ABSTRACT
In The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America 1500-2000, Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton attempt to reshape our understanding of American history by arguing that republican ideas of freedom and imperialism are two sides of the same coin. In their view, American imperialism was not an aberration for a country that fought wars only for liberty. Rather, they suggest that American empire was part of “the progressive extension of a polity’s, or a people’s, dominion over the lands or lives of others, as a means of imposing what the builders of empires understand as order and peace on dangerous or unstable peripheral regions.” As Anderson and Cayton are quick to point out, “to found a narrative of American development on the concept of dominion is to forgo the exceptionalist traditions of American culture – those durable notions that the United States is essentially not like other nations but rather an example for them to emulate, a “shining city on a hill.” Instead, they dismiss American exceptionalism “in favor of a perspective more like the one from which historians routinely survey long periods of European, African, or Asian history.”1
