Michael A. Verney, A Great and Rising Nation: Naval Exploration and Global Empire in the Early US Republic by Anthony Peebler

No understanding of American national development during the Early Republic and antebellum period is complete without the acknowledgement of the role played by naval exploration in developing early visions of American global empire.While the United States expanded its territory across the North American continent, it sought to achieve imperial ambitions abroad through US Navy-led exploring expeditions.The republican character of many American citizens did not allow explorationists to embark on the expeditions for the same government-initiated reasons that Europeans had.Rather, explorationists found interest groups within the United States to support their enterprise, transforming a lack of interest in expeditions at the end of the War of 1812 to the funding of voyages much larger than European counterparts by the 1850s.In A Great and Rising Nation: Naval Exploration and Global Empire in the Early Republic, Michael Verney argues that the United States' attempts to fulfil its imperial ambitions during the antebellum period were "neither wholly exceptional nor unexceptional" (6).He also asserts that US imperialism was multidimensional, composed of "republicanism, capitalism, Protestantism, white supremacy, traditional gender roles, and imperial expansion" (7).Interests representing these several dimensions promoted exploring expeditions to different parts of the Pacific, the Middle East, South America, and even into the Arctic Circle.Verney masterfully uses case studies of several US expeditions to demonstrate their use for various imperial ends.Early attempts to fund the first exploring expedition, which, though boasting both government and private supporters, ultimately lost favour in Congress due to republican fears of such an endeavour strengthening the central government.The explorationists found an unlikely ally in President Andrew Jackson.Though he at first championed fiscal restraint over naval adventures, Jackson adapted the idea of exploration to his own ends, namely expanding US naval influence in regions where Jacksonian capitalism had attempted to break into.The resulting voyage, known as the US Exploring Expedition (1838-42), both communicated American government interest in protecting Jacksonian capitalism (even resorting to racial violence in Fiji to achieve that end) and produced American charts of the Pacific that attempted to "equalize opportunity for working white men and the capitalist investors who supplied them" (72).Beyond examining the stated goals of the expedition, Verney devotes

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