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Podcast: New Books in Economic and Business History
Episode: Miles M. Evers and Eric Grynaviski, "The Price of Empire: American Entrepreneurs and the Origins of America's First Pacific Empire" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
Description: The United States was an upside-down British Empire. It had an agrarian economy, few large investors, and no territorial holdings outside of North America. However, decades before the Spanish-American War, the United States quietly began to establish an empire across thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean.While conventional wisdom suggests that large interests – the military and major business interests – drove American imperialism, The Price of Empire: American Entrepreneurs and the Origins of America's First Pacific Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2024) argues that early American imperialism was driven by small entrepreneurs. When commodity prices boomed, these small entrepreneurs took risks...