This book examines the social, economic and political aftermath of the famous Anglo-American 'destroyers-for-bases' deal of 2nd September 1940 that saw fifty obsolete U.S. destroyers exchanged for 'base colonies' in Trinidad, Bermuda, Newfoundland and the Bahamas.
2020 L.A. Times Book Prize Finalist, History A provocative examination of how the U.S. military has shaped our entire world, from today’s costly, endless wars to the prominence of violence in everyday American life. The United States has been fighting wars constantly since invading Afghanistan in 2001. This nonstop warfare is far less exceptional than it might seem: the United States has been at war or has invaded other countries almost every year since independence. In The United States of War, David Vine traces this pattern of bloody conflict from Columbus's 1494 arrival in Guantanamo Bay through the 250-year expansion of a global U.S. empire. Drawing on historical and firsthand anthropological research in fourteen countries and territories, The United States of War demonstrates how U.S. leaders across generations have locked the United States in a self-perpetuating system of permanent war by constructing the world’s largest-ever collection of foreign military bases—a global matrix that has made offensive interventionist wars more likely. Beyond exposing the profit-making desires, political interests, racism, and toxic masculinity underlying the country’s relationship to war and empire, The United States of War shows how the long history of U.S. military expansion shapes our daily lives, from today’s multi-trillion–dollar wars to the pervasiveness of violence and militarism in everyday U.S. life. The book concludes by confronting the catastrophic toll of American wars—which have left millions dead, wounded, and displaced—while offering proposals for how we can end the fighting.
Seapower has been a constant in world politics, a tool through which powerful countries have policed the seas for commercial advantage. Political geographer Colin Flint highlights the geography of seapower as a dynamic, continual struggle to gain control of near waters—those parts of the oceans close to a country's shoreline—and far waters—parts of the oceans beyond the horizon and that neighbor the shorelines of other countries. A forceful and clarifying challenge to conventional accounts of geopolitics, Near and Far Waters offers an accessible introduction to the combination of economic and political relations that are the reason behind, and the result of, the development of seapower to control near waters and project force into far waters. Examining the histories of three naval powers (the Netherlands, Britain, and the United States), this book distills the past and present patterns of seapower and their tendency to trigger repercussive conflict and war. Readers will gain an appreciation for how geopolitics works, the importance of seapower in economic competition, the motivations behind China's desire to become a global naval force, and the risks of current and future wars. Drawing on decades of experience, Flint urges readers to take seriously the dilemma of near/far waters as a context for an alternative understanding of global politics.
Taking American mobilization in WWII as its departure point, this book offers a concise but comprehensive introduction to the history of militarization in the United States since 1940. Exploring the ways in which war and the preparation for war have shaped and affected the United States during 'The American Century', Fitzgerald demonstrates how militarization has moulded relations between the US and the rest of the world. Providing a timely synthesis of key scholarship in a rapidly developing field, this book shows how national security concerns have affected issues as diverse as the development of the welfare state, infrastructure spending, gender relations and notions of citizenship. It also examines the way in which war is treated in the American imagination; how it has been depicted throughout this era, why its consequences have been made largely invisible and how Americans have often considered themselves to be reluctant warriors. In integrating domestic histories with international and transnational topics such as the American 'empire of bases' and the experience of American service personnel overseas, the author outlines the ways in which American militarization had, and still has, global consequences. Of interest to scholars, researchers and students of military history, war studies, US foreign relations and policy, this book addresses a burgeoning and dynamic field from which parallels and comparisons can be drawn for the modern day.
Clarke and Clarke have created a journal that provides an ethnographic record of the East Indians and Creoles of San Fernando - and the entire sugar belt south of the town known as Naparima. They record socio-political relations during the second year of Trinidad s independence (1964), and provide first-hand evidence for the workings of a complex, plural society in which race, religion, and politics had become, and have remained, deeply intertwined. Entries occur whenever there is evidence of social scientific importance to the project, and these range from descriptions of weddings and pujas (prayer ceremonies devoted to a Hindu deity) to interviews with religious leaders, politicians and members of the south Trinidad elite.
In some ways, Canadian history has always been international, comparative, and wide-ranging. However, in recent years the importance of the ties between Canadian and transnational history have become increasingly clear. Within and Without the Nation brings scholars from a range of disciplines together to examine Canada’s past in new ways through the lens of transnational scholarship. Moving beyond well-known comparisons with Britain and the United States, the fifteen essays in this collection connect Canada with Latin America, the Caribbean, and the wider Pacific world, as well as with other parts of the British Empire. Examining themes such as the dispossession of indigenous peoples, the influence of nationalism and national identity, and the impact of global migration, Within and Without the Nation is a text which will help readers rethink what constitutes Canadian history.
From the expansionist fervour of the late nineteenth century through both world wars and the Cold War, a varied and ever-changing group of dreamers campaigned for Canada’s union with the British Caribbean colonies. They hoped to diversify Canada’s climate and agricultural capabilities, spur economic development, boost the nation’s autonomy and stature in the Empire-Commonwealth and the world, temper American power, and secure a tourist paradise. Dominion over Palm and Pine traces the transnational ebb and flow of these union campaigns, situating them in the global history of colonialism and white supremacy, Black activism, and decolonization. Paula Hastings centres the British Caribbean in historical narratives that rarely take account of the region, challenging us to rethink the history of Canadian expansionism and its entangled relationship with nation building, the struggle for sovereignty at home and abroad, and Canada’s evolving role and reputation on the world stage. Widely conceived, the brokers of Canada’s international histories included a multiplicity of actors who shaped the evolving contours and outcomes of the debate: Canadian legislators, civil servants, businessmen, and social justice activists; Caribbean migrants, intellectuals, and anti-colonial nationalists; and British colonial officials, absentee planters, and politicians. Canada’s lack of an overseas empire is often vaunted as a national characteristic that sets Canada apart from the United States and the old European powers. In excavating the dogged resilience of Canadian designs on the Caribbean, Dominion over Palm and Pine unsettles notions of Canadian goodness that rest on this self-righteous observation.
Named one of the ten best books of the year by the Chicago Tribune A Publishers Weekly best book of 2019 | A 2019 NPR Staff Pick A pathbreaking history of the United States’ overseas possessions and the true meaning of its empire We are familiar with maps that outline all fifty states. And we are also familiar with the idea that the United States is an “empire,” exercising power around the world. But what about the actual territories—the islands, atolls, and archipelagos—this country has governed and inhabited? In How to Hide an Empire, Daniel Immerwahr tells the fascinating story of the United States outside the United States. In crackling, fast-paced prose, he reveals forgotten episodes that cast American history in a new light. We travel to the Guano Islands, where prospectors collected one of the nineteenth century’s most valuable commodities, and the Philippines, site of the most destructive event on U.S. soil. In Puerto Rico, Immerwahr shows how U.S. doctors conducted grisly experiments they would never have conducted on the mainland and charts the emergence of independence fighters who would shoot up the U.S. Congress. In the years after World War II, Immerwahr notes, the United States moved away from colonialism. Instead, it put innovations in electronics, transportation, and culture to use, devising a new sort of influence that did not require the control of colonies. Rich with absorbing vignettes, full of surprises, and driven by an original conception of what empire and globalization mean today, How to Hide an Empire is a major and compulsively readable work of history.
In Tip of the Spear, Alfred Peredo Flores argues that the US occupation of the island of Guåhan (Guam), one of the most heavily militarized islands in the western Pacific Ocean, was enabled by a process of settler militarism. During World War II and the Cold War, Guåhan was a launching site for both covert and open US military operations in the region, a strategically significant role that turned Guåhan into a crucible of US overseas empire. In 1962, the US Navy lost the authority to regulate all travel to and from the island, and a tourist economy eventually emerged that changed the relationship between the Indigenous CHamoru population and the US military, further complicating the process of settler colonialism on the island. The US military occupation of Guåhan was based on a co-constitutive process that included CHamoru land dispossession, discursive justifications for the remaking of the island, the racialization of civilian military labor, and the military's policing of interracial intimacies. Within a narrative that emphasizes CHamoru resilience, resistance, and survival, Flores uses a working class labor analysis to examine how the militarization of Guåhan was enacted by a minority settler population to contribute to the US government's hegemonic presence in Oceania.