Denial of Empire: The United States and Its Dependencies

"I think this book justifies its appearance here because of its distinctiveness. But it’s different from all the others, because it has been almost totally neglected since it was published in 1962. It might to pass the test of illumination, but it fails the test of recognition. The book enters my list because Perkins was one of those scholars who lay the foundation stones of a subject without receiving the credit they deserve. This has nothing to do with whether I agree with the author or not; it is a matter of trying to assess its contribution as objectively as possible. No one else has undertaken the task since 1962. Perkins’s research is painstaking, thorough, and reliable, and deserves the recognition it has so far been denied. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Perkins was writing after Pratt, but in the same mode. He was what you might call a rather orthodox or mainstream scholar. He wrote a similar study of the Caribbean later on, but Denial of Empire was the first book to present a thorough account of the management of the colonies the United States acquired in 1898 from the foundation of the empire to its demise half a century later. “Perkins’s research is painstaking and reliable, and deserves the recognition it has so far been denied” There are a couple of other things to say about Perkins. He was not a scintillating scholar. His book has a dogged quality to it that has made it extraordinarily reliable. He was also unfortunate, as we’ll see in a minute, in the timing of his publication, because his views were being challenged, even as his book appeared. It was the changing mood of the times, not his scholarship, that consigned his book to oblivion. Perkins argued that there was nothing wrong with the benevolent intentions of US colonial rule, but that they were frustrated by local complexities and political problems at home. He wasn’t whitewashing or trying to overplay what you might call the success of the imperial project. He was appropriately and admirably objective about that. His difficulty was that he seems to have accepted—understandably, because it was in the air of the time—the ideas of people like George Kennan, who believed that the United States had a civilising mission. The US was driven to encompass the world to fulfil a benign duty, that of liberating other peoples. On that view, the problem lay not in the project but in the difficulties of achieving such a monumental task. Rightly or wrongly, this perspective is not one that most scholars would start with today. Nevertheless, Perkins’s study remains one of the starting points for appraising US colonial rule. My own book is littered with page references to his work, and I’m more than happy to acknowledge a scholar who should be counted as one of the founding fathers of what I think will soon be recognised as a new subject. As new publications on the US empire appear, I am confident his book will be recognised as a pioneering study. That’s another good question. Perkins did not offer an extended explanation of his title, but he clearly used it to refer to the contradiction between the values enshrined in the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the subsequent acquisition of colonies. An ex-colonial state that advertised anti-imperial values found it difficult to accept that it had become a colonial power itself. Consequently, the US was ‘in denial’ when it came to its own empire, while criticising other powers that feely admitted that they ruled over colonial subjects. I think it is. The expansionist imperial history of the United States from 1898 to the close of the 1950s has more or less been erased from the books. It’s quite extraordinary. I have called this, in my own book, the largest historiographical gap in the history of modern empires. There is a vast literature on the war of 1898. But as soon as the war finishes, everyone loses interest, and I have not found a survey of Western imperial history that makes even a half-hearted attempt to deal with the history of the islands after 1898. Admittedly, the US Empire was small in relation to the British and French empires. Nevertheless, by 1940 the United States ruled about 23 million people in the Pacific and Caribbean. This was a substantial number of souls to be saved and stomachs to be filled. George Bush was speaking in understandable ignorance of half a century of history of formal colonial rule. It is a tribute to Perkins that he saw the importance of the subject and made a great start for the rest of us, who can build on the empirical work he assembled so reliably."