1998/11/01 by Ada Ferrer · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Cuban History and Society
paper · pdf · doi:10.1215/00182168-78.4.663
openalex publication_date 1998/11/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/24
The year I898 marked a momentous transformation: the collapse of a fourhundred-year-old Spanish empire and the formal emergence of a new and significandy more powerful American one. Seen from the perspectives of the metropoles, this transformation takes on the look of inevitabilityof the forward and inexorable march of time and history. The old empire, Spain, lost its last two possessions in the Americas long after the onset of its imperial decline and almost a century after the erosion of most of its empire in South and Central America. From the perspective of the new empire, the United States, the acquisition of Spanish territories in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam (as well as the annexation of Hawaii in the same year) represented America's historic and inevitable encounter with the world, when the United States deigned to share its political ideals with the rest of humanity or (depending on one's perspective) scrambled to acquire new markets for ever-expanding industries. But if in imperial eyes the transformations of I898 seemed unsurprising-simply the manifestation of processes long in the making-from the perspective of individuals living these transformations in the colonies, the events of I898 looked like something else entirely.