Imperial Insecurity: Alaskan Fishing and Ambitions for U.S. Empire in the Northeast Pacific, 1854-1911

Historians of the nineteenth-century United States have attributed too much credit to the concept of Manifest Destiny in American expansion. Expansion was not inevitable, nor did contemporaries believe it so. This thesis argues that American expansion was marked by weakness just as much as it was by strength. Applying an emotional analysis to the works of politicians, military officials, and journalists reveals considerable anxiety over the vulnerability of the United States coast in the Northeast Pacific. The threat of the British empire and its naval and commercial strength at sea was of particular concern for American contemporaries. This unique form of institutional insecurity is defined as state anxiety, a concept this project defines as an undercurrent of anxiety which informed and drove American expansion. The purchase of Alaska and the development of coastal fishing, analyzed using this emotional methodology, is shown to have been incredibly important in securing the North American Pacific coastline against the perceived threat of British imperial interference. Seeking security and advantage over a rival of superior strength, the United States looked to Alaska as a potential check on the power of the British empire in the Pacific. The U.S. possession of Alaskan inlets, harbors, and fishing grounds was viewed as a material, economic, and militaristic advantage over Britain in the Pacific, as commercial fishing was recognized as the basis of all great naval powers in history. Fishing's growth in the Northeast Pacific was accompanied by the increased presence of the United States national government in the Pacific, as revenue cutters policed Alaskan fishing grounds for the protection of fish stocks from domestic and foreign poaching. The comingled growth of a United States commercial and naval presence secured what was a vulnerability for the United States in the Northeast Pacific. Through applying an emotional methodology to the history of American expansion, something as ordinary as fishing is revealed to have been significant in matters of territorial sovereignty and imperialism.