Anne L. Foster

Projections of Power: The United States and Europe in Colonial Southeast Asia, 1919-1941

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Throughout its history, the United States has been both imperialistic and anticolonial: imperialistic in its expansion across the continent and across oceans to colonies such as the Philippines, and anticolonial in its rhetoric and ideology. How did this contradiction shape its interactions with European colonists and Southeast Asians after the United States joined the ranks of colonial powers in 1898? Anne L. Foster argues that the actions of the United States functioned primarily to uphold, and even strengthen, the colonial order in Southeast Asia. The United States participated in international agreements to track and suppress the region's communists and radical nationalists, and in economic agreements benefiting the colonial powers. Yet the American presence did not always serve colonial ends; American cultural products (including movies and consumer goods) and its economic practices (such as encouraging indigenous entrepreneurship) were appropriated by Southeast Asians for their own purposes. Scholars have rarely explored the interactions among the European colonies of Southeast Asia in the early twentieth century. Foster is the first to incorporate the United States into such an analysis. As she demonstrates, the presence of the United States as a colonial power in Southeast Asia after the First World War helps to explain the resiliency of colonialism in the region. It also highlights the inexorable and appealing changes that Southeast Asians perceived as possibilities for the region's future.

Produktdetails

• American Encounters/Global Int
• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Seitenzahl: 256
• Erscheinungstermin: Juli 2010
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 229mm x 152mm x 14mm
• Gewicht: 376g
• ISBN-13: 9780822348009
• ISBN-10: 0822348004
• Artikelnr.: 30362432

Autorenporträt

Anne L. Foster is Assistant Professor of History at Indiana State University. She is an editor of The American Colonial State in the Philippines: Global Perspectives, also published by Duke University Press.

Inhaltsangabe

Acknowledgments vii
Preface ix
Introduction 1
1. New Threats and New Opportunities: Regional Cooperation in Southeast
Asia, 1919-1929 15
2. "The Highways of Trade Will Be Highways of Peace": United States Trade
and Investment in Southeast Asia 43
3. An Empire of the Mind: American Culture and Southeast Asia, 1919-1941 73
4. Depression and the Discovery of Limits 111
5. Challenges to the Established Order, 1930-1939 143
Conclusion: The United States and Imperialism in Twentieth-Century
Southeast Asia 175
List of Abbreviations 181
Notes 183
Bibliography 219
Index 235