The Dominion of War

In The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500-2000, historians Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton present a synthetic narrative of North American conflicts during the colonial period and after American Independence that illustrates how war functioned as the primary motor for social and political change. The authors assert that all North American conflicts ranging from Samuel de Champlain’s Indian alliances to Colin Powell’s direction of the First Persian Gulf War were motivated either by imperial ambition or were the direct consequence of a prior imperial war.
Anderson and Cayton demonstrate the imperial origins of memorialized wars, like the American Revolution, that are typically associated with defending liberty and promoting freedom. They also call attention to the forgotten wars for territorial expansion, such as the Spanish-American War. The volume challenges the “grand narrative” of United States history wherein Americans believe historical conflicts were “thrust upon” the nation and jingoistic pursuits of self-interest were an unfortunate aberration (xii-xiii). The Dominion of War is a story of growing American dominion on the world stage and casts the nation as an empire often cloaked in the rhetoric of consensual expansion and the defender of global democracy.
Anderson and Cayton conceptually organize North American history into four periods: the Age of Contact (1500s), the Age of Colonization and Conflict (1600-1750), the Age of Empires and Revolutions (1750-1900), and the Age of Intervention (1900 to the present). Throughout the volume the authors remain sensitive to varied imperial strategies—conquest, trading posts, economic liberalism, alliance, or consent (purchase)—but primarily address the vacillation between an ethos of consent and conquest—consent meaning an empire by invitation or territorial expansion through peaceful purchase.
Most empires during the Age of Contact expanded through consent. Indian-Indian and Indian-European alliances, middle grounds, and sporadic open warfare marked an age where no single group or empire acquired hegemony. Samuel de Champlain fostered broad alliances among Indians and illustrated that not all empires expanded through warfare alone, despite his participation in small Indian-Indian conflicts. Likewise, William Penn promised land and liberty for settlers and peaceful relations with Native Americans in Pennsylvania. Penn made efforts to learn Indian languages and acquired land by purchase rather than force of arms. Gradually Penn’s ideal harmony of Anglo-Indian interests broke down as burgeoning populations coveted, squatted on, and seized Indian lands and culminated most infamously in the Walking Purchase of 1737. Given that William Penn premised colonial expansion on consent, the later Pennsylvanian conflicts marked the broader shift toward overt conquest during the Age of Colonization and Conflict. After 1600 North America became embroiled in a three-way contest between Spanish, French, and British ambitions while Native Americans occupied liminal spaces between the empires and sustained their independence by playing one empire against another.
While the French and Indian War (1754-1763) signaled the Age of Empires and Revolutions, Anderson and Cayton are primarily concerned with how the “Revolutionary Settlement” reached between Federalists and anti-Federalists in 1787 articulated an empire of consent that transitioned toward an empire of intervention through the nineteenth century (188-189). The Settlement promulgated two central tenets of American imperialism: the Bill of Rights elevated state militias over a national army, and the Northwest Ordinance confined territorial acquisition to only voluntary cessions according to popular sovereignty. This curtailed vision of empire unraveled after the War of 1812 primarily because pundits could couch American aggression as necessary measures to promote liberty. Subsequent conflicts predicated on preserving or promoting liberty included Andrew Jackson’s illegal military campaigns through the Old Southwest and Florida, the Mexican-American War, and the massive expansion of federal authority during the Civil War to emancipate slaves and occupy the South. The evolving rhetoric and expansionist conflicts abrogated the Revolutionary Settlement as federal power increasingly relied on standing armies to subordinate foreign and domestic enemies.
This trend intensified during the twentieth century as an ethos of liberty, democracy, and freedom coalesced into a pervasive ideal of the burgeoning United States being antithetical to “empire” despite clear historical precedents of national expansion through consent and conquest. Americans arrived at this point by first supplementing the Revolutionary Settlement with an addendum during the early twentieth century that indicated United States’ disinterest in foreign affairs unless forced to “protect liberty from tyranny” by military force (356). Various amateur historians—called “debunkers”—arose during the 1930s and recast the American Revolution, Civil War, and First World War (and later World War II and the Korean War) as examples where the nation exercised power to defend liberty at home and abroad. With overtly imperial wars against Native Americans, Mexico, and the Philippines either re-interpreted as aberrations or ignored entirely, Americans understood American intervention and hegemony as necessary instruments for the preservation of liberty and democracy.
Anderson and Cayton demonstrate how imperial ideologies fostered North American conflicts and, in turn, how those conflicts conditioned and modified those ideologies through lived experience and collective memory. Their approach to war and society illuminates matters at the heart of American expansion, identity, and ideals. And by doing so the authors confront the United States as an empire during a time when Americans too often conflate consent and conquest into a narrative that presents foreign countries inviting American intervention on the behalf of protecting liberty. This work deserves wide recognition and the authors have written an incredibly well-written narrative that should engage both historians and educated readers alike.