In this richly detailed and impressively researched account, David M. Pletcher surveys topics that are either have been marginalized (for example, Canada, which merits two chapters) or are poorly covered (the putative influence of private economic interest groups on U.S. trade policy) in the general literature on late-nineteenth-century U.S. economic expansion in the Western Hemisphere. The first part of the book (which covers the years 1865–1885) sets the tone with an introductory chapter on the export trade and tariff. Successive chapters focus on Canada, Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and South America. Pletcher organizes the second part of the book around various projects for hemispheric expansion from the mid-1880s until the revived Cuban war for independence in 1895. In the final part of the book (which will certainly be the most controversial), Pletcher explores the U.S. reaction to the Cuban revolution and the creation of the protectorate system and concludes with some general comments about the 1898–1914 period, years in which the economic expansionist goals of late-nineteenth-century business sectors finally appeared to be acheiving success in inspiring the U.S. government, especially the executive branch, to take a more aggressive approach to trade policy.

The author’s aim is to strike a balance between two generations of historians with very different approaches to this presumably formative era in the nation’s foreign relations. One group (most of whom wrote before the 1960s) treated the diplomatic history of these years as little more than a series of discrete episodes, often dismissing those who represented the country abroad as little more than political hacks. The second (often lumped together under the rubric of the “New Left”) came of age in the 1960s and 1970s. Their leader (according to Pletcher) was William Appleman Williams, who, in a succession of books (The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, The Roots of the Modern American Empire: A Study of the Growth and Shaping of Social Consciousness in a Marketplace Society, and Empire as a Way of Life) identified these years as a critical period in the shaping of the twentieth-century U.S. imperial mission.

What the traditionalists viewed as an era when the country’s foreign relations had no coherence became in the treatments of their successors a design of calculating and ambitious persons for the crafting of U.S. empire. Pletcher faults the first for their inattentiveness to economic matters but applauds their concern with politics; he admires the second for trying to make some sense out of the montage of episodes that litter the foreign relations landscape in the thirty-five years after the Civil War. Despite this acknowledgment, Pletcher makes clear his sentiments about the direction of late-nineteenth-century U.S. diplomatic historiography:

[I]n evaluating the expansionist writings of this period, Williams and his followers tend to take the intent for the deed, overlooking the considerable gap between aims and achievements. Secondly, they too often imply predominantly economic motives for polices that represented a compromise among many contending impulses – humanitarian, ideological, strategic, and others. Finally, and most serious, they are inclined to assume that economic expansion was a deliberate, consistent policy throughout the period.... The evidence does not support the claim of a single overarching policy, a “way of life” to cover all expansionist thoughts and actions from 1865 to 1898 (pp. 2–3).

In reading these words, should I be “inclined to assume” the existence of some monolithic “school of diplomatic historians” (sometimes referred to as the “Wisconsin School”) who as graduate students came under the influence of William Appleman Williams and who have spent their careers propagating his controversial and (to Pletcher) largely incorrect assessment about this era in U.S. foreign relations? Certainly, we can do more than assume that Williams (and his colleague, Fred Harvey Harrington) did influence a cohort of diplomatic historians who studied at Wisconsin in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Many of them went on to write revisionist accounts of Gilded Age diplomacy (perhaps the best known is Walter LaFeber’s The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansionism, 1860–1898, published in 1963 and reissued with a new preface in a thirty-fifth anniversary edition in 1998) or, presumably inspired by Williams’s emphasis on economic factors in U.S. foreign relations or his preoccupation with motive, the history of the U.S. role in the twentieth-century world. Nor, finally, can there be any doubt about the influence of Tragedy, however difficult it may be to measure that influence. A book one early reviewer (in this instance, a political scientist) matter-of-factly dismissed became either a source book of universal truths about the character of this nation’s role in the world for a generation of revisionist historians or a sloppily constructed, ahistorical compendium of distortions that traditionalists and some postrevisionists have felt compelled to refute.

But what does all this add up to? If I were to lay out the accumulated corpus of scholarship of Walter LaFeber, Lloyd Gardner, and Robert Freeman Smith before me with the intention of identifying common intellectual linkages to Williams, I would doubtless succeed. But I would also find important differences, particularly in the intellectual development and interests of these three scholars. What Williams and other diplomatic historians have tried to achieve in their interpretations of U.S. foreign economic relations during these years is to give these myriad policies and episodes some meaning in the context of a dramatically and rapidly changing domestic and international climate. Within this purview, economic expansion and particularly foreign trade are critical factors, as some contemporaries recognized and as Pletcher himself acknowledges.

Certainly, if the historian focuses more on causation or emphasizes economic factors more than other, arguably equally relevant forces, then something will be lost. There may be an inclination to become deterministic – that is, the pursuit of the China market as explanation for U.S. actions in the western Pacific at the end of the nineteenth century, or, to use a contemporary example, exaggerated claims about the benefits of foreign trade and national economic well-being at the end of the twentieth century. Most likely, there will be distortions, as contradictory and ambiguous evidence is either dismissed or marginalized.

Explanation in history (and certainly any effort at synthesis) requires a rethinking about a particular era with special concern for the difficulties and dilemmas confronted by those who lived it, by choices they made, and by the legacy of those choices for later generations. This sometimes leads to a preoccupation with a central theme or motive – that is, in Roots of the Modern American Empire, identifying the origins of U.S. expansion in the twentieth century in the ideas and actions of agriculturalists in the tumultuous decades of the late nineteenth century. But such an approach can also prompt a fresh appraisal of and discussion about a critical era or decision in history.

This would be a much more persuasive book had Pletcher simply inverted the title and subtitle, for what is offered here is neither a new synthesis nor a persuasive reassessment of late-nineteenth-century U.S. economic expansion in the Western Hemisphere. The Diplomacy of Trade and Investment is a marvelously detailed account of the activities of economic expansionists (among them, wheat, flour, and cotton exporters; petroleum and iron and steel companies; manufacturers of consumer goods; and investors) and their often frustrating efforts in trying to energize U.S. trade policy. As someone who has emphasized the importance of the particular when trying to understand an era, I cannot fault Pletcher for his preoccupation with detail and his reminders about the ambiguities and often contradictory nature of the evidence. I share his suspicions about overarching generalizations and join him in rejecting any singular theory or motive about explaining causation.

Yet this would have been a more creditable book had Pletcher been less concerned with disavowing a particular school of historians – he is, in fact, joining the debate after much of the furor has subsided – than in meeting the standard he achieved in his superb 1973 study, The Diplomacy of Annexation: Texas, Oregon, and the Mexican War. In that work (as well as his in less formidable account of U.S. foreign relations in the early 1880s), Pletcher demonstrates an appreciation for (if not agreement with) the dilemmas confronted by leaders as they sorted out the differing obstacles they confronted and is particularly attuned to the complexity and ambiguity of the issues at hand.

In detailing the U.S. economic relationship with the Western Hemisphere, Pletcher would have profited by looking more closely at recent scholarship. Thomas F. O’Brien’s provocative assessment of U.S. business in Latin America from 1900 to 1945 (which includes a stimulating overview of the nineteenth-century change from a “merchant republic” to a “corporate culture”) may have appeared in print too late for close inspection. But even a casual reading of some of the bilateral studies in the “United States and the Americas” series – particularly the volumes on Canada, Central America, Panama, Mexico, and Cuba – would have informed Pletcher’s account or at least inspired him to be less tentative. Pletcher sums up the Canadian-U.S. economic relationship in the late nineteenth century with a matter-of-fact comment that the failure to annex Canada did not mean a failure of U.S. economic influence. Compare this lame assessment with John Herd Thompson and Stephen J. Randall’s nuanced account of the same period. A perusal of Thomas M. Leonard’s chapter on U.S.-Central American relations in this era would have reminded Pletcher about the role of U.S. entrepreneurs in Honduras (among them, the “King of Honduras,” Washington Valentine, who does not even appear in Pletcher’s narrative); and a similar reading of Michael Conniff’s account of the U.S. intervention in the 1885 Liberal revolt on the isthmus and its aftermath might have prompted Pletcher to pay more attention to its significance. Dirk Raat’s survey of the North Americanization of Porfirian Mexico is not so detailed as Pletcher’s but is nevertheless more persuasive in its explanation of the long-term consequences of that country’s late-nineteenth-century economic relationship with the United States. Had Pletcher perused Louis Pérez’s excellent summation of U.S.-Cuban relations, he might have been a bit jarred by Pérez’s assertion that the purpose of U.S. intervention in Cuba was to prevent not guarantee Cuban independence. Pérez focuses on the character of the U.S.Cuban relationship, evaluated historically, thus providing us with a far more useful (however controversial and debatable) explanation about the role of economic forces in the decision for war.

My purpose here is not to “nitpick” or to refute but to make the matter-of-fact observation (as Karl Popper did in his statement about falsification) that no theory or methodology is very useful unless it is possible to array a set of conditions or circumstances in which the theory can be disproved. Pletcher (and probably most modern U.S. historians) retain doubts about Williams’s preoccupation with economic expansion in Roots as a primordial force in late-nineteenth-century U.S. history. If economic expansion is narrowly defined in terms of foreign trade and investment then such doubts about the merits of Roots are eminently justified. But Williams did not define his terms in this way nor did he contrive such a narrow conceptual framework for his interpretation of this era:

The agricultural majority of the country developed, through the interaction of existing ideas and continuing experience, a marketplace image or conception of the world and how it worked – and of how it could be manipulated to attain their objections. That marketplace outlook defined primary values, such as freedom and equality of opportunity, as being necessary and worthy per se, and as being necessary to the proper functioning of the marketplace. The integration of the concern with freedom and the concern with economic profit and welfare led to a central conviction that it was necessary to expand the marketplace, and to expand it as a free marketplace, if freedom, profit, and welfare were to be realized. That proposition, transformed from an analysis into a belief through the processes of internalization and reinforcement, provided the dynamic causal force for a steady movement by the majority toward an imperial foreign policy.... The result of those interacting processes was a war against Spain and the formulation of a grand strategy for such imperial expansion of the free American marketplace.

Every sentence in that paragraph is refutable, but I find it a bit more intellectually challenging than the concluding sentence of Pletcher’s alternative interpretation of the era. Of course (as Williams himself recognized), the expansionists failed, but the reasons for their failure lay not in the frustrations of urging the government to undertake a more aggressive trade policy but in a fundamental incompatibility between means and ends in U.S. foreign relations and, more fundamental, about the inherent risks that this country takes in winning if victory “requires us to become more like what we find so unacceptable. For those kinds of victories can very easily change us into small businessmen promoting a marginal product.”

Williams’s intention in Roots was to provide meaning for a generation profoundly disturbed by the war in Vietnam. He wrote as a historian but his audience was not only his colleagues in the academy but also the citizens of a nation whose values he cherished. He did not lay claim to any singularly valid view of the late-nineteenth-century “marketplace consensus” as explanation for the country’s twentieth-century imperial course, nor did he state that accepting the meaning that he offered would tell his readers what to do about the national crisis attributed to the Vietnam War. And he reminded his fellow radicals that they did not have all the answers about the proper course of action. But at least there is no ambiguity about his motive. That his interpretation of U.S expansionism in the late nineteenth century is distorted, exaggerated, and contrived is undeniable. Quite likely, Williams knew this when he sat down to write Roots. And he must have anticipated that the book would be controversial. That’s the price the historian who takes risks often pays. But he certainly knew that no one could ever characterize his interpretation of that age as a “marginal product.”