Trotskygrad wrote:
Narupug wrote:
America colonizes places economically in most cases. Just look at Latin America.
France and most of Europe colonized in a much more political and visible way.
yes, I see that, but why didn't america feel the need to do political colonialism? You could argue that the US had opportunities to do colonies of that sort as "Old Europe" was still doing them in the late 1800s
And we did, you could argue that much of American expansionism as it swept across the continent was motivated by a lot of the same attitudes that were driving European colonization in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. It's just that Europeans had to go a little farther to find land where they could bully people into stealing their land and Americans only had to go to their backyards. America also wanted the land to settle and Europe was more interested in just forcing the inhabitants to work for them. America went through a nice little period of European style colonization in the late 1800s, when the USS Maine blew up, we gladly jumped into war with Spain and forced them to give us the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam. We also got a nice little base in Cuba that you've probably heard of before and prevented Cuba from making treaties with other nations or going into debt. We also bullied Latin America into allowing us to build the Panama Canal.
The reason the US didn't go quite as far as some European countries is to some extent the US learned it's lesson from Europe about colonization. As much as the idea that America is all about freedom and fighting tyranny is untrue, Americans over history have been somewhat less inclined to just waltz into another country and just take over. We prefer to coerce countries into doing what we want them to so that it at least appears they have free will. That and we've had enough internal problems without worrying about managing an overseas empire.
