Why does this timeline begin in 1441? Why not in 1775 with the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War, or in 1787 when the U.S. Constitution was drafted? How does our view of U.S. history change depending on when we begin the story?
Many of us learn that the United States was founded by American colonists rebelling against British imperial rule, that their grievances were over self-determination and Britain’s treatment of its colonies. We typically hear that the formation of the United States was an act of liberation. But liberation for whom?
While voting is just one feature of democratic societies, its history in the United States reveals the chasm between the rhetoric of democracy and the reality of exclusion. Following the creation of the U.S. Constitution, only white male property owners – by some estimates, just 6% of the population – had the right to vote. It was not until the next century amid the Panic of 1819 that property restrictions were lifted, creating a system of universal white male suffrage. Enslaved people, women, Catholics, Jews, and non-white immigrants were still excluded. Barriers like poll taxes, literacy tests, and violence continued to prevent free black men from voting even after Emancipation and passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. All women were barred from voting until 1920, and even then, women’s suffrage in effect excluded black women. Native Americans were excluded from U.S. citizenship until 1924, after which they continued to face barriers to voting. Asians were excluded from U.S. citizenship until the 1950s.
This timeline asks users to think critically about Asian American history—not in terms of immigrant assimilation into a benevolent and democratic nation as we are often taught, but in terms of struggles over power that have spanned centuries and the globe. It invites us to explore the interrelated histories of various groups of people in America in the context of oligarchy, or rule by the few, versus genuine democracy. To reveal the roots of the anti-democratic tendencies of rule in the United States, we begin much earlier than the American Revolution. Starting in 1441 when Europeans first engaged in slave trading on the western coast of Africa helps to reveal the imperial beginnings of America. Centuries of rivalries between western European forces – mainly the aristocracies of Spain, Portugal, England (later Britain), France, and the Dutch Republic – preceded the founding of the United States in the late 18th century. These rivalries featured contests over wealth and power among the few that depended on the subjugation of the many, both within Europe and in other parts of the world.
The idea of connecting the histories of various peoples in the context of a larger global system is not new. Speaking of W.E.B. DuBois’s 1935 essay, Black Reconstruction, scholar Lisa Lowe has written about the central role that black slave labor played in forming a global system of racialized capitalism that relied on colonialism in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In The Intimacies of Four Continents she writes: “DuBois was concerned to interrogate slavery in the U.S. South—not as a world apart, isolated from world economic processes—but as central to the emergence of the United States as a modern capitalist nation… and as the crucible of the development of a racialized global division of labor.†In this way, the vast institution of slavery affected not only enslaved black people, but the entire world economy. Likewise, the removal and genocide of Indigenous peoples made way for land commodification. Numerous military interventions beyond U.S. borders drove migration and fueled new industries. All of these dynamics have shaped the world in which we all live.
In Black Marxism, political theorist Cedric Robinson also describes a global system of racial difference that he called racial capitalism. Writing in the 1980s and building on DuBois, he argued that this system emerged from European feudalism. Europe’s aristocracy had constructed hierarchies of human difference within Europe to accumulate and maintain wealth and power. Robinson wrote, “Medieval colonial slavery served as a model for Atlantic colonial slavery. The only important change was that the white victims of slavery were replaced by a much greater number of African Negroes, captured in raids or bought by traders.â€
It is true that the establishment of the 13 former British colonies into an independent United States was an act of rebellion against the British empire. However, the colossal growth of the United States from those original colonies confined to the Atlantic Coast into a nation spanning the continent relied on the same brutal logics of imperialism that leveraged Christian ideas of human difference and hierarchy to oppress the poor in Europe. In the American context these ideas justified land theft and genocide. Over the course of the next century, the United States would assume its present shape through war and the forced removal of Indigenous peoples in an ongoing process known as settler colonialism.
In 19th Century America, the small group of oligarchs who controlled U.S. economic and political life relied on a global system of production that treated black bodies as commodities. The power amassed through slavery fueled the acceleration of settler colonialism, violently dispossessing Indigenous peoples of their lands, and manipulating the ambitions of previously impoverished European migrants and their descendants to settle those lands. In 1830, the United States passed the Indian Removal Act, forcing several tribes from their homelands in the South to reservations in Oklahoma. Meanwhile, between 1730 and 1839, wealthy British landowners secured over 4,000 bills, taking previously communal land away from villages and communities in England. More than 30 percent of the land in England was “enclosed,†or privatized. Only those who could afford to pay for the rights to farm on these lands were able to make a living, which forced many peasants to migrate to cities for jobs and many others to leave for America, where they would gain uplifted cultural, economic, and political status as white settlers.
The majority of European settlers in early America brought with them their own experiences of dispossession and of violent group rivalries. This made the concept of race, of the deserving versus the undeserving, familiar. The promise of whiteness – which bound together white racial identity with material benefits like land – was a powerful enticement. Within white supremacy, race has functioned as a lever for profit through social control, discouraging white people from joining forces with people of color against an oligarchy that exploits them differently, but exploits them nonetheless.
As shown in the maps below, from the time of first European contact in the Americas in 1492 to the late 19th century, Indigenous landholdings in what is now the United States plummeted to just 156 million acres. By 1934, only about 50 million acres of Indigenously controlled land remained—an area the size of the states of Idaho and Washington combined. During World War II, the U.S. government took 500,000 more acres for military use. By 1955, the Indigenous land base had shrunk to 2.3 percent of its original size. Scholar Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz explains, “The United States as a socioeconomic and political entity is a result of this centuries-long and ongoing colonial process.â€
To study empire is to think deeply about the meanings and implications of borders and national identities. A century after the American Revolution, as the United States was completing its expansion westward toward the Pacific, it was also waging military interventions in Chile, Argentina, and Nicaragua. America’s imperial ambitions beyond the North American continent took off in earnest with the 1893 overthrow of the kingdom of Hawai’i and the 1898 seizure of the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico through the Spanish-American War. Struggles against U.S. settler colonialism and against U.S. wars abroad faced the same opposition, an oligarchy powered by the appropriation of indigenous lands and by evolving systems of profit that commodified human labor, from slavery to “coolie†labor to “braceros†and beyond.
As critical race scholar Moon-Ho Jung explains: “The contradiction is not between empire and nation; it is between empire and democracy. It is that contradiction that Asian American studies is especially poised to expose and explain, but the field must embrace empire as an analytic and overcome nationalist impulses to reproduce a typical ‘American’ story.†In the context of empire, as critical race theorist George Lipsitz has declared: “All racial identities are relational.â€