St. Louis and Empire

"Berger captures [St. Louis’s 250-year-plus peculiar] history in a thoroughly engaging and entertaining way, through biographies of key players and institutions."—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Plenty of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century St. Louisans thought their city lay at the center of the world—or should, anyway. More than a century later, St. Louis and Empire puts this dynamic and underappreciated city on the map but in a more careful and critical way. Berger’s understanding of the extraordinary mix of characters and commercial networks that tied the American heartland to the world (from Russia to Cuba to the Phillipines) offers both a new understanding of this complex city and a surprising perspective on an era every bit as ‘global’ as our own.”—Eric Sandweiss, Chair, Department of History, Indiana University

“Connecting imperial dreams and the pursuit of foreign markets to the local consequences of industrial growth and decline, emeritus professor of history Henry Berger provides a very fresh way of looking at cities. He examines urban elites and the role they have played in globalization and, perhaps surprising, the shaping of foreign, not simply domestic, policy. At once a success story and a troubling look at the growing ‘disconnect between international expansion and domestic torpidity,’ this deeply researched history uncovers the roots of contemporary globalization and its discontents.”—Jay Gitlin, Yale University, author of The Bourgeois Frontier, coeditor of Frontier Cities

''Henry W. Berger's St. Louis and Empire: 250 Years of Imperial Quest and Urban Crisis is a sweeping yet focused narrative of the city's long history as seen through the eyes of its (mostly deluded) prophets of commerce and territorial expansion. It is the product of sustained and profound reflection on mountains of original and secondary sources. . . This book is a significant achievement that eloquently bespeaks the years of labor that went into its production."- Matthew J. Mancini, Saint Louis University 

Students of American foreign policy often ignore the Midwest, assuming that the region has played no role in establishing the nation’s international goals. Henry Berger’s St. Louis and Empire, however, places St. Louis at the forefront of America’s historic quest to establish itself as the heart of a global economic empire. Berger, applies his expertise in foreign policy history to his own local-community [and] argues that St. Louis has been an outward-looking city since its founding. However, as recent events in Ferguson, Missouri, show, St. Louis’s outward focus has failed to produce widespread domestic prosperity and has left the city in a state of urban decay and decline. . . . Berger’s book offers an insightful reinterpretation of St. Louis’s history and clearly shows that the city deserves a spot at the table when discussing the historical evolution of American foreign policy. – Thomas J Gubbels, The Annals of Iowa
 

"For more than a century, St. Louis has imagined itself as at the geographical center of an imperial nation. Henry Berger's wide-spanning St Louis & Empire explains how imagined geography put pressure on the rest of world. An account of scalar relations moving from city to globe, it delineates a category of inquiry commonly invisible to both urban history and diplomatic history—that is, an individual US cities foreign relations. Illustrated with masculine portraiture that looks drawn from that dusty museum wing that patrons go out if their way to walk past, the book makes one further signal intervention. U.S. imperial history need not only be rooted out of declassified documents or the testimony of those violated by it. It is engrained in everyday urban spaces—in street and building names, in monuments, in biographies of city fathers, in portraits looming over our heads. You only have to look, Berger tells us." Andrew Friedman, Society for Historians of American Foreign Realtions 

“With a book that either defies or transcends categorization, Henry W. Berger gives us a history of St. Louis from the perspective of its imperial aspirations as expressed through two hundred and fifty years of commercial initiatives. Berger’s book. . . is as much an endorsement as a critique of this interesting and exhaustively researched work that takes the reader on an interesting and enlightening journey from the origins of St. Louis.”—Middle West Review, John Reda