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Emily S. Rosenberg, The Invisible Protectorate: The United States, Liberia, and the Evolution of Neocolonialism, 1909–40, Diplomatic History, Volume 9, Issue 3, July 1985, Pages 191–214, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7709.1985.tb00532.x
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In the early twentieth century the United States established supervisory controls over a number of countries, giving them a status somewhere between formal colonies and full independence. Historians have studied motivations, methods, and results of the “special relationship” of the United States with Cuba, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Haiti, and this well-developed historiography, in turn, has been incorporated into textbooks. But Liberia, a country that followed a pattern similar to these Caribbean “protectorates,” remains consistently missing from most histories of American foreign policy. The invisibility of Liberia is unfortunate. Its relations with the United States reflect the major trends in political economy between the administrations of Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt and provide an illuminating case study of issues relating to neocolonialism.1
Modern Liberia was an American undertaking from the start. The American Colonization Society, founded in 1816, established a settlement of exslaves, called it Monrovia after the president of the United States, and provided an early constitution. As the newcomers to Africa expanded their settlement along the west coast, the Liberian government changed from being the ward of a private body in the United States—the Colonization Society—into an independent state. The Americo-Liberian rulers issued a declaration of independence in 1847 and drew up a constitution; both documents were modeled closely upon U.S. precedents. Within the next fifteen years Britain, France, the United States, and other major powers formally recognized Liberia, and it followed Haiti as the world's second independent black republic.2
