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America's roots: racism, capitalism and ethnic extermination

By Martin Jacques
THE GUARDIAN, LONDON
Sunday, Jan 07, 2007, Page 19

Publication Notes: Dangerous Nation: America and the World, 1600-1898 By Robert Kagan 527 pages Atlantic Books

Britain and the US have found themselves in conflict many times, and at war with each other twice. None the less, ever since the Pilgrim Fathers, the two countries have shared much and their different historical paths have had many points of intersection. Most importantly, they share ethnic and racial characteristics. Perhaps the latter, more than anything else, helps to explain why, during a convulsive century in which the US was busy usurping Britain's imperial power and reach, the two never came to blows.

The perception of these shared characteristics has helped to obscure in the British mind the highly specific and unique conditions of America's birth and evolution, which set it apart in very profound ways from both Britain and Europe. The US was born a settler colony, that unique product of largely British (but also European) migration during the era of empire, which was to leave a permanent Anglo-Saxon footprint in such disparate lands as North America and Australia. The settler colony produced a quite different dynamic and mentality from that of Europe and Asia, both of which were characterized by the relative continuity of their native populations. The establishment of settler colonies meant the conquest and brutal destruction of the native populations. It is impossible to understand the psychology of the Americans, or indeed the Australians, without understanding what they did to the Indians and Aborigines respectively. This was not ethnic cleansing but something closer to ethnic extermination.

One of the myths that surrounds American history is that it has been relatively non-aggressive and, of course, anti-colonial. Robert Kagan, in what will eventually be a two-volume history of American foreign policy, has no time for these arguments. He shows that, quite to the contrary, from the Pilgrim Fathers onwards, the new colonial settler society was by its very nature expansionist and aggressive, with an insatiable appetite for territory. He writes: “This colonial America was characterized not by isolationism and utopianism, not by cities upon hills and covenants with God, but by aggressive expansionism, acquisitive materialism, and an overarching ideology of civilization that encouraged and justified both.” It bred both a particularly abhorrent form of racism and a new kind of capitalism. With a seemingly limitless supply of land, every white male settler could ultimately fulfill their dream of becoming a landowner: colonial America, in Kagan's words, was like an “expansionist pressure cooker.”

This restless territorial acquisitiveness, on which the British colonial masters eventually sought to place a constraint, together with the growing power and prosperity of the colony (on the eve of the revolution, Americans already enjoyed a higher standard of living than any European country and the population had increased from 75,000 to 1.6 million in a century), brought it into growing conflict with Britain. What began as a struggle for autonomy (based on the proposition that the empire should be conceived of in terms of countries that enjoyed something like equal power and status) soon became a struggle for independence, which then turned into a revolution rooted in Enlightenment principles and espousing a liberal republican ideology. The embryonic nation, of course, was in no position to use the traditional argument for nationhood, resting on roots, identity and history, given that it was seeking to separate itself from those roots, so the act of formation of the newly independent country inevitably involved a quite new principle for a nation. In the light of the fact that we tend to think of the US as “non-ideological” (mainly because of the lack of a strong left/right tradition) — another myth — it is ironic that the two great wars that were fought on its territory, namely the war of independence and the subsequent civil war, were, as Kagan points out, both highly ideological.

Kagan captures well the fundamental relationship between the nature of a country and the character of its foreign policy: that the latter reflects the national idea, whatever that might be and however it might change over time. The book is at its best in showing how the country's restless and constant desire for expansion is rooted in its settler origins. (He vividly describes the way in which the settlers constantly set the agenda of government when it came to the theft of Indian land, irrespective of the treaties that the government had solemnly agreed with the Indians.) Already, in the early decades of the 19th century, not long after independence, “American leaders from every region of the country and representing every political stripe”, writes Kagan, “shared a common belief that most if not all of North America, including Canada, Mexico, and the islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico, formed the natural' dominion of the US.”

The fact that the US rested on universalist abstract principles imbued American society from the outset with a wider and more ambitious concept of its role: that its values were relevant and applicable to the rest of the world. Of course, at the root of its restless expansion and growing self-confidence — and ultimately its enormous influence — was the hugely dynamic nature of its capitalism, which was eventually to transform the entire world. In fact, although Marx's analysis of capitalism was based on Britain, its true lodestar — and insight — was surely the American model-to-be, at once both revolutionary and untrammeled by a past that it had destroyed.

The second volume will deal with the 20th century. There are too many illusions about the US, and in its own way this book helps to dispel some of them. Although at times it suffers from an excessively narrative style, it is an extremely useful contribution to our understanding of American history.

Martin Jacques is a visiting research fellow at the Asia Research Centre, at the London School of Economics.
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