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Originally Posted by Gypsy Davey
Well he said, "Every territory outside of the original 13 colonies represents imperial expansion." I don't think the U.S. itself is an empire, and where admission of new States is provided for in a Constitution - by Congress, the elected branch - which is meant to establish not an empire but a republican democracy, his claim seems a bit silly.
Whether the U.S. itself, no matter how many individual States it comprises, has sometimes acted as an imperial power outside its bounds is a separate question, I think. I just question whether the growth of the U.S. from 13 to 50 States is an example of "imperial" expansion.
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I personally think he/she has a point. However, I do think that they have construed it far too narrowly. It should read "Every territory,
including the original 13 colonies, represents imperial expansion."
I'd go into it in detail, if you'd like, but I don't think of it as a particularly controversial point, particularly if you manage to keep in mind peoples like the Cherokees, Shawnee, Osage, Sioux, Blackfeet...and so on. More than 500 nations were obliterated by European expansion.
Also, it's not the "state making" process (as outlined in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and the Constitution), but the process leading up to it (claiming the territory, settling it, and then displacing the peoples who were already there, or subjegating them), which was "imperialist". Cultural imperialism is still imperialism, and it's usually followed by some type of political settlement which establishes the political imperialism aspect of the expansion.
As fragment noted earlier in this thread:
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I don't think that the admission of new states is imperial expansion per se. Rather it can be argued that the process by which the territory that those states exist on was acquired was a form of imperial expansion.
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Exactamundo!