Marked Out by the Will of Heaven to Sway the Destinies of Half the Globe:” The Peculiar Imperialism of the United States and Russia///Tanr Taraf ndan Dünyan n Yar s n n Kaderini Tayin in Belirlenenler:‖ Amerika Birle ik Devletleri ve Rusya‘n n S rad S mürgecilikleri

It is argued in this paper that during the era of global imperialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while nations like Great Britain, France, and other European powers were amassing far-flung overseas empires, the United States and Russia engaged in a different form of imperialism. In the United States, what has traditionally been characterized as ―frontier expansion,‖ and not as ―imperialism,‖ has more recently been recast. Scholarship, especially since 1980, has characterized U.S. expansion from the initial 13 colonies on the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific coast explicitly as imperialistic. Similarly, recent scholarship on Russian expansion has also questioned both pre-revolutionary and Soviet claims that this also was not imperialistic. What scholars have not addressed are the parallels between American and Russian expansionist regimes with a view to characterizing how overland imperialism was different in its motivations and outcomes from the more traditional overseas imperialism engaged in by other contemporary expansionist powers. This article aims to fill this gap in the literature.