Una giovane potenza con ambizioni mondiali

The article discusses the emergence of US power in the world, at the end of the XIX century, and the historiography that places it within the contours of Euro-American imperialism in an age of rapid globalization. The US shared many cultural, economic and "civilizational" features with European colonialism but its political tradition banned direct territorial and administrative control of other nations, while its racial understanding of republicanism excluded integration within its own polity. The ad hoc solutions on the ground were varied, and the turn-of-the-century American empire was multi-faceted, if not contradictory, but its overall thrust already pointed to the universal, deterritorialized, liberal "empire of modernity" soon to come