ABSTRACT
Until the end of the nineteenth century, the United States had only a minor political presence outside of North America. Unlike European countries, it had no formal colonies; those territories it controlled were either uninhabited, such as Midway Island, or, for a few years, part of a joint protectorate, like Samoa. In the Caribbean, the U.S. had no preponderant role; and its relations with Liberia, a country founded by former American slaves, were far short of anything resembling client status. Within a few years, all this was to change. Even though it took a century for the U.S. to arrive at its current number of clients, the logic of a client empire and some of the principal contexts of acquiring those clients were well in place by the early 1900s. In this chapter, we will give an overview of the U.S. client acquisition process. We will
begin with a brief general discussion of the double nature of acquisition in general and how it structures the clientilism relationship thereafter. This leads us to a presentation of what we shall call acquisition contexts, isolating five distinct combinations of situations, motives, and programmatic means which led the U.S. to acquire particular states as clients. We will discuss each of these contexts in turn, providing examples from various historical eras from the late 1890s up to the present. Following that, we will give a historical account of U.S. client acquisition, emphasizing patterns found repeatedly in different decades. This accounts for the variety and heterogeneity of today’s clients.
