Generations of historians have maintained that in the last decade
of the nineteenth century white-supremacist racial ideologies such
as Anglo-Saxonism, social Darwinism, benevolent assimilation, and
the concept of the "white man's burden" drove American imperialist
ventures in the nonwhite world. In
Race over Empire, Eric T.
L. Love contests this view and argues that racism had nearly the
opposite effect.
From President Grant's attempt to acquire the Dominican Republic in
1870 to the annexations of Hawaii and the Philippines in 1898, Love
demonstrates that the imperialists' relationship with the racist
ideologies of the era was antagonistic, not harmonious. In a period
marked by Jim Crow, lynching, Chinese exclusion, and immigration
restriction, Love argues, no pragmatic politician wanted to place
nonwhites at the center of an already controversial project by
invoking the concept of the "white man's burden." Furthermore,
convictions that defined "whiteness" raised great obstacles to
imperialist ambitions, particularly when expansionists entered the
tropical zone. In lands thought to be too hot for "white blood,"
white Americans could never be the main beneficiaries of
empire.
What emerges from Love's analysis is a critical reinterpretation of
the complex interactions between politics, race, labor,
immigration, and foreign relations at the dawn of the American
century.