Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2025
This chapter uses ecological footprint analysis to introduce ways that spatial analysis can broaden understandings of foreign relations history. It argues that ecological footprint analysis can help foreign relations historians account for power, as it relates to such matters as US access to resources and goods and impacts on people and ecosystems. Among the specific topics considered are consumerism, resource wars, military operations, production, extraction, development ideologies, commodity chains, commodity webs, waste, sacrifice zones, environmental harm, environmentalist movements, climate diplomacy, imperial debris, slow violence, and the shifting baseline syndrome. The latter part of the chapter opens out to a larger landscape of spatial approaches to US foreign relations history. Topics addressed in this section include geographic analyses (geostrategy, empire of bases, and spheres of influence), border formation, mental maps, framing choices (the frontier, borderlands, middle ground, native ground, outposts, inposts, peripheries, centers, metropoles, hinterlands, places of encounter, home fronts, and frontlines), units of analysis (logo maps, the Greater United States, bilateral relations, regions, nodal points, contact zones, ocean worlds, world systems, global governance, and translocal, transnational, and transimperial approaches), scale (ranging from specific locations, such as refugee camps, to planetary history), and abstract spatializations (technoscapes, mediascapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes).
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