The United States between Empire and Occupation

American experience of occupation was marked by some of the same factors shaping European experience. From an American point of view the trend, and consequences, was forcefully expressed in 1895 by Henry Cabot Lodge:

The United States contributed one of the most influential theorists and advocates of this trend in the shape of Alfred Thayer Mahan, whose influential text The Influence of Sea Power upon History had been published in 1890. More important still, the United States now had the material resources commensurate with these kinds of ambitions. Indeed, in terms of its share of world manufacturing capacity the United States outranked Britain by the turn of the century and stood as the pre-eminent industrial nation in the world. It is true that the United States was still far from having the military capacity these economic resources could support, though the need to develop them was the point of advocacy by men like Mahan.

The events which demonstrated to contemporaries, both American and European, the new status of the United States was the war with Spain of 1898–9, with its striking victory over the Spanish navy in Manila Bay in May 1898. Although this triumph took place in the Philippines, the initial focus of the dispute between Spain and the United States lay in the Caribbean, specifically Cuba. Cuba had long been of strategic concern to the United States, as well as increasing business interest and the object of intermittent annexationist desires. Prior to the war, however, the United States’ position had been to support Spanish colonial authority, if only as an alternative to possible control by more powerful European powers.