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Reasons For American Imperialism In The Early 20th Century

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Before the 20th century the United States was an isolationist nation but around the late 19th century America decided to convert into an imperialist power. They had numerous reasons to shift into being an imperialist nation. America didn’t want to begin imperializing to settle and live in the nations they were taking over, they already had America for that reason, they wanted to adopt these nations for what they had to offer, which was many things. America saw an opportunity to improving their nation and took it. Even if there were many causes for America to imperialize, three of them stood out the most. Those three reasons being, economy, military, and culture superiority. One reason that America saw to imperialize was their economy, with all of this newly achieved land there were many new ways to improve their economy. A big reason imperialism helped America’s economy was all of the resources other nations had to offer. For example, Hawaii had sandalwood. Sandalwood had a lot of value in China, according to History.com. Sandalwood from Hawaii could then be sold to China and all of the profit would go to America, therefore increasing its economy. Hawaii also had sugar to offer. The sugar industry was big and brought in a lot of money, America saw this as an opportunity to obviously increase the economy. Of course, …show more content…

They had a few valid reasons to do so. Even if they had many reasons to turn to imperializing, there were three reasons that stood out the most. One of the reasons was to improve the economy by using these newly achieved nations to their advantage. Another reason was the desire of improving their Army in order to compete with other nation's Army. The final reason was that they thought they were a superior culture and other nations had to be like them. America's shift was pretty major and pretty effective for them at the

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