[f. prec. + -IST.] One who advocates a policy or a theory of expansion, esp. an advocate of expansion of the currency. Also attrib.
1841. York Gaz. (Pa.), 26 Jan., 1/6. The actual and destructive war which was waged upon those very [commercial] interests, was in fact carried on by the expansionists and the advocates of a bloated paper currency themselves.
1849. Cleveland Herald, 28 Nov., 3/1. They [a few Locofocos] are, to-day, slave-expansionists according to the Cass platform…. This paper [‘Cleveland Plain Dealer’] is printed in the ‘infected district’ of Northern Ohio, and caters for the Locofoco expansionists and the ‘Free Democracy.’
1862. Lit. Churchm., VIII. 339/1. ‘We look for the time’ (says the Expansionist) ‘and doubt not it will come,’ [etc.].
1881. Nation (N.Y.), XXXII. 160/1. Whether the new Secretary … would be an expansionist or a contractionist.
1884. Goldw. Smith, Expansion of Eng., in Contemp. Rev., April, 531. Standing on his historical island, the British Expansionist sees all the other communities of the race revolving round him.
1886. F. B. Jevons, in Jrnl. Hellenic Studies, VII. 292. The expansionists [i.e., those who maintain that the Iliad was ‘expanded’ from an original shorter poem] therefore have set to work to remove these incrustations. Ibid., VII. 295. Although Fick himself supports the expansionist theory, his great discovery does not.
