THE WAR OF 1898: THE BEGINNING OF THE NEW US IMPERIALISM
1898 is a crucial year for both Spanish and American historiography. In the first case, this date is related to the one known as the "98 disaster": the loss of the colonies of Cuba, the Philippines and Puerto Rico, the latest possessions of, at the end of the 19th century, decadent and convulsive Spanish Spanish empire. The American victory in the conflict originated a current of thought in Spain that was critical of its results and advocated the regeneration of the Spanish nation, in which many intellectuals of the time were registered. For the United States, the Spanish-American war was the end of a process of economic and social changes that had transformed the country into the previous decades, as well as the beginning of its effective expansion towards the Caribbean and the Pacific. It is from this perspective from where we will approach the Spanish-American war.
The objective that has promoted the realization of this work, therefore, is to know how the Spanish-American war was lived from the American optics and what are the main elements that allow to consider this event as the origin of a new American imperialism. For this, both the internal and exterior policy of the United States will be attended, trying to identify what elements have been present in the development of the Nation against those who would assume a change in the American policy of the end of the century.
In the first section, we will talk about the background to the conflict of 1898;These refer to a multitude of political, economic and social factors that were present in the last third of the 19th century. American foreign policy would evolve from a policy of colonization and territorial expansion towards a new model of political and commercial influence, which would begin to carry out after the civil war. At an economic level, the beginning of a serious crisis in 1893 that caused great social mismatches after decades of uncontrolled industrialization and mass immigration. The implications they had in the renewal of American thought of the 1890s will also be attended to a series of concepts developed throughout the American political tradition such as the Monroe doctrine (and the evolution of its meaning at the end of the 19th century)or the idea of "manifest destiny", inherited from continental expansion.
In the second section we address the evolution of American policy from the outbreak of the Cuban insurrection of 1895 to the negotiations of the Paris Treaty of 1898. In these years, the imperialist issue was invoked in political and social debates, as well as in the new sensationalist press, whose influence during the conflict was also very important. Since the end of the 1880s and early 90European imperialist powers, such as Democratic candidate William J. Bryan, even leading politicians and military, such as Alfred Theyer Maham, Henry Cabot Lodge or the future president Theodore Roosevelt, which would position themselves in favor of a new role of the United States appropriate to its importance in the world economy. These voices in favor of an expansionist policy were based on the development of naval power in order to expand US influence in two directions: towards the Caribbean, where there were many interests focused on the construction of an interoceanic channel in Central America, and the Pacific,where tensions between imperialist powers were increasing by the control of Asian markets.
Finally, issues related to the result of war and the transfer of Spanish colonies to the US government will be addressed. At this point we will refer, on the one hand, to foreign policy with Cuba and the organization of the island, where a military administration would be established after the war until 1902. Subsequently, it would be reduced by its sovereignty to the prerogatives that Washington would impose in the Cuban Constitution through the Platt amendment. In practice, Cuba would be constituted as an American protectorate. Puerto Rico and the Philippines, however, if they would be directly incorporated into the United States. Regarding the latter, the debates about its political status and the insurrectionary process starring the Filipino nationalists from the end of the war with Spain until the stabilization of the archipelago that same year will also be addressed that same year.
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