In May 1869, Confederate veteran Thomas Jordan set sail for Cuba, where he joined anticolonial rebels fighting the island’s first war of independence. He briefly became their general-in-chief. He was joined by Union and Confederate veterans, pointing to the complex intersections of race, slavery, and imperial expansion in the aftermath of the American Civil War. While white supremacy prevented a multiracial democracy from blossoming at home, Americans sought to expand territorially and commercially across the globe. In this welcome collection of essays, editor David Prior’s goal of engaging Reconstruction and empire as correlated forces is powerful and far-reaching. At the heart of both lie questions of citizenship and sovereignty entwined with discourses of race, gender, and identity. Building upon such insights, Reconstruction and Empire: The Legacies of Abolition and Union Victory for an Imperial Age explores how the United States navigated the tensions of rebuilding a nation domestically and abroad between 1865 and 1898.
Scholars have increasingly brought the international dimensions of the Reconstruction era to the fore, yet few works have thoroughly addressed the question of empire. As Prior convincingly argues in the introduction, building on Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction and as well as contemporary historiographical debates, it is possible and desirable to conceive “an alternative historiographical universe where a long-standing interpretive paradigm of “Reconstruction & Empire” reigns in place of our own “Gilded Age & Progressive Era” (4). This collection’s eleven studies highlight the sometimes-contradictory continuities of the United States’ imperial endeavors through a wide range of actors from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Some expansionist projects were short-lived and never accomplished yet are nevertheless crucial to understanding the development of the nation into the hegemonic power it is today.
Reconstruction and Empire challenges the traditional periodization of Reconstruction by expanding its geographical, temporal, and thematical understandings. Its focus on the Caribbean Basin, notably Cuba and Hispaniola, its extension into the 1890s and early twentieth century, and the examination of religious communities’ imperial designs sheds new light onto how exactly the United States emerged as a global power. In doing so, the book successfully introduces a framework in which Reconstruction and empire no longer operate as clearly delimited and distinct processes. Imperial reconstructions thus become a lens through which the boundaries of multiracial democracy, social and economic transformations in the later decades of the century, and international entanglements acquire new meanings. Additionally, the inclusion of a chapter about cartoons and race shows the importance of visual representations in the articulation of political discourses.
Most contributions directly or indirectly incorporate Spain into their account and highlight the tense yet respectful relationship between Madrid and Washington in the decades leading to 1898. The significant attention paid to the Spanish empire in this book is particularly refreshing, since Spain is often neglected in Atlantic or global histories of the nineteenth century. The legacies of the American Civil War in Spain were complex and multidimensional. Cuba only abolished slavery in 1886. Andre Fleche, Gregg French, and Justin Jackson consider how Cuba was not only subject to a double colonial dependence—Spanish political rule and U.S. economic reliance—but it also shaped both countries’ imperial visions. Other essays, such as Cristina Davidson’s analysis of the African Methodist Episcopal Church’s missionary activity in the Caribbean and Reilly Ben Hatch’s study of Mormon responses to the Spanish-Cuban-American War, offer a glimpse into the relationship between religious and imperial sentiment. Adrian Brettle, Lawrence Glickman, and David Holtby uncover myriad paths toward reconciliation, and Brian Shott, Mark Elliott, and DJ Polite investigate matters of race, humanitarian internationalism, and violence. In her afterword, Rebecca Edwards elegantly suggests several future avenues of research the volume provides. Notably, by realizing that “there was no single imperial or anti-imperial vision,” she opens the study of the nineteenth-century American political imagination to endless new questions (322).
While the book makes a compelling case for a paradigm shift in the field, it does have limitations. This book brings together scholars—mostly men—who, except for Brian Shott, an independent historian, all work at North American universities. Although the lack of non-U.S. sources—as is often the case within American historiography—does not diminish the book’s valuable contributions, scholarship seeking to internationalize and de-exceptionalize U.S. history would benefit from more globally comprehensive archival and bibliographical research.
Still, the book is a wonderful scholarly contribution. David Prior and Fordham University Press should be commended. Reconstruction and Empire will be of special interest to historians of the period from the Civil War to the Progressive Era and to historians of imperialism more broadly. Hopefully, these will not remain separate categories for long. Graduate students looking to question overarching narratives of postbellum America will surely be inspired by the book’s insights.
