The Colonial West
Whereas European countries looked to other parts of the world for new markets, resources, and territorial conquest, America focused its energies on its own Western frontier. Because westward expansion required little in the way of a massive army or colonial infrastructure, America developed a much leaner central state than its European competitors.
For example, Russian colonial staff eventually accounted for roughly 2% of Turkistan’s population, whereas American territorial staff in the West never exceeded 0.8% of the area’s population.
Unlike colonial subjects of European states, residents of the American West were represented in the national government. Upon achieving statehood, Western territories enjoyed representation disproportionate to their small populations, by virtue of having two seats each in the Senate. In the US colonial subjects were citizens who enjoyed an outlet to vent their frustrations.
As immigration drove down industrial wages, many native-born Americans picked up stakes and moved West. While the foreign-born population stood at about 15% in 1910, homegrown migrants, most of whom traveled westward, accounted for 19% of the total population.
In the colonial West anger was aimed primarily at immigrants (who drove down wages) and Eastern and foreign financial institutions.
The West may have been “tamed” by Americans, but its conquest was financed largely by foreign capital. Whereas Britain normally placed between 20% and 66% of its foreign investments in government securities — thus aiding the development of large, public-sector infrastructure projects in countries like Canada — in the United States, which had a leaner central state, only 6% of British capital went directly to the federal government. 60% went to private firms, such as railroad companies.
That is why American-style radicalism was more anticolonial than socialist, and why the demands of American radicals focused more on the regulation of utilities, railroads, and banks than on the construction of a European-style welfare state.
“Is America Really So Unique?,” Joshua Zeitz’s review of Eric Rauchway’s Blessed Among Nations