American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization
Neil Smith
Abstract
An American Empire, constructed over the last century, long ago overtook European colonialism, and it has been widely assumed that the new globalism it espoused took us “beyond geography.” This book debunks that assumption, offering an incisive argument that American globalism had a distinct geography and was pieced together as part of a powerful geographical vision. The power of geography did not die with the twilight of European colonialism, but it did change fundamentally. That the inauguration of the American Century brought a loss of public geographical sensibility in the United States wa ... More
An American Empire, constructed over the last century, long ago overtook European colonialism, and it has been widely assumed that the new globalism it espoused took us “beyond geography.” This book debunks that assumption, offering an incisive argument that American globalism had a distinct geography and was pieced together as part of a powerful geographical vision. The power of geography did not die with the twilight of European colonialism, but it did change fundamentally. That the inauguration of the American Century brought a loss of public geographical sensibility in the United States was itself a political symptom of the emerging empire. This book provides a vital geographical-historical context for understanding the power and limits of contemporary globalization, which can now be seen as representing the third of three distinct historical moments of U.S. global ambition.
Keywords:
American Empire,
European colonialism,
globalism,
geography,
globalization,
global ambition,
United States
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2003 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780520230279 |
| Published to California Scholarship Online: March 2012 |
DOI:10.1525/california/9780520230279.001.0001 |
