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As the first volume in this Oxford series to pursue a theme across the nation's entire history, From Colony to Superpower faces a daunting challenge of coverage. Its sensible solutions determine both the virtues and the limits of the volume. A strict chronological order comes at some cost of cross-period comparisons; Herring offers just enough of these to make us want more. Substantively, focus on policy and policymakers makes this a summa of conventional diplomatic history rather than a genuine new opening in (pace the subtitle) American foreign relations. We get a thorough, accurate, detailed delineation of the chief policy initiatives of an era; the global, political, and economic contexts out of which they emerged; and especially the leaders who formulated them, typically presidents, secretaries of state, and (later) national security advisers. Despite Herring's ready acknowledgement that unofficial ventures such as businesses, missions, tourism, and cultural exchange could be more important for American international doings than the formal means of arms and diplomacy, we in fact read little of former compared to the latter. For instance, American Protestant missions during their heyday in the last third the 19th century get no more coverage than the modest initiatives of the contemporaneous Secretary of State, James G. Blaine.
Given these traditional emphases, however, Herring works very well. The foremost presidents and diplomats of each era are memorably sketched, their international vision effectively integrated with their personal character and domestic politics. Vital statistics on commerce and the military come steadily to hand to lend a sense of comparative scale and growth over time. Every important treaty, along with the signal failures and scandals of American diplomacy, is explained in appropriate detail, from the XYZ Affair of the 1790s to the foundational documents of the Cold War to Donald Rumsfeld's infamous utterances about Iraq. The volume regularly returns to American policy toward Africa and Latin America along with the more familiar domains of Europe, East Asia, and, eventually, the Middle East. Kudos to Herring, then, for fashioning a volume which teachers can consult for classroom presentations, pundits for historical angles on breaking news, and concerned citizens for questions to ask of their leaders—and of themselves.
A subject of this scale also presents narrative challenges, and Colony to Superpower deals with them by riding the irresistible tide suggested by its title. Moral, immoral, or amoral, the United States in these pages can hardly help garnering its stupendous gifts of demography, domain, and protective oceans to become a nation more powerful than any other and to pursue, as much as any other, its inherent interests. But given its character as a nation composed of immigrants and founded by a revolution, it cannot help but parade its special qualities, real and presumed, and lift its nobler intentions into a self-concept that infuses, or masks, much of its international conduct with claims of providential destiny. Herring nowhere approaches a Chomsky-like screed about the aggressions committed in the process or the duplicities with which they were covered, but he persistently points these out by way of correcting the "mythologies" and "illusions" to which he believes Americans are subject on this front.
The corrective note sounds already on page 1: "Americans think of themselves as peace-loving, but few nations have had as much experience at war as the United States. Indeed, beginning with the American Revolution, each generation has had its war. Armed conflict has helped to forge the bonds of nationhood, nurtured national pride, and fostered myths about the nation's singular virtue and indomitableness." Herring keeps the theme in view by proceeding to record how fully the nation was occupied with imperial conquest over the course of the 19th century. The first conquest came in seizing a continental domain from retreating, preoccupied, or otherwise bungling Europeans but most of all, and by any means necessary or possible, from native peoples and the recently independent, fellow republic of Mexico. The second conquest came via sea-borne trade across the Caribbean, a precursor to the casual occupations American armed forces would make there in the 20th century. These two, together with contemporaneous ventures of trade and exploration in the Pacific, made the 19th-century past prelude indeed to the more familiar tale of wars and commercial empire to come. The racism, relentless expansionism, and comparatively easy pickings of 19thcentury "manifest destiny" put a deep imprint on American memory—and on American expectations.
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