The Price of Empire: American Entrepreneurs and the Origins of America's First Pacific Empire - Paperbackby Miles M. Evers (Author), Eric Grynaviski (Author) The United States was an upside down British Empire. It had an agrarian economy, few large investors, and no territorial holdings outside of North America. However, decades before the Spanish American War, the United States quietly began to establish an empire across thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean. While conventional wisdom suggests that large interests the military and major business interests