Between the American Civil War and the outbreak of world War I, global history was transformed by two events: the United States's rise to the status of a great world power (indeed, the world's greatest economic power) and the eruption of nineteenth- and twentieth-century revolutions in Mexico, China, Russia, Cuba, the Philippines, Hawaii, Panama, Nicaragua, and elsewhere. The American Search for Opportunity traces the U.S. foreign policy between 1865 and 1913, linking these two historic trends by noting how the United States - usually thought of as antirevolutionary and embarked on a 'search for order' during this era - actually was a determinative force in helping to trigger these revolutions. Walter LaFeber argues that industrialization fuelled centralisation: Post-Civil War America remained a vast, unwieldy country of isolated, parochial communities, but the federal government and a new corporate capitalism now had the power to invade these areas and integrate them into an industrialization, railway-linked nation-state. The furious pace of economic growth in America attracted refugees from all parts of the world. Professor LaFeber describes and influx of immigration so enormous that it led to America's first exclusionary immigration act. In 1882, the United States passed legislation preventing all Chinese immigrant labour, skilled and unskilled, from entering the country for the next 10 years.

‘LaFeber’s new book The American Search for Opportunity, 1865–1913, is important for one central reason: the debut of an audacious new thesis on the era of modernisation and empire … LaFeber's thesis is significant in constitutional s well as diplomatic history. This is daring business … [His] book is a breeze to read - stimulating, lively, fresh … sometimes rolling with rhetorical power. As his books on the Panama Canal and Central America, he writes informatively and easily about the states and societies with which the United States dealt.’

Source: The Journal of American-East Asian Relations

‘Happily the new, four-volume Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations provides an opportunity to scan the past two centuries for indications of the shape of foreign policy in the post-Cold War world. Each of the four books stands on its own. Each offers a clear overview of a particular period written by a distinguished historian drawing on a considerable body of research,itself the product of decades of scholarly endeavour. None is simply a chronicle of events.’

Source: World Policy Journal

‘The four volumes in this new offering from Cambridge University Press provide a magisterial overview of American diplomatic history from the Revolution to 1991. The four authors are all recognised experts in the periods they cover. These volumes are much more than surveys; each author shares with the reader his interpretation of the larger historical scholarship for years to come.’

Source: Library Journal