A Great and Rising Nation: Naval Exploration and Global Empire in the Early US Republic by Michael A. Verney (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Great and Rising Nation: Naval Exploration and Global Empire in the Early US Republic by Michael A. Verney Heesoo Cho (bio) Keywords Early republic, U.S. exploration, U.S. Navy; Imperialism, U.S. Empire, Maritime history A Great and Rising Nation: Naval Exploration and Global Empire in the Early US Republic. By Michael A. Verney. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. Pp. 300. Paper, $35.00.) Michael Verney's book recovers nineteenth-century U.S. imperialization through six naval explorations between 1816 and 1853. Imperialization was not an uncommon process to many Americans in this period who observed and practiced it in the western lands of North America and the cotton fields of the South. Overseas imperialism, however, had different overtones. Naval exploration had long been considered a "European strategy for global imperialism" (4) that was at odds with the republican values that Americans held dear to their hearts. Verney argues that the gradual embracement of naval exploration as an instrument of U.S. global imperialism is "a story about coalition building" (5) among white capitalists, evangelicals, slaveholders, and the middle class. By moving chronologically through the first half of the nineteenth century, Verney successfully shows how each group aligned their private interests with the scientific, commercial, and religious advancement of the nation and thereby contributed to the process of creating a global U.S. empire rooted in white supremacy. Verney's book joins a growing body of scholarship that explores U.S. expansion and identity formation in the seafaring world. Work over the last decade includes Paul A. Gilje, Free Trade and Sailors' Rights in the War of 1812 (New York, 2013); Brian Rouleau, With Sails Whitening [End Page 342] Every Sea: Mariners and the Making of An American Maritime Empire (Ithaca, NY, 2014); Dane Morrison, True Yankees: The South Seas and the Discovery of American Identity (Baltimore, 2014); Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2015); Jason W. Smith, To Master the Boundless Sea: The U.S. Navy, the Marine Environment, and the Cartography of Empire (Chapel Hill, NC, 2018). Primarily driven by maritime scholars, this scholarship shifts our attention from territorial visions of empire contained to the land mass of North America to overseas places where empire assumes many shapes. Sailors' social and cultural lives have been conducive to understanding the encounters between Americans and foreign populations, from which ideas about racial and ethnic differences developed. By centering this story in naval exploration, Verney demonstrates how overseas expansion was also a state enterprise that took place in the halls of Congress. The global U.S. empire that developed as a result was not a product of a separate maritime world but one deeply connected to continental concerns. In this sense, Verney also joins historians such as Kariann Akemi Yokota, Emily Conroy-Krutz, and Dael Norwood, among others, who situate the history of the early republic in a global context, in which global is not an antithesis to national but an extension. Empire is both a given and a process in this book. Verney defines empire in its broadest sense, "as a field of cultural domination or spatial governance where power, knowledge, and/or access to resources is structured hierarchically" (9). This capacious definition allows him to find evidence of empire in pursuits of knowledge and commerce, practices of religion and diplomacy, and the expansion of slavery. It also takes us to the Pacific islands, South America, the Dead Sea, and the Arctic, all subjected to European imperialism at varying times. At these places, Americans practiced their own visions of empire based on white supremacy. For instance, the South Sea Expedition of 1838–1842 (referred to as the "Ex Ex" by contemporaries) promoted overseas capitalism to increase opportunities at home for white laborers. Masculinity and gentility were at the center of the Arctic missions between 1850 and 1855 to rescue Sir John Franklin and his crew. From a conventional definition of empire that focuses on territorial acquisition and commercial exploitation, many of these U.S. naval explorations were a failure. The expeditions to the Amazon Valley and Rio de la Plata between 1850 and 1860 failed to integrate...