There was a time when Americans openly argued about whether their country was becoming an empire. They did not always hide the argument behind phrases like “global leadership,” “strategic interests,” “national security,” or “maintaining international order.” They used the word imperialism. Senators debated it. Newspapers argued about it. Political organizations formed around opposing it. Writers, labor leaders, business leaders, socialists, clergy members, academics, and ordinary citizens asked whether a republic founded on the principle of self-government could rule other people without their consent.
In 1898, that argument became important enough to produce an organization called the American Anti-Imperialist League. Its members included Mark Twain, industrialist Andrew Carnegie, philosopher William James, labor leader Samuel Gompers, former Treasury Secretary George Boutwell, and many others who agreed on surprisingly little except that the United States should not become a colonial empire. The immediate issue was the Philippines, but the larger question was what kind of country the United States intended to become.
More than a century later, Americans still argue about wars, military spending, sanctions, foreign aid, arms sales, occupations, alliances, covert operations, military bases, and intervention in other countries. What we rarely do is put those arguments together. The word imperialism itself has largely retreated to academic writing, activist circles, historical discussions, and political accusations. When it does appear in ordinary political conversation, it is often used selectively. Our adversaries are imperialists. Our allies have security concerns. Their military presence is occupation. Ours is deterrence. Their interference is aggression. Ours is leadership.
That makes it difficult to have a serious conversation about imperialism at all. Yet the fundamental question behind anti-imperialism has not disappeared: When does influence become domination, and what gives one country the right to exercise that power over another?
That is where this series begins. Before we can ask what happened to the anti-imperialists, we need to understand what they were opposing.
What Exactly Is Imperialism?
The word imperialism creates an immediate problem. Nearly everyone recognizes it, but far fewer people define it the same way. Sometimes imperialism means conquest. Sometimes it means colonialism, military intervention, or economic domination. In everyday political arguments, it can deteriorate into little more than a label attached to a powerful country doing something the speaker opposes.
That makes the term almost useless unless we define it. At its broadest, imperialism describes the extension of a state’s power beyond its own territory in ways that establish or maintain significant control over other territories, societies, governments, or peoples.
Historically, the most obvious version was formal empire. Britain governed India. France colonized Algeria. Belgium ruled the Congo. European governments claimed territories, installed colonial administrations, extracted resources, imposed laws, controlled trade, redrew borders, and treated millions of people as colonial subjects. This is what many Americans picture when they hear the word empire: old maps with enormous portions of the world colored according to whichever European country controlled them.
But imperialism does not always require annexation. A powerful country can exercise tremendous influence over a weaker one while allowing that country to retain its flag, government, borders, and formal independence. Military pressure, economic dependency, political interference, control over strategically important resources, support for coups or client governments, debt and financial leverage, coercive sanctions, and overwhelming military relationships can all become instruments through which one country restricts the meaningful sovereignty of another.
None of those things is automatically imperialism, and that distinction matters. Economic sanctions, for example, can be imposed for legitimate reasons. Countries voluntarily enter military alliances. Foreign troops can be present at the invitation of a government facing a genuine security threat. International trade can benefit both sides, and powerful states can use their influence to prevent aggression rather than facilitate it. If we call every exercise of international power imperialism, the word loses its meaning.
The better question is whether power has become domination. Does the weaker society retain meaningful political choice? Can it say no? Can its people determine their own government and political future? Does an ostensibly voluntary relationship depend on threats or coercion? Is one country effectively deciding questions that properly belong to another country’s population?
Imperialism, then, is ultimately not just about power. It is about the relationship between power, domination, and sovereignty. That gives us a better way to examine modern foreign policy than simply asking whether one country formally owns another.
If a foreign government secretly helps overthrow another country’s elected leadership and assists in installing a government friendlier to its interests, we should ask what happened to sovereignty. If a country depends so heavily on another government for weapons, financing, intelligence, or diplomatic protection that its political choices become constrained, we should ask how equal that relationship actually is.
The same questions apply to economic coercion and military presence. If a powerful government can inflict devastating economic consequences on another society in an attempt to force political compliance, we should examine both the justification and the consequences. If foreign military forces remain in another country for generations, we should be willing to ask what purpose they serve, who consented to their presence, and whether that consent remains meaningful.
Those questions do not predetermine the answers. They force us to examine the power relationship, and that is exactly what anti-imperialism was created to do.
So What Is Anti-Imperialism?
Anti-imperialism begins with a remarkably simple proposition: Powerful countries do not acquire the right to dominate weaker peoples simply because they possess the ability to do so.
Everything after that becomes more complicated because there has never been one anti-imperialist ideology. Anti-imperialist history includes socialists and capitalists, liberals and radicals, labor organizers and business owners, Black liberation movements and white politicians, religious pacifists and military veterans, internationalists and nationalists.
Some anti-imperialists opposed nearly every war, while others supported wars of national liberation. Some believed capitalism produced imperialism, while others believed empire corrupted capitalism. Some supported strong international institutions, while others distrusted international commitments almost as much as imperial expansion itself. Some believed deeply in racial equality and universal human dignity, while others opposed imperial expansion partly because they did not want nonwhite colonial populations incorporated into American political life.
That history should not be cleaned up to make anti-imperialism more attractive. Political coalitions are rarely that tidy, and people can oppose the same system for completely different reasons. What linked these movements was not agreement about everything. It was resistance to the idea that powerful states possessed an inherent right to rule, control, exploit, or determine the political future of weaker peoples.
Several different traditions grew from that idea. One came from republicanism, with a small “r.” Its advocates feared that a republic could not maintain an empire abroad indefinitely without becoming less republican at home. Empire required armies, executive authority, secrecy, taxation, coercion, and populations accustomed to accepting that some human beings could be governed without their consent. The danger, in this argument, was not only what imperialism did to the people being dominated. It was what empire eventually did to the imperial country.
Another tradition came from liberalism and self-determination. If legitimate government derives its authority from the consent of the governed, then ruling people who did not consent created an obvious contradiction. Socialists developed another critique, arguing that imperial expansion was intertwined with capitalism, competition for markets, access to resources, investment opportunities, labor, and profit. Working people were frequently expected to fight and die in wars whose economic rewards flowed disproportionately elsewhere.
Anti-colonial movements approached imperialism from an entirely different position. Their members were not primarily debating whether empire might corrupt the political institutions of the imperial country. They were living under it, and their demand was independence.
Black internationalists connected colonial domination abroad to racial hierarchy at home. They saw relationships among European colonialism, American racism, resource extraction, white supremacy, and a larger global system that divided human beings into those entitled to rule and those expected to be ruled.
Another tradition, eventually influential among libertarians and some conservatives, focused on the danger empire posed to limited government. Permanent military commitments, foreign wars, conscription, taxation, surveillance, secrecy, and enormous military bureaucracies were viewed as threats to individual liberty and constitutional government.
These traditions frequently disagreed with one another, sometimes bitterly. But they kept returning to the same uncomfortable question: Can a country genuinely claim to believe in freedom while denying meaningful freedom to people beyond its borders?
America Had an Empire Before Americans Wanted to Call It One
The American relationship with empire has always been complicated by the country’s own creation story. The United States was born from an anti-colonial revolution. Americans rebelled against an empire, resisted distant authority, declared that governments derived their legitimate powers from the consent of the governed, fought for independence, and established a republic.
That history became central to American identity, but it also made the idea of an American empire politically awkward. Territorial expansion nevertheless began almost immediately.
The United States expanded across lands inhabited by Indigenous nations whose sovereignty was repeatedly ignored, restricted, or destroyed. Native peoples were displaced through warfare, coercion, forced migration, broken agreements, and treaties negotiated under profoundly unequal circumstances. The country expanded through purchases and negotiations, but also through annexation and war.
The Mexican-American War produced one of the earliest major national arguments that American expansion could itself become conquest. Abraham Lincoln, then a young Whig congressman, challenged President James K. Polk’s explanation of how the war began. Henry David Thoreau’s opposition to slavery and the war helped inspire his famous essay on civil disobedience. Ulysses S. Grant, who served as a young Army officer during the conflict, later described the war in extraordinarily harsh terms, regarding it as an unjust war by a stronger nation against a weaker one and connecting it to the expansion of slavery.
The United States nevertheless continued westward. Continental expansion became embedded in the national story as settlement, Manifest Destiny, exploration, and national growth. The fact that other peoples already inhabited much of that land was often pushed to the margins of the story.
Then came 1898, and the imperial question became much harder to avoid.
1898: The United States Has to Decide What It Is Becoming
The Spanish-American War began amid widespread American outrage over Spanish colonial rule in Cuba. To many Americans, intervention seemed perfectly consistent with the country’s own revolutionary mythology. Cubans were struggling against an empire, and Americans would help them win their freedom.
Spain lost the war quickly, leaving the United States with a decision. Spain’s remaining possessions included Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. Rather than simply facilitating independence everywhere Spain withdrew, the United States acquired overseas territories of its own.
The Philippines became the defining controversy. Filipino revolutionaries had already fought Spanish colonial rule and expected independence. Instead, under the Treaty of Paris, Spain ceded the Philippines to the United States in exchange for $20 million.
Filipinos had not fought one colonial ruler merely to acquire another, and war followed. The Philippine-American War pitted American forces against Filipinos fighting for independence, producing brutal combat, civilian suffering, atrocities, disease, displacement, and a long American campaign to suppress the resistance.
Suddenly the contradiction was difficult to hide. The United States described itself as a republic committed to self-government while governing people who had not consented to American rule. Americans were forced to confront a question that would recur throughout the next century: Was the United States defending liberty, or was it becoming an empire?
Americans chose sides.
The American Anti-Imperialist League
On June 15, 1898, opponents of American colonial expansion gathered in Boston and created the organization that became the American Anti-Imperialist League. Its membership was remarkable. Mark Twain joined. Andrew Carnegie joined. Philosopher William James joined. American Federation of Labor president Samuel Gompers joined. Former Treasury Secretary George Boutwell became its first president.
These were not political clones. They did not share one economic philosophy, one political party, one religion, or one vision of American society. What united them was opposition to American colonial rule.
The League argued that governing people without their consent violated the principles the United States claimed to represent. Its platform declared imperialism hostile to liberty and warned that it tended toward militarism. The anti-imperialists believed the United States was in danger of abandoning the political tradition that had supposedly distinguished the republic from the European empires.
Their argument also contained a warning that would echo through later generations of anti-imperialist thought: You cannot easily build one political system for people at home and another for people abroad without the two eventually affecting each other.
The Anti-Imperialist League should not, however, be turned into a collection of twenty-first-century heroes. Some members genuinely believed Filipinos possessed the same right to self-government claimed by Americans. Others were motivated by constitutional concerns or worried about the economic costs of expansion. Labor activists worried about the consequences for American workers. Some opposed annexation for racist reasons because they did not want millions of Filipinos incorporated into the United States or its political system.
That contradiction is part of the history. Anti-imperialism did not automatically make someone egalitarian. It meant they opposed empire, and their reasons for doing so mattered. Those reasons were not always admirable.
Still, imperialism became important enough to enter national electoral politics. In the presidential election of 1900, Democrat William Jennings Bryan made opposition to imperialism an important part of his campaign against Republican President William McKinley. McKinley won, American control of the Philippines continued, and the Anti-Imperialist League’s political influence eventually declined.
The organization disappeared, but the argument did not. Instead, it migrated into other political movements.
The Socialists Ask a Different Question
During the early twentieth century, some of America’s strongest anti-imperialist arguments increasingly came from socialist and labor movements. Their emphasis was different. Many of the nineteenth-century republican anti-imperialists had asked what empire would do to the republic. Socialists increasingly asked who benefits from empire, and who pays for it?
Eugene V. Debs became one of the most prominent American voices of this tradition. Debs was a labor organizer, socialist leader, and repeated candidate for president. His opposition to World War I emerged partly from a class analysis of war.
In Debs’s view, working people fought the wars, died in them, and left families to bear their losses, yet ordinary workers had remarkably little influence over the geopolitical and economic decisions that produced those conflicts. He believed nationalism was being used to convince workers from different countries to kill one another while political and economic elites remained comparatively insulated from the consequences.
His opposition eventually sent him to prison. On June 16, 1918, Debs delivered a speech in Canton, Ohio, criticizing the war and praising people who had resisted it. Federal agents were listening. Debs was arrested under the Espionage Act of 1917, convicted, and sentenced to ten years in federal prison. The Supreme Court upheld his conviction, although President Warren Harding eventually commuted his sentence in 1921.
The episode matters for reasons larger than Debs. It demonstrates something that would recur throughout the history of American anti-imperialism: opposition to war and empire did not always disappear because its advocates lost the argument. Sometimes dissent was actively suppressed.
During World War I, federal power was used against socialists, antiwar activists, labor organizers, and others considered threats to the war effort. Speech that would ordinarily have been part of political debate could suddenly carry extraordinary consequences.
This gives us the beginning of an answer to the question at the center of this series. Some anti-imperialists lost elections. Some lost public support. Some coalitions fractured or became absorbed into other causes. Some were marginalized, and some were deliberately weakened by government repression.
That pattern would become considerably more important later.
Anti-Imperialism Was Never Only a Left-Wing Idea
Modern American politics can make this history difficult to recognize because today the word anti-imperialist is usually associated with the political left. Historically, opposition to foreign empire also existed within Republican, conservative, libertarian, constitutionalist, nationalist, and noninterventionist traditions.
Those traditions need the same careful treatment as the left-wing ones. Not everyone who opposed foreign intervention did so because they believed in universal self-determination. The broad movement later described as American “isolationism,” particularly before World War II, contained everything from principled opponents of militarism to nationalists, xenophobes, antisemites, and people who were simply indifferent to suffering outside the United States.
Those differences matter, but so does the existence of a serious constitutional argument against permanent international military commitments. Its reasoning was that war expands executive power, global military commitments require enormous military institutions, covert operations require secrecy, permanent threats produce permanent emergency powers, and maintaining military superiority requires enormous amounts of public money.
Most importantly, governments that acquire extraordinary powers for use abroad do not necessarily keep those powers neatly contained there. From this perspective, empire threatened liberty not only because of what an imperial state might do to foreigners. Empire could transform the state itself.
This concern did not belong exclusively to socialists or pacifists. Senator William Borah of Idaho, a Republican, became one of the country’s most prominent opponents of binding international commitments after World War I. He and other senators helped defeat American membership in the League of Nations, motivated by a mixture of constitutional concerns, nationalism, noninterventionism, and suspicion of permanent entanglement in European power politics.
The politics were complicated. They always were. But anti-imperialism and noninterventionism were once capable of crossing America’s normal partisan boundaries.
That fact is important because one of the most striking differences between that era and ours is not simply that Americans stopped protesting wars. We did not. It is that the larger architecture of American power gradually became something both major political parties largely accepted, even while fighting bitterly over how that power should be used.
Before that consensus fully developed, however, something extraordinary happened. The center of the anti-imperialist movement moved out of the imperial countries entirely.
The People Living Under Empire Take Over the Argument
After World War II, the old European colonial empires began to crack. India and Pakistan gained independence from Britain. Indonesia fought to end Dutch rule. Ghana became independent. Algerians fought an extraordinarily violent war against French colonial rule. Anti-colonial movements spread across Africa, Asia, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and elsewhere.
For the people living through these struggles, imperialism was not an academic theory. It determined who governed them, who controlled their land and resources, who set the laws, who could vote and organize, which language children were taught, which industries were developed, where wealth flowed, and who could be arrested or killed.
The center of anti-imperialist thought increasingly shifted away from people in powerful countries asking whether empire was morally acceptable. The people living under empire were demanding that it end.
This period produced a generation of political leaders and thinkers who became inseparable from twentieth-century anti-imperialism, including Jawaharlal Nehru, Kwame Nkrumah, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Sukarno, Ho Chi Minh, Patrice Lumumba, Julius Nyerere, Frantz Fanon, and many others.
They did not agree with one another about everything. They disagreed about socialism, capitalism, nationalism, democracy, religion, political violence, economic development, and what newly independent states should become. Nor should every anti-colonial leader be romanticized simply because he opposed colonialism. Independence movements could produce authoritarian governments, corruption, repression, ethnic conflict, and new concentrations of power of their own.
Anti-imperialism does not require pretending otherwise. What these movements shared was an experience that transformed twentieth-century politics. Their societies had spent generations being told, explicitly or implicitly, that powerful nations possessed the right to organize the world for them.
They rejected that premise.
Bandung and a Different Vision of the World
In April 1955, representatives from twenty-nine Asian and African governments gathered in Bandung, Indonesia. Many represented countries that had only recently escaped colonial rule.
The Bandung Conference addressed decolonization, economic development, racial discrimination, sovereignty, peace, and the increasingly dangerous rivalry between the United States and Soviet Union. That last issue was becoming impossible to escape. The old European empires were weakening just as two enormous power blocs were consolidating. Washington wanted allies, Moscow wanted allies, and newly independent countries were under enormous pressure to choose.
Some refused the premise.
The political tradition that emerged from Bandung eventually helped produce the Non-Aligned Movement, formally established in 1961. Non-alignment did not mean every participating country remained perfectly neutral. In practice, members sometimes leaned toward one superpower, pursued their own regional ambitions, fought one another, or violated the principles they professed.
Again, the history is messy. But the underlying idea was important. Countries that had struggled to escape European colonialism did not necessarily want to become instruments of either Washington or Moscow. They wanted room to determine their own political futures.
Buried inside that idea is something modern anti-imperialism desperately needs to recover: Opposing one empire does not require joining another.
A country does not become anti-imperialist merely because it opposes the United States. An American adversary is not automatically a liberator, just as a government does not receive immunity from criticism because Washington wants it removed. Likewise, a government aligned with the United States does not automatically become an imperial puppet simply because the alliance exists.
If anti-imperialism means anything coherent, it has to be more principled than choosing teams. It has to oppose domination itself.
That distinction would become increasingly difficult to maintain because the old European empires were collapsing at precisely the moment when the world was dividing into two enormous rival power systems. The United States claimed to be defending freedom. The Soviet Union claimed to be supporting anti-colonial liberation. Both accumulated allies, clients, military relationships, intelligence networks, spheres of influence, and strategic interests. Both would intervene beyond their borders, and both would describe many of those interventions as necessary.
People struggling against imperialism would increasingly find themselves confronting a problem that still divides anti-imperialists today: What happens when opposing one empire makes you useful to another?
That is where the next part of this story begins.
