More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
This was the first time the United States was governing Muslims,
Captain John Pershing,
Wood hoped for “one clean-cut lesson.” Instead, he got what he feared: a dozen frittering ones.
Bud Dajo.
Massacres like this weren’t unknown in the United States. Wounded Knee, Sand Creek, Bloody Island—the Indian wars had painted the West red. Yet Bud Dajo dwarfed them all.
T. V. Soong,
Sun Yat-sen,
Chiang Kai-shek,
pacifists and foreigners in an era of increasingly belligerent nationalism.
Congress had passed their law strictly limiting what the United States could do with Cuba. It prohibited the exercise of “sovereignty, jurisdiction or control” over the island, “except for pacification.”
stable government? One in which “money can be borrowed at a reasonable rate of interest” and “capital is willing to invest”
‘Money at six percent.’”
Wood got the Cuban legislature to agree to both demands—not only agree to them but write them into law.
clause granting the United States the right to invade Cuba
Guantánamo Bay,
Cuba encountered its own diffident subjects. Afro-Cubans,
dispatched marines to Guantánamo Bay and assembled a large naval force in the area. But
Roosevelt’s government encouraged Panamanian nationalists to secede from Colombia, and then he negotiated for a small zone in which to build the canal. The U.S. lease was perpetual, and
U.S. interests would be protected, and the Dominican Republic would remain independent.
U.S. troops entered Cuba (four times), Nicaragua (three times), Honduras (seven times), the Dominican Republic (four times), Guatemala, Panama (six times), Costa Rica, Mexico (three
times), and Haiti (twice) between 1903 and 1934.
annexed in that period was the U.S. Virgin Islands, peacefully purchased from Denmark in 1917.
imperialism as “an inexcusable blunder, which has involved us in enormous expense, brought us weakness instead of strength, and laid our nation open to the charge of abandonment of the fundamental doctrine of self-government.”
For the inhabitants of the world’s colonies, there were two Wilsons: Wilson the liberator, Wilson the racist. And
As the First World War approached, Wilson was eager to stress his anti-imperialist side,
Paris Peace Conference in 1919, where the Treaty of Versailles
But the larger question was the fate of empire in general.
Indian National Congress voted to send Gandhi
Egyptian nationalists sought to send Sa‘d Zaghlul,
Nguyen Tat Thanh, from French Indochina
“Nguyen the Patriot” (Nguyen Ai Quoc) and
Albizu’s journey, but his experience traveling through the Jim Crow South as a “black” man appears to have been searing; for
Like Gandhi and Zaghlul, Albizu never got to meet Wilson.
The defeated powers’ colonies, instead of being liberated, were redistributed among the victors.
The year 1919 was, for the colonies, when the switch was thrown, when nationalist movements abandoned polite petitioning.
“a bunch of robbers bent on securing territories and indemnities.”
Mao Zedong.
Ho Chi Minh.
Sayyid...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
a leading Islamist thinker who would become the key inspiration ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Pedro Albizu Campos would become the most dangerous domestic anti-imperialist the Unit...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
That the world’s richest country should at the same time be so squalid was hard to countenance.
In one corner stood reformers, intent on imposing order. In the other, a discordant multitude of crosscutting interests and publics.
the overseas territories
functioned as laboratories, spaces for
bold experimentation where ideas could be tried with practically no resistance, oversight, or
Rhoads, by contrast, appeared to regard Puerto Rico as an island-size laboratory. He saw the empire much as Daniel Burnham had: a place to try out ideas while facing few consequences.
Few outsiders had mastered Caribbean affairs as thoroughly as Ernest Gruening had. Yet, typical for his generation of anti-imperialists, Gruening knew little of the United States’ actual colonies.
Gruening hesitantly probed, “a democracy shouldn’t have any colonies.”
Manuel Quezon embodied the contradictions of colonialism.
