This classic work, by the distinguished historian Walter LaFeber, presents his widely influential argument that economic causes were the primary forces propelling America to world power in the nineteenth century. Cornell University Press is proud to issue this thirty-fifth anniversary edition, featuring a new preface by the author."In this Beveridge Award-winning study, Walter LaFeber . . . probes beneath the apparently quiet surface of late nineteenth-century American diplomacy, undisturbed by major wars and undistinguished by important statements of policy. He finds those who shaped American diplomacy believed expanding foreign markets were the cure for recurring depressions. . . . In thoroughly documenting economic pressure on American foreign policy of the late nineteenth century, the author has illuminated a shadowy corner of the national experience. . . . The theory that America was thrust by events into a position of world power it never sought and was unprepared to discharge must now be re-examined. Also brought into question is the thesis that American policymakers have depended for direction on the uncertain compass of utopian idealism."-American Historical Review
Years of preparation, 1860-1889 : The roots of the new empire ; The industrial revolution ; Westward the course of empire - and discontent ; The reaction of American business ; Seward ; Grant and Fish ; Evarts ; Blaine and Frelinghuysen ; Bayard and the Pacific ; The beginning of the modern American navy ; Conclusion: the period of preparation -- The intellectual formulation : Frederick Jackson Turner and the American frontier ; Josiah Strong and the missionary frontier ; Books Adams, Alfred Thayer Mahan, and the far western frontier ; The ideological consensus -- The strategic formulation : The assumptions and objectives ; Pan-Americanism : "The battle for a market" ; The beginnings of the modern battleship navy ; The Haitian revolution ; The Chilean revolution ; The new empire in the western Pacific, 1889-1892 ; A premature American frontier in the Pacific -- The economic formulation : The goldbugs and foreign markets ; The tariff of 1894 ; "Symptoms of revolution" ; The American business community : analysis ; The American business community : solutions -- Reaction: depression diplomacy, 1893-1895 : Hawaii ; The Brazilian revolution of 1894 ; Replacing the British in Nicaragua ; Depression, expansion, and the battleship navy -- Reaction: The Venezuelan boundary crisis of 1895-1896 : Lighting the fuse ; The explosion ; Aftermath -- Reaction: New problems, new friends, new foes : The Cuban revolution, 1895-1897 ; The far east ; New friends ; New foes -- Reaction: Approach to war : McKinley ; Cuba, 1897 to March 17, 1898 ; The far east, 1897 to March 1898.