Historians for Hire: Selling the Story of McCormick’s Reaper

Abstract

directional impact of settler colonialism on such conversations. The United States, after all, operated not just in a world of European power but also in a world of indigenous peoples competing for continental control. The presence of powerful indigenous polities in North America shaped U.S. deliberations about empire, security, race, and civilization. Settler colonialism and its genocidal outreach not only informed many of the struggles over political identity described in the book but also underwrote much of the trans-imperial conversations between the United States and European empires. Finally, the global reach of U.S. imperial imaginaries and practices before the 1890s was less timid and more assertive than many of the conversations in Priest’s analysis would lead one to conclude. His assertion that “During the 1880s the United States still did not have an overseas empire of its own [...].” (122) distracts from his argument about the longevity and centrality of empire to American perceptions of the international system before the turn of the century. This spatial-temporal global arc of engagement reached from the colonization in Liberia in the 1820s, to the creation of extraterritorial enclaves in Asia and Latin America, the acquisition of islands and archipelagoes in the Caribbean Basin and the Pacific Ocean, to the establishment of naval stations, resource extraction, and export zones by the middle of the century. The United States not only translated European imperial insights, it actively built its own global presence throughout the century.