Historians used to describe turn-of-the-twentieth-century U.S. imperialism as something new and unprecedented. Now they stress continuities between foreign policy in this era and the nation’s earlier, relentless expansion across North America. Wars against native peoples had occurred almost continuously since the country’s founding; in the 1840s, the United States had annexed a third of Mexico. The United States never administered a large colonial empire, as did European powers like Spain, England, and Germany, partly because it had a plentiful supply of natural resources in the American West. But policymakers undertook a determined quest for global markets. Events in the 1890s opened opportunities to pursue this goal in new ways.