American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization

American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (2003)
By Neil Smith

Synopsis: Smith's book is an attempt to demonstrate how historical change and geographical knowledge are linked by focusing on the "American Century" as beginning in 1898 "where the government, corporate institutions, and ruling class sought a twentieth-century globalism best conceived as an American Empire" (xvii). The goal of the book is to challenge the belief that the "American Century" was/is beyond geography, and does this by following the development of U.S. globalism through the twentieth century. This book is massive and dense and divided into five parts: I: From Exploration to Enterprise: Geography on the Cusp of Empire; II: The Rise of Foreign Policy Liberalism: The Great War and the New World; III: The Empire at Homes: Science and Politics; IV: The American Lebensraum; V. The Bitter End. The basic argument is "power always expresses spatiality" (xix), and we are thus not "beyond geography." Henry Luce had exclaimed in 1941 that geography was dead. The book also argues that there have been three formative moments in America's rise to globalism: 1) 1898 and the colonial wars (kind of up to WWI); 2) WWII; 3) 1989-1999 - "Capitalist revolution" or "globalization." U.S. expansion/imperialism too an increasinly market-based form as opposed to territorial/straight-up colonial form. The book spends a lot of time on Isaiah Bowman - a geographer, university president, and presidential advisor who impacted geographical policy in the U.S. Geopolitics emerges as a modern mix of power via political control of territory. It's now all about international connections of power and the market.

Interacts With:

Foreign policy,
Hmm, there seems to be a common sort of "insecurity" among geographers, that they often feel the need to defend themselves and prove that they are still relevant. This makes sense - especially with the recent decline in geography programs - but sometimes it can come off as a little tedious. I mean, ok, yes, geography and place are important - do we really need to keep arguing that place is important? Let's just justify this by talking about it/working on this instead of constantly pointing this out. Just do it!
This book is tricky and I don't have much to say about it.