U.S. Imperialism in Central America

Abstract

Thomas D. Schoonover's book of essays on U.S.-Central American relations follows many of the prescriptions that recent critics of diplomatic history have offered for revitalizing the field. He studies U.S. foreign relations as part of international history and is guided by the theoretical framework of the world systems approach; he utilizes the records of several European and Central American countries as well as those of the United States and avoids an ethnocentric and parochial perspective. Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein, as well as William A. Williams and Thomas J. McCormick, have strongly influenced Schoonover's work. The book's dominant theme, noted in the subtitle, is that in its relations with Central America the United States exercised social imperialism whereby Central America would serve to relieve the internal problems of the United States. Many contemporaries believed that the economic, social, and political problems of late-nineteenth-century America could be alleviated by expanding overseas markets to absorb surplus production, thus keeping production and domestic employment high. To use the language of world systems theory, the metropole (the United States by the end of the nineteenth century) would preserve its well-being and security through its relationship with the periphery (Central America). In this, the United States was not unique, for other metropole nations did likewise. For this relationship to work as the metropole state wanted, the periphery would have to be dependent; otherwise, the metropole's options would diminish. Schoonover uses social imperialism to explain “impulses operating within the metropole states and dependency theory to illuminate the consequences of metropole intrusions in the periphery” (pp. 3–4). His nine essays or episodes do not present a complete history of U.S.-Central American relations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nor even one that is unfamiliar, for he intends that they illustrate how the world systems analysis can be applied to what have traditionally been considered small, bilateral events.