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Adam Smith Theory Of American Imperialism

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After the British colonial administration rose taxes and barred western immigration in conclusion of the French and Indian War, American lawyers, wealthy merchants, and aristocratic planters clung to their innate liberties, arguing that British colonial taxation, administration, and jurisdiction violated their basic freedoms. To America’s founding fathers, the colonies’ separation from Britain represented not only a break from the tyrannous crown, but also from the European practice of realpolitik and subsequent domination of the mercantilist world economic system. The colonies sought a freer international system of open markets and diplomacy, adopting the ideas of Adam Smith in their quest for economic liberty. Smith’s theories of self-interest …show more content…

Jeffersonian expansionism sought to supply liberty with enough land and treasure to support the rapid growth of white American settlers. Jeffersonian internationalism sought to express the interests of these white settlers to the entirety of the world. Hand in hand, expansionism and internationalism represented critical foundations to the American force of liberty. This white-American force once again demanded the exploitation of non-white …show more content…

American liberty and promises of freedom did not extend to the small island of former slaves. Haiti was unrecognized by the United States government as an independent nation for decades following its violent revolution and overthrow of French slavery in 1803. Instead, southern slaveholders believed that a “prolonged racial war” during San Domingue’s revolution would spread to the United States. Southern interests were to isolate and embargo the island to quarantine its success and prevent any spread of its revolutionary ideas to their slaveholdings on the mainland. It was not lost on the international community, especially Haiti, that America, a slaveholding nation, was extremely concerned with ‘liberty’. In this case, the projection of American liberty meant the freedom to discriminate against a fellow republic for internal interests and resembled the hierarchized and racialized form of the force of liberty at an international

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