American Enterprise Institute

The American Revolution and America’s Role in the World

Founding American Foreign Policy Notes

  1. The source of this quote is contested, but Nigel Rees offers a helpful discussion of its origins in Nigel Rees, ed., Brewer’s Famous Quotations (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006), 306.
  2. Enoch Powell, Joseph Chamberlain (Thames & Hudson, 1977), 151.
  3. Ralph Waldo Emerson attributed this line to Ames in his 1844 essay “Politics.” Available in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: First and Second Series, ed. Irwin Edman (Harper Colophon Books, 1981), 412.
  4. A. G. Hopkins, American Empire: A Global History (Princeton University Press, 2018), 110, 180.
  5. Douglas A. Irwin, Clashing over Commerce: A History of US Trade Policy (University of Chicago Press, 2017), 96.
  6. Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (Routledge, 2002), 113.
  7. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (University of North Carolina Press, 1954), 77.
  8. These figures draw on the historical tables made available by the Office of Management and Budget at White House, “Historical Tables,” https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/information-resources/budget/historical-tables/.
  9. This quote is from Hamilton’s original draft of Washington’s Farewell Address. It can be found in Selected Writings and Speeches of Alexander Hamilton, ed. Morton J. Frisch (AEI Press, 1985), 436.
  10. Alexander Hamilton, “Alexander Hamilton’s Final Version of the Report on the Subject of Manufactures,” December 5, 1791, Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-10-02-0001-0007.
  11. Gordon C. Bjork, “The Weaning of the American Economy: Independence, Market Changes, and Economic Development,” The Journal of Economic History 24, no. 4 (1964): 541–60, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2115760.
  12. Quoted in Bradford Perkins, The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, vol. 1, The Creation of a Republican Empire, 1776–1865 (Cambridge University Press, 1993), 56.
  13. Perkins, The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, 1:56.
  14. James Madison to Richard Henry Lee, July 7, 1785, Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-08-02-0168.
  15. Douglass North, “The United States Balance of Payments, 1790–1860,” in Trends in the American Economy in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton University Press, 1960), 581.
  16. North, “The United States Balance of Payments, 1790–1860,” 588.
  17. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 71.
  18. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, Dictionary of American Biography, ed. Dumas Malone (Scribner’s, 1934), 615.
  19. Richard Sylla and Robert E. Wright, “Scale and Scope in Early American Business History: The ‘Fortune 500’ of 1812,” Working Paper No. 224 (Institute for New Economic Thinking, August 3, 2024), https://www.ineteconomics.org/research/research-papers/scale-and-scope-in-early-american-business-history-the-fortune-500-of-1812.
  20. Douglas A. Irwin, “The Welfare Cost of Autarky: Evidence from the Jeffersonian Trade Embargo, 1807–1809,” Working Paper No. 8692 (National Bureau of Economic Research, December 2001), https://www.nber.org/papers/w8692.
  21. North, “The United States Balance of Payments, 1790–1860,” 583.
  22. Hopkins, American Empire, 84.
  23. Walter Russell Mead, God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 160.