USA: Imperialists and Anti-Imperialists

A book about the Great Debate - the argument that broke out in the United States after 1898 over whether a republic founded against empire could itself become one.

Ilya Dementyev was a historian of American historiography at Moscow State University, a specialist not in slogans but in how American scholars had written the history of their own expansion, and it shows. He worked from the Foreign Policy Archives of the Russian ministry - the dispatches Tsarist envoys sent home from Washington in the 1890s - and from manuscript collections in the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library and the Wisconsin State Historical Society: the Gompers papers, the papers of the anti-imperialist Moorfield Storey, the records of the Social Democratic Party. He read a long run of the American labour and socialist press of 1897 to 1903 in the original. And he argued with the American historians by name and by page - Walter LaFeber, William Appleman Williams, David Healy, Julius Pratt, E. Berkeley Tompkins.

The opening chapters document the turn of American capitalism toward expansion at the close of the nineteenth century with the receipts: the manufacturers' associations that wanted foreign markets and said so, the trade press, the Congressional record.

What gives the book its real subject is the other half of the title. The anti-imperialists - the league, the labour opposition, the socialists, the veterans of abolition - are treated as a serious movement with its own arguments, which is rarer than it should be.

The text is of the early 1970s, carried into English at the end of the decade.

Translated by David Skvirsky. New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.