"A System of Foreign Colonies": Space, Nation, and Empire in the Alaska Purchase

Through an analysis of the arguments about climate, contiguity, and distance made by opponents of the Alaska Purchase, this essay examines the spatial anxieties shadowing the evolution of US expansionism during a postwar moment in which innovation in, and the expansion of, technological systems was revolutionizing imperial possibilities. It traces the role of space in identifying national compatibility and, relatedly, in identifying human and racial difference. The first part focuses on how misperceptions that Alaska's climate was exceedingly and uniformly cold encouraged a belief that the region could not fit within a framework of territorial expansion that was still primarily predicated on visions of white settlement. In the second part, this essay considers the place of territorial contiguity in the expansionist imagination, showing how policymakers and pundits worried that noncontiguous expansion was a harbinger of disunity, even as old spatial precepts were being challenged by new imperial realities.