The Dividends of Democracy's Destruction: Surplus, Ideology, and Militarism in the Turn to Empire in Du Bois's Black Reconstruction.

This article analyzes W.E.B. Du Bois's *Black Reconstruction* to argue that the failure of Reconstruction in the United States facilitated the country's emergence as an imperial power. It highlights how a political coalition among the industrial North, Southern landowners, and white workers dismantled the emancipatory gains of Black freedmen, enabling the accumulation of surplus capital, militarism, and racist ideologies that underpinned U.S. imperial expansion. The paper further explores Du Bois's critique of democracy, technology, and national identity, emphasizing his turn toward transnational Black solidarity and anticolonial political action as necessary responses to the interconnected domestic and global structures of racialized capitalism and imperialism. This reading situates Du Bois's work as foundational for understanding the ethical and political challenges of resisting a technologized, possessive nationalism that sustains racial oppression both within the U.S. and internationally.