How and to what extent the United States developed an empire are questions of longstanding interest to scholars of political science, international relations, and history. The purely historical dimensions of the questions are fascinating; and American policy continues to ensure their ongoing relevance. Miles M. Evers and Eric Grynaviski’s new book, The Price of Empire: American Entrepreneurs and the Origins of America’s First Pacific Empire, provides a fresh and provocative perspective on these issues. The book’s central claim is that American entrepreneurs searching for commercial and strategic advantages in overseas extraction inexorably drove the American state into its first imperial claims in the Pacific; as a corollary, there was no central design by—and scarcely any direct interest for—the American state to enter the empire business then and there. Evers and Grynaviski’s original and compelling analysis contains rich implications for the study of international affairs, the comparative study of empires, and the analysis of decision making in the American state.

Evers and Grynaviski carefully decompose the transmission belt from entrepreneurial interests to state empire into three stages, or mechanisms. In the first stage of the process, rising prices for extractive commodities induce entrepreneurs to search out new sources of supply, including by making large land claims overseas. This is dubbed the price mechanism in the book. The second stage is the threat mechanism. When adverse changes in local politics or hostile competition from foreign powers threaten entrepreneurs’ profit sources, they lobby the U.S. government for protection. The third stage is the lobbying mechanism, in which entrepreneurs use “positional resources” such as private information about island politics or market conditions to draw in official state support for their claims. State support, then, amounts to and culminates in an American empire.

Evers and Grynaviski use this theory to explain two broad types of events in early U.S.-Pacific imperialism. First, they are able to explain why the United States acquired overseas possessions with no discernible, direct strategic import for U.S. national security and which offered only miniscule markets for American domestic output. This covers cases of imperial expansion such as claims for unoccupied islands under the Guano Act of 1856 and the coconut and copra plantations of American Samoa. Second, they can clarify why, before the 1890s, the United States did not assert claims over many strategically important sites that were nevertheless unclaimed by European powers. The book convincingly shows that, in contrast to prevailing accounts, neither strategic value (either at the time of initial claim or over the twentieth century) nor population size (hence market potential) explain U.S. imperial claims in the Pacific through most of the nineteenth century. What does effectively explain both positive and negative cases of U.S.-Pacific imperialism, however, is first the presence of profit opportunities in extractive commodities for private American entrepreneurs, followed by threats to those opportunities, and in turn a strong lobbying response toward the government by those entrepreneurs.

An important locus of analysis is the role of state interests in driving imperial expansion. The scope of the book excludes some of the largest, most well-trodden sites of American empire, such as the Philippines or Puerto Rico. State interests or grand strategy may well have led America to empire in cases other than those analyzed in the book, even in the absence of private entrepreneurial interest. But in the telling of the book’s cases, entrepreneurs in an imperial lobby leveraged their “positional” advantages to manipulate the United States into staking imperial claims, despite that state initially having no interest at stake. Whatever advantages or interests the American state later found in some of these islands—for instance, the Midway Atoll served as a staging point for naval operations in World War II—was a matter of discovering how to use what the state already claimed, not of claiming the territory because of potential future use. The analytical move here is precise: by eliminating state interests as a driver of imperialism, Evers and Grynaviski negate the realist position that empires are developed to secure state advantages.

This last step of the transmission belt—that lobbyists manipulated the US into developing an empire despite no state interest to do so—is the hardest part of the argument to sustain. Indeed, while Evers and Grynaviski marshal a strong case for entrepreneurial interest as the leading force behind specific island claims, the evidence is less compelling for lobbyist manipulation of the government, because there are other alternative interpretations. In the case of early American imperialism, we know that powerful US policy makers desired to lay claim on overseas territories, both for the “option value” of however they might turn out to be useful, even if such advantages were not known at the time, and because such acquisitions signalled America’s maturation as a world power. Consider, then, a thought experiment: if those policy makers desired to extend claims with (a) little direct risk of European war and (b) little direct government outlay or personnel to actually hold the territory, what kind of system would they design? A reasonable candidate is one in which private entrepreneurs do the spade work of finding and holding territory, provided such efforts do not conflict with the claims of other world powers. In this light, vigorous lobbying by an entrepreneur with a local stake is important not because it manipulates the government, but because it signals the entrepreneur’s willingness to sustain their claim over a long term—thereby achieving objectives of key actors in the government. In fact, such a system is reasonably close to the one depicted in The Price of Empire. The difference in interpretations is more than a matter of inflection: in the one sketched here, state interests (or at least, the policy interests of certain senior actors in the state) are indeed served and advanced through the early American model of empire-by-entrepreneur, but the costs are largely outsourced to the private sector.

In this way, early American imperialism turns out to be, arguably, not so different from early English imperialism. Evers and Grynaviski note how different the early American formula was from later British versions in India and Africa—but this is comparing the headwaters of American imperialism to the mid-stream of the British empire. Looking back to the seventeenth century beginnings of England’s empire, one again finds a state with no design or plan for its overseas claims, and with no administrative hierarchy by which to govern them. Instead, the state built its first empire through private entrepreneurs who found sites for settlement (without causing costly European wars), figured out how to make a profit there, and actually held the territory. England, as America, then built on those entrepreneurial claims to find new holdings and backfill a state apparatus for direct administration. In both the early English and American cases, these “entrepreneurial empires” leave ample room for the designs of the state as important moving parts.

One upshot is that Evers and Grynaviski have opened an interesting avenue for further research on the use of commercial agents to build empires. In general, when and why do states follow this model? The Price of Empire deserves praise not just for the future work it will inspire, but for its clear and compelling assessment of the entrepreneurial origins of America’s claims in the Pacific. Scholars of American empire will change their reading of case evidence in light of this book. Scholars of modern empires in general will find it a model for the interplay of theory development and qualitative case evidence. In these respects, The Price of Empire will reward careful study by a wide range of scholars.