1898 and American Expansionism

China has been rising in global political economy, and the twenty-first century may have marked the beginning of a ¿Chinese Century¿, similar to the American Twentieth Century. The history of international politics is recurrently that of the rise and fall of hegemonic powers. To learn the lessons of history, Jittipat Poonkham critically studies the rise of America and a peaceful transition of Great Britain and the United States in the late nineteenth century. He argues that the Spanish-American War of 1898 marked a pivotal moment in a great transformation of US foreign policy and identity. American expansionism was possible not only due to the transformative roles of American expansionists (such as Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and John Hay) but also because of the emerging intersubjective understandings and shared ideas between British and American hegemonies.