Institutions of empire

This dissertation examines the governance of overseas colonies as a formative moment in American state development. Between the Spanish-American War and World War I, the United States acquired, governed, and attempted to develop ten overseas colonies and dependencies. Yet the American state approached colonial management in a variety of ways. After establishing the legal and bureaucratic institutions necessary to govern the Philippines and Puerto Rico, formal colonization was replaced with a system of informal colonialism through military pressure and financial incentive. Given a system of separated powers and a relatively weak central state, the dissertation asks how the United States confronted such drastically new responsibilities in governance, and how the empire continued to expand in the face of public indifference and congressional obstruction. Drawing on archival and quantitative data, the study focuses principally upon two cases of American imperial governance--the Philippines and the Dominican Republic--to investigate this variation in U.S. colonial control. The dissertation explains this shift from formal, centrally managed imperialism to more indirect forms of imperial rule as a strategic move by the president and executive officials to maximize their discretion over American foreign affairs, while minimizing congressional supervision. It argues that Congress's initial delegation of nearly all responsibility for colonial rule--a task that promised few district-specific benefits or spoils--led to the creation of new governance patterns that made the executive much less reliant on domestic state capacity in foreign affairs. This was due, in part, to the multidivisional form of the colonial state, which allowed for easy coordination among bureaucratic agents, but contributed to informational asymmetries that dramatically increased the costs of congressional supervision. American executive officials built upon this favorable organizational hierarchy through their management of information flows to Congress and developed close ties to private interests outside the American state. As a result of its decision to delegate responsibility for colonial management, Congress became more dependent on executive officials for information and administration, while the American colonial state became more autonomous from Congress. The dissertation closes with an account of how this formative moment in American state development contributed to presidential dominance of American foreign affairs.