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PARTISAN REVIEW
511
the two generations
before
this rise of the general surplus - were the
great age of American shipping. And, as Professor Field lucidly shows,
the founders of the republic saw commerce not only as an immediate
necessity for the survival of the American experiment but as a key to
the advancement of civilization. They may have been right, or they may
have been wrong ; but that is what they believed. Commerce would en–
large the mind, reduce prejudice, confer reciprocal benefits and diffuse
enlightenment. As Melville had young Redburn put it, "Under the
beneficent sway of the Genius of Commerce, all climes and countries
embrace; and yard-arm touches yard-arm in brotherly love."
Professor Field gives full weight to the role of commerce in Amer–
ican expansionism; but, what is more important, he also gives full
weight to other factors equally vital in fostering the expansionist out–
look but ignored by Professor Williams and not reducible to economic
motives. One of these factors is the missionary impulse, which, as Pro–
fessor Field points out, probably did more than anything else to begin
the Americanization of exotic corners of the planet. (In this connection
one must mention the pioneer work of C.
J.
Phillips,
Protestant Amer–
ica and the Pagan World: The First Half Century of the American
Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 1810-7860,
written in
1954 but only recently published as a H arvard East Asian Monograph.)
Another factor on which Professor Field lays appropriate stress is
the part played in expansionism by strategy and politics.
It
is true that
the American Navy acquired its original forward role partly in order
to protect the commerce of the young republic. But the Navy also
had the job of protecting the security of the young republic; and it had
its own institutional interests and ambitions. Nothing, I think, wrecks
Professor Williams's account of the roots of the American empire more
than his total disregard of the strategic and political motives in Amer–
ican imperial policy.
For where his overseas-markets thesis becomes vague and unsatisfac–
tory is precisely at the point that the quest for economic markets moves
into the passion for political domination. The "battle for markets," he
writes at one point, "was not predestined to evolve into imperialism";
what it did, he says, was to confront the American people with "a choice
between embracing imperialism or changing their domestic political
economy in fundamental respects." Unwilling in the nineties to make
such changes, the leaders, in the Williams view, then embarked on a
course of active overseas expansion. "The exports that prevented do–
mestic upheaval became the exports that required an imperial foreign
policy." In order "to acquire and maintain hee and effective access to
