The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500-2000

Rating:
Summary: An interesting thesis
Review: Anderson and Cayton make the controversial thesis that Americans use the themes of liberty and freedom for their own expansionist aims. The first two chapters of the book, the authors describe how the European powers cooperated with the Native Americans in order to acheive their aims. But after the Seven Years War, the colonists viewed British cooperation with natives as impeding their drive westward. During the Revolutionary War, Americans ethnically cleansed thousands of Native Americans in order to defend their individual rights to expand westward. George Washington tried tired to slowly assimilate Native Americans to embrace ideas of freedom and democracy, but his plans fell apart due to the violent actions by Scotch-Irish settlers and later by Andrew Jackson's policies in the western borderlands. Grant tried to implement Washington's program after the Civil War, but did nothing to prevent the expulsion of the Native Americans from their lands. The same policies that Washington and Grant used on the Native Americans expanded to the Phillippines and Cuba in which the interests of these citizens were subordinated to the wishes of the United States. MacArthur followed similiar actions in his dealings with the Japanese after the Second World War in which he repressed some Japanese publications because they were against the interests of the United States. The main weakness of this book is that the first two chapters of the book does not flow with the remaining chapters and that the authors don't compare the American empire with its European counterparts in the nineteenth century. Otherwise this book strongly disputes writings by the likes of William Kristol on the right, and Samantha Powers on the left, that advocate the use of American military force in order to spread individual freedom.