous trade agreements to secure access to raw materials. Early social reformers saw opportunities to spread Christian gospel and the benefits of American life to those in less developed nations. With the rhetoric of Fredrick J. Turner and the strategies of Alfred Mahan underpinning the desire for expansion abroad, the country moved quickly to ready itself for the creation of an American empire.

Review Questions

Why did the United States express limited interest in overseas expansion in the 1860s and 1870s?

• fear of attacks on their borders
• post-Civil War reconstruction
• the Anti-Imperialist League
• Manifest Destiny

Which of the following did Mahan not believe was needed to build an American empire?

• military bases around the world
• the reopening of the American frontier
• a canal through Central America

Why were the Midway Islands important to American expansion?

The Midway Islands provided a more stable path to Asian markets and a vital naval coaling station, which steamships needed in order to travel further afield.

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22.1 Turner, Mahan, and the Roots of Empire

Learning objectives.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Explain the evolution of American interest in foreign affairs from the end of the Civil War through the early 1890s
• Identify the contributions of Frederick Jackson Turner and Alfred Thayer Mahan to the conscious creation of an American empire

During the time of Reconstruction, the U.S. government showed no significant initiative in foreign affairs. Western expansion and the goal of Manifest Destiny still held the country’s attention, and American missionaries proselytized as far abroad as China, India, the Korean Peninsula, and Africa, but reconstruction efforts took up most of the nation’s resources. As the century came to a close, however, a variety of factors, from the closing of the American frontier to the country’s increased industrial production, led the United States to look beyond its borders. Countries in Europe were building their empires through global power and trade, and the United States did not want to be left behind.

AMERICA’S LIMITED BUT AGGRESSIVE PUSH OUTWARD

On the eve of the Civil War, the country lacked the means to establish a strong position in international diplomacy. As of 1865, the U.S. State Department had barely sixty employees and no ambassadors representing American interests abroad. Instead, only two dozen American foreign ministers were located in key countries, and those often gained their positions not through diplomatic skills or expertise in foreign affairs but through bribes. Further limiting American potential for foreign impact was the fact that a strong international presence required a strong military—specifically a navy—which the United States, after the Civil War, was in no position to maintain. Additionally, as late as 1890, with the U.S. Navy significantly reduced in size, a majority of vessels were classified as “Old Navy,” meaning a mixture of iron hulled and wholly wooden ships. While the navy had introduced the first all-steel, triple-hulled steam engine vessels seven years earlier, they had only thirteen of them in operation by 1890.

Despite such widespread isolationist impulses and the sheer inability to maintain a strong international position, the United States moved ahead sporadically with a modest foreign policy agenda in the three decades following the Civil War. Secretary of State William Seward, who held that position from 1861 through 1869, sought to extend American political and commercial influence in both Asia and Latin America. He pursued these goals through a variety of actions. A treaty with Nicaragua set the early course for the future construction of a canal across Central America. He also pushed through the annexation of the Midway Islands in the Pacific Ocean, which subsequently opened a more stable route to Asian markets. In frequent conversations with President Lincoln, among others, Seward openly spoke of his desire to obtain British Columbia, the Hawaiian Islands, portions of the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and other territories. He explained his motives to a Boston audience in 1867, when he professed his intention to give the United States “control of the world.”

Most notably, in 1867, Seward obtained the Alaskan Territory from Russia for a purchase price of $7.2 million. Fearing future loss of the territory through military conflict, as well as desiring to create challenges for Great Britain (which they had fought in the Crimean War), Russia had happily accepted the American purchase offer. In the United States, several newspaper editors openly questioned the purchase and labeled it “ Seward’s Folly ” ( Figure 22.3 ). They highlighted the lack of Americans to populate the vast region and lamented the challenges in attempting to govern the native peoples in that territory. Only if gold were to be found, the editors decried, would the secretive purchase be justified. That is exactly what happened. Seward’s purchase added an enormous territory to the country—nearly 600,000 square miles—and also gave the United States access to the rich mineral resources of the region, including the gold that trigged the Klondike Gold Rush at the close of the century. As was the case elsewhere in the American borderlands, Alaska’s industrial development wreaked havoc on the region’s indigenous and Russian cultures.

Seward’s successor as Secretary of State, Hamilton Fish, held the position from 1869 through 1877. Fish spent much of his time settling international disputes involving American interests, including claims that British assistance to the Confederates prolonged the Civil War for about two years. In these so-called Alabama claims, a U.S. senator charged that the Confederacy won a number of crucial battles with the help of one British cruiser and demanded $2 billion in British reparations. Alternatively, the United States would settle for the rights to Canada. A joint commission representing both countries eventually settled on a British payment of $15 million to the United States. In the negotiations, Fish also suggested adding the Dominican Republic as a territorial possession with a path towards statehood, as well as discussing the construction of a transoceanic canal with Colombia. Although neither negotiation ended in the desired result, they both expressed Fish’s intent to cautiously build an American empire without creating any unnecessary military entanglements in the wake of the Civil War.

BUSINESS, RELIGIOUS, AND SOCIAL INTERESTS SET THE STAGE FOR EMPIRE

While the United States slowly pushed outward and sought to absorb the borderlands (and the indigenous cultures that lived there), the country was also changing how it functioned. As a new industrial United States began to emerge in the 1870s, economic interests began to lead the country toward a more expansionist foreign policy. By forging new and stronger ties overseas, the United States would gain access to international markets for export, as well as better deals on the raw materials needed domestically. The concerns raised by the economic depression of the early 1890s further convinced business owners that they needed to tap into new markets, even at the risk of foreign entanglements.

As a result of these growing economic pressures, American exports to other nations skyrocketed in the years following the Civil War, from $234 million in 1865 to $605 million in 1875. By 1898, on the eve of the Spanish-American War, American exports had reached a height of $1.3 billion annually. Imports over the same period also increased substantially, from $238 million in 1865 to $616 million in 1898. Such an increased investment in overseas markets in turn strengthened Americans’ interest in foreign affairs.

Businesses were not the only ones seeking to expand. Religious leaders and Progressive reformers joined businesses in their growing interest in American expansion, as both sought to increase the democratic and Christian influences of the United States abroad. Imperialism and Progressivism were compatible in the minds of many reformers who thought the Progressive impulses for democracy at home translated overseas as well. Editors of such magazines as Century , Outlook , and Harper’s supported an imperialistic stance as the democratic responsibility of the United States. Several Protestant faiths formed missionary societies in the years after the Civil War, seeking to expand their reach, particularly in Asia. Influenced by such works as Reverend Josiah Strong’s Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis (1885), missionaries sought to spread the gospel throughout the country and abroad. Led by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, among several other organizations, missionaries conflated Christian ethics with American virtues, and began to spread both gospels with zeal. This was particularly true among women missionaries, who composed over 60 percent of the overall missionary force. By 1870, missionaries abroad spent as much time advocating for the American version of a modern civilization as they did teaching the Bible.

Social reformers of the early Progressive Era also performed work abroad that mirrored the missionaries. Many were influenced by recent scholarship on race-based intelligence and embraced the implications of social Darwinist theory that alleged inferior races were destined to poverty on account of their lower evolutionary status. While certainly not all reformers espoused a racist view of intelligence and civilization, many of these reformers believed that the Anglo-Saxon race was mentally superior to others and owed the presumed less evolved populations their stewardship and social uplift—a service the British writer Rudyard Kipling termed “the White Man’s Burden.”

By trying to help people in less industrialized countries achieve a higher standard of living and a better understanding of the principles of democracy, reformers hoped to contribute to a noble cause, but their approach suffered from the same paternalism that hampered Progressive reforms at home. Whether reformers and missionaries worked with native communities in the borderlands such as New Mexico; in the inner cities, like the Salvation Army; or overseas, their approaches had much in common. Their good intentions and willingness to work in difficult conditions shone through in the letters and articles they wrote from the field. Often in their writing, it was clear that they felt divinely empowered to change the lives of other, less fortunate, and presumably, less enlightened, people. Whether oversees or in the urban slums, they benefitted from the same passions but expressed the same paternalism.

Lottie Moon, Missionary

Lottie Moon was a Southern Baptist missionary who spent more than forty years living and working in China. She began in 1873 when she joined her sister in China as a missionary, teaching in a school for Chinese women. Her true passion, however, was to evangelize and minister, and she undertook a campaign to urge the Southern Baptist missionaries to allow women to work beyond the classroom. Her letter campaign back to the head of the Mission Board provided a vivid picture of life in China and exhorted the Southern Baptist women to give more generously of their money and their time. Her letters appeared frequently in religious publications, and it was her suggestion—that the week before Christmas be established as a time to donate to foreign missions—that led to the annual Christmas giving tradition. Lottie’s rhetoric caught on, and still today, the annual Christmas offering is done in her name.

We had the best possible voyage over the water—good weather, no headwinds, scarcely any rolling or pitching—in short, all that reasonable people could ask. . . . I spent a week here last fall and of course feel very natural to be here again. I do so love the East and eastern life! Japan fascinated my heart and fancy four years ago, but now I honestly believe I love China the best, and actually, which is stranger still, like the Chinese best. —Charlotte “Lottie” Moon, 1877

Lottie remained in China through famines, the Boxer Rebellion , and other hardships. She fought against foot binding, a cultural tradition where girls’ feet were tightly bound to keep them from growing, and shared her personal food and money when those around her were suffering. But her primary goal was to evangelize her Christian beliefs to the people in China. She won the right to minister and personally converted hundreds of Chinese to Christianity. Lottie’s combination of moral certainty and selfless service was emblematic of the missionary zeal of the early American empire.

TURNER, MAHAN, AND THE PLAN FOR EMPIRE

The initial work of businesses, missionaries, and reformers set the stage by the early 1890s for advocates of an expanded foreign policy and a vision of an American empire. Following decades of an official stance of isolationism combined with relatively weak presidents who lacked the popular mandate or congressional support to undertake substantial overseas commitments, a new cadre of American leaders—many of whom were too young to fully comprehend the damage inflicted by the Civil War—assumed leadership roles. Eager to be tested in international conflict, these new leaders hoped to prove America’s might on a global stage. The Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Theodore Roosevelt, was one of these leaders who sought to expand American influence globally, and he advocated for the expansion of the U.S. Navy, which at the turn of the century was the only weapons system suitable for securing overseas expansion.

Turner ( Figure 22.4 ) and naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan were instrumental in the country’s move toward foreign expansion, and writer Brooks Adams further dramatized the consequences of the nation’s loss of its frontier in his The Law of Civilization and Decay in 1895. As mentioned in the chapter opening, Turner announced his Frontier Thesis —that American democracy was largely formed by the American frontier—at the Chicago World’s Colombian Exposition. He noted that “for nearly three centuries the dominant fact in American life has been expansion.” He continued: “American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise.”

Although there was no more room for these forces to proceed domestically, they would continue to find an outlet on the international stage. Turner concluded that “the demands for a vigorous foreign policy, for an interoceanic canal, for a revival of our power upon our seas, and for the extension of American influence to outlying islands and adjoining countries are indications that the forces [of expansion] will continue.” Such policies would permit Americans to find new markets. Also mindful of the mitigating influence of a frontier—in terms of easing pressure from increased immigration and population expansion in the eastern and midwestern United States—he encouraged new outlets for further population growth, whether as lands for further American settlement or to accommodate more immigrants. Turner’s thesis was enormously influential at the time but has subsequently been widely criticized by historians. Specifically, the thesis underscores the pervasive racism and disregard for the indigenous communities, cultures, and individuals in the American borderlands and beyond.

Click and Explore

Explore the controversy associated with Turner’s Frontier Thesis at U.S. History Scene.

While Turner provided the idea for an empire, Mahan provided the more practical guide. In his 1890 work, The Influence of Seapower upon History , he suggested three strategies that would assist the United States in both constructing and maintaining an empire. First, noting the sad state of the U.S. Navy, he called for the government to build a stronger, more powerful version. Second, he suggested establishing a network of naval bases to fuel this expanding fleet. Seward’s previous acquisition of the Midway Islands served this purpose by providing an essential naval coaling station, which was vital, as the limited reach of steamships and their dependence on coal made naval coaling stations imperative for increasing the navy’s geographic reach. Future acquisitions in the Pacific and Caribbean increased this naval supply network ( Figure 22.5 ). Finally, Mahan urged the future construction of a canal across the isthmus of Central America, which would decrease by two-thirds the time and power required to move the new navy from the Pacific to the Atlantic oceans. Heeding Mahan’s advice, the government moved quickly, passing the Naval Act of 1890, which set production levels for a new, modern fleet. By 1898, the government had succeeded in increasing the size of the U.S. Navy to an active fleet of 160 vessels, of which 114 were newly built of steel. In addition, the fleet now included six battleships, compared to zero in the previous decade. By the start of the twentieth century, the United States ranked among the top five naval powers globally.

The United States also began to expand its influence to other Pacific Islands, most notably Samoa and Hawaii. With regard to the latter, American businessmen were most interested in the lucrative sugar industry that lay at the heart of the Hawaiian Islands’ economy. By 1890, through a series of reciprocal trade agreements, Hawaiians exported nearly all of their sugar production to the United States, tariff-free. When Queen Liliuokalani tapped into a strong anti-American resentment among native Hawaiians over the economic and political power of exploitative American sugar companies between 1891 and 1893, worried businessmen worked with the American minister to Hawaii, John Stevens, to stage a quick, armed revolt to counter her efforts and seize the islands as an American protectorate ( Figure 22.6 ). Following five more years of political wrangling, the United States annexed Hawaii in 1898, during the Spanish-American War.

The United States had similar strategic interests in the Samoan Islands of the South Pacific, most notably, access to the naval refueling station at Pago Pago where American merchant vessels as well as naval ships could take on food, fuel, and supplies. In 1899, in an effort to mitigate other foreign interests and still protect their own, the United States joined Great Britain and Germany in a three-party protectorate over the islands, which assured American access to the strategic ports located there. Ten years later, Great Britain agreed to give up its claim on the islands, and they were divided between Germany and the United States.

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Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/us-history/pages/1-introduction

• Authors: P. Scott Corbett, Volker Janssen, John M. Lund, Todd Pfannestiel, Sylvie Waskiewicz, Paul Vickery
• Publisher/website: OpenStax
• Book title: U.S. History
• Publication date: Dec 30, 2014
• Location: Houston, Texas
• Book URL: https://openstax.org/books/us-history/pages/1-introduction
• Section URL: https://openstax.org/books/us-history/pages/22-1-turner-mahan-and-the-roots-of-empire

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Chapter 20: An Age of Empire—American Foreign Policy, 1890-1914

Turner, mahan, and the roots of empire, learning objectives.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Explain the evolution of American interest in foreign affairs from the end of the Civil War through the early 1890s
• Identify the contributions of Frederick Jackson Turner and Alfred Thayer Mahan to the conscious creation of an American empire

During the time of Reconstruction, the U.S. government showed no significant initiative in foreign affairs. Western expansion and the goal of Manifest Destiny still held the country’s attention. Although American missionaries proselytized as far abroad as China, India, the Korean Peninsula, and Africa, reconstruction efforts took up most of the nation’s resources. As the century came to a close, however, a variety of factors, from the closing of the American frontier to the country’s increased industrial production, led the United States to look beyond its borders. Countries in Europe were building their empires through global power and trade, and the United States did not want to be left behind.

AMERICA’S LIMITED BUT AGGRESSIVE PUSH OUTWARD

On the eve of the Civil War, the country lacked the means to establish a strong position in international diplomacy. As of 1865, the U.S. State Department had barely sixty employees and no ambassadors representing American interests abroad. Instead, only two dozen American foreign ministers were located in key countries, and those often gained their positions not through diplomatic skills or expertise in foreign affairs but through bribes. The nation’s beleaguered presence on the international stage reflected its generally “isolationist” worldview; since the era of George Washington’s presidency, American leaders had tended to prioritize the country’s internal development and avoided “entangling alliances” overseas. Further limiting U.S. potential for foreign impact was the fact that a strong international presence required a strong military—specifically a navy—which the United States, after the Civil War, was in no position to maintain. Additionally, as late as 1890, with the U.S. Navy significantly reduced in size, a majority of vessels were classified as “Old Navy,” meaning a mixture of iron hulled and wholly wooden ships. While the navy had introduced the first all-steel, triple-hulled steam engine vessels seven years earlier, they had only thirteen of them in operation by 1890.

Despite such widespread isolationist impulses and the sheer inability to maintain a strong international position, the United States moved ahead sporadically with a modest foreign policy agenda in the three decades following the Civil War. Secretary of State William Seward, who held that position from 1861 through 1869, sought to extend American political and commercial influence in both Asia and Latin America. He pursued these goals through a variety of actions. A treaty with Nicaragua set the early course for the future construction of a canal across Central America. He also pushed through the annexation of the Midway Islands in the Pacific Ocean, which subsequently opened a more stable route to Asian markets. In frequent conversations with President Lincoln, among others, Seward openly spoke of his desire to obtain British Columbia, the Hawaiian Islands, portions of the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and other territories. He explained his motives to a Boston audience in 1867, when he professed his intention to give the United States “control of the world.”

Most notably, in 1867, Seward obtained the Alaskan Territory from Russia for a purchase price of $7.2 million. Fearing future loss of the territory through military conflict, as well as desiring to create challenges for Great Britain (which they had fought in the Crimean War), Russia had happily accepted the American purchase offer. In the United States, several newspaper editors openly questioned the purchase and labeled it “Seward’s Folly.” They highlighted the lack of Americans to populate the vast region and lamented the challenges in attempting to govern the native peoples in that territory. Only if gold were to be found, the editors decried, would the secretive purchase be justified. That is exactly what happened. Seward’s purchase added an enormous territory to the country—nearly 600,000 square miles—and also gave the United States access to the rich mineral resources of the region, including the gold that trigged the Klondike Gold Rush at the close of the century. As was the case elsewhere in the American borderlands, Alaska’s industrial development wreaked havoc on the region’s indigenous and Russian cultures.

Although mocked in the press at the time as “Seward’s Folly,” Secretary of State William Seward’s acquisition of Alaska from Russia was a strategic boon to the United States.

Seward’s successor as Secretary of State, Hamilton Fish, held the position from 1869 through 1877. Fish spent much of his time settling international disputes involving American interests, including claims that British assistance to the Confederates prolonged the Civil War for about two years. In these so-called Alabama claims, a U.S. senator charged that the Confederacy won a number of crucial battles with the help of one British cruiser and demanded $2 billion in British reparations. Alternatively, the United States would settle for the rights to Canada. A joint commission representing both countries eventually settled on a British payment of $15 million to the United States. In the negotiations, Fish also suggested adding the Dominican Republic as a territorial possession with a path towards statehood, as well as discussing the construction of a transoceanic canal with Columbia. Although neither negotiation ended in the desired result, they both expressed Fish’s intent to cautiously build an American empire without creating any unnecessary military entanglements in the wake of the Civil War.

BUSINESS, RELIGIOUS, AND SOCIAL INTERESTS SET THE STAGE FOR EMPIRE

While the United States slowly pushed outward and sought to absorb the borderlands (and the indigenous cultures that lived there), the country was also changing how it functioned. As a new industrial United States began to emerge in the 1870s, economic interests began to lead the country toward a more expansionist foreign policy. By forging new and stronger ties overseas, the United States would gain access to international markets for export, as well as better deals on the raw materials needed domestically. The concerns raised by the economic depression of the early 1890s further convinced business owners that they needed to tap into new markets, even at the risk of foreign entanglements.

As a result of these growing economic pressures, American exports to other nations skyrocketed in the years following the Civil War, from $234 million in 1865 to $605 million in 1875. By 1898, on the eve of the Spanish-American War, American exports had reached a height of $1.3 billion annually. Imports over the same period also increased substantially, from $238 million in 1865 to $616 million in 1898. Such an increased investment in overseas markets in turn strengthened Americans’ interest in foreign affairs.

Businesses were not the only ones seeking to expand. Religious leaders and social reformers joined businesses in their growing interest in American expansion, as both sought to increase the democratic and Christian influences of the United States abroad. Imperialism and social uplift were compatible in the minds of many reform-minded individuals. Editors of such magazines as Century , Outlook , and Harper’s supported an imperialistic stance as the democratic responsibility of the United States. Several Protestant faiths formed missionary societies in the years after the Civil War, seeking to expand their reach, particularly in Asia. Influenced by such works as Reverend Josiah Strong’s Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis (1885), missionaries sought to spread the gospel throughout the country and abroad. Led by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, among several other organizations, missionaries conflated Christian ethics with American virtues, and began to spread both gospels with zeal. This was particularly true among women missionaries, who composed over 60 percent of the overall missionary force. By 1870, missionaries abroad spent as much time advocating for the American version of a modern civilization as they did teaching the Bible.

Social reformers of the early Progressive Era also performed work abroad that mirrored the missionaries. Many were influenced by recent scholarship on race-based intelligence and embraced the implications of social Darwinist theory that alleged inferior races were destined to poverty on account of their lower evolutionary status. While certainly not all reformers espoused a racist view of intelligence and civilization, many of these reformers believed that the Anglo-Saxon race was mentally superior to others and owed the presumed less evolved populations their stewardship and social uplift—a service the British writer Rudyard Kipling termed “the white man’s burden.”

By trying to help people in less industrialized countries achieve a higher standard of living and a better understanding of the principles of democracy, reformers hoped to contribute to a noble cause. But their approach often suffered from a prejudicial sense of superiority that blinded them to the wishes of the peoples they hoped to serve. Their good intentions and willingness to work in difficult conditions shone through in the letters and articles they wrote from the field. Many felt divinely empowered to change the lives of the less fortunate. It was also clear from their writings that they assumed the less fortunate were also less enlightened and of inferior intelligence. They often spoke of uplifting peoples whom they supposed were incapable of bettering themselves on their own.

Lottie Moon, Missionary

Lottie Moon was a Southern Baptist missionary who spent more than forty years living and working in China. She began in 1873 when she joined her sister in China as a missionary, teaching in a school for Chinese women. Her true passion, however, was to evangelize and minister, and she undertook a campaign to urge the Southern Baptist missionaries to allow women to work beyond the classroom. Her letter campaign back to the head of the Mission Board provided a vivid picture of life in China and exhorted the Southern Baptist women to give more generously of their money and their time. Her letters appeared frequently in religious publications, and it was her suggestion—that the week before Christmas be established as a time to donate to foreign missions—that led to the annual Christmas giving tradition. Lottie’s rhetoric caught on, and still today, the annual Christmas offering is done in her name.

We had the best possible voyage over the water—good weather, no headwinds, scarcely any rolling or pitching—in short, all that reasonable people could ask. . . . I spent a week here last fall and of course feel very natural to be here again. I do so love the East and eastern life! Japan fascinated my heart and fancy four years ago, but now I honestly believe I love China the best, and actually, which is stranger still, like the Chinese best. —Charlotte “Lottie” Moon, 1877

Lottie remained in China through famines, the Boxer Rebellion , and other hardships. She fought against foot binding, a cultural tradition where girls’ feet were tightly bound to keep them from growing, and shared her personal food and money when those around her were suffering. But her primary goal was to evangelize her Christian beliefs to the people in China. She won the right to minister and personally converted hundreds of Chinese to Christianity. Lottie’s combination of moral certainty and selfless service was emblematic of the missionary zeal of the early American empire.

TURNER, MAHAN, AND THE PLAN FOR EMPIRE

The initial work of businesses, missionaries, and reformers set the stage by the early 1890s for advocates of an expanded foreign policy and a vision of an American empire. Following decades of an official stance of isolationism combined with relatively weak presidents who lacked the popular mandate or congressional support to undertake substantial overseas commitments, a new cadre of American leaders—many of whom were too young to fully comprehend the damage inflicted by the Civil War—assumed leadership roles. Eager to be tested in international conflict, these new leaders hoped to prove America’s might on a global stage. The Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Theodore Roosevelt, was one of these leaders who sought to expand American influence globally, and he advocated for the expansion of the U.S. Navy, which at the turn of the century was the only weapons system suitable for securing overseas expansion.

Historian Fredrick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis stated explicitly that the existence of the western frontier forged the very basis of the American identity.

Turner and naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan were instrumental in the country’s move toward foreign expansion, and writer Brooks Adams further dramatized the consequences of the nation’s loss of its frontier in his The Law of Civilization and Decay in 1895. As mentioned in the chapter opening, Turner announced his Frontier Thesis—that American democracy was largely formed by the American frontier—at the Chicago World’s Colombian Exposition. He noted that “for nearly three centuries the dominant fact in American life has been expansion.” He continued: “American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise.”

Although there was no more room for these forces to proceed domestically, they would continue to find an outlet on the international stage. Turner concluded that “the demands for a vigorous foreign policy, for an interoceanic canal, for a revival of our power upon our seas, and for the extension of American influence to outlying islands and adjoining countries are indications that the forces [of expansion] will continue.” Such policies would permit Americans to find new markets. Also mindful of the mitigating influence of a frontier—in terms of easing pressure from increased immigration and population expansion in the eastern and midwestern United States—he encouraged new outlets for further population growth, whether as lands for further American settlement or to accommodate more immigrants. Turner’s thesis was enormously influential at the time but has subsequently been widely criticized by historians. Specifically, the thesis underscores the pervasive racism and disregard for the indigenous communities, cultures, and individuals in the American borderlands and beyond.

While Turner provided the idea for an empire, Mahan provided the more practical guide. In his 1890 work, The Influence of Seapower upon History , he suggested three strategies that would assist the United States in both constructing and maintaining an empire. First, noting the sad state of the U.S. Navy, he called for the government to build a stronger, more powerful version. Second, he suggested establishing a network of naval bases to fuel this expanding fleet. Seward’s previous acquisition of the Midway Islands served this purpose by providing an essential naval coaling station, which was vital, as the limited reach of steamships and their dependence on coal made naval coaling stations imperative for increasing the navy’s geographic reach. Future acquisitions in the Pacific and Caribbean increased this naval supply network. Finally, Mahan urged the future construction of a canal across the isthmus of Central America, which would decrease by two-thirds the time and power required to move the new navy from the Pacific to the Atlantic oceans. Heeding Mahan’s advice, the government moved quickly, passing the Naval Act of 1890, which set production levels for a new, modern fleet. By 1898, the government had succeeded in increasing the size of the U.S. Navy to an active fleet of 160 vessels, of which 114 were newly built of steel. In addition, the fleet now included six battleships, compared to zero in the previous decade. As a naval power, the country catapulted to the third strongest in world rankings by military experts, trailing only Spain and Great Britain.

American imperial acquisitions as of the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898. Note how the spread of island acquisitions across the Pacific Ocean fulfills Alfred Mahan’s call for more naval bases in order to support a larger and more effective U.S. Navy rather than mere territorial expansion.

The United States also began to expand its influence to other Pacific Islands, most notably Samoa and Hawaii. With regard to the latter, American businessmen were most interested in the lucrative sugar industry that lay at the heart of the Hawaiian Islands’ economy. By 1890, through a series of reciprocal trade agreements, Hawaiians exported nearly all of their sugar production to the United States, tariff-free. When Queen Liliuokalani tapped into a strong anti-American resentment among native Hawaiians over the economic and political power of exploitative American sugar companies between 1891 and 1893, worried businessmen worked with the American minister to Hawaii, John Stevens, to stage a quick, armed revolt to counter her efforts and seize the islands as an American protectorate. Following five more years of political wrangling, the United States annexed Hawaii in 1898, during the Spanish-American War.

Queen Liliuokalani of Hawaii (a) was unhappy with the one-sided trade agreement Hawaii held with the United States (b), but protests were squashed by an American-armed revolt.

The United States had similar strategic interests in the Samoan Islands of the South Pacific, most notably, access to the naval refueling station at Pago Pago where American merchant vessels as well as naval ships could take on food, fuel, and supplies. In 1899, in an effort to mitigate other foreign interests and still protect their own, the United States joined Great Britain and Germany in a three-party protectorate over the islands, which assured American access to the strategic ports located there.

Section Summary

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, after the Civil War, the United States pivoted from a profoundly isolationist approach to a distinct zeal for American expansion. The nation’s earlier isolationism originated from the deep scars left by the Civil War and its need to recover both economically and mentally from that event. But as the industrial revolution changed the way the country worked and the American West reached its farthest point, American attitudes toward foreign expansion shifted. Businesses sought new markets to export their factory-built goods, oil, and tobacco products, as well as generous trade agreements to secure access to raw materials. Early social reformers saw opportunities to spread Christian gospel and the benefits of American life to those in less developed nations. With the rhetoric of Fredrick J. Turner and the strategies of Alfred Mahan underpinning the desire for expansion abroad, the country moved quickly to ready itself for the creation of an American empire.

Review Question

• Why were the Midway Islands important to American expansion?

Answer to Review Question

• The Midway Islands provided a more stable path to Asian markets and a vital naval coaling station, which steamships needed in order to travel further afield.

Frontier Thesis  an idea proposed by Fredrick Jackson Turner, which stated that the encounter of European traditions and a native wilderness was integral to the development of American democracy, individualism, and innovative character

Seward’s Folly  the pejorative name given by the press to Secretary of State Seward’s acquisition of Alaska in 1867

• US History. Authored by : P. Scott Corbett, Volker Janssen, John M. Lund, Todd Pfannestiel, Paul Vickery, and Sylvie Waskiewicz. Provided by : OpenStax College. Located at : http://openstaxcollege.org/textbooks/us-history . License : CC BY: Attribution . License Terms : Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col11740/latest/

7.1 Turner, Mahan, and the Roots of Empire

Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Explain the evolution of American interest in foreign affairs from the end of the Civil War through the early 1890s
• Identify the contributions of Frederick Jackson Turner and Alfred Thayer Mahan to the conscious creation of an American empire

During the time of Reconstruction, the U.S. government showed no significant initiative in foreign affairs. Western expansion and the goal of Manifest Destiny still held the country’s attention, and American missionaries proselytized as far abroad as China, India, the Korean Peninsula, and Africa, but reconstruction efforts took up most of the nation’s resources. As the century came to a close, however, a variety of factors, from the closing of the American frontier to the country’s increased industrial production, led the United States to look beyond its borders. Countries in Europe were building their empires through global power and trade, and the United States did not want to be left behind.

AMERICA’S LIMITED BUT AGGRESSIVE PUSH OUTWARD

On the eve of the Civil War, the country lacked the means to establish a strong position in international diplomacy. As of 1865, the U.S. State Department had barely sixty employees and no ambassadors representing American interests abroad. Instead, only two dozen American foreign ministers were located in key countries, and those often gained their positions not through diplomatic skills or expertise in foreign affairs but through bribes. Further limiting American potential for foreign impact was the fact that a strong international presence required a strong military—specifically a navy—which the United States, after the Civil War, was in no position to maintain. Additionally, as late as 1890, with the U.S. Navy significantly reduced in size, a majority of vessels were classified as “Old Navy,” meaning a mixture of iron-hulled and wholly wooden ships. While the navy had introduced the first all-steel, triple-hulled steam engine vessels seven years earlier, they had only thirteen of them in operation by 1890.

Despite such widespread isolationist impulses and the sheer inability to maintain a strong international position, the United States moved ahead sporadically with a modest foreign policy agenda in the three decades following the Civil War. Secretary of State William Seward, who held that position from 1861 through 1869, sought to extend American political and commercial influence in both Asia and Latin America. He pursued these goals through a variety of actions. A treaty with Nicaragua set the early course for the future construction of a canal across Central America. He also pushed through the annexation of the Midway Islands in the Pacific Ocean, which subsequently opened a more stable route to Asian markets. In frequent conversations with President Lincoln, among others, Seward openly spoke of his desire to obtain British Columbia, the Hawaiian Islands, portions of the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and other territories. He explained his motives to a Boston audience in 1867, when he professed his intention to give the United States “control of the world.”

Most notably, in 1867, Seward obtained the Alaskan Territory from Russia for a purchase price of $7.2 million. Fearing future loss of the territory through military conflict, as well as desiring to create challenges for Great Britain (which they had fought in the Crimean War), Russia had happily accepted the American purchase offer. In the United States, several newspaper editors openly questioned the purchase and labeled it “ Seward’s Folly ” (Figure 7.3). They highlighted the lack of Americans to populate the vast region and lamented the challenges in attempting to govern the native peoples in that territory. Only if gold were to be found, the editors decried, would the secretive purchase be justified. That is exactly what happened. Seward’s purchase added an enormous territory to the country—nearly 600,000 square miles—and also gave the United States access to the rich mineral resources of the region, including the gold that triggered the Klondike Gold Rush at the close of the century. As was the case elsewhere in the American borderlands, Alaska’s industrial development wreaked havoc on the region’s indigenous and Russian cultures.

Seward’s successor as Secretary of State, Hamilton Fish, held the position from 1869 through 1877. Fish spent much of his time settling international disputes involving American interests, including claims that British assistance to the Confederates prolonged the Civil War for about two years. In these so-called Alabama claims, a U.S. senator charged that the Confederacy won a number of crucial battles with the help of one British cruiser and demanded $2 billion in British reparations. Alternatively, the United States would settle for the rights to Canada. A joint commission representing both countries eventually settled on a British payment of $15 million to the United States. In the negotiations, Fish also suggested adding the Dominican Republic as a territorial possession with a path toward statehood, as well as discussing the construction of a transoceanic canal with Colombia. Although neither negotiation ended in the desired result, they both expressed Fish’s intent to cautiously build an American empire without creating any unnecessary military entanglements in the wake of the Civil War.

BUSINESS, RELIGIOUS, AND SOCIAL INTERESTS SET THE STAGE FOR EMPIRE

While the United States slowly pushed outward and sought to absorb the borderlands (and the indigenous cultures that lived there), the country was also changing how it functioned. As a new industrial United States began to emerge in the 1870s, economic interests began to lead the country toward a more expansionist foreign policy. By forging new and stronger ties overseas, the United States would gain access to international markets for export, as well as better deals on the raw materials needed domestically. The concerns raised by the economic depression of the early 1890s further convinced business owners that they needed to tap into new markets, even at the risk of foreign entanglements.

As a result of these growing economic pressures, American exports to other nations skyrocketed in the years following the Civil War, from $234 million in 1865 to $605 million in 1875. By 1898, on the eve of the Spanish-American War, American exports had reached a height of $1.3 billion annually. Imports over the same period also increased substantially, from $238 million in 1865 to $616 million in 1898. Such an increased investment in overseas markets in turn strengthened Americans’ interest in foreign affairs.

Businesses were not the only ones seeking to expand. Religious leaders and Progressive reformers joined businesses in their growing interest in American expansion, as both sought to increase the democratic and Christian influences of the United States abroad. Imperialism and Progressivism were compatible in the minds of many reformers who thought the Progressive impulses for democracy at home translated overseas as well. Editors of such magazines as  Century ,  Outlook , and  Harper’s  supported an imperialistic stance as the democratic responsibility of the United States. Several Protestant faiths formed missionary societies in the years after the Civil War, seeking to expand their reach, particularly in Asia. Influenced by such works as Reverend Josiah Strong’s  Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis  (1885), missionaries sought to spread the gospel throughout the country and abroad. Led by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, among several other organizations, missionaries conflated Christian ethics with American virtues, and began to spread both gospels with zeal. This was particularly true among women missionaries, who composed over 60 percent of the overall missionary force. By 1870, missionaries abroad spent as much time advocating for the American version of a modern civilization as they did teaching the Bible.

Social reformers of the early Progressive Era also performed work abroad that mirrored the missionaries. Many were influenced by recent scholarship on race-based intelligence and embraced the implications of social Darwinist theory that alleged inferior races were destined to poverty on account of their lower evolutionary status. While certainly not all reformers espoused a racist view of intelligence and civilization, many of these reformers believed that the Anglo-Saxon race was mentally superior to others and owed the presumed less evolved populations their stewardship and social uplift—a service the British writer Rudyard Kipling termed “the White Man’s Burden.”

By trying to help people in less industrialized countries achieve a higher standard of living and a better understanding of the principles of democracy, reformers hoped to contribute to a noble cause, but their approach suffered from the same paternalism that hampered Progressive reforms at home. Whether reformers and missionaries worked with native communities in the borderlands such as New Mexico; in the inner cities, like the Salvation Army; or overseas, their approaches had much in common. Their good intentions and willingness to work in difficult conditions shone through in the letters and articles they wrote from the field. Often in their writing, it was clear that they felt divinely empowered to change the lives of other less fortunate and, presumably, less enlightened people. Whether overseas or in the urban slums, they benefited from the same passions but expressed the same paternalism.

Lottie Moon, Missionary

Lottie Moon was a Southern Baptist missionary who spent more than forty years living and working in China. She began in 1873 when she joined her sister in China as a missionary, teaching in a school for Chinese women. Her true passion, however, was to evangelize and minister, and she undertook a campaign to urge the Southern Baptist missionaries to allow women to work beyond the classroom. Her letter campaign back to the head of the Mission Board provided a vivid picture of life in China and exhorted the Southern Baptist women to give more generously of their money and their time. Her letters appeared frequently in religious publications, and it was her suggestion—that the week before Christmas be established as a time to donate to foreign missions—that led to the annual Christmas giving tradition. Lottie’s rhetoric caught on, and still today, the annual Christmas offering is done in her name.

We had the best possible voyage over the water—good weather, no headwinds, scarcely any rolling or pitching—in short, all that reasonable people could ask. . . . I spent a week here last fall and of course feel very natural to be here again. I do so love the East and eastern life! Japan fascinated my heart and fancy four years ago, but now I honestly believe I love China the best, and actually, which is stranger still, like the Chinese best. —Charlotte “Lottie” Moon, 1877

Lottie remained in China through famines, the  Boxer Rebellion , and other hardships. She fought against foot binding, a cultural tradition where girls’ feet were tightly bound to keep them from growing, and shared her personal food and money when those around her were suffering. But her primary goal was to evangelize her Christian beliefs to the people in China. She won the right to minister and personally converted hundreds of Chinese to Christianity. Lottie’s combination of moral certainty and selfless service was emblematic of the missionary zeal of the early American empire.

TURNER, MAHAN, AND THE PLAN FOR EMPIRE

The initial work of businesses, missionaries, and reformers set the stage by the early 1890s for advocates of an expanded foreign policy and a vision of an American empire. Following decades of an official stance of isolationism combined with relatively weak presidents who lacked the popular mandate or congressional support to undertake substantial overseas commitments, a new cadre of American leaders—many of whom were too young to fully comprehend the damage inflicted by the Civil War—assumed leadership roles. Eager to be tested in international conflict, these new leaders hoped to prove America’s might on a global stage. The Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Theodore Roosevelt, was one of these leaders who sought to expand American influence globally, and he advocated for the expansion of the U.S. Navy, which at the turn of the century was the only weapons system suitable for securing overseas expansion.

Turner (Figure 7.4) and naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan were instrumental in the country’s move toward foreign expansion, and writer Brooks Adams further dramatized the consequences of the nation’s loss of its frontier in his The Law of Civilization and Decay  in 1895. As mentioned in the chapter opening, Turner announced his  Frontier Thesis —that American democracy was largely formed by the American frontier—at the Chicago World’s Colombian Exposition. He noted that “for nearly three centuries the dominant fact in American life has been expansion.” He continued, “American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise.”

Although there was no more room for these forces to proceed domestically, they would continue to find an outlet on the international stage. Turner concluded that “the demands for a vigorous foreign policy, for an interoceanic canal, for a revival of our power upon our seas, and for the extension of American influence to outlying islands and adjoining countries are indications that the forces [of expansion] will continue.” Such policies would permit Americans to find new markets. Also mindful of the mitigating influence of a frontier—in terms of easing pressure from increased immigration and population expansion in the eastern and midwestern United States—he encouraged new outlets for further population growth, whether as lands for further American settlement or to accommodate more immigrants. Turner’s thesis was enormously influential at the time but has subsequently been widely criticized by historians. Specifically, the thesis underscores the pervasive racism and disregard for the indigenous communities, cultures, and individuals in the American borderlands and beyond.

CLICK AND EXPLORE

Explore the  controversy associated with Turner’s Frontier Thesis  at U.S. History Scene.

While Turner provided the idea for an empire, Mahan provided the more practical guide. In his 1890 work The Influence of Seapower upon History , he suggested three strategies that would assist the United States in both constructing and maintaining an empire. First, noting the sad state of the U.S. Navy, he called for the government to build a stronger, more powerful version. Second, he suggested establishing a network of naval bases to fuel this expanding fleet. Seward’s previous acquisition of the Midway Islands served this purpose by providing an essential naval coaling station, which was vital, as the limited reach of steamships and their dependence on coal made naval coaling stations imperative for increasing the navy’s geographic reach. Future acquisitions in the Pacific and Caribbean increased this naval supply network (Figure 7.5). Finally, Mahan urged the future construction of a canal across the isthmus of Central America, which would decrease by two-thirds the time and power required to move the new navy from the Pacific to the Atlantic oceans. Heeding Mahan’s advice, the government moved quickly, passing the Naval Act of 1890, which set production levels for a new, modern fleet. By 1898, the government had succeeded in increasing the size of the U.S. Navy to an active fleet of 160 vessels, of which 114 were newly built of steel. In addition, the fleet now included six battleships, compared to zero in the previous decade. By the start of the twentieth century, the United States ranked among the top five naval powers globally.

The United States also began to expand its influence to other Pacific Islands, most notably Samoa and Hawaii. With regard to the latter, American businessmen were most interested in the lucrative sugar industry that lay at the heart of the Hawaiian Islands’ economy. By 1890, through a series of reciprocal trade agreements, Hawaiians exported nearly all of their sugar production to the United States, tariff-free. When Queen Liliuokalani tapped into a strong anti-American resentment among native Hawaiians over the economic and political power of exploitative American sugar companies between 1891 and 1893, worried businessmen worked with the American minister to Hawaii, John Stevens, to stage a quick armed revolt to counter her efforts and seize the islands as an American protectorate (Figure 7.6). Following five more years of political wrangling, the United States annexed Hawaii in 1898, during the Spanish-American War.

The United States had similar strategic interests in the Samoan Islands of the South Pacific—most notably, access to the naval refueling station at Pago Pago where American merchant vessels as well as naval ships could take on food, fuel, and supplies. In 1899, in an effort to mitigate other foreign interests and still protect their own, the United States joined Great Britain and Germany in a three-party protectorate over the islands, which assured American access to the strategic ports located there. Ten years later, Great Britain agreed to give up its claim on the islands, and they were divided between Germany and the United States.

American History from Reconstruction to the Present Copyright © 2022 by LOUIS: The Louisiana Library Network is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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