America Compared: Imperialism

Summer Clark

Comparative Perspective

After reaching the Pacific and condolidating domestic control by conquering the South and the West, the United States turned outward. All this did not happen without fierce resistance from indigenous peoples, or even controversy at home. There were charges of hypocrisy in professing democratic values but denying them to others. As a former colony itself, the United States was more reluctant than ots mother country or other European nations to take on colonies and to keep them for long. The British governed trough an alliance between the imperial bureaucracy and a tiny native elite.

Colonial Rule in the Philippines The nation fought two wars to

acquire these tropical Pacific islands. The Spanish-American war of 1898 stemmed from American support for Cuba's ant colonial rebels and public anger over the sinking of the battleship "Maine" in Havana harbor. Spanish had converted many Philippine natives to Catholicism. A popular independence movement led by Emilio Aguinaldo had been fighting the Spanish years before the Americans had arrived. After such a bloody beginning, American rule in the Philippines took a very different turn.