Progressive Era Imperialism

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Introduction. As nineteenth-century British historian and philosopher Lord Acton put it, “Power tends to corrupt: absolute power corrupts absolutely”. During this era, imperialism was a term for colonizing foreign nations and lands, relying primarily on business, political, and military structures rather than settlers to rule colonized peoples and exploit their resources (Keene 2011, p562). Nationalism is the greatness and unity of one country and “In its purest form, nationalism can spawn democracy if it is rooted in the sovereignty of the people, but as nationalist and self-determination concepts spread in the nineteenth century, nationhood became associated with the uniqueness or ethnicity of the people and thus more removed from …show more content…

Cars, refrigerators, invention of penicillin, suburbs, asphalts highways, mass productions, mass consumption, are all part of economic prosperity post war. The progressive era improved the efficiency of American’s industrial production. Economic prosperity in 1920s did not last. In 1929, stock market crashed. The Great Depression lasted from 1929-1939. Overproduction of textiles, mining, automobiles, agriculture, exported goods and failing demands contribute to the decline of economy. Farmers can not pay debts, massive layoffs in manufacturing sector, companies and farmers lost markets overseas, which plunged America to deeper depression, “To reduce the imbalance between exports and imports would have required the country to abandon the Open Door policy, whose goal was unlimited American economic expansion. U.S. exports abroad grew fivefold in the1920s, largely because of unsupervised loans and investments abroad by American bankers and financiers as the country accumulated its largest merchandise export balance for any decade before World War II. Direct U.S. foreign investments increased from $3.8billion to$7.5billion. When these ceased because of the Great Depression, it became clear that the favorable balance of trade the United States enjoyed in the1920s increased the severity of that worldwide economic crisis. To remedy this trade imbalance, the United States government would …show more content…

We do understand the origin but we need to understand the importance. What is the responsibility of war? After all the wars the United States had been involved with, the popularity of sanctions was never redesigned. Sanction was an efficient means of United States to advance interest without using military force. At present time, governments around the world are in race for the expansion of their nuclear weapon. If we are not aggressive enough in rewriting our foreign policies, we will have to be watching on the sidelines again as other countries initiate havoc and use their newly invented

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