Linking American Empire With the Ags

Abstract

With its maxim, exploration is commercial the American Geographical Society articulated a dominant way of seeing the world in the late-nineteenth-century United States; a belief that not only would exploration lead to commercial gain--although the AGS certainly didn't deny that it would--but that exploration itself was commercial progress; mother words, the conquering of space was part of the progressive mission. As Karen Morin shows us, the AGS as an institution and the men who gave it life both reflected and shaped dominant notions of progress, civilization, and space that were circulating in late-nineteenth-century America, giving us our first interrogation of the role of geography--as a popular set of practices, as a worldview, and as a discipline--in the making of the American empire. Civic Discipline, in other words, helps us understand what geography was and did during the second half of the nineteenth century, a key moment in the ascension and extension of the United States as a national and global power. It lays bare what many of us have thought but have had little evidence to confirm: that geographers like Charles Daly directly profited from, and helped legitimize, the American empire. This, among many other contributions, makes Civic Discipline an important book. My comments here are directed at two aspects of the book that made me want to ask for more; that pushed me to think of new connections and possibilities. The first has to do with the connections between the strategies, practices, and discourses of America's internal empire and its external, foreign empire, of which Civic Discipline provides two rich examples. In the first example, Morin discusses Daly's and the AGS'S role in promoting railroad and canal development in the United States and in Central America. As she shows, the AGS actively promoted and gave scientific legitimacy to the expansionist narrative of America's manifest destiny through publications both scholarly and popular, and through Daly's influential annual addresses. They did this by collecting and distributing geographical information detailing the space and the resources of the U.S. West, because, as they wrote, Nothing would conduce more to the unity, stability, and future greatness of our country, than the exploration and exposition of the resources of the great region which lies between the Mississippi and the (Contributions to Physical Geography 1873, quoted in Morin 2011, 96). In turn, acting as the promulgator of these geoeconomic hopes for the U.S. West served to give the AGS the social and scientific status it sought. It also guided some of Daly's investments in land and people in the northern Midwest, including the Northern Pacific Railroad. When the AGS turned its sights to South America in the late 187os and 188os, Morin skillfully draws out the explicit and implicit connections between Daly, the AGS, commercial interests, and the federal government's plans to build an interoceanic isthmus canal. It is at this point that I wanted to know more about the ways in which Daly's experiences with the Northern Pacific Railroad shaped--or didn't shape--his actions and words when, as a judge, geographer, and commercial investor, Daly positioned the evidence in favor of a location for the canal in Nicaragua. In addition, I was curious about whether the AGS wrote about and/or considered Central and South America in ways similar to its geoeconomic hopes for the U.S. West. Broadly speaking, I was interested in understanding how, when the United States was barely ascendant as a global power, geography and geographers morphed their understanding of the U.S. West into their early forays outside its borders. Were Central America and South America, for example, seen as the next frontier, as America's manifest destiny pushed onto the world stage? In a similar vein, I was very interested in exploring connections between Daly's interests in social reform movements close to home, in New York City, and his support of King Leopold's efforts to control the Congo for his and others' economic interests. …