|
Article Excerpt
The conventional argument of historians, historical and political geographers, and international relations scholars is that America became a global hegemon only after the collapse of the Axis Powers and the end of World War II in 1945. Such conventionality is rooted in an interpretation of hegemonic struggles as almost entirely military in nature (see, for example, Goldstein 1988). As John Agnew noted, "theories of hegemonic succession have trouble accounting for the absence of war as the USA replaced Britain as the dominant world power" (1993, 133). Despite his description of America as an imperial power from the Louisiana Purchase on, Donald Meinig eschews much discussion of hegemonic challenge and succession in his magisterial The Shaping of America and argues that a "global America" emerged only from the security failures of the "hemispheric defense" policy intended to control Germany and Japan and that led up to World War II (1993; 2004, 331-336). Many of these problems stem from the tendency of academic disciplines to focus on the affairs of the nation-state in which they are embedded and to have great difficulty seeing historical events in comparative and internationalist perspectives.
For example, Meinig privileges President Woodrow Wilson's attempt to create an internationalist peace after World War I, arguing that he "clung to neutrality" in his attempts to maintain the moral high ground for America (Meinig 2004, 306). Against this classical view of Wilsonian idealism is the fact that, at the Paris Peace Conference in Versailles in 1919, President Wilson was not at all neutral when he noted to Admiral William Bullard that "there were three dominating factors in international relations--international transportation, international communication, and petroleum--and that the influence which a country exercised in international affairs would be largely dependent upon their position of dominance in these three activities." In his official History of Communications-Electronics in the United States Navy, Captain Linwood Howeth noted that Owen Young, then president of General Electric, the key company in telecommunications at the time, gave this account of his 1919 conversation with Bullard to the radio historian Gleason Archer on 5 February 1937 (Archer 1938, 164-165; Howeth 1963, 368). President Wilson's remark referred directly to an American economic struggle with Britain that can be dated back to the American Civil War in two of those three areas--international transportation and international communication. At the Paris Peace Conference the president took specific action on the factor of international communication, sending Admiral Bullard back to the United States to negotiate the creation of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) as a geopolitical entity to allow the U.S. Navy to retain the control of international radio communication it had won during World War I (Hugill 1999, 119-123).
In the conventional reading the main challenge to a declining Britain came from Germany and erupted in the form of the two British-American-German Wars (more simply, the "German Wars") we conventionally call "World War I" and "World War II." "Although precipitated by British attempts to maintain its political dominance, the two world wars. ... can be seen as the United States preventing Germany taking Britain's place and culminating in the United States 'succeeding' to Britain's mantle in 1945" (Flint and Taylor 2007, 57). Meinig argues that the United States preferred continental isolation through the late 1800s, switched to hemispheric defense until the 1930s, then was finally forced reluctantly into globalism (2004). I argue here for a very different point of view, that, although Meinig was correct that a U.S. imperium came into existence in the early 1800s, America began to challenge Britain in economic terms as early as 1861. I follow Howard Fuller in arguing that America responded to a perceived British naval threat in the early 1860s (2008), and I argue that America posed a direct naval challenge to Britain in 1866. By 1919 President Wilson was, in fact, reflecting on nearly sixty years of an evolving conflict, mostly economic, two major components of which were international transportation and international communications. By the late 1920s American writers were clearly aware of this competition, as the provocative title of Ludwell Denny's 1930 book, America Conquers Britain: A Record of Economic War, makes very clear.
The two main models of hegemonic transition come from the work of Immanuel Wallerstein (1974) and George Modelski (1978). Other scholars have argued that hegemonic transitions involve global wars, such as the British-French wars that marked the transition to British hegemony in the early 1800s and the British-American-German wars that signaled the transition to American hegemony by 1945 (Goldstein 1988; Flint and Taylor 2007, 45-57). These conventional readings fail to take into account the fact that at least two major types of state exist--trading states and territorial states, with subtle gradations between the two--and that conflicts between and among the different types of states produce different types of hegemonic transitions. The transition from British to American hegemony was the most complex in the history of the last 500 years, for it involved multiple conflicts: between trading states (Britain against America); between trading and territorial states (Britain and America against Germany and Japan); and between territorial states (Germany against Russia/the Soviet Union) (Hugill 2009). To further complicate the state-type issue, the multinational companies that began to emerge in the global economy of the early 1900s have rarely regarded them selves as trading-state or territorial-state companies, because they do business in many parts of the world. They thus seek to manipulate the policies of the states in which they do business, expecting different outcomes in trading from territorial states For multinational companies, "transnational structuring" takes over (Huntington 1973; Nowell 1994).
I concentrate in this article on the underreported conflict between the two main trading states involved in the last hegemonic transition: a declining Britain and a rising America. Trading states fight predominantly economic "wars," as was first the obvious case with the Dutch/British transition of the mid-1600s. The main British challenge to Dutch hegemony was not so much military as through the protectionist economic policies adopted by the British in the Navigation Acts, the casus belli of the three Anglo-Dutch naval wars of the seventeenth century (Hugill 2009). The American challenge to Britain evolved in precisely the same way from 1861 on, without the overt naval clashes of the Anglo-Dutch wars but with serious covert naval clashes at the time of the American Civil War.
PROTECTIONISM AND ECONOMIC WAR
The hegemonic transition between Britain and America began when the United States moved to protectionism in 1861. By any measure, in 1861 America was Britain's main trading partner. America was the overwhelmingly main supplier of cotton to the British textile industry, on which much of Britain's industrial wealth was based. Textiles were the leading sector of the British economy through the early 1870s, when iron and steel replaced them, and of the American economy through the early 1890s, when food processing replaced them. Textiles remained the main manufacturing sector of the American economy through the early 1930s, when they were finally surpassed by iron and steel. In terms of America's foreign trade, cotton was absolute king throughout the 1800s. Between 1831 and 1860 Britain took 68.5 percent of all Americas cotton exports. In 1860 America's total exports were worth $400 million, of which $169 million went to Britain, $155 million of which was cotton, almost 40 percent of America's total exports. America was also the increasingly dominant supplier of the cheap wheat that fed Britain's growing urban industrial proletariat, although wheat's importance came later and it was only worth a fraction of the cotton output. Nevertheless, from 1871 to 1900 Britain took 58.6 percent of all American wheat exports. Britain was by far the mainsource of American imports. In 1860 American imports totaled $362 million. The value of British exports to America that year was $138 million, most of it in the form of manufactured goods: wool and cotton textiles, and iron and steel products. In addition, Britain was by far the most important external source of capital for American infrastructural growth, agriculture, and industry (U.S. Census Bureau 1960; Mitchell 1980).
Britain was also a major source of skilled labor for American economic growth. The early phases of industrialization were driven by skills learned through apprenticeship and on the job. Without the emigration of skilled workers from Britain, the transfer of such skills to the United States would have been significantly more difficult. Much of the early history of the American textile industry can be written in terms of such skilled migrants as Samuel Slater, known to this day in Derbyshire as "Slater the Traitor," or Thomas Marshall, who transferred to America in the 1790s much of the skill they had acquired from Richard Arkwright's pioneering spinning mills (Fitton 1989). In the same way, many emigrants from Wales to America before the Civil War were iron founders (Knowles 1997), and they created the reserve of skilled labor needed for American industry to expand rapidly behind its tariff wall after 1861.
Despite the importance of iron, the focal point in the economic struggle between Britain and America was a textile "war" that intensified slowly from the 1790s and exploded after 1861. The banner of the Textile World Journal emphasized the bedrock "Tenet of our Creed: We Believe in the Conservation of and Protection to Domestic Industries." After 1861 a protected U.S. cotton textile industry innovated rapidly. American entrepreneurs quickly replaced spinning mules with ring spinners, thus heavily unionized male labor with nonunion and female labor. The rapid improvement of the ring spinner for lower-grade cottons from the 1870s, plus the adoption of James Northrop's automatic loom in the 1880s, set American cotton mills on the road to...
|
