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

I've not read this book, but based on the C-SPAN interviews and questions, it appears to be light on the economic impetus for war. For example, the big difference between the lust for land by George Washington and Andrew Jackson is they had different ideas about how to achieve their quests. Ideology and idealism wrapped around economic interests to hide them are still base economic self interests. ---BBB

The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500-2000 by Fred Anderson, Andrew Cayton

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

It can't be any mystery that "war and imperialism have powerfully influenced American development," as this book's authors say. But how powerfully did war and imperial ambition affect the U.S. when set against other factors? One wishes historians Anderson (author of the prize-winning Crucible of War) and Cayton (Frontier Indiana) had told us in this otherwise enterprising, readable work. Covering 500 years, they relate the nation's past through a narrative of colonists' and, later, citizens' determination to expand and secure by force their possessions. It's solid corrective history.

Particularly appealing is the authors' organizing principle: they tell their tale through the lives and careers of such great military figures as George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses Grant, Douglas MacArthur and Colin Powell. The trouble is that by doing so, they often sacrifice analysis. They succeed in convincing us that wars and imperial expansion are fundamental impulses of the nation's history?-arguably its central engine. But they overlook how those impulses may have grown out of the nation's immigrant origins, its democratic politics or its capitalist economy. That's too bad, because, in their telling, the U.S. looks a lot like other powerful nations, which may not be correct if these other, causative factors are taken into account. B&w photos, maps.
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From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com

The very best histories not only elucidate the past but illuminate the present. Far and away the most important contribution to U.S. military history to appear since this nation emerged as the world's sole superpower, The Dominion of War meets and easily surpasses that demanding standard.

Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton are academics, professors of history at the University of Colorado at Boulder and Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, respectively. But their achievement here transcends mere scholarship. In slightly more than 400 pages of crisp, engaging prose, they perform a vital public service. Far more convincingly than the politicians, pundits and pollsters clogging the airways and expounding on the events of the day, Anderson and Cayton show how the United States worked itself into the predicament in which it now finds itself.

To put it bluntly, here -- rather than in the abstruse writings of Leo Strauss, the maneuverings of Karl Rove or the machinations of Halliburton executives past and present -- is to be found the best explanation to date for how the Bush administration and its supporters persuaded themselves in the spring of 2003 that a preventive war to topple and democratize an oil-rich but decrepit dictatorship on the far side of the world was legitimate, necessary, eminently doable and a lofty expression of American idealism.

At the center of that explanation lies an appreciation of the symbiotic relationship between liberty, expansion, empire and war, a relationship that Anderson and Cayton describe as central to the American story from the outset. Their own recounting of that story reinterprets the roles of eight individuals, starting with Samuel de Champlain at the beginning of the 17th century and culminating with Colin Powell at the end of the 20th, but focusing in particular on the heroic figures of George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant and Douglas MacArthur. Deftly sketching the life of each protagonist (and reflecting on the ironies inherent in that life), the authors stitch together an alternative narrative of American history from the beginning of European colonization almost to the present day.

The result is revealing. Rejecting what they refer to as a "passive-voice" approach to U.S. history that depicts war as something thrust upon a peace-loving people, Anderson and Cayton show that Americans have, of their own volition, repeatedly opted for the sword, viewing it as a righteous response to those who threaten liberty itself by refusing to accommodate U.S. requirements for deference, access or outright control.

The refusal of others to accommodate American demands, often articulated in terms of enlarging the sphere of freedom, thus constitutes a casus belli. The ensuing wars were justified as defensive in nature but were waged offensively and produced (with a few notable exceptions) the expansion of American power, initially across the continent, then throughout the hemisphere and ultimately around the world.

Although they portray their countrymen as instinctively belligerent, Anderson and Cayton take great pains to note that Americans' professions of their devotion to liberty are neither cynical nor hypocritical. But if heartfelt, they also turn out to be conveniently elastic. In practice, freedom means whatever Americans say it means, with the reigning definition tending to coincide neatly with the nation's momentary political and commercial priorities.

In 1775, freedom called for citizen-soldiers to expel the redcoats occupying Boston and crippling New England's economy. In 1846, it required the liberation (and absorption) of large chunks of Mexico. In 1898, the cause of Cuban freedom saw the U.S. Army liberating (and annexing) the Philippines, Puerto Rico and other assorted properties. Beginning in 1941, GIs set out to liberate (and destroy) America's chief competitors for global primacy, an aim finally accomplished a full half-century later. Thus, according to Anderson and Cayton, have American freedom and American hegemony become inextricably bound. "The quest for liberty and the pursuit of power together," the authors write, "have created an American historical dialectic catalyzed and made dynamic by war."

Viewed from this perspective, President Bush's 2003 decision to invade Iraq as a first step toward transforming the Middle East qualifies not as a radical break from the past but as a new riff on a familiar melody. Nor, the authors emphasize, should it come as a surprise that this most recent American martial endeavor has delivered results other than those predicted.

This too has been a recurring theme. Rather than bringing "peace," American wars fought to advance the cause of freedom and dominion have generated a backwash of dissatisfaction and instability, inevitably leading to new wars fought at the urging of politicians promising that, this time, freedom will prevail and lasting peace be assured.

For example, the French and Indian War, which mid-18th-century Americans supported to ensure that the rights of Englishmen would prevail in North America, lit the fuse that soon culminated in revolutionary violence to overturn British rule, which was viewed by 1776 as arbitrary and illegitimate. Similarly, when 19th-century Americans seized upon their "manifest destiny" to pry the Southwest from the grasp of backward and undeserving Mexico, they unwittingly set in train the events leading to the final, bloody collision over slavery.

So it goes: To expect that wars fought on behalf of both liberty and dominion will produce peace, Anderson and Cayton suggest, is an illusion. Peace is a chimera. Empire, in contrast, is real but certain to be contested. There is no end in sight to the sacrifices that sustaining our global dominion will entail.

The Dominion of War deserves a place on that narrow bookshelf reserved for works that unmask the contradictions afflicting the American experiment. It is a magnificent accomplishment.

Reviewed by Andrew J. Bacevich
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist

Two historians present an incisive, provocative account of the U.S. rise to global preeminence over five centuries. Central to their thesis is the assertion that military conflict has been essential in determining the cultural and political evolution of North America. It was imperial ambition rather than a love of liberty that led to British victory in the French and Indian War, ensuring Anglo-American supremacy in the eastern half of North America; parodoxically, that British victory led directly to the American Revolution. Similarly, our imperial ambition, which provoked the Mexican-American War, intensified our sectional rivalries, and the Civil War followed. Although the authors' views deserve to be challenged by those holding alternative visions, Anderson and Cayton have provided a well-written and important reinterpretation of our past. Jay Freeman
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