10.6092/issn.2611-2752/11642
The essay offers a critical overview of recent historiographies on the nineteenth-century United States that allows on the one hand to grasp the imperial and colonial character of U.S. nineteenth-century territorial expansion, on the other hand, it accounts for nineteenth-century U.S. industrial growth and market building both as a quest for independence on the world market and as an expansive imperial process. In this respect, an understanding of colonization and industry as the two driving forces of nineteenth-century U.S. history can prove crucial for a comprehensive interpretation of Friedrich List's and Henry Charles Carey's national project for capitalist development.
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State, Market and Colonization: Notes on Empire in Nineteenth-Century U.S. History
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State, Market and Colonization: Notes on Empire in Nineteenth-Century U.S. History
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https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/11642                                                            ISSN 2611-2752




             State, Market and Colonization: Notes on Empire in
                                Nineteenth-Century U.S. History

                                                  Matteo Rossi

                                            Published: November 10, 2020



                                                      Abstract

       Arguing for the need to adopt “empire” as a crucial concept to understand U.S. history, the essay
       offers a critical overview of recent historiographies on the nineteenth-century United States that
       allows on the one hand to grasp the imperial and colonial character of U.S. nineteenth-century
       territorial expansion, on the other hand, it accounts for nineteenth-century U.S. industrial growth
       and market building both as a quest for independence on the world market and as an expansive
       imperial process. In this respect, an understanding of colonization and industry as the two driving
       forces of nineteenth-century U.S. history can prove crucial for a comprehensive interpretation of
       Friedrich List’s and Henry Charles Carey’s national project for capitalist development.
       Keywords: American Empire; Colonization; State; Capitalism; National Economy.




Matteo Rossi: University of Torino (Italy)
 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4553-5095
 matteo.congiurossi@gmail.com
Matteo M. Rossi is a PhD student in Global History of Empires at the University of Torino, where he is working
on a research project on Henry Charles Carey’s political economy. In 2019 he obtained his MA in International
Relations at the University of Bologna. In 2018 he was Visiting Scholar at the Department of Political Science at
Columbia University in New York and in 2021 he will be Short-term Fellow at the Library Company of Philadel-
phia. His broad research interests include the history of nineteenth-century U.S. economic and political thought,
the history of the American State and empire, the history of capitalism.



Copyright © 2020 Matteo Rossi                                                                                         45
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons BY License.
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State, Market and Colonization                                                                          USAbroad. Vol. 3 No. 1S (2020)




1 Empire in Early U.S. History
Adopting “the imperial as a way of seeing”1 U.S. history, Paul Kramer argued, allows to go beyond the
rather sterile debate on whether and when the United States actually was or had an empire, and to
accept as a fact the existence of a consistent pattern of U.S. imperial thought and politics. Against ex-
ceptionalist historiographies denying the applicability of the concept of empire to the United States,
as for the concepts of State and class, interpretations of U.S. history as an imperial and colonial his-
tory have often represented an insightful critique of American power, of its functioning and of its
self-representations. However, such interpretations, currently piled up into a massive body of litera-
ture, often underestimated the relevance of empire in U.S. history between the American Revolution
and the Civil War. On the contrary, if an “American way of life” ever existed, as William Appleman
Williams noted, empire was a foundational part of it, since “Americans thought of themselves as an
empire at the outset of their national existence … having matured in an age of empires as part of an
empire.”2 Recently, in his interpretative synthesis, Tiziano Bonazzi reconstructed the imperial con-
text from which the American Revolution emerged, tracing its origins back to the British need, after
the Seven Years War, to look at empire “through the eyes of the State” in order to more strictly govern the
colonies. In this perspective, the foundation of the United States should be understood as a reaction
to this critical imperial reorganization, as the birth of a State, stretching the international system of
European States beyond the Atlantic.3 Still, understanding empire as a context in the “age of imperial
revolutions”4 is not enough to fully account for the imperial dimension of early U.S. history.
     Following Jane Burbank’s and Frederik Cooper’s definition of empires as power structures that
create, exploit and govern differences, or precisely as “expansionist polities” where “different peoples
… will be governed differently,”5 empire stood as a foundational political project of the new repub-
lic. Against British colonial rule and against traditional republican thought, the revolutionary élites
invoked a different kind of imperial politics and the building of a State that could be “republic and em-
pire at the same time,”6 triggering a struggle over the concept of empire, which would have continued
over the course of U.S. history, as Piero Bairati reconstructed.7 Benjamin Franklin’s expansive vision
of the British empire, Thomas Jefferson’s “empire of liberty,” Alexander Hamilton’s depiction of the
federal government as aimed to preserve “the Union of so large an empire”8 and James Madison’s
reflections on the advantages of “an extensive territory”9 for republican government, are but a few
examples of how an imperial lexicon permeated U.S. political thought since its beginning.10 In some
ways, to American revolutionaries, “empire” was the name of political power itself: the specific, histor-
ical name denoting the kind of territorially expansive State they projected to build. Summarizing the


1.   Paul A. Kramer, “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World,” The American Historical
     Review, 5 (2011): 1350.

2.   William Appleman Williams, “The Age of Mercantilism: An Interpretation of the American Political Economy, 1763 to
     1828,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 4 (1958): 420. See also: William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplo-
     macy. Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1959; William Appleman Williams, Empire as a Way of Life. Oxford-New York:
     Oxford University Press, 1980.

3.   Tiziano Bonazzi, La rivoluzione americana. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2018.

4.   Jeremy Adelman, “An Age of Imperial Revolutions,” The American Historical Review, 2 (2008): 319-40.

5.   Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History. Power and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton
     University Press, 2010, 8-10.

6.   John G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton:
     Princeton University Press, 1975, 531.

7.   Piero Bairati, ed., I profeti dell’impero americano. Dal periodo coloniale ai nostri giorni. Torino: Einaudi, 1975.

8.   Alexander Hamilton, Federalist XXIII, in The Federalist Papers, London: Penguin, 1987, 188.

9.   James Madison, Federalist LXIII, in The Federalist Papers, 373.

10. Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson. New York: Oxford Uni-
    versity Press, 1990; Karl-Friedrich Walling, Republican Empire: Alexander Hamilton on War and Free Government. Lawrence:
    University Press of Kansas, 1999; Peter S. Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire. The Language of American Nationhood. Charlottesville: Uni-
    versity of Virginia Press, 2000; Richard H. Immerman, Empire for Liberty. A History of American Imperialism from Benjamin
    Franklin to Paul Wolfowitz. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.



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different imperial levels of early U.S. history, John Pocock explained how American Independence
emerged at the same time as the aftermath of a crisis in British multiple monarchy and as an expan-
sionist claim over North America, soon institutionally organized through federalism in the new State.11
In both senses, “empire” should be an inescapable conceptual framework for studying the founding
of the United States.12
    Moreover, the expansionist dynamic through which the new republic tried to fulfill its aspiration
forces historians to extend an imperial interpretation of U.S. history to the whole nineteenth century.
The annexation of Western territories, the removal of Native Americans, the invasion of Mexico, the
definition of the Monroe doctrine, all represented crucial moments of an imperial and colonial de-
velopment.13 In this respect, without denying the importance of 1898 as the turning point from a
continental-territorial to a global-commercial vision of empire, the traditional notion that U.S. impe-
rialism started only in the late nineteenth century should be reconsidered.14 Recent historiographies,
which I will now discuss, further substantiated the need for an imperial history of the nineteenth-
century United States. On the one hand, Daniel Immerwahr, Paul Frymer and Adam Dahl accounted
for the inner imperial and colonial logic of westward expansion and of the political thought legitimiz-
ing it. On the other hand, A.G. Hopkins and Marc-William Palen reconstructed the imperial meaning
of industrial development and of industrial thought, both for national independence and for global
commercial expansion. Both perspectives will prove crucial for a deeper understanding of Henry
Charles Carey’s and Friedrich List’s national economy and of their insight into nineteenth-century
U.S. capitalism.



2 Expansion and Colonization
As Daniel Immerwahr points out in his How to Hide an Empire (2019), the United States was never just
a union of States, but, since its independence, it was “a collection of states and territories … a parti-
tioned country, divided into two sections, with different laws applying in each.”15 The invention of
“territory” itself as a distinct political category is proof of a fundamentally imperial, differentiated
and hierarchical way of conceiving government. By telling the story of the “Greater United States”
and of its forgotten subjects, Immerwahr not only traces the existence of a “persistently ignored”16


11.   John G.A. Pocock, “Empire, State and Confederation: The War of American Independence as a Crisis in Multiple Monarchy,”
      in A Union for Empire. Political Thought and the British Union of 1707, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995; John G.A.
      Pocock, La ricostruzione di un impero: sovranità britannica e federalismo americano. Manduria: Lacaita, 1996.

12. On the imperial meaning of the American Revolution, see also: Peter S. Onuf, Statehood and Union: a History of the Northwest
    Ordinance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987; Marc Egnal, A Mighty Empire: the Origins of the American Revolution.
    Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988; James G. Wilson, The Imperial Republic: A Structural History of American Constitu-
    tionalism from the Colonial Era to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century. Aldershot-Burlington: Ashgate, 2002; Gary Lawson e
    Guy Seidman, The Constitution of Empire: Territorial Expansion and American Legal History. New Haven: Yale University Press,
    2004; Eliga H. Gould and Peter S. Onuf, Empire and Nation. The American Revolution in the Atlantic World. Baltimore: The
    Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005; Charles S. Maier, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors. Cambridge,
    Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006; Julian Go, Patterns of Empire: The British and American Empires, 1688 to the Present.
    Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011; Eliga H. Gould, Among the Powers of the Earth. The American Revolution and
    the Making of a New World Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.

13. On empire and imperial processes in nineteenth-century U.S. history: Ernest N. Paolino, The Foundations of the American
    Empire: William Henry Seward and U.S. Foreign Policy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973; William Earl Weeks, John
    Quincy Adams and American Global Empire. Lexington, Ky: University Press of Kentucky, 1992; Anders Stephanson, Manifest
    Destiny. American Expansionism and the Empire of Right. New York: Hill and Wang, 1996; Thomas R. Hietala, Manifest Design:
    American Exceptionalism and Empire. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003; Jay Sexton, The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and
    Nation in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Hill and Wang, 2011; Marco Mariano, L’America nell’“Occidente.” Storia della
    dottrina Monroe (1823–1963). Roma: Carocci, 2013.

14. Even excellent contributions still tend to ignore or minimize the U.S. nineteenth-century imperial expansion, for example:
    Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco A. Scarano, eds., The Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State.
    Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2-009.

15. Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire. A Short History of the Greater United States. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
    2019, 10.

16. Ibid. 35.



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State, Market and Colonization                                                                USAbroad. Vol. 3 No. 1S (2020)




U.S. empire back to the Revolution, but he also argues for the need to understand it in specifically
colonial terms. In this respect, Immerwahr depicts the all-Indian territories created after 1834 as the
nation’s “first colony”17 and argues that African Americans were treated like “colonized subjects,” since
“empire isn’t just landgrabs.”18 Thus, the nineteenth-century westward expansion stood as the first act
in the longer story of the Greater United States, the story of “a violently expansive empire of settlers,
feeding on land and displacing everything in its path.”19 In depicting this process, Immerwahr high-
lights the tensions between the movements of frontiersmen, such as Daniel Boone, and Washington’s
and Jefferson’s determination to turn expansion into a “controlled process,”20 which account for the
federal government’s role in politically directing the pace of colonization. Moreover, Immerwahr
reconstructs how the United States annexed fifty-nine small islands in the Pacific and the Caribbean
before 1863 to import guano as a manure for western lands,21 a forgotten episode which reveals an in-
teresting connection between imperial expansion and economic development. Immerwahr’s book is
largely dedicated to the U.S. empire after 1898, as such reproducing some of the problems of previous
historiographies. However, it stands as a relevant demystification of American imperialism and of its
colonial functioning.
    A deeper account of the concrete functioning of empire and colonization in the nineteenth cen-
tury, is offered by Paul Frymer in his Building an American Empire (2017), which, in the wake of the
American Political Development School, reconstructs the efforts of the federal government to con-
trol territorial expansion through land policies. To Frymer, the U.S. foundational imperial aspiration
was quickly translated into “a project of population control and settlement with the use of land policy
very much at the center,”22 thus in a project of colonization with the American State at its core. This,
however, in the first decades largely meant opposing unrestrained westward movements and favoring
a slow, compact and coherent expansion that could both avoid conflicts on the frontier and foster eco-
nomic development: as Jefferson put it, it meant “advancing compactly as we multiply.”23 To do so,
Frymer argues, land ordinances “carefully managed and designed to harness the nation’s strengths (its
increasing population of settlers and citizen soldiers) in order to minimize its weaknesses (a small and
weak military and bureaucracy).”24 Thus, in declaring a monopolistic authority over western land and
in controlling its sale and distribution through surveys, the federal government played a critical role
in managing “the task of settlement by regulating its direction, pace, and scale — moving preferred
populations onto contested territory in order to engineer the demography of the region.”25 Nonethe-
less, claiming that the federal government was particularly active does not mean arguing that it always
succeeded. On the contrary, the American State “struggled for control, winning and losing, asserting
and bumbling as it went along.”26 Accordingly, Frymer points out that, though crucial, “the American
State was also importantly weak,”27 often lacking the military and bureaucratic means to enforce its
decisions, which left a significant amount of “racial diversity”28 and uncontrolled movements to deal
with in the long term. In this respect, Frymer’s historical interpretation of the American State is sig-
nificantly nuanced, but also precise, following Brian Balogh’s argument that the federal government


17.   Ibid. 16.

18. Ibid. 14.

19. Ibid. 18.

20. Ibid. 31.

21. Ibid. 46-58.

22. Paul Frymer, Building an American Empire. The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion. Princeton Studies in American
    Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017, 1-10.

23. Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John C. Breckinridge, August 12, 1803, in Id. Writings. New York, The Library of America, 1984,
    1138.

24. Frymer, Building an American Empire, 35.

25. Ibid. 9.

26. Ibid. 36.

27. Ibid. 12.

28. Ibid. 13.



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State, Market and Colonization                                                                   USAbroad. Vol. 3 No. 1S (2020)




structured national rules to ensure an ordered development29 and Ira Katznelson’s accounts of the
State’s “flexible” capacity to mobilize resources, coordinating and galvanizing rising capitalist enter-
prises.30 Still, by describing the federal government as the engine of territorial expansion, even with
its fallacies, Frymer’s contribution allows to go beyond the debate about the strength or weakness of
the nineteenth-century American State31 and to account for the concrete ways in which it operated. To
Frymer, the American State can be better understood as a “conventionally weak state” that constantly
tried to exert its coercive power by “harnessing and strategically controlling society.”32 Land policies
stood as the State’s political tool both in governing society and in governing expansion, or rather in im-
plementing expansion as a white-settler colonization of the North-American continent. This required
making war, implementing “the politics and logistics of removal”33 and restraining “population move-
ments”34 to guarantee a white-only settlement of the West. Furthermore, reconstructing the specific
role of the State in imperial expansion, Frymer proves the need for bridging and connecting histories
of the American State and histories of the American empire, which too often proceed on separate
paths.
     From a very different methodological perspective, but reaching similar conclusions, Adam Dahl’s
Empire for the People (2018) investigates the ideological and conceptual underpinnings legitimizing U.S.
territorial expansion. In doing so, Dahl unveils the imperial and colonial foundations of U.S. demo-
cratic thought, showing that native dispossession and settler colonialism constituted its “basic concep-
tual logic.”35 Federalism itself and its institutional implementation did not represent “an alternative
to colonial empire but rather an alternative mode of colonial expansion,” operating through the prin-
ciple of “federative replication” and guaranteeing the equality of the units of empire. Still, the North-
west Ordinance could include new States on “an equal footing,” institutionalizing “a form of empire
without colonial dependence,” precisely because it allowed a preliminary violent process of colonial
dispossession, the removal of Natives and the expansion of slavery.36 Thus, federalism, despite its
“post-colonial” and equalitarian shape, kept colonial dispossession as its substantial precondition. In
this precise sense, to Dahl federalism solved the imperial crucible of how to govern differences by
violently erasing them. Moreover, against democratic interpretations of the U.S. Constitution and
of the Declaration of Independence, Dahl investigates “the coloniality of constituent power,” arguing
that, since the eighteenth-century, American democratic thought rested upon a “labour-value theory
of empire”37 which legitimized democratic sovereignty as an expanding settler sovereignty. Through
the Vermont Constitution of 1777, Dahl reconstructs how colonization stood as the American form
of democratic constituent power, both negatively as the power to dissolve old orders and positively




29. Brian Balogh, A Government Out of Sight. The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America. Cambridge: Cam-
    bridge University Press, 2009.

30. Ira Katznelson, “Flexible Capacity: The Military and Early American State-building,” in Shaped by War and Trade: Interna-
    tional Influences on American Political Development, eds. Ira Katznelson and Martin Shefter, Princeton: Princeton University
    Press, 2002, 82-110.

31. On the debate on the American State, see: William J. Novak, “The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State,” The American
    Historical Review, 3 (2008): 752-72; “AHR Exchange On the ‘Myth’ of the ‘Weak’ American State,” The American Historical
    Review, 3 (2010); Raffaella Baritono, “Uno Stato a ‘bassa intensità’? L’esperienza storica statunitense,” in Lo Stato globale,
    eds. Raffaella Gherardi and Maurizio Ricciardi, Bologna: CLUEB, 2009, 81-110; Raffaella Baritono, “Un Leviatano suo
    malgrado. Stato e nazione negli Stati Uniti tra Guerra civile e ascesa mondiale,” in Nazionalizzazione e modernità: Italia,
    Europa e Stati Uniti (1861–1901), eds. Tiziano Bonazzi, Daniele Fiorentino, and Annunziata Nobile, Ariccia: Aracne, 2014,
    51-73; Max M. Edling, A Hercules in the Cradle. War, Money and the American State, 1783–1867. Chicago: Chicago University
    Press, 2014.

32. Frymer, Building an American Empire, 71.

33. Ibid. 77.

34. Ibid. 71.

35. Adam Dahl, Empire of the People. Settler Colonialism and the Foundations of Modern Democratic Thought. Lawrence: University
    Press of Kansas, 2018, 16.

36. Ibid. 24-6.

37. Ibid. 32.



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as the power to constitute new ones, providing “the foundation of an imperial-democratic polity,”38
in which colonization replaced revolution as the means of exercising constituent power. Therefore,
Jefferson’s political thought, which captured this colonial doctrine “in distilled ideological form,”39
cannot be simply described as a radically democratic thought.40 Besides, pushing his analysis deep
into the nineteenth century, Dahl takes into account the disavowal of Native presence implicit in Alexis
de Tocqueville’s geographical depictions of North America, in Walt Whitman’s poetry, in Ralph Waldo
Emerson’s writings and in John O’Sullivan’s “safety-valve theory of colonization,”41 showing a perva-
sive strain of imperial-colonial thought.
    Moreover, such reading of nineteenth-century U.S. history, can help assess the sectional conflict
between Northern and Southern States as a struggle for “land and more land,”42 as W.E.B. Du Bois
noted, as the clash of two competing imperial visions resting on two expansive political economies.
Interestingly enough, both Dahl and Frymer interpret the Republican Party’s free labor doctrine as an
intrinsically imperial claim over the West and as a project of white-settler colonization that grounded
the party’s opposition to slavery and its dreams of racial separation. To Dahl, Abraham Lincoln’s
and William Seward’s concept of free labor was a “colonial thinking”43 that, claiming western lands
for white workers, involved native removal and racial separation. As we will see, the same can be
said of Henry Carey’s thought, which gave scientific-economic shape to the Republican free-labor
doctrine. Accordingly, Frymer identifies the 1862 Homestead Act, approved in the middle of the Civil
War, as the highest attempt to foster western settlement, while regulating it and while “manufacturing
whiteness,”44 thus politically fabricating racial demographics “by incentivizing white Americans and
Europeans to settle the West with the promise of free land.”45 Consequently, in the Republican outlook,
the free-white colonization of Western territories had to be mirrored by the black colonization of
Africa or of Central America, a project that, since the foundation of the American Colonization Society
in 1816, had broad support and persisted as Lincoln’s goal long into the Civil War. In other words,
keeping the West free from slavery required a “second removal”46 that in Frymer’s perspective should
be understood as a further attempt by the federal government to manage population movements. A
failed attempt, that still tells much about “the politics of colonization”47 at the heart of the Republican
Party’s program. As Dahl puts it, “just as the safety-valve theory displaced class conflict by projecting
it onto a geographic elsewhere, racial colonization restored national unity by transporting the source
of racial conflict (i.e.,”the colored race“) to Central America.”48 In both accounts, the sectional conflict
stands as a strife between “two competing imperial imaginaries: an empire of free soil and free labor
and an empire of slavery and domination.”49 In Frymer’s words, “both sides endorsed expansion,
but in different directions and forms, with different methods, and with very different goals” and both
shared “the assumption that America was a white nation.”50
    Thus, the nineteenth-century U.S. territorial expansion over North America should be casted as a
process of empire building; as a process of colonization, which required the removal of Native Amer-
icans and the racial separation from African Americans; as a process regulated and governed by the


38. Ibid. 48.

39. Ibid. 49.

40. For example in: Antonio Negri, Il potere costituente. Saggio sulle alternative del moderno. Roma: Manifestolibri, 2002, 179-240.

41. Dahl, Empire of the People, 102-123.

42. William E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880, ed. David L. Lewis, New York: The Free Press, 1992, 28.

43. Dahl, Empire of the People, 138.

44. Frymer, Building an American Empire, 128-171.

45. Ibid. 132.

46. Ibid. 220-62.

47. Ibid. 262.

48. Dahl, Empire of the People, 139.

49. Ibid. 126.

50. Frymer, Building an American Empire, 132.



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American State through land policies, culminating in the Homestead Act; as a process whose ideo-
logical legitimation shaped the colonial foundations of U.S. political and democratic thought. More-
over, Dahl and Frymer allow a reassessment of sectional conflict as a struggle between imperial claims
and of the Republican Party’s political program as an intrinsically imperial and colonial expansion-
ist doctrine. In this respect, colonization emerges as the driving force of the nineteenth-century U.S.
imperial history.



3 Market and Industrial Development
Nonetheless, territorial expansion still does not fully account for the multifaceted relevance of empire
in nineteenth-century U.S. history. Two further contributions focus more specifically on the imperial
dimension of U.S. industrial development, commercial policies and market building before and after
the Civil War. A. G. Hopkins, in his American Empire (2018), combines “global, imperial, and insular
approaches”51 to study empires as “agents of globalization,” accelerating and extending “the flows and
velocity of goods, peoples, and ideas across the world.”52 To Hopkins, if the need for imperial history
is self-evident for the period after 1898, the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War should
be understood in imperial terms as well, because of the imperial and neocolonial trade relationships
in which the United States was still embedded. Hopkins as well places the State and its functioning
at the center of his account, interpreting the American Revolution as a reaction to the dialectic of the
British military-fiscal State and of its mercantilist economic system, which made the thirteen colonies
autonomous right before the moment when a stricter political control became necessary.53 Still, “the
achievement of formal independence was not the end of the empire story”54 in North America, be-
cause the United States continued to rely on British capital for investments and on British markets
for agricultural exportations, even transplanting some “key features of Britain’s military-fiscal state,”55
such as the central bank and the public credit system. Since his Report on Manufactures, Alexander
Hamilton had clearly highlighted the link between the fiscal and commercial strengthening of the
American State, the acceleration of economic development and the achievement of effective inde-
pendence from Great Britain.56 However, to Hopkins long into the nineteenth century, the United
States remained a “decolonizing State” trying to make the transfer of power a reality and struggling
to overthrow the persisting colonial ties with Great Britain, which increasingly oriented the U.S. econ-
omy towards a pattern of “dependent development” based on exportations of agricultural products,
especially southern cotton and midwestern grain.
     Thus, during the greater part of nineteenth century, the United States was still engaged in a “pro-
tracted exercise in decolonization,”57 which required the growth of national industries and the struc-
turing of a diversified national market as political-economic tools in a long “struggle for indepen-
dence.”58 In Hopkins’ perspective, the advocates of the so-called American System precisely caught,
in the first half of the century, the need for grounding political independence in economic develop-
ment, thus bringing the Hamiltonian program into a new context of accelerated industrial growth,
British free-trade hegemony and sectional conflict. In particular, Friedrich List’s and Henry Carey’s

51. A. G. Hopkins, American Empire. A Global History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018, 13.

52. Ibid. 25-41.

53. Ibid. 45-94.

54. Ibid. 98.

55. Ibid. 131.

56. On the fiscal building of the early American State, also see: E. James Ferguson, The Power of the Purse. A History of American
    Public Finance, 1776-1790. Durham: University of North Carolina PRess, 1965; Max M. Edling, A Revolution in Favor of
    Government. The Origins of the United States Constitution and the Making of the American State. Oxford: Oxford University
    Press, 2003; Matteo Battistini, “A National Blessing: debito e credito pubblico nella fondazione atlantica degli Stati Uniti
    d’America,” Scienza & Politica. Per una storia delle dottrine, 48 (2013): 13-31; Max M. Edling, A Hercules in Cradle. War, Money
    and the American State, 1783–1867. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2014.

57. Hopkins, American Empire, 7.

58. Ibid. 142-90.



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State, Market and Colonization                                                                  USAbroad. Vol. 3 No. 1S (2020)




economic thought, but also, among others, Henry Clay’s politics, aimed “at achieving national eco-
nomic independence through neomercantilist policies of tariff protection, transport improvements,
and managed sales.”59 In this respect, mid-nineteenth-century national economy, later translated in
the Republican Party’s program, had the anti-colonial goal of overthrowing the imperial ties with
Great Britain by completing the financial and commercial structuring of the American State and of
its national market. Only after the Civil War, when the national economic program of the Repub-
lican Party was fully implemented and the U.S. industrial growth took off, the United States could
solve its “classic postcolonial dilemma: how to make formal independence effective.”60 At the same
time, Hopkins maintains that “it is hard to argue that the United States created a continental empire
in the nineteenth century,”61 limiting the actual existence of an American empire to the few decades
after 1898 and before 1945, when the United States “ceased to be an empire” and became “a hege-
mon.”62 Hopkins’ formulation clearly proposes once more some of the exceptionalist schemes he
supposedly wants to challenge through his global history. However, his understanding of the decol-
onizing meaning of nineteenth-century U.S. economic development and protectionism stands as a
precious foothold for a more accurate historical interpretation, without contradicting accounts, such
as Frymer’s and Dahl’s, of the strictly imperial and colonial character of U.S. territorial expansion.
As a matter of fact, the two aspects should be kept together, since this duplicity of the U.S. imperial
aspiration was already present at the outset of the American Revolution, as a claim of independence
against Great Britain and as a claim of sovereign expansion over North America.
     In any respect, Hopkins fails to see a further imperial element both of U.S. economic development
and of List’s, Carey’s and the Republican Party’s national economy, presented in Marc-William Palen’s
The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade (2016),63 which reconstructs the Anglo-American debates over trade and
empire, and particularly the struggle between the free-trade “Cobdenite” school and the protection-
ist “Listian” school in the United States. Even if defining nineteenth-century U.S. protectionism as
simply “Listian” is inaccurate, since such a self-proclaimed school never existed and since List was
himself deeply influenced by earlier American protectionists, Palen’s perspective can be very useful.
Above all, his book explains that the List-Carey economic doctrine was not limited to the call for pro-
tection as a means of national development, but it had a long-term understanding that, as American
industries became internationally competitive, the United States would need more access to foreign
markets and that imperial means might be required to access them.64 In this respect, while calling
for protection for infant industries and for the building of a national market in order to make U.S.
economy independent from British markets and capitals, List’s and Carey’s protectionism was at the
same time laying the grounds for the coercive opening of foreign markets and for the establishment
of a U.S. industrial and commercial hegemony over the world market. Thus, List, Carey and their
disciples saw national industrial development only as the first necessary step towards imperial com-
mercial expansion on a global level. In other words, they understood how imperial expansion could
only be produced by strong and accelerating industrial development. In this regard, protectionism
was not only a program for domestic prosperity but also a “globalizing ideology.”65 Palen often fails
to explicitly recognize the role of the State in such processes and in accounting, as Hopkins does, for
how national economy prescribed its commercial and fiscal strengthening as a necessary step towards
independence and empire building, often getting trapped in distinctions between “formal” and “in-
formal” imperialism. Nonetheless, he has the merit of accounting for the long-term imperial side of
the national-economic doctrine that, in Hopkins’ perspective, was struggling to “decolonize” the U.S.
economy. For both, industrial development stood as the material foundation of national indepen-

59. Ibid. 160.

60. Ibid. 187.

61. Ibid. 237.

62. Ibid. 32.

63. Marc-William Palen, The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalization, 1846–
    1896. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

64. Ibid. 1-32.

65. Ibidem.



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State, Market and Colonization                                                              USAbroad. Vol. 3 No. 1S (2020)




dence and of imperial expansion.
    To Palen, since the late 1850s, Carey and his disciples had a crucial political role in making the Re-
publican Party “a protectionist party en bloc”66 and in establishing such a commercially expansive im-
perial vision as the party’s core economic program, which would have later been implemented since
the 1890s by politicians such as James Blaine and William McKinley.67 In this respect, Palen’s goal
is to challenge the established interpretation of the free-trade character of late-nineteenth-century
American imperialism. On the contrary, it was economic nationalism, that “played a crucial role in
American imperial expansion in the late nineteenth century, and thus in controlling the more region-
alized course of U.S. economic globalization for decades to come.”68 Following this reassessment, the
U.S. overseas expansion since 1898 should be reinterpreted as a consequence of “the imperialism of
economic nationalism — not the imperialism of free trade”69 and any understanding of the laissez-faire
character of late-nineteenth-century U.S. capitalism should be carefully reconsidered. Only by recon-
structing the political hegemony of protectionism and economic nationalism in the second half of the
nineteenth century, is it possible, in Palen’s perspective, to understand the rise of the United States
as a global industrial and imperial power over the world market in the first decades of the twentieth
century. Consequently, contrary to traditional interpretations and common sense, List’s and Carey’s
national economy should be recast as an intellectual and political root of later American globalization.
    Taking Hopkins’ and Palen’s contributions together, we can more deeply account for the relevance
of empire in nineteenth-century U.S. history, arguing that economic and industrial development rep-
resented the root of U.S. effective independence from the persisting imperial and neocolonial British
commercial hegemony and the root of U.S. imperial expansion towards foreign markets. Accord-
ingly, List’s and Carey’s national economy and later the Republican Party’s economic policy stood as
a decolonizing program for national economic independence, as an imperial program for a global
commercial expansion of U.S. industrial power over the world market, and as a call to strengthen
the American State in order to produce industrial development, national independence and imperial
expansion.



4     Conclusion: National Economy and Empire
Overall, according to the discussed literature, long into the nineteenth century the United States was
still placed in an imperial commercial relationship with Great Britain. It was territorially expand-
ing over the North-American continent through imperial and colonial means, which ideologically
reflected in the conceptual foundations of U.S. political thought. It was fractured by a sectional con-
flict over the terms of imperial expansion. Moreover, industrial development was already laying the
commercial grounds for later U.S. imperial expansion. Only by acknowledging all these elements,
is it possible to account for how the U.S. industrial and imperial rise since the 1890s was politically,
economically and intellectually produced in the previous century. In addition, recent historiography
has the merit of taking a step further in assessing the role of the American State in imperial processes,
through colonial dispossession, land policies, population control, infrastructural investments and later
through commercial policies. In this respect, historical accounts have no choice but to keep State and
empire together in studying the nineteenth-century United States. It is not possible to understand the
history of the American State without acknowledging its original imperial and colonial logic of action
and it is not possible to understand the history of American empire without acknowledging how it was
concretely implemented through the State. Moreover, in describing the imperial and colonial concep-
tual foundations and political aspirations of the Republican Party’s program and of its major political
and economic ideologues, the discussed literature provides a crucial background for a deeper histori-
cal and political understanding of Friedrich List’s and Henry Charles Carey’s economic thought. The


66. E. Peshine Smith to H. C. Carey, quoted in Palen, The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade, 30.

67. Palen, The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade, 84-115; 172-205.

68. Ibid. XXXV.

69. Ibid. XXXVI.



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State, Market and Colonization                                                                      USAbroad. Vol. 3 No. 1S (2020)




main scholarly accounts on List and Carey focused on their protectionism as a means of industrial de-
velopment,70 while few acknowledged its inner imperial outlook,71 no one took into account Carey’s
specific drive for a governed continental expansion and only Karl Marx realized that Carey’s political
economy ended up in a theory of the State.72 Therefore, an interpretation holding these elements to-
gether could prove both original and comprehensive. On the one hand, it could illustrate how Carey,
in his economic science of free labor, conceived the U.S. territorial expansion over North America as
a process of settler colonization which had to be tightly regulated by the federal government and to
harness unrestricted westward movements in order to be instrumental to economic development. In
this precise sense, Carey’s political economy stood as one of the ideological roots of the Republican
homestead policy. On the other hand, such approach could show List’s and Carey’s national economy
as a program not only for national independence on the world market, but also for a State-managed
industrial growth and for imperial global expansion in the long run. In this regard, Carey’s doctrine,
politically implemented by his disciples since the 1860s, constituted a crucial pillar of later Republican
protectionism and economic policies. My research will try to bring forth how Carey’s political econ-
omy linked colonization and industrial growth into a general insight on American capitalism and on
the conditions for its global rise, which required a strengthened government as the political engine of
development and a stricter connection between State, capitalism and empire.




70. Among others, on Carey: Paul K. Conkin, Prophets of Prosperity. America’s First Political Economists. Bloomington: Indiana
    University Press, 1980; Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War.
    Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995; Nicholas G. Onuf and Peter S. Onuf, Nations, Markets, and War. Modern History and
    the American Civil War. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006; Heather Cox Richardson, The Greatest Nation of the
    Earth. Republican Economic Policies during the Civil War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997; Marc Egnal, Clash
    of Extremes. The Economic Origins of the Civil War. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009. On List: Harald Hagemann,
    Stephan Seiter, and Eugen Wendler, eds., The Economic Thought of Friedrich List. Abingdon-New York: Routledge, 2019;
    Michael Liebig, “Friedrich List and the American System of Political System,” Executive Intelligence Review, 12 (1999): 25-
    29; Keith Tribe, Governing Economy. The Reformation of German Economic Discourse 1750–1840. Cambridge: Cambridge
    University Press, 1988; Eugen Wendler, Friedrich List (1789–1846). A Visionary Economist with Social Responsibility. Heidelberg-
    Berlin: Springer, 2015.

71.   As for Carey, an exception is: Bairati, I profeti dell’impero americano, 179-181. As for List: Onur U. Ince, “Friedrich List and
      the Imperial Origins of the National Economy,” New Political Economy, 4 (2016): 380-400.

72. Karl Marx, Grundrisse. Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. New York: Penguin, 1978, 886.



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State, Market and Colonization                                                   USAbroad. Vol. 3 No. 1S (2020)




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