The Imperial Drawbridge: Alaska and the U.S. Pacific Empire

Abstract

Historians of the nineteenth-century West generally agree that the United States created a continental empire in the U.S. West. Historians of U.S. foreign relations have long characterized the U.S. presence in the Pacific beginning in the late nineteenth century as imperial. Many historians have acknowledged a link between the two expressions of imperial power, but few have actually attempted to demonstrate the connection. This dissertation argues that Alaska served to bridge the historiographical and geographic chasms between the United States’ nineteenth-century continental and twentieth-century overseas empires. Thus, the acquisition of Alaska, the exploitation of its natural resources, and the reordering of the region’s human geography created an important gateway for the United States into the Pacific as well as demonstrated the adaptability of U.S. empire in a globalizing world. This dissertation demonstrates that U.S. leaders had a flexible vision of U.S. overseas empire well before the Spanish-American War, complicating much of the current historiography of U.S. empire. Alaska’s non-contiguous geography, isolation, and harsh climate gave Americans a space in which to experiment with overseas empire and reimagine the future of their country, in the changing global contexts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as one no longer based upon continental settlement, but rather global economic imperialism. This project takes an important step in helping to round out our understanding of U.S. empire. In Alaska, we have a space to investigate, complicate, and better understand all manner of questions related to American imperialism, including race, gender, capitalism, mobility, the environment, and foreign relations, to name only a few. Better understanding these thematic particulars in Alaska serves to not only broaden our local or regional knowledge, but forces us to expand our field of vision when pondering such questions on a global scale.