Untitled

crossing empires
american encounters / global interactions

A series edited by Gilbert M. Joseph and Penny von Eschen
This series aims to stimulate critical perspectives and fresh interpretive frameworks for
scholarship on the history of the imposing global presence of the United States. Its primary
concerns include the deployment and contestation of power, the construction and decon
struction of cultural and political borders, the fluid meaning of intercultural encounters,
and the complex interplay between the global and the local. American Encounters seeks
to strengthen dialogue and collaboration between historians of U.S. international relations
and area studies specialists.
The series encourages scholarship based on multiarchive historical research. At the same
time, it supports a recognition of the representational character of all stories about the
past and promotes critical inquiry into issues of subjectivity and narrative. In the pro
cess, American Encounters strives to understand the context in which meanings related
to nations, cultures, and political economy are continually produced, challenged, and re
shaped.
crossing empires
taking u.s. history into
transimperial terrain
Edited by Kristin L. Hoganson and Jay Sexton
Duke University Press Durham and London 2020

© 2020 duke university press
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hoganson, Kristin L., editor. | Sexton, Jay, [date] editor.
Title: Crossing empires : taking U.S. history into transimperial
terrain / edited by Kristin Hoganson and Jay Sexton.
Other titles: American encounters/global interactions.
Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2020. | Series:
American encounters / global interactions | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019015472 (print) |
LCCN 2019017689 (ebook)
ISBN 9781478006039 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 9781478006947 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Transnationalism. | Cosmopolitanism—
United States. | Transnationalism—Political aspects—
United States. | International relations.
Classification: LCC JZ1320 .C76 2020 (print) |
LCC JZ1320 (ebook) | DDC 327.73—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019015472
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019017689
Cover art: Fracked World. © Rebecca Riley. Courtesy of the

artist.
Contents
Preface ix
Introduction 1
Kristin L. Hoganson and Jay Sexton
part i. in pursuit of profit

1. Fur Sealing and Unsettled Sovereignties 25
John Soluri
2. Crossing the Rift: American Steel and Colonial Labor

in Britain’s East Africa Protectorate 46
Stephen Tuffnell
part ii. transimperial politics

3. “Our Indian Empire”: The Transimperial
Origins of U.S. Liberal Imperialism 69
Michel Gobat
4. Empire, Democracy, and Discipline:

The Transimperial History of the Secret Ballot 93
Julian Go
5. Medicine to Drug: Opium’s Transimperial Journey 112

Anne L. Foster
part iii. governing structures
6. One Service, Three Systems, Many Empires:
The U.S. Consular Service and the Growth of
U.S. Global Power, 1789–1924 135
Nicole M. Phelps
7. Transimperial Roots of American Anti-Imperialism:

The Transatlantic Radicalism of Free Trade, 1846–1920 159
Marc-William Palen
8. The Permeable South: Imperial Interactivities

in the Islamic Philippines, 1899–1930s 183
Oliver Charbonneau
part iv. living transimperially

9. African American Migration and the Climatic
Language of Anglophone Settler Colonialism 205
Ikuko Asaka
10. Entangled in Empires: British Antillean

Migrations in the World of the Panama Canal 222
Julie Greene
11. World War II and the Promise of Normalcy:

Overlapping Empires and Everyday Lives in the Philippines 241
Genevieve Clutario
part v. res ist ance across empires

12. Fighting John Bull and Uncle Sam:
South Asian Revolutionaries Confront the Modern State 261
Moon-Ho Jung
13. Indigenous Child Removal and Transimperial Indigenous

Women’s Activism across Settler Colonial Nations
in the Late Twentieth Century 281
Margaret D. Jacobs
vi contents
Bibliography 303
Contributors 335
Index 339
contents vii
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Preface
This book began as a conference held at Oxford’s Rothermere American In

stitute. A group of scholars assembled to explore the various imperial terrains
through which people, ideas, and things circulated, as well as to unpack the lay
ered experiences of empire found in particular communities and places. “The
central challenge posed by this conference,” the call for papers asserted, “is to
make the imperial visible in ways that early work in transnational history has
not.” The project has gone through many twists and expansive turns since then,
but its core objective of uncovering and making sense of transimperial phenom
ena, connections, and relations has remained.
As is always the case, this book is the product of the particular moment in
which it was written. The transnational, global, and imperial turns of recent
historical writing inform the essays that follow. As the introduction argues, this
scholarship has revealed the limits of national history, while opening up new
doors to the power relationships central to the study of empire. In the bigger
picture, the unexpected developments of recent years also left their mark on
this volume. The conference was a held a month before the Brexit referendum;
the essays w ere drafted during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign and its
aftershocks. These events were more than expressions of resurgent nationalism.
They were also the unanticipated products of the imperial entanglements that
have given modern globalization its distinctive form: immigration; economic
inequality; ethnic, racial, gender, and cultural tensions; and the persistence of
geopolitical rivalries. In this age of conflict over the terms of global integration,
it behooves us to look anew at imperial crossings, conflicts, and inheritances.
In the course of producing this volume, we have incurred many intellectual
debts. We came to this topic not only through our own research but also through
the findings of our students, among them David Greenstein, Matt Harshman,
Mike Hughes, Koji Ito, Mandy Izadi, Tariq Khan, Josh Levy, Seb Page, Mark
Petersen, Karen Phoenix, Andy Siebert, David Sim, Yuki Takauchi, and Megan
White. The pages that follow bear the imprint of the many interventions and
comments made by those who participated in the conference, including Na
than Cardon, John Darwin, Brian DeLay, Augusto Espiritu, Nick Guyatt, Paul
Kramer, Diana Paton, Tamson Pietsch, and Karine Walther. Skye Montgomery,
Koji Ito, and Ed Green provided essential organizational support as well as in
sights drawn from their scholarly expertise. Big thanks are also owed to the
anonymous peer reviewers of the manuscript and to Duke University Press edi
tor Miriam Angress, who has been a pleasure to work with.
We gratefully acknowledge the institutional support that made the confer
ence possible. Without the backing of the Vere Harmsworth Professorship and
the Rothermere American Institute this project would never have happened.
We are likewise beholden to the great enablers at the Rothermere Institute:
Nigel Bowles, Huw David, Jane Rawson, and Jo Steventon. Further support
came from The Queen’s College, Corpus Christi College, St. Anne’s College, the
University of Illinois, and the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy at
the University of Missouri.
x preface
introduction
Kristin L. Hoganson and Jay Sexton
This book originated in a desire to call out empire, which has all too often slunk
out of view as nation-centered histories have opened up to the world. The na
tionalist fervor of recent years has only underscored the value of both the trans
and the imperial approaches brought together in this volume. In such times, it is
worth recalling that no polity has ever gone it alone, whether rising or declining
in might, and that only-us nationalism has a long history of entwinement with
imperialist impulses. Times of unraveling likewise make us take heed of the
raveling, reminding us that global connections have never been inevitable, that
our own global moment is the contingent product of high-stakes struggles over
power. The fabric of our times has been knit together over millennia, unevenly,
with plenty of dropped stitches and new threads. Some of the strands may have
torn over time, but we are still enmeshed in the residual filaments of the past.
One such filament, heralded with great acclaim in its day, was the first trans
atlantic cable. Laid from Ireland to Newfoundland in 1858, this cable enabled
electrical impulses to be sent via a copper wire from one shore of the A tlantic
to the other. Policymakers at the time saw this and subsequent cables as stra
tegically valuable technologies and as conduits for diplomatic dispatches.
Recognizing the usefulness of cables for state purposes, officials helped negoti
ate cable arrangements and offered subsidies to cable firms.1 Cable commu
nications affected international relations by reducing the likelihood of major
battles being fought after the declaration of peace and reducing the autonomy
granted by foreign offices to their diplomats. They also accelerated the pace of
diplomacy, at times heightening the pressure on policymakers to act hastily in
response to inflamed public passions and hair-trigger military dynamics.2
Yet even as transatlantic cables affected international relations—that is, of
ficial relations between nation-states—most of the signals they transmitted
carried market updates, syndicate news, and other nonstate messages. The po
tential for profit, not just state interest, motivated private-sector investment in
cables. The greatest champion of the transatlantic telegraph was not a president
or a prime minister but the Anglo-American financier Cyrus Field, the master
mind of the Atlantic Telegraph Company. Field recognized that monetary value
could be extracted from the accelerated flow of information. By the 1860s,
steam technology had reduced the time lag of news across the Atlantic by sev
eral weeks, to less than ten days.3 The telegraph, however, transported informa
tion across the Atlantic in hours and for short messages, mere minutes. This
new communications technology kept readers up to date on important develop
ments in business, politics, even weather, thus bringing a range of markets on
either side of the Atlantic into closer sync, felting global capital more densely.4
Given that the first transatlantic cable did not so much connect nation-states
as it connected a variety of nonstate actors and interests across national bound
aries, enabling quicker U.S.-British connections via Canada, the resulting histo
ries might seem to merit the label transnational. Though its roots can be traced
back decades, indeed generations, in histories of migration, diaspora, move
ment politics, and the Atlantic World, the term transnational took off in U.S.
history writing in 2002, with the publication of Rethinking American History in
a Global Age, edited by Thomas Bender. This anthology aimed to make sense of
an increasingly interconnected world by breaking history out of the national
containers that had come to structure understandings of the past. In his contri
bution to Rethinking American History, Akira Iriye distinguished between the
terms international and transnational: “Whereas ‘international’ implies a rela
tionship among nations, ‘transnational’ suggests various types of interactions
across national boundaries. Extraterritorial movements of individuals, goods,
capital, and even ideas would seem to be less international than transnational
phenomena.”5 Following this definition, the transatlantic cable appears to have
resulted from transnational corporate relationships and facilitated transnational
communications.
But even the term transnational does not fully capture the relationships
stitched into being by the first transatlantic cables. Given that the cable bound
the receivers in Valentia Harbor, Ireland, to those in Trinity Bay, Newfound
land, the crews of the cable-laying ships to the p eople in the coastal towns
where they docked, the markets in London to those in New York, we could
2 kristin l. hoganson and jay sexton

regard the r esulting relationships as more site-specific than the term transnational
suggests. The word translocal can capture the smaller-scale nature of some of the
links forged by the cable, but it still doesn’t capture the entire array of the rela
tionships brought into being when the cable-laying ship reached shore. For that,
the more capacious term transborder might be more apt. We might even drop the
trans prefix in favor of different conceptual vocabularies: communications revo
lution, capitalism, entanglements, globalization, Atlantic World, and the like. But
all of these terms continue to obscure some of the most important political
formations spliced together by these cables: the powerful empires of the day.
The transatlantic cable was a product of Victorian imperialism. The copper
wires that formed the core of the cable were wrapped in an insulating layer of
gutta percha. This substance—a rubber-like gum from the gutta percha tree—
came from tropical rainforests in Siam; the British colonies of Malaya and
Sarawak; the Dutch colonies of Java, Sumatra, and Borneo; French Indochina
and the Spanish (and subsequently U.S.) colony of the Philippines. The final
layer of wrapping, before the tar and pitch outer coating, consisted of jute yarn.
Like gutta percha, jute came from the tropics, where it was grown mostly by
colonial subjects in Bengal.6 The rapid growth of global telegraphy in the late
nineteenth c entury in turn intensified imperial control and resource extraction
in these regions.7
Not only were the transatlantic cables literally wrapped in the stuff of em
pire, but they also traveled imperial routes. It is worth reiterating that the early
transatlantic cable did not directly connect the United States and England.
Rather it connected the British colonies of Ireland and Newfoundland. The
newly laid cables fed into larger webs of empire, unspooling on the eastern side
of the Atlantic to the southern tip of Africa or through the Red Sea to Aden, be
fore going on to Singapore and Hong Kong.8 One of the catalysts for the boom
in British telegraphy was the major imperial crisis of the mid-Victorian era, the
“Great Rebellion” of 1857 in India. Imperial officials, urged on by metropolitan
telegraph boosters, vowed never again to be kept weeks away from news of co
lonial uprisings.9 As the foregoing suggests, the new telegraph wires of the era
were predominantly the products of British power and enterprise.
It was through the global circuits of its former colonial master that the
United States came into telegraphic contact with Europe and its colonies. On
the American side of the Atlantic, the cables fed into the expanding telegraph
network that was helping the United States extend its power across the continent
and onward in the hemisphere. The transatlantic cables thus joined different
imperial geographies and forms. But no bond is permanent. The first transat
lantic cable snapped shortly after being laid in 1858, widening once again the
Introduction 3
distance between North America and the world during one of the g reat global
crises of the nineteenth c entury, the American Civil War. The ensuing irregu
larity of Atlantic communications contributed to the destabilization of politi
cal relations and markets during the conflict. When transatlantic telegraphic
exchange resumed in 1866, much had changed: the world’s mightiest slave
holding empire had morphed into an industrializing behemoth whose imperial
capabilities were evident in its breakneck colonization of the North American
West and rapidly expanding influence in the Caribbean and Pacific.
telegraph cables w ere not the only t hings entangled in empire in the Vic
torian era, for empires played a fundamental role in the making of the modern
world. Writing on the years since 1405, the British historian John Darwin has
argued that “the default position so far as politics went was imperial power.”10
The seeming rise of the sovereign nation-state by the seventeenth century hid
the ongoing significance of imperial states in the modern world. Prior to the
great age of decolonization in the aftermath of World War II, most of the world’s
people were incorporated into formal empires. Some of these—such as the
Qing, Habsburg, Ottoman, Russian, German, and U.S. empires—were primar
ily land based, with a central state exercising control over Indigenous people or
smaller nations. Even some polities without central state bureaucracies created
land-based empires, as seen in the example of the Comanche empire.11 Other
empires—such as the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French, British, Danish,
Belgian, Japanese, and Italian—were especially notable for overseas colonies,
stretching from New Zealand to Greenland. Some imperial formations, such
as the American republics that emerged from European rule in the nineteenth
century, have long been labeled as nations and yet existed in the gray zone
where nations shade into empires, with central states exercising colonial forms
of power over the Indigenous p eoples within their borders and often pursuing
expansionist policies at the expense of neighboring states.12 In the global era of
empire building that stretched from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries,
some colonial subjects even had colonial subjects. Not only did settler colonists
exercise power over Indigenous people, but Europeanized elites in places like
the Philippines also exercised power over animist “tribes.”13
Historians generally define empire as a political unit that encompasses an
extensive sweep of territory containing various peoples or polities. Empires
are known for according varying degrees of autonomy and different rights,
dependent on geography and population group. They are typically character
ized by vast disparities in power, sustained by the use or threat of force, as

well as through asymmetric structures of economic and ecological exchange.
Empires might extend their power through settler colonialism—meaning an in
flux of newcomers who dominate, displace, or kill Indigenous p eoples, typi
cally upending ecological systems as well.14 They might be characterized more
by territorial annexation without substantial demographic change or with sub
stantial intergroup mixing. They might rely heavily on indirect rule, that is, the
exercise of power without sovereign claims, through collaborators, economic
dominance, or military intimidation. They might mix all of the above. The term
imperial formations can serve as an umbrella for this wide range of definitions,
in the process drawing attention to the making and unmaking of empires as an
“active and contingent process.”15
Until recently, scholarship on imperial formations treated them much as
historians treated nation-states prior to calls for transnational scholarship—
that is, as well bounded. This particularly has been the case in the U.S. his
toriography, which has had to deal with a persistent case of empire denial.
To navigate this peculiar terrain, historians of the United States have written
brief a fter brief debunking the deniers. One of the leading surveys of U.S. for
eign relations through 1865, for example, opens with a ten-point list as to why
the United States should be classified as an empire.16 The persistent struggle to
“prove” the existence of U.S. empire to audiences fixed on nationalist narratives
has had the unintended effect of cordoning off U.S. imperial formations from
those established by other imperial powers. Historians have brought other em
pires into the U.S. picture mostly to add comparative angles to their uncloset
ing efforts.17
To the extent that historians have understood various empires as bumping
up against each other, clashing, or even collaborating, they long have empha
sized official interimperial relations, though often labeling these relations in-
ternational. They have, for example, paid ample attention to imperial rivalries,
wars, and transfers of colonies from one empire to another. They have also stud
ied interimperial collaborations such as the Berlin Conference that carved up
Africa and the multi-imperial force that landed troops in China in 1900 to quell
the Boxer Uprising.18 Yet t hese latter relationships have been so overshadowed
by the former that the historian Richard Drayton has come up with the term
masked condominia to describe the largely hidden partnerships between em
pires.19
Among these partnerships are those that thickened the network of
nineteenth-century telegraph cables, described in a recent account as a prod
uct of “interimperial collaboration.”20 Traceable to the early twentieth-century
writings of J. A. Hobson, interimperialism is a useful concept for the interactions
Introduction 5
between imperial formations.21 Yet in our historiographical age, the term con
notes official dealings of governments and armed forces in much the same way
that international is taken to mean a focus on state-to-state relations. The term
interimperial thus hides the types of nonstate relations brought to mind by the
prefix trans, thereby perpetuating conceptions of empires as official units that
interact with each other only as such.22
this volume seeks to bring sharper definition and meaning to an emerg

ing historiography that is seeking to break f ree from the stand-alone paradigm
to probe the connections between empires. Despite the particular dynamics
driving inward-looking histories of U.S. imperial formations, there are coun
terdynamics that provide the background to this volume. As national histories
have opened up so as to encompass border crossings of various kinds, it has
become increasingly difficult to contain the imperial. In keeping with the turn
toward more transnational scholarship, histories of empire have begun ven
turing into transimperial terrain. In some cases they have done so explicitly,
using the term that appears in the subtitle of this volume. In a history of Pacific
Rim settler colonies, Penelope Edmonds identifies the construction of Anglo-
Saxon exceptionalism as a transimperial process across British dominions and
the United States.23 Paul Kramer has characterized U.S. colonial officials’ adop
tion of the structures and practices of Spanish colonialism in the Philippines as
“historias transimperiales.”24 Jesse Cromwell has written on the “trans-imperial
lives” of mobile p eople; Volker Barth and Roland Cvetkovski have alluded to
“transimperial networks of contact and debate”; Richard Drayton has analyzed
“the trans-imperial campaign” to save natural resources; and Julian Go has
used the term “trans-imperial” in reference to Irish nationalism’s influence on
Puerto Rican anticolonialism.25 The term transimperial—sometimes hyphen
ated, sometimes not—has popped up in other contexts too, ranging from the
connections between the Venetian and Ottoman empires to the character of
the “Greater Caribbean world.”26
The scholarship that inspired this volume traces its genealogy back to the
transnational turn and its predecessors and also to the boom in global, impe
rial, and postcolonial history. Much of this work has been produced by scholars
outside of the United States. Studies of the “British world,” for example, have
foregrounded the connections between imperial center and specific colonies,
as well as the intra-imperial or transcolonial networks that linked various British
colonies to one another, whether as parts of entire webs, as the former term
suggests, or as the linked peripheries brought to mind by the latter.27 Studies

of “imperial careering,” institutional networks, and labor mobility have been
particularly successful at uncovering these dimensions of the British Empire.28
British imperial scholars also have called for more “connected histories of em
pire” that extend beyond the British world to consider the synergies and fric
tions between different empires.29 Such a connected imperial history can find
inspiration in global histories of empire and more regionally specific studies
of oceanic “worlds,” such as those of the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific.30 This
rapidly growing body of transimperial research runs the gamut of lines of inquiry.
“Migrant workers, missionaries, social reformers, highly educated profession
als, and humble pilgrims, as well as money, commodities, technologies, and
even diseases, moved among imperial systems,” Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette
Burton point out in an influential study that traces the development of what
they label “imperial globality.”31
This emerging transimperial scholarship signals a more geographically capa
cious and politically aware approach that offers much to historians of U.S. em
pire. It invites further investigation into border-crossing relationships in which
imperial formations figure prominently and in which the main dynamic is not
the affirmation of boundaries through official state-to-state relations but the
blurring of them through mobility, connectivity, exchange, and adaptation. Far
from being just interesting sideshows, such transimperial processes are key to
our understanding of the origins, development, and erosion of imperialism in
modern history. Awareness of the bridges between empires and the traffic they
have carried also brings into focus the countervailing construction of barriers
and walls. Approaching the past with connectivity in mind can help us place
interimperial rivalries and conflicts in the larger context of coexistence. Rather
than appearing the norm, wars stand out as times of conspicuous disruption
that have severed some connections across empires, even as they have forged
new ones, not least of which were the anti-imperial movements that swept
across the globe during and after the world wars of the twentieth century.
Much of the emerging scholarship on transimperial connections has fo
cused on the high age of empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. These are the years that even the most vociferous deniers of U.S.
imperialism grudgingly cede as an aberration, due to military interventions, oc
cupations, annexations, and financial control in places such as Hawai‘i, Cuba,
Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, Panama, Haiti, the Dominican Republic,
Mexico, Nicaragua, the Virgin Islands, and numerous so-called guano islands
(some of which are now administered as refuges by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service). These years marked the consolidation of U.S. control over Indigenous
peoples within its newly fixed North American borders. They w ere also the hey
Introduction 7
day of a European-dominated global imperial order, spanning the time from the
so-called scramble for Africa to the rise of national self-determination as a fun
damental liberal principle, the invigoration of anticolonial nationalist move
ments amid the crisis of World War I, and the seeming promise of communist
alternatives to colonial rule following the Bolshevik Revolution.32 Histories of
this thoroughly imperial—yet highly contested—span of time are beginning to
reveal hidden dimensions of the American past: those of an imperial formation
in an imperial world.33
Our efforts to track down the mobility of organisms, goods, and capital and
the systems that made such mobility possible first drew our attention to impe
rial crossings. As the example of the transatlantic cable suggests, the United
States and its expanding empire became increasingly integrated into the impe
rial structures and systems of the European powers. But this is just the tip of the
iceberg. From the nineteenth century into the twentieth, American companies
traded and invested in European colonies, seeking, for example, rubber, oil,
bauxite, and tin, as well as export markets in Southeast Asia. Corporate agents
linked their own interests to European colonial power (especially in the face of
Japanese assertiveness in East Asia and the Pacific), even while professing an
ticolonial commitments.34 Transimperial ties can be found in histories of con
sumption as well as production. The sugar, teas, bananas, tropical hardwoods,
Oriental rugs, and cashmere shawls so relished by U.S. consumers were among
a wide array of products that arrived through imperial routes.35 Many of the
animals that populated U.S. zoos in the late nineteenth century likewise came
from imperial snares.36 In ports around the world, U.S. steamships voraciously
consumed foreign coals, particularly those mined in Britain and its imperial
possessions.37 One of the editors of this volume started thinking about the value
of an anthology following research on bioprospecting, salt pork, and curry. The
other editor came to this topic through his research on the transimperial pas
sageways of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company.
Some other early glimmerings that the word transnational was distorting
the past emerged from mappings of h uman mobility. American slave traders,
like their European partners and rivals, coursed in and out of imperial outposts
in their nefarious dealings.38 The migration from the U.S. eastern seaboard to
California in the mid-nineteenth century is traditionally presented as a na
tional story. Yet more migrants traveled to the goldfields via Central America
than in the overland covered wagons of American folklore. Such transit routes,
especially the world’s first transcontinental railroad in Panama (completed in
1855), facilitated the exchange of p eople, goods, and services across a number
of empires.39

Numerous accounts reveal the inadequacy of strictly national frameworks
for understanding labor migrants and other mobile people.40 These include his
tories of the British colonial subjects from Barbados and Jamaica who worked
on the Panama Railroad and, later, the Panama Canal.41 Histories of h uman
mobility across the Pacific have also tracked the ways in which imperial circuits
threading through South Asia, Japan, China, the Philippines, Hawai‘i, Austra
lia, New Zealand, and South Africa became enmeshed with settler colonialism
in places such as British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon.42 Borderlands ac
counts of Native Americans who moved back and forth between U.S., Mexican,
and Canadian jurisdiction further trouble the assumption that cross-border mo
bility can be contained within histories of nation-states.43 Missionary histories
also cross imperial domains, for most of the missionaries who set forth from the
United States for “heathen” lands in the long nineteenth century (stretching
through World War I) landed in European colonies, where they depended on
European power for security and access.44 Stories of individuals likewise reveal
imperial crossings, as seen in writings on Mary Leiter Curzon, the Chicago-
born heiress who became vicereine of India; Santukno Hiramura, an Ainu
woman who found some common ground with a native Patagonian w oman at
the 1904 St. Louis Fair; and the Filipino nationalist José Rizal, who named his
anti-Spanish movement “los indios bravos” after the Native Americans he had
seen performing in a Wild West show.45
Once we started thinking about transimperial connections, still more examples
started jumping out in our readings on colonial governance. British imperial
ists looked to the United States as a potential model for imperial federation,
and twentieth-century German and Japanese expansionists also referenced
the United States.46 Anti-Asian immigration policies w ere not just a m
atter of
national, much less transnational politics—they played out across the British,
U.S., Japanese and other empires.47 Ideas about coolie labor circulated among
the sugar planters of the British West Indies, the Spanish colony of Cuba, and
Louisiana, with consequences for U.S. migration policies, naturalization law,
and racial politics.48 Colonial state builders in the U.S.-occupied Philippines
and other island territories looked to European colonies for ideas.49 And Euro
pean colonial administrators looked back. The German colonial government in
Togo, for example, brought in cotton-growing experts from Tuskegee Institute
in Alabama to enhance the productivity of their African labor force, and hence
the profits of German planters.50
These kinds of affinities and connections also appear in histories of anti
colonial resistance. Pan-Africanist politics connected black intellectuals and
activists in the Caribbean, Central and North America, Europe, and Africa.51
Introduction 9
Anticolonial and antiracist movements crossed the Pacific as well.52 Mobiliz
ing more on the grounds of colored cosmopolitanism than diasporic affinities,
African American activists joined South Asian nationalists in professing com
mon commitments to antiracism and decolonization.53 Pan-Asianist advocates
positioned themselves in opposition to an entire network of interlaced pow
ers.54 People subject to changing or overlapping colonial rulers can also be seen
as acting transimperially. The Trinidadians who used the U.S. presence during
World War II to advance anticolonial struggles against the British may have po
sitioned themselves interimperially (meaning between empires), but they also
navigated two layered empires so as to advance their own interests.55
With our antennae attuned, we picked up more evidence of transimperial
ism in histories of imperial transfer and succession, including the U.S. acquisi
tion of one-time Spanish holdings and the growing U.S. footprint in one-time
European colonies during the Cold War.56 Allusions to U.S. nationals and impe
rial subjects as peripheral or bit players in other empires began to register as
further evidence of transimperial pasts. Our forays outside of our main field
in U.S. history persistently reminded us that there are plenty of transimperial
histories—whether written or yet to be told—in which the United States only
hovers off stage, if it is present at all.57
Recent scholarship on the history of capitalism has played a particularly
significant role in busting open nationalist frameworks so as to better reveal
the workings of power. The new literature on the U.S. South in the nineteenth
century has illuminated the many ways in which the economic vitality of slav
ery rested upon the transimperial processes that enabled Indian removal and
field clearing, international commodity market development, transoceanic
transportation, industrial capitalist production, and global consumption of
southern staple crops, particularly cotton.58 The southern slave empire was less
a distinctly American phenomenon than it was the product of the expansion of
Victorian capitalism, which produced a wave of “second slavery” in the New
World, as well as coercive labor regimes within the colonial world more gener
ally.59 Recent work on the various forms of political economy that underwrote
nineteenth-century capitalist development also have highlighted connections
to imperialism. Take the case of debates over protectionism versus free trade.
These w ere framed in relation to national development but also, crucially, with
imperial market rivalries in mind.60 New infrastructures of empire owed much
to emerging imperial states, which lavished subsidies upon steam transport
companies arms-race-style.61
Historians also are returning to an older literature probing the links between
imperialism and capital flows that can be traced back to J. A. Hobson’s writ

ings around 1900. This literature positions the late nineteenth-century United
States as both an upstart, imperialist exporter of capital and, paradoxically, a
satellite within the orbit of the powerful financial empire based in London.62
Recognizing the ways that traders, investors, resource extractors, managers,
workers, and corporations navigated multiple imperial formations can help us
grasp the larger politics of economic connections. This recognition has par
ticular significance for understandings of the U.S. role in Latin America and
the Caribbean. Although the world systems writings that took off in the 1960s
analyzed the role of the “developed world” in forging Latin American depen
dency, more specific studies focused on either U.S. or European penetration of
the Latin American periphery. As a result of this either-or bilateral approach,
the foreign relations historians who have focused on U.S. financial and military
power have argued for U.S. hegemony, even in the years leading up to World
War I, when European rivals still exercised considerable clout. Approaching
the history of this region with transimperialism in mind can thus do more than
power up relations previously described as transnational—it can better explain
the workings and extent of U.S. power in the historical stomping grounds of
European empires.63
The more we thought about the range of scholarship outlined above, as well
as the propensity of scholars to stamp it all with the transnational label, for
lack of a better term, the more we became convinced that historians need to be
more explicit about the political formations and power dynamics that s haped
the border-crossing histories they tell. They need to stop using transnational as a
default term and call out empire when it appears. Assuming all border-crossing
histories to be transnational in nature writes the contemporary prominence
of the nation-state anachronistically into the past, collapsing power relation
ships into national frames. Even terms such as translocal and transborder can
hide important structures of power. Opening up beyond transcolonial, the term
transimperial also encompasses imperial centers, geographies of indirect gover
nance, and nonsovereign forms of power. The words we choose do analytical
work—hence our efforts to define so many. Misleading terminology keeps us
from understanding the politics of transimperial pasts.
The essays in this volume do not ignore national formations. They recog
nize that empires and nations are tangled up in all kinds of messy ways that
sometimes defy clear distinctions. But they all start from the assumption that
making imperial formations visible can help us to recognize the many asym
metric power relations that have crisscrossed over time and space. The point
is larger than just labeling empires as such when relevant, however. It is to fol
low the admonition to ask what empire does.64 How can recognizing imperial
Introduction 11
formations enhance our understandings of particular circuits, connections, and
paths? How can it sharpen our analyses of power? Our appraisals of globaliza
tion and the makings of the modern world? T hese are some of the questions
that drive this volume.
the essays that follow probe these questions. Rather than attempt to
provide an overarching narrative of transimperialism as it has related to U.S.
history, the chapters in this volume paint a more pointillist picture, showcas
ing cutting-edge research on the topic. The contributors are joined together
by their interests in globalizing U.S. history, in understanding empire, and in
historicizing the global. But they come from a variety of subdisciplines, in
cluding the histories of business, diplomacy, the environment, gender, Indig
enous peoples, labor, material culture, medicine, migration, politics, and race
and ethnicity. Their work scrambles the old historiographic divides between
traditional diplomatic history and newer work deeply inflected by social, cul
tural, transnational, and postcolonial approaches. Of particular note, it helps
us avoid the seeming inevitability suggested by impersonal broad-brushstroke
histories and advance the “histories from below” perspectives that have figured
so prominently in postcolonial studies. Though attuned to structural consider
ations, t hese essays foreground agency and individual experience in ways that
remind us of the possibilities for social and political change as well as of the
ways that the most intimate and small-scale matters have been formed by vast
fields of power and vice versa. If microhistories contain the global, the reverse
is also true: the power lines and force fields of the global can be truly grasped
only through their fine-grained constituent parts. We welcome this volume’s
commingling of approaches, geographies, concerns, and scales because of the
resulting insights into the power relations that have forged the modern world.
Part I opens with essays by John Soluri and Stephen Tuffnell that reveal how
the pursuit of profit unsettled imperial boundaries, as well as accelerated the
exploitation of l abor and resources. Part II, comprising essays by Michel Gobat,
Julian Go, and Anne L. Foster, examines political ideas, practices, and institu
tions that straddled imperial borders. This subject is further developed in the
essays by Nicole M. Phelps, Marc-William Palen, and Oliver Charbonneau in
part III, which assess the structures of governance that sought to order transim
perial relations and commerce. The essays of part IV, written by Ikuko Asaka,
Julie Greene, and Genevieve Clutario, zoom in on the migrants, laborers, and
colonial subjects whose experiences w ere conditioned by transimperial interac
tions and successions. The final section, part V, comprising essays by Moon-Ho

Jung and Margaret D. Jacobs, considers how resistance to imperial power has
gathered momentum through transimperial crossings.
Taken together, these essays de-exceptionalize the study of U.S. imperialism
by weaving the strands of empire involving the United States and U.S. actors into
world history. This makes it harder to deny the history of U.S. imperialism, for to
do so would mean to rend the fabric of global history; it also illuminates the work
ings of empire and the processes of imperial formation. Historians researching
across present-day boundaries have always faced plenty of hurdles (financial,
linguistic, and otherwise). Only a collective effort can begin to bring the larger
landscape of transimperial histories into view, and these essays do that well.
They relegate the term transnational to specific relations with specific (mostly
European) states, at least prior to decolonization. For border crossings else
where, they bring state power out of the shadows and give it form. They are
sensitive to moving borders, to changes in sovereignty in particular places, to
bird’s-eye and ground-level views. They navigate the fuzzy lines between inter-
and trans-; between colonial, national, and imperial. Joining with global histo
rians who have rejected the premise that change only radiated outward from
imperial centers, they map its multidirectionality.65 Recognizing the divisions
and hierarchies within imperial formations as well as across them, they track
lateral and vertical vectors in multiple fields.
Just as important, this attention to imperial formations helps illuminate the
borders and barriers that inhibited movement and connection, that channeled
transiness in particular directions.66 These essays, in other words, are alert to
the ways that cross-border interactions and processes served the interests of im
perial regimes, as well as undermined them, often in unexpected ways. Along
with helping us to understand the specific routes and limited-access lanes trav
eled by p eople, ideas, and t hings, these essays draw attention to the overlaid ex
periences of empire found in particular communities and places. Together they
provide a better accounting of the imperial roots of the world system we inhabit
today. Their sensitivity to the limits of U.S. power, as well as to moments of
rupture and reconfiguration, makes them especially timely.
In unearthing these previously hidden imperial histories, this volume seeks
to do more than simply slot the United States into Europe-centered frameworks
of global history and empire. Indeed this volume has emerged from postcolonial
critiques of core and periphery models.67 Integrating America’s entangled impe
rial past into global history matters not simply because it de-exceptionalizes the
United States but also because it provides new possibilities for understanding
the origins of what we now call globalization. When viewed through a transim
perial prism, globalization looks different than when seen as an outgrowth of
Introduction 13
individual colonial regimes. The formal trappings of colonialism—the color-
coded maps and metropole-periphery binaries—recede in importance, giving
ground to a more Jackson Pollock–like world of mobile labor, cross-border po
litical negotiation, and multifaceted exchanges, that, however random they
may seem at first glance, still reveal patterns and power.
Although this volume focuses on the years before the United States could
call itself a superpower—the years in which it had to carefully navigate between
other empires as it laid the groundwork for its future might—the sensitivity
to power found in t hese essays can help us understand the origins of the post-
1945 sphere presided over by the United States. For what w ere the international
institutions constructed by the United States after 1945 other than transimpe
rial configurations of governance, economy, and defense? Even in the supposed
American century, the border-straddling infrastructures that knit the transat
lantic alliance and larger anticommunist bloc together advanced more global
cross-border phenomena. The economic liberalism and material exchanges of
this era did more than consolidate wealth, especially across the so-called Global
North. As mass migrations and ecological transformations dramatically reveal,
they also linked North to South, East to West, aligned to nonaligned, urban
to rural, rich to poor, in thoroughly encompassing ways, still shot through by
power as before. Even after the great wave of decolonization in the second
half of the twentieth c entury and the rise of new non-Western configurations,
transimperial girders from the prewar past continued to structure the modern
world. The current fracturing of the post–World War II order is exposing transim
perial trusses among the I-beams of self-interested states. The more that post
war structures teeter, the more apparent it becomes that the United States has
never been as hegemonic as both celebrants and critics of the Pax Americana
have maintained.
Although the essays in this volume provide the backstory to the age of U.S.-
led globalization, they pick up the story midsentence. Historians of the eigh
teenth century have long written transimperial histories, even if not using that
term. This volume extends their approaches to the post-1815 period, but much
more could be done in this respect. Other future lines of inquiry might venture
into historical terrain in which the United States does not figure largely, if at
all, and to imperial formations beyond the scope of this launch-stage volume.
A short collection such as this could not possibly do justice to e very topic, and
we must confess to egregious gaps. We look forward to more transimperial his
tories centering on groups such as women and Indigenous people; topics such
as slavery, black radicalism, science, and agriculture; nonhuman animals and
organisms; reinterpretations of global institutions such as the United Nations

and World Bank; and places such as borderlands, enclaves, and military bases.
We believe that studies of the Anthropocene must keep an eye on the transim
perial ledger sheets of benefits, costs, and culpability. Truly there is much work
to be done. But to see the possibilities that might follow from putting empire
into greater conversation with transiness, these essays are a great place to start.
notes
1. For the complex interactions between states and the development of telegraphy, see
Peter J. Hugill, Global Communications since 1844: Geopolitics and Technology (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Richard R. John, Network Nation: Inventing American
Telecommunications (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010).
2. David Paull Nickles, Under the Wire: How the Telegraph Changed Diplomacy (Cam
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Daniel R. Headrick, The Invisible Weapon:
Telecommunications and International Politics, 1851–1945 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1991), 14–46; John A. Britton, Cables, Crises, and the Press: The Geopolitics of the
New International Information System in the Americas, 1866–1903 (Albuquerque: University
of New Mexico Press, 2014).
3. The uneven compression of time and space is considered in Richard D. Knowles,
“Transport Shaping Space: Differential Collapse in Time-Space,” Journal of Transport
Geography, 14 (2006): 407–25.
4. Dwayne R. Winseck and Robert M. Pike, Communication and Empire: Media, Mar-
kets, and Globalization, 1860–1930 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), xvii.
5. Akira Iriye, “Internationalizing International History,” in Rethinking American His-
tory in a Global Age, edited by Thomas Bender (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2002), 51. An earlier usage of this term can be found in Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller,
and Cristina Szanton Blanc, Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predica-
ments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States (Langhorne, PA: Gordon and Breach, 1994). For
some examples of scholarship that provided transnational analyses prior to Rethinking
American History, see Frank Thistlethwaite, The Anglo-American Connection in the Early
Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959); Ian Tyrrell,
Woman’s World, Woman’s Empire: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in International
Perspective, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Paul
Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1995); Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International
Women’s Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Daniel T. Rodgers,
Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press
of Harvard University Press, 1998). For assessments of transnational approaches that
critique U.S.-centrism and highlight the need for more attentiveness to power, see
Louis A. Pérez Jr., “We Are the World: Internationalizing the National, Nationalizing the
International,” Journal of American History 89 (September 2002): 558–66; Laura Briggs,
Gladys McCormick, and J. T. Way, “Transnationalism: A Category of Analysis,” American
Quarterly 60 (September 2008): 625–48.
Introduction 15
6. Steven C. Topik and Allen Wells, “Commodity Chains in a Global Economy,” in
A World Connecting, 1870–1945, edited by Emily S. Rosenberg (Cambridge, MA: Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), 740; Tariq Omar Ali, A Local History of Global
Capital: Jute and Peasant Life in the Bengal Delta (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2018).
7. John Tully, “A Victorian Ecological Disaster: Imperialism, the Telegraph, and Gutta-
Percha,” Journal of World History 20 (December 2009): 567.
8. Headrick, The Invisible Weapon, 46; Martin Redfern, “Wiring Up the ‘Victorian
Internet,’ ” bbc News, November 29, 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature
/4475394.stm.
9. Daniel R. Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperi-
alism, 1850–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 99.
10. John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire since 1405 (New York:
Bloomsbury, 2007), 491. Chris Bayly makes a similar point in a recent roundtable
conversation: “Before 1850, large parts of the globe were not dominated by nations so
much as by empires, city-states, diasporas, etc. . . . To designate ‘global history’ as ‘trans
national history’ would not be very useful before 1914, if then.” He goes on to say that
global and transnational historians have “continued to grapple with the problem of model
ing the element of power into the concept of circulation,” C. A. Bayly, Sven Beckert,
Matthew Connelly, Isabel Hofmeyr, Wendy Kozol, and Patricia Seed, “ahr Conversation:
On Transnational History,” American Historical Review 111 (December 2006): 1442, 1452.
11. Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2008). See also Anne F. Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families: A New History of the North
American West, 1800–1860 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011).
12. Krishan Kumar, “Empires and Nations: Convergence or Divergence?,” in Sociol-
ogy and Empire: The Imperial Entanglements of a Discipline, edited by George Steinmetz
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 279–99.
13. Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the
Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 380.
14. Margaret D. Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism,
and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009); James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The
Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2009).
15. Ann Laura Stoler and Carole McGranahan, “Introduction: Refiguring Imperial
Terrains,” in Imperial Formations, edited by Ann Laura Stoler, Carole McGranahan, and
Peter C. Perdue (Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2007), 8.
16. William Earl Weeks, The New Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, vol.
1: Dimensions of the Early American Empire, 1754–1865 (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2013). We use the “duck” test developed by historian Ian Tyrrell: “If it walks like
an empire, if it quacks like an empire, then it probably is, no matter what professions
to the contrary.” Ian Tyrrell, “Empire of Denial: American Empire, Past, Present and
Future,” October 8, 2008, https://iantyrrell.wordpress.com/empire-of-denial-american
-empire-past-present-and-future/.

17. Charles S. Maier, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors (Cam
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Kimberly Kagan, ed., The Imperial Moment
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
18. For a survey of U.S. foreign relations that touches briefly on interimperial rela
tions, see Walter LaFeber, The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, vol. 2:
The American Search for Opportunity, 1865–1913 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University
Press, 1993), rivalries over Samoa, 91; intervention in China, 173. On U.S. and Spanish
conflicts in Cuba (and the importance of Cuban nationalists to this history), see Louis A.
Pérez Jr., The War of 1898: The United States and Cuba in History and Historiography
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); John Lawrence Tone, War and
Genocide in Cuba, 1895–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006);
Nancy Mitchell, The Danger of Dreams: German and American Imperialism in Latin Amer
ica (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). On World War I as a war of
empires, see Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela, eds., Empires at War: 1911–1923 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2014).
19. Richard Drayton, The Masks of Empire: The World History underneath Modern Em-
pires and Nations, c. 1500 to the Present (London: Palgrave, 2017).
20. Dwayne R. Winseck and Robert M. Pike, Communication and Empire: Media,
Markets, and Globalization, 1860–1930 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007),
xvii.
21. For Hobson, see the conclusion of Steve Tuffnell’s essay in this volume.
22. After his initial call for transnational histories, Thomas Bender wrote an essay, “An
Empire among Empires,” that briefly touched on imperial crossings. But this essay dwelt
more on categorization (what might it mean to label the United States an empire?)
than transiness, and as one chapter in a larger work titled A Nation among Nations, this
essay did not dislodge the nation as the main unit for border-crossing histories. Thomas
Bender, “An Empire among Empires,” in A Nation among Nations: America’s Place in World
History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 182–245.
23. Penelope Edmonds, “ ‘I Followed England round the World’: The Rise of Trans-
Imperial Anglo-Saxon Exceptionalism and the Spatial Narratives of Nineteenth-Century
British Settler Colonies of the Pacific Rim,” in Re-Orienting Whiteness, edited by K. Elling
haus, J. Carey, and L. Boucher (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
24. Paul Kramer, “Historias Transimperiales: Raices Espanoles del Estado Colonial
eeuu en Filipinas,” in Filipina: Un Pais Entre Dos Imperios, edited by María Elizalde (Bar
celona: Bellaterra, 2011).
25. Jesse Cromwell, “More than Slaves and Sugar: Recent Historiography of the
Trans-imperial Caribbean and Its Sinew Populations,” History Compass, December 2014,
778; Volker Barth and Roland Cvetkovski, eds., “Encounters of Empire: Methodological
Approaches,” in Imperial Co-operation and Transfer, 1870–1930: Empires and Encounters
(New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 22; Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Impe-
rial Britain, and the “Improvement” of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2000), 238; Julian Go, “Anti-Imperialism in the U.S. Territories after 1898,” in Empire’s
Twin: U.S. Anti-Imperialism from the Founding Era to the Age of Terror, edited by Ian Tyrrell
and Jay Sexton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), chapter 4.
Introduction 17
26. E. Natalie Rothman, Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and
Istanbul (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012); Ernesto Bassi, An Aqueous Territory:
Sailor Geographies and New Granada’s Transimperial Greater Caribbean World (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2016). See also Gotha Research Centre and Erfurt University
Conference, Trans-Imperial Cooperation and Transfers in the Age of Colonial Globaliza
tion: Towards a Triangular History of Colonialism?, March 23–24, 2018, http://www
.forum-global-condition.de/veranstaltung/trans-imperial-cooperation-and-transfers
-in-the-age-of-colonial-globalization/; Nathan Cardon and Simon Jackson, “Everyday
Empires: Trans-Imperial Circulations in a Multi-disciplinary Perspective—Origins,
Inspirations, Ways Forward,” Past and Present, May 5, 2017, http://pastandpresent.org
.uk/everyday-empries-trans-imperial-circulations-multi-disciplinary-perspective-origins
-inspirations-ways-forward/.
27. For an introduction, see Carl Bridge and Kent Fedorowich eds., The British World:
Diaspora, Culture and Identity (London: Routledge, 2003).
28. Durba Ghosh and Dane Kennedy, eds., Decentring Empire: Britain, India, and the
Transcolonial World (Hyderabad, India: Orient Longman, 2006); David M. Pomfret, Youth
and Empire: Trans-colonial Childhoods in British and French Asia (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2016). For other examples of works that develop the term transcolonial,
see Julia Martínez and Claire Lowrie, “Transcolonial Influences of Everyday American
Imperialism: The Politics of Chinese Domestic Servants in the Philippines,” Pacific Histori-
cal Review 81 (November 2012): 511–36; Sara E. Johnson, The Fear of French Negroes:
Transcolonial Collaboration in the Revolutionary Americas (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2012). On imperial careering, institutions, and labor mobility, see David Lambert
and Alan Lester, eds., Colonial Lives across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the
Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Tamson
Pietsch, Empire of Scholars: Universities, Networks and the British Academic World, 1850–1939
(Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2013); Lara Putnam, “The Making and
Unmaking of the Circum-Caribbean Migratory Sphere: Mobility, Sex across Boundaries,
and Collective Destinies, 1840–1940,” in Migrants and Migration in Modern North America:
Cross-Border Lives, Labor Markets, and Politics, edited by Dirk Hoerder and Nora Faires
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 99–126.
29. Simon J. Potter and Jonathan Saha, “Global History, Imperial History and Con
nected Histories of Empire,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 16, no. 1 (Spring
2015).
30. For an influential global history of empire, see Darwin, A fter Tamerlane. For
representative works on the various oceanic worlds, see Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History:
Concept and Contours (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); K. N. Chaud
huri, “The Unity and Disunity of Indian Ocean History from the Rise of Islam to 1750:
The Outline of a Theory and Historical Discourse,” Journal of World History 4 (1994):
1–21; Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 2006; Thomas R. Metcalf, Imperial Con-
nections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2008); David Armitage and Alison Bashford, eds., Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land,
P eople (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

31. Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, “Empires and the Reach of the Global,”
in A World Connecting: 1870–1945, edited by Emily Rosenberg (Cambridge, MA: Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), 295.
32. Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International
Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
33. Transnational histories that are attuned to empire include Bender, A Nation among
Nations; Ian Tyrrell, Transnational Nation: United States History in Global Perspective since
1789 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
34. Anne L. Foster, Projections of Power: The United States and Europe in Colonial
Southeast Asia, 1919–1941 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). On capital, see,
for example, Peter James Hudson, “On the History and Historiography of Banking in the
Caribbean,” Small Axe 18 (March 2014): 22–37.
35. Kristin L. Hoganson, Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of American Do-
mesticity, 1865–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
36. Daniel E. Bender, The Animal Game: Searching for Wildness at the American Zoo
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).
37. Peter A. Shulman, Coal and Empire: The Birth of Energy Security in Industrial America
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015).
38. Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American
Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Greg Grandin, The Empire
of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World (New York: Metropolitan
Books, 2014).
39. John Haskell Kemble, The Panama Route, 1848–1869 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1943); Aims McGuinness, Path of Empire: Panama and the California Gold
Rush (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008).
40. Daniel E. Bender and Jana K. Lipman, eds., Making the Empire Work: Labor and
United States Imperialism (New York: New York University Press, 2015).
41. Julie Greene, The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal
(New York: Penguin Press, 2009); Lara Putnam, Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and
the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).
42. Nayan Shah, Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality, and the Law in the North
American West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Kornel Chang, Pacific
Connections: The Making of the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands (Berkeley: University of Califor
nia Press, 2012); Elizabeth Sinn, Pacific Crossing: California Gold, Chinese Migration, and
the Making of Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013); Seema Sohi,
Echoes of Mutiny: Race, Surveillance and Indian Anticolonialism in North America (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Paul A. Kramer, “Imperial Openings: Civiliza
tion, Exemption, and the Geopolitics of Mobility in the History of Chinese Exclusion,
1868–1910,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 14 (July 2015): 317–47.
43. Shelley Bowen Hatfield, Chasing Shadows: Indians along the United States–Mexico
Border 1876–1911 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998); Beth LaDow,
The Medicine Line: Life and Death on a North American Borderland (New York: Routledge,
2001); Sheila McManus, The Line Which Separates: Race, Gender, and the Making of the
Alberta-Montana Borderlands (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005); Eric W.
Introduction 19
Meeks, Border Citizens: The Making of Indians, Mexicans, and Anglos in Arizona (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2007); Kristin L. Hoganson, “Struggles for Place and Space:
Kickapoo Traces from the Midwest to Mexico,” in Transnational Indians in the North
American West, edited by Clarissa Confer, Andrae Marak, and Laura Tuennerman (Col
lege Station: Texas a&m University Press, 2015), 210–25; Michael Hogue, Métis and the
Medicine Line: Creating a Border and Dividing a People (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2015).
44. For works considering this point, see Ian Tyrrell, Reforming the World: The Creation
of America’s Moral Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Emily
Conroy-Krutz, Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015); Barbara Reeves-Ellington, Kathryn Kish
Sklar, and Connie A. Shemo, eds., Competing Kingdoms: Women, Mission, Nation, and
the American Protestant Empire, 1812–1960 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010);
Karen Phoenix, “A Social Gospel for India,” Journal of the History of the Gilded Age and
Progressive Era 13 (April 2014): 200–222.
45. Dana Cooper, Informal Ambassadors: American Women, Transatlantic Marriages,
and Anglo-American Relations, 1865–1945 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2014),
104; Danika Medak-Saltzman, “Transnational Indigenous Exchange: Rethinking Global
Interactions of Indigenous Peoples at the 1904 St. Louis Exposition,” American Quarterly
62 (September 2010): 591–615; Joy S. Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory,
and Popular History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 161–219; Sharon Delmendo, The
Star-Entangled Banner: One Hundred Years of America in the Philippines (New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 27–30. On world’s fair and circus performers, see
also Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International
Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Janet M. Davis, The
Circus Age: Culture and Society under the American Big Top (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2002), 216.
46. Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order,
1860–1900 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 231–59; Paul A.
Kramer, “Empires, Exceptions and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule between the British
and United States Empires, 1880–1910,” Journal of American History 88 (March 2002):
1315–53; Julian Go, Patterns of Empire: The British and American Empires, 1688 to the
Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 3; Jens-Uwe Guettel, German
Expansionism, Imperial Liberalism, and the United States, 1776–1945 (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2012).
47. Although they speak of transnational collaborations to protect white privilege,
Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds write about settler colonies—Australia, South Africa,
the United States, and Canada—embedded in larger imperial systems. Marilyn Lake and
Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the Interna-
tional Challenge of Racial Equality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
48. Moon-Ho Jung, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Stacey L. Smith, Freedom’s Frontier:
California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).

49. Julian Go and Anne L. Foster, eds., The American Colonial State in the Philippines: Global
Perspectives (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Kramer, “Historias Transim
periales”; Karine V. Walther, Sacred Interests: The United States and the Islamic World,
1821–1921 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), esp. 157–240.
50. Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire,
and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).
51. Van Gosse, “ ‘As a Nation the English Are Our Friends’: The Emergence of African
American Politics in the British Atlantic World, 1772–1861,” American Historical Review
113, no. 4 (October 2008): 1003–28; Adam Ewing, The Age of Garvey: How a Jamaican
Activist Created a Mass Movement and Changed Global Black Politics (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2014); Frank Andre Guridy, Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans
and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2010); Michelle Ann Stephens, Black Empire: The Masculine
Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914–1962 (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2005); David Luis-Brown, Waves of Decolonization: Discourses
of Race and Hemispheric Citizenship in Cuba, Mexico, and the United States (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2008).
52. Moon-Ho Jung, ed., The Rising Tide of Color: Race, State Violence, and Radical Move-
ments across the Pacific (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014).
53. Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United
States and India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Penny M. Von
Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1997).
54. Eri Hotta, Pan-Asianism and Japan’s War, 1931–1945 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2007); Torsten Weber, Embracing “Asia” in China and Japan: Asianism Discourse and the
Contest for Hegemony, 1912–1933 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
55. Harvey R. Neptune, Caliban and the Yankees: Trinidad and the United States
Occupation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). This usage of
interimperial extends Eiichiro Azuma’s term inter-National, which he applies to the
Japanese immigrants to the United States who found themselves wedged between
the categories of Japan and the United States. Eiichiro Azuma, Between Two Empires:
Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2005), 6.
56. Eileen Findlay, Imposing Decency: The Politics of Sexuality and Race in Puerto Rico,
1870–1920 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); Louis A. Pérez, Cuba: Between
Reform and Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Julian Go, Patterns of
Empire: The British and American Empires, 1688 to Present (New York: Cambridge Univer
sity Press, 2011), 237; Nick Cullather, “Damming Afghanistan: Modernization in a Buffer
State,” Journal of American History 89 (September 2002): 512–37.
57. See, for example, Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror,
and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998); Rebecca E. Karl, Staging
the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2002); Duncan Bell, Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
Introduction 21
58. Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2014); Sven
Beckert and Seth Rockman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic
Development (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Edward Baptist, The
Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic
Books, 2014); Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton
Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).
59. Dale Tomich and Michael Zeuske, “Introduction: The Second Slavery. Mass Slav
ery, World-Economy, and Comparative Microhistories,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center)
31, no. 2 (2008): 91–100.
60. Marc-William Palen, The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle
over Empire and Economic Globalisation, 1846–1896 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge Univer
sity Press, 2016).
61. For explorations of the importance of subsidies to global steam companies, see
William Wray, Mitsubishi and the n.y.k., 1870–1914: Business Strategy in the Japanese
Shipping Industry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); Freda Harcourt,
Flagships of Imperialism: The p&o Company and the Politics of Empire from Its Origins to 1867
(Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2006).
62. Gary B. Magee and Andrew S. Thompson, Empire and Globalisation: Networks of
People, Goods and Capital in the British World, c. 1850–1914 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge
University Press, 2010); A. G. Hopkins, “The United States, 1783–1861: Britain’s Honor
ary Dominion?,” Britain and the World 4, no. 2 (2011): 232–46; J. A. Hobson, Imperialism:
A Study (New York: James Pott, 1902).
63. Gilbert M. Joseph, “Close Encounters: Toward a New Cultural History of U.S.–
Latin American Relations,” in Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of
U.S.–Latin American Relations, edited by Gilbert M. Joseph, Catherine C. Legrand, and
Ricardo D. Salvatore (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 3–46.
64. Paul A. Kramer, “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States
in the World,” American Historical Review 116 (December 2011): 1348–49.
65. Ballantyne and Burton, Empires and the Reach of the Global, 286, 300–301.
66. Sukanya Banerjee, “Who, or What, Is Victorian? Ecology, Indigo, and the Transim
perial,” Victorian Studies 58 (Winter 2016): 213–23.
67. For a review of the British imperial turn that critiques Eurocentrism, applauds
postcolonial approaches, and skates over the U.S. role in global history, see Durba
Ghosh, “ahr Forum: Another Set of Imperial Turns?,” American Historical Review 117
(June 2012): 772–93.

part i. in pursuit of profit
1. fur sealing and unsettled sovereignties
John Soluri
Now this is the Law of the Muscovite, that he proves with shot and steel,
When ye come by his isles in the Smoky Sea ye must not take the seal,
Where the gray sea goes nakedly between the weed-hung shelves,
And the little blue fox he is bred for his skin and the seal they breed for themselves. . . .
But since our women must walk gay and money buys their gear,
The sealing-boats they filch that way at hazard year by year.
English they be and Japanee that hang on the Brown Bear’s flank,
And some be Scot, but the worst of the lot, and the boldest thieves, be Yank!
—Rudyard Kipling, “The Rhyme of the Three Sealers,” 1893
In 1796 the ship Neptune departed from New Haven, Connecticut, bound for
the South Atlantic to hunt fur seals. Upon reaching the Falkland/Malvinas Is
lands, the Neptune met the Juno, a New York–based ship. The captains of the
two vessels, David Greene and Paul Bunker, joined forces to search for seals
along the coast of Patagonia. They encountered a small Spanish garrison at a
place called Puerto Deseado. The garrison’s commander detained Greene and
Bunker under the suspicion that they were British subjects. The two captains
fled when the Spanish soldiers were attending an evening mass:
They [Green and Bunker] started and w
ere soon hold of their w
haleboat,
which had been hauled up. The movement was so quick that it was not
known whether an alarm had been given, and a fter they w ere afloat (and
it was too dark to be fired at) there was little danger but that they could
row two feet to one of any boat rowed by the Spaniards. They muffled
their oars and got alongside the sloop about midnight, jumped on deck
and got possession of the arms, the soldiers being asleep. They then made
the soldiers get into their own boat and, knocking out the flints, returned
to them their muskets—and treated them to a drink of grog. The soldiers
were told to tell their commander that he did not know how to keep
Yankees.1
This tale of Yankee exceptionalism, related in the journal of Eben Townsend,

supercargo on the Neptune, reveals how U.S. fur sealers disregarded geopolitical
borders in the pursuit of prey, crossing into South Atlantic waters claimed by
the Spanish Empire.2
Some thirty years later the border-crossing ways of U.S. fur sealers contin
ued to provoke conflicts in the South Atlantic. In 1831 Louis Vernet, acting as
governor of the Malvinas and Tierra del Fuego under the authority of the newly
constituted Argentine Confederation, arrested Gilbert Davison, captain of the
Harriet, a vessel based in Stonington, Connecticut, engaged in sealing. Vernet
confiscated the Harriet’s sealskins and sent the vessel to Buenos Aires, where he
sought to have the Argentine courts rule on the legitimacy of the seizure. He
allowed three other U.S. sealers to continue hunting with the proviso that their
sealskins would be held in trust u ntil the Argentine courts issued a ruling.3
Vernet based his daring actions on an 1829 Argentine decree that granted him
a monopoly on sealing activities in Patagonia.
However, when Captain Davison reached Buenos Aires, he gave a deposition
before U.S. Consul George Slacum in which he described Vernet as “pretend
ing” to act as governor. Davison detailed the seizure of U.S. vessels and alleged
that Vernet was not interfering with British sealers.4 Viewing the matter to be
an urgent question of the “free use of unappropriated fisheries,” Consul Slacum
took the issue before Argentine foreign minister Tómas Manuel Anchorena.
The Argentine official considered the seizure a private matter to be settled in
local courts. Slacum responded by giving an ultimatum: if Argentina did not
agree to cease interfering with U.S. sealing vessels, he would order a naval frig
ate, the uss Lexington, to proceed to the Malvinas/Falklands. Anchorena in turn
promised to lodge a formal protest if the Lexington entered the Malvinas.
A resolute Slacum dispatched the Lexington under the command of Silas
Duncan. Upon reaching the Malvinas, Commander Duncan compelled some
forty residents of Port Louis—described by Duncan as a “band of pirates”—to
26 john soluri

leave the island. Duncan later declared that he had acted in order to protect
“citizens and commerce of the United States engaged in the fisheries in ques
tion.”5 U.S. president Andrew Jackson conveyed his approval of Duncan’s ac
tions and the “firmness of his measures.”6 However, in Buenos Aires the press
reported that U.S. marines had destroyed weaponry and confiscated the con
tents of Vernet’s storehouse. In 1832 the United States and Argentina severed
relations over the incident. The British Empire took advantage of the dispute to
expel the small Argentine garrison in Port Louis in 1833; the following year, the
hms Challenger landed Henry Smith, who, bearing the title of naval governor,
initiated the long-term British occupation of the “Falklands.”7
Meanwhile, in the United States, the Suffolk Insurance Company denied
claims filed by the owners of the U.S. vessels impounded by Vernet, contend
ing that the ships’ crews had been engaged in illegal activities when they w ere
captured. The ship o wners sued the insurance company, initiating a l egal dispute
that reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1839. The Court ruled in favor of the ship
owners, noting in its decision that the executive authority of the U.S. govern
ment “has insisted . . . that the Falkland Islands do not constitute any part of
the dominions within the sovereignty of the government of Buenos Ayres.”8
The case reveals the shifting and pragmatic relationship between private enter
prise and the state: New England–based fur sealers must have appreciated the
U.S. government’s willingness to project its power in support of their right to
an “unappropriated fishery” in the distant South Atlantic, but a New England
insurance firm might be prepared to recognize the sovereign rights of a foreign
power (be it the Argentine Confederation or the British Empire) when it served
its financial interest.
These two stories of U.S. fur sealers in the South Atlantic reveal impor
tant changes in territorial sovereignty that took place in the early nineteenth
century. In 1796 the “Yankee” sealers Greene and Bunker traversed land and
waters nominally claimed and lightly defended by the Spanish Empire. How
ever, when Davison and Vernet clashed in 1831, U.S. fur sealers in the South
Atlantic encountered an altered geopolitical world in which a new state, the
Confederation of Argentina, struggled to assert its sovereignty in the face of
challenges from Britain, Spain, and the United States, in addition to multiple
indigenous societies. That the British Empire gained control of the Falklands
largely reflected its unsurpassed naval power in the 1830s.
The two stories also reveal a noteworthy continuity: the presence of capi
talistic fur sealers transgressing territorial boundaries. The nineteenth-century
fur seal trade forged unlikely ties among places like Stonington, Connecti
cut; the Malvinas/Falkland Islands; Punta Arenas, Chile; the Pribilof Islands;
Fur Sealing and Unsettled Sovereignties 27

and Victoria, Canada; in addition to more familiar centers of commerce like
London, New York, and Canton (Guangzhou).9 This sprawling, dynamic net
work cut across and connected empires, indigenous societies, and postcolonial
states in South America. It also linked ecosystems and distinct populations of
marine mammals inhabiting subpolar regions in the northern and southern
hemispheres. Commercial hunting devastated populations of fur seals while
unsettling territorial sovereignties. Rising concerns about the overhunting of
fur seals led to one of the first multilateral, conservation treaties, the Conven
tion between the United States and Other Powers Providing for the Preserva
tion and Protection of Fur Seals (1911), that initiated a c entury of interstate
diplomacy related to ocean resources in which indigenous peoples would find
their territories increasingly subsumed by expanding states.10
Tracing the movements of commercial fur sealers in the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries reveals the limits of transnational frameworks and
the value of “powering up” environmental histories to consider transimpe
rial connections while also “touching ground” in specific localities where
power was exercised, contested, and deflected. In this essay, I “power up” in
two, complementary ways. First, I adopt a transoceanic framework in order to
show connections between commercial fur sealing in North Pacific and South
Pacific/South Atlantic seas. I build on scholarship that explores the intersection
of empires and ecological phenomena by emphasizing, along with a growing
number of scholars, that oceans are not only passageways but also contested
resource bases.11 Second, I increase the resolution of my narrative lens in order
to glimpse—if seldom fully capture—the entanglements of fur seal ecologies,
capitalist enterprises, and contested territorial sovereignties in two important
hunting grounds: the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea, and Tierra del Fuego,
the southernmost point of South America.
After briefly describing some key aspects of fur seal ecology and lifecycles,
I examine the transimperial politics of fur sealing in the North Pacific, where
first the Russian Empire and then the United States negotiated with indigenous
Unangan (Aleuts) as well as the British and Japanese empires for control over
the northern fur seals that formed massive colonies on the Pribilof Islands. I
then shift to Tierra del Fuego to reveal some of the transoceanic reverberations
of the U.S. acquisition of Alaska’s sealing grounds, including the revival of fur
sealing in the southern hemisphere. In contrast to Alaska, the presence of U.S.
fur sealers in Tierra del Fuego did not contribute to U.S. territorial acquisition,
but it unsettled the sovereignties of the indigenous Yámana and Kawéskar. In
the third part of the essay I consider how state-led initiatives to conserve fur
seals in both Alaska and Tierra del Fuego simultaneously reinforced the power
28 john soluri

of colonizing states over indigenous societies while revealing how the move
ments of fur seals and hunters unsettled claims to sovereignty. I conclude with
some remarks on the value of writing environmental histories that transgress
political boundaries.
Taking Seals: Alaska

The movements of fur sealers largely reflected the circulations and life c ycles
of their prey. Dozens of species of seals—what taxonomists call otarids—
inhabit the earth’s oceans and littoral zones. Those designated “fur seals” pos
sess inner and outer coats of fur. In the modern world, commercial markets
in China, Europe, Russia, and the United States coveted the soft, dense, inner
layer of fur that served as a raw material for making garments. The most prized
fur seal pelts generally came from high-latitude regions, where seals grew par
ticularly dense layers of fur. If imperial projects in the tropics took advantage of
intense solar radiation to produce plantation crops like sugar or rubber, com
mercial marine hunters sought out the opposite: regions where marine mam
mals adapted to the absence of heat by producing layers of fat or extremely
dense undercoats of hair.
Fur seals spend a great portion of their lives in open water, ranging over
enormous distances. These periods of often solitary travel are punctuated by
seasonal congregations on land to shed fur, to mate, and for females to give
birth and nurse offspring. Commercial hunters generally tried to time their
operations to coincide with the nearly simultaneous birthing, mating, and
nursing seasons when fur seals tended to form large colonies for several weeks.
Although indigenous and commercial hunters harpooned or shot fur seals in
open water (pelagic hunting), the mass killings that enabled some sealers to
reap fortunes while driving local seal populations to near extinction exploited
fur seals’ own sense of territoriality: large colonies often formed on the same
island littorals from one year to the next.12
Hunters exploited fur seals’ territoriality and transformed birthplaces into
killing zones. In general, sealers killed as many animals as possible due in part
to the fact that crewmembers on sealing vessels, like their counterparts on
whaling ships, received a share of the take. This wage form, along with the
deprivations endured on long voyages, no doubt left sealers with little incen
tive to conserve fur seals for an uncertain future.13 In most cases this practice
led to a rapid and sharp drop in fur seal populations in given localities, com
pelling sealers to search for new “fishing” grounds. As a result, nineteenth-
century U.S.-based sealing vessels traversed the littoral zones of the Americas

and beyond, unsettling sovereignties and ecologies from the South Atlantic to
the North Pacific.
When Yankee mariners began hunting fur seals in the North Pacific, they
entered a region already altered by Russian hunters who, authorized by the im
perial government in St. Petersburg, sought out sea otters for trade with China.
Over the course of the 1700s, Russian hunters severely depleted sea otter
populations while exploiting Unangan labor; brutal treatment and introduced
diseases reduced the Unangan population from an estimated twelve thousand
to approximately two thousand.14 In 1786 Gavriil Pribylov, an employee of a
Russian company trading in sea otter pelts, visited an island (Saint George)
with massive colonies of northern fur seals (Calorhinus ursinus). The following
year Russian mariners found another large fur seal colony on an adjacent island
(Saint Paul). This sparked a frenzy of hunting activity on the two islands (later
renamed Pribilof), led by various Russian companies that rapidly depleted colo
nies of fur seals whose total population reached at least one million.15
Concerned about indiscriminate hunting, indigenous resistance, and an in
creased presence of British and U.S. traders, Tsar Paul I chartered the Russian
American Company (rac), Russia’s first joint-stock company, in 1799.16 The
rac enjoyed a monopoly over trade in “Russian America” and ownership of the
region’s marine mammals. In the early nineteenth c entury, the company trans
planted a Unangan village to the Pribilof Islands, where indigenous workers
killed and processed fur seals under harsh living conditions. The rac paid Un
angan workers wages that were distributed via a community fund managed by
indigenous leaders, a bending to Unangan customs by the rac that the anthro
pologist Dorothy Jones has suggested was likely a pragmatic decision necessary
to maintain a reliable labor force.17 Nevertheless company charters issued in the
mid-nineteenth century stripped Unangan of their sovereignty by declaring them
to be Russian subjects obligated to abide by imperial law.18
As early as 1805 rac officials instituted conservation measures for fur seals.19
By the late 1820s the rac’s Alaskan administrators prohibited killing female
seals and encouraged hunters to take young males, operating on the assump
tion that the “bachelor seals” w ere not crucial to the species’ ability to repro
duce itself. These measures appear to have enabled the northern fur seal to
make a partial recovery in the mid-nineteenth century. According to historian
Briton Cooper Busch, the population of northern fur seals reached its precom
mercial hunting level in the 1860s.20
Following the California Gold Rush, Russian control of the North Pacific
fur trade came under a rising threat from British and U.S. interests. The U.S.
government raised the prospect of purchasing Alaska as early as 1854. The onset
30 john soluri

of the Civil War disrupted U.S. efforts to purchase Alaska until 1867, when the
Russian Empire, seeking to consolidate its power elsewhere, sold the enormous
territory to the United States for $7 million.21 The transfer of imperial sover
eignty triggered a flurry of activity among investors, ships’ captains, and others
based in San Francisco and Victoria. In 1868 the Alaska Commercial Company
(acc) formed and immediately began staking claims over key sealing beaches
on the Pribilof Islands. A killing frenzy ensued: hunters slaughtered more than
250,000 fur seals before a U.S. Revenue officer arrived on the scene. The U.S.
government banned all sealing in 1869 except that carried out by Unangan for
autoconsumption.22
In 1870 the U.S. Congress created regulations for the hunting of fur seals
in Alaska. The act authorized the U.S. Treasury to grant hunting privileges to
“responsible parties” and charged the department with ensuring the preserva
tion of the fur seal trade and the “comfort, maintenance, and education of the
natives thereof.”23 That same year, the Treasury Department awarded a twenty-
year lease to the acc to hunt as many as 100,000 fur seals per year. During the
life of the lease, the acc’s employees killed more than two million fur seals,
generating $6 million in government revenue and nearly $17 million for com
pany shareholders.24 The acc’s reach extended beyond the newly acquired U.S.
territory; working through a Russian intermediary, the company also gained
twenty-year monopoly rights to hunt fur seals on the Russian-controlled Com
mander Islands and Robben Island.25
The acc shipped the vast majority of the fur seal skins that it obtained from
the North Pacific to San Francisco, where they w ere repacked for overland
26
shipment to New York. From New York, the skins traveled to London, where
the Curtis Lampson Company auctioned them, along with myriad other furs
sourced from all over the world. The labor-intensive process of turning seal
skins into a supple, dyed material suitable for garment manufacture employed
thousands of people in late nineteenth-century London. Buyers in the United
States, particularly New York City, then re-imported most of the dyed seal furs
to produce luxury outerwear. This circuitous pathway of turning a life form
into a luxury good—not unlike contemporary tuna-to-sushi transformations—
further illustrates the complex relationships between colonialism, territoriality,
and commodification.27
The acc’s takeover of Alaska’s sealing grounds did not initially lead to dra
matic changes in the lives of Unangan workers; they continued to perform
many of the same tasks they had done under Russian authority, including
herding, killing, and skinning fur seals in return for piece-wage rates compa
rable to what their Russian employers had paid before selling the islands.28

Unangan earnings were comparable to those of manual laborers in the con
tinental United States.29 However, U.S. Treasury agents stationed on the is
lands frequently undermined the authority of Unangan community leaders
and compelled Unangan residents to perform unpaid labor. This situation
worsened during the second concessionary period (1890–1910), when the de
pletion of fur seals reduced the piece-wages earned by Unangan workers. U.S.
Treasury agents, now faced with the prospect of running deficits in Alaska, in
creasingly adopted colonial mentalities and practices, marked by a discursive
shift that transformed Unangan people from “employees” to “wards” of the
state. When the federal government ended the Pribilof concession in 1910,
Unangan residing on the islands lost their only source of income.30 The pres
ence of U.S. commercial sealers and state agents, like that of the Russian
Empire before them, led to the loss of Unangan political sovereignty.31
The late nineteenth-century impoverishment of the Unangan inhabiting the
Pribilof Islands resulted largely from dwindling fur seal populations linked to
an increase in open-sea (pelagic) hunting of fur seals in the Bering Sea by Ca
nadian, Japanese, and Russian sealers. In fact, less than half of the documented
sealing vessels operating in the North Pacific held a U.S. registry; approxi
mately one-third came from the British Dominion of Canada, including fifty
constructed in Atlantic ports such as Nova Scotia.32 Between 1870 and 1910
vessels operating from British Columbia and Nova Scotia took more than one
million seals from the w aters surrounding the Pribilof Islands. However, many
contemporary observers regarded pelagic hunting to be extremely wasteful on
account of the inconvenient reality that fur seal carcasses lacked buoyancy and
quickly sank beyond the reach of boat crews. Consequently the number of fur
seals killed in open waters far surpassed the quantity of skins that entered
commercial markets.33
In the late 1880s the U.S. government seized several U.S. and Canadian vessels
(bearing British flags) engaged in pelagic hunting, raising immediate protests
from Canadian authorities. In 1893 a tribunal convened in Paris affirmed the
Russian transfer of Alaska to the United States but denied the U.S. claim that
the Bering Sea was “territorial water.” The Paris tribunal imposed a summer
time ban (May through July) on pelagic hunting within sixty miles of the Pribi
lof Islands for a period of five years.34 The negotiations over pelagic hunting
were entangled with conflicting imperial interests: British authorities (who
handled Canada’s foreign affairs) had to balance the demands of resident Ca
nadians to share in the wealth of the Alaska trade with U.S. claims that pelagic
hunting threatened the stability of an industry whose raw material fed Lon
don’s economy. The 1893 agreement put an end to controversial seizures and
32 john soluri

c onfiscations, but it did not resolve the question of pelagic hunting. U.S. offi
cials could not effectively patrol the waters around the Pribilof Islands; more
over, Japanese sealers—not party to the Paris agreements—intensified their
hunting in the region. Entering the twentieth century, most government offi
cials supported a complete ban on pelagic hunting but struggled to find a politi
cal compromise. In the meantime, social tensions heightened; in 1905 hunters
employed by Canadian sealing companies went on strike in order to renegotiate
their piece-wage scales in the face of a shrinking seal population.35
The transimperial contests that took place over sealing in the North Pacific
had ripple effects as far away as Tierra del Fuego. The reorientation of the flow
of fur seal skins from Asian markets to London following the U.S. takeover of
the Pribilof Islands stimulated demand for fur seals from other regions, includ
ing South America. Access to the principal London auction house enabled the
formation of a local fur sealing fleet based in Punta Arenas, a Chilean port on
the Straits of Magellan. In addition, vessels from the United States also hunted
fur seals in and around Tierra del Fuego; Canadian-based sealers also plied the
region’s waters, particularly a fter the U.S. began interfering with vessels engaged
in pelagic hunting in the North Pacific. Although the United States made no ter
ritorial claims in the region, the heightened presence of fur sealers in Tierra del
Fuego provoked changes not unlike those that took place in the late nineteenth-
century North Pacific, including the depletion of fur seals and challenges to the
sovereignty of the Yámana and Kawéskar, the indigenous “canoe people” who
inhabited the region’s labyrinthine waterways.36
Pursuing Seals: Tierra del Fuego

In 1868 (one year after the U.S. purchased Alaska) the Chilean government
declared Punta Arenas, a penal colony populated primarily by prisoners and
soldiers, to be a duty-free port. The government also contracted the Pacific
Navigation Company to provide regular steamer service linking Punta Arenas
to Valparaíso and London. Around this time, an Argentine named Luís Piedra
Buena and a young Portuguese sailor named José Nogueira arrived in Punta
Arenas and began hunting South American fur seals (Arctocephalus australis)
in the region’s channels and islets. Over the next twenty years, Nogueira pur
chased several vessels and became Punta Arenas’s first and most important
shipper.37 The fur seal trade provided the foundation for his business. Chilean
officials registered exports of more than twenty-five thousand sealskins
between 1877 and 1880, a figure that did not include additional thousands
taken by foreign sealers.38 In the early 1880s Chilean authorities reported

that sealing “contributed mightily” to the development of business, including
the establishment of five import h ouses in Punta Arenas that purchased skins
and furs and provisioned visiting ships. At its peak the local sealing fleet con
sisted of twenty-eight vessels and six hundred seasonal workers.39
Fur sealers based in the United States first hunted South American fur seals
in the vicinity of Tierra del Fuego in the late eighteenth century, when maritime
hunters oriented their activities toward Canton (Guangzhou), where traders ea
gerly exchanged Chinese manufactured goods for the pelts of sea otters and fur
seals.40 However, by the early nineteenth c entury fur sealers had found prime
hunting grounds elsewhere, including the South Shetland Islands (650 kilometers
south of Cape Horn) and on the Juan Fernández Islands in the Southeastern Pa
cific, where they reportedly took at least a million sealskins.41 In fact, when the
Argentine government attempted to establish its sovereignty over the Malvinas/
Falkland Islands in the early 1830s, fur sealing in the region was in sharp decline.
Fur seal hunters from the United States had returned to Tierra del Fuego
by 1874, when two U.S. schooners spent time resupplying in Punta Arenas, to
the delight of Chile’s territorial governor, who noted that the vessels purchased
goods from local businesses.42 The Stonington-based Thomas Hunt journeyed to
Cape Horn in 1874 and 1878, taking thousands of fur seals.43 Between 1878 and
1881 Captain James Buddington took eighty-six thousand sealskins from “Cape
Horn rookeries,” a haul that netted him an enormous profit, with which he pur
chased a large home in Stonington.44 Fellow New Englander George Comer’s
trip to Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia during the same period yielded far fewer
sealskins (four thousand) yet was a financial success.45
The salted skins of South American fur seals ended up in the same London
warehouses as the skins taken from fur seals in the North Pacific. Late nineteenth-
century traders at Lampson Company auctions generally viewed “Cape Horn”
skins as inferior to those from Alaska, but quality assessments and auction
prices varied from season to season. In addition, a segmented market existed
in which some buyers sought out high-quality skins for “dressing and dyeing,”
while other buyers purchased “inferior” quality skins at discount prices for
what trade journals referred to as “washing and drying.”46 All told, between
1870 and 1900 the skins of some 300,000 South American fur seals passed
through London auction h ouses before reaching end-markets in Europe, Rus
sia, and the United States.47 The (briefly) connected economies of places like
Punta Arenas, Stonington, and London demonstrate how transnational frame
works can obscure not only the significance of transimperial interactions but
also translocal connections that operate in relation to, but are not fully sub
sumed by, territorial states.
34 john soluri

Commercial fur seal hunters plying the myriad channels of the Fuegian ar
chipelago frequently encountered the canoes and/or shoreline settlements of
Yámana and Kawéskar. Sealers and Yámana also met one another when visiting
the Anglican mission situated near the Argentine settlement of Ushuaia on the
Beagle Channel. For example, in 1879 an English missionary, Thomas Bridges,
reported that a Yámana man named Eemyoosa had “lived and worked happily
for some months” with a sealing crew.48 Eemyoosa’s relative Meenataga also
found satisfactory work with a sealing crew. The following year the mission’s
staff appealed to their superiors for guidance as to whether to allow “Christian
natives” to work for the sealers “frequenting the neighborhood.” They noted
that sealing crews increasingly sought Yámana men who were skilled in “chas
ing the seal” and “civilized by the Gospel.”49 Sealing captains continued to en
list indigenous help in the early 1880s, but unlike the larger, geographically
fixed sealing operations on the Pribilof Islands, commercial sealing in Tierra del
Fuego never relied primarily on indigenous laborers.50
Sporadic violence marked late nineteenth-century encounters between
sealers and Yámana communities. In 1876 the crew of the Charles Shearer
landed at Tierra del Fuego with the intention of trading. When they ap
proached a group of Yámana dwellings, the crew came u nder attack. In the
ensuing violence, two sealers and four Yámanas perished.51 Three years later
a Norwegian sealer named John Stole reported that his crew had repulsed an
indigenous attack on their vessel, killing eight men and capturing a w oman,
whom they turned over to the missionary Thomas Bridges—a decision highly
suggestive, among other things, of the region’s uncertain sovereignties.52 In
another incident reported by the British naval surgeon Richard Coppinger,
seven canoes launched a nocturnal attack on the schooner Annita, killing five
sealers before retreating.53 Sealers’ narratives usually portrayed indigenous
men as acting violently without reason. However, Captain J. Willis, pilot of
the South American Missionary Society’s vessel, attributed the violence to the
sealing crews: “We know that t hese natives are continually being killed or shot
at by lawless sealers, also their wives and daughters taken by force, so that it is
no wonder that they kill white men whenever they have the opportunity.”54 In
1882–83 the members of a French scientific expedition to Cape Horn reported
that a dispute provoked by the rape of indigenous w omen (probably Yámana)
had ended in the killing of fifteen indigenous men by a sealing crew.55
The violence provoked by fur sealers did not single-handedly destroy Tierra
del Fuego’s indigenous societies. In a dynamic repeated throughout the Ameri
cas for centuries, nonindigenous interlopers (including fur sealers, mission
aries, and traders) introduced communicable diseases that took the lives of

hundreds of indigenous p eople. For example, in 1882 Thomas Bridges sought
out the doctor accompanying the French scientific expedition cited above to
diagnose the cause of a fever that was killing the mission’s indigenous residents.
Describing his visit to the mission located near the settlement of Ushuaia,
the doctor observed that most of the Yámana “fled from Ushuaia because there
diseases, be it tuberculosis or another introduced disease, claim more victims
than in any other part [of Tierra del Fuego].”56 Two years later smallpox killed
more than five hundred Yámana—approximately one half of the population
recorded by the missionaries.57 In 1887 Bridges, noting that “various epidemics”
killed many “native-settled families,” lamented, “We have to almost commence
again.”58 Bridges’s expression of paternalistic despair conveyed the colonial
mind-set and changing ecologies that together unsettled indigenous sovereign
ties in Tierra del Fuego.
Somewhat paradoxically, interloping commercial sealers in Tierra del Fuego
served to strengthen the colonizing projects of the Chilean state by generat
ing valuable commodities that ruling elites in Santiago claimed to be “national
patrimony.” At nearly the same time that the United States sought to prevent
Canadian and Japanese vessels from hunting fur seals in open seas, the Chilean
government—along with the governments of neighboring Argentina and the
British-controlled Falkland Islands, sought to restrict foreign vessels from seal
ing in their respective territories. However, the wide-ranging movements of fur
seals, not unlike migratory birds, compelled territorial states to recognize the
limits of their ability to enforce their sovereignty at all times and places. Fur
seal conservation, like fur seal hunting, was simultaneously a translocal, trans
national, and transimperial affair.
Conserving Fur Seals, Claiming Sovereignty

In 1881 Francisco Sampaio, the Punta Arenas–based governor of the Chilean
territory of Magallanes, alerted his superior in distant Santiago that foreign
sealers threatened to put an end to “the only industry that nourishes this col
ony.” He urged the government to issue a temporary ban on fur seal hunting
in order to avoid “the complete extinction of such a valuable product for the
future of Punta Arenas.”59 Two years later a three-person Chilean commission
produced a lengthy report on fur seal hunting that explicitly linked nationalism
and conservation. Acknowledging the presence of both Punta Arenas–based
and foreign sealers, the commission argued, “Given that hunting occurs in
places considered to be territorial waters [mar territorial], the vessels of foreign
origin . . . are in violation of the Civil Code that guarantees the rights of Chil
36 john soluri

ean citizens and resident foreigners to carry out this industry.”60 The commis
sion confessed that they lacked precise data on the number of fur seals killed by
foreign crews but offered the example of the “American schooner” Florence that
had reportedly taken thirteen thousand fur seal skins.61
The report then described the measures taken by the U.S. government to
regulate fur sealing on the Pribilof Islands, including a ban on foreign vessels.
It praised the regulations put in place by “the G reat Republic” in order to guar
antee “a monopoly on sealing for its own citizens and flag of the nation,” while
simultaneously preventing the extinction of the species.62 Noting that enforc
ing such regulations would be costly, the report’s authors suggested that the
Chilean government follow the United States in granting a private concession:
“This is undoubtedly a correct measure given that there is no one better to guard
against violations than the self-interested concessionaire.”63 The report con
cluded with a set of proposed regulations for Chile; the first article restricted
fur seal hunting to vessels “flying the national flag.”
The 1883 report did not stray far from the economic and political liberalism
ascendant in Chile at the time.64 On the one hand, its authors expressed concerns
about the presence of U.S. sealing vessels violating Chilean sovereignty and the
rights of Chilean citizens to valuable, that is, marketable, resources. On the other
hand, the authors praised the United States for its regulatory scheme in Alaska
and urged the Chilean government to use it as a model. This points to the am
bivalence with which at least some Chilean authorities viewed the distant United
States, whose presence in Cape Horn was largely limited to maritime traffic and
sealers. For Chilean authorities e ager to strengthen their country’s territorial
claims, the expansionist United States—“the Great Republic”—could serve as a
model precisely b ecause the Chilean state, like its powerful, distant neighbor,
pursued territorial expansion via the colonization of indigenous lands.65
For observers in the United States, the history of sealing in the southern
hemisphere served as a cautionary tale, not a model for emulation. Official
government reports, newspaper editorials, and trade magazines almost always
portrayed the “southern sealing grounds” as overexploited due to the absence
of regulation.66 For example, describing the experience of the San Francisco–
based sealing schooner John Hancock in Cape Horn, a trade journal reported
that “Chilian” sealers were already in the area: “As soon as a seal, no matter if it
were a pup, showed his head above w ater, he was killed. It was found that the same
condition of things existed all about the coast and the neighboring islands. The
Chilian hunters have exterminated the seals entirely in the South.”67 As shown
earlier, the situation in Alaska was hardly better; pelagic hunting thwarted U.S.
attempts to regulate fur sealing.

The central government in Chile did not act to protect fur seals until 1892,
when newly elected president Jorge Montt decreed a one-year ban on fur seal
hunting in Chilean territory. One year later the Chilean Congress, with mini
mal debate, extended the ban to four years.68 That same year the governor of
Magallanes reported that two “American schooners” w ere hunting fur seals in
Chilean territory. The Chilean government responded by authorizing a naval
cutter, the Cóndor, to patrol “national waters” for foreign sealers.69 The efforts
of the Cóndor notwithstanding, the ban came under criticism from some ob
servers in Chile for “favoring foreigners who, due to the lack of vigilance along
our coasts, have been able to dedicate themselves to the industry without any
risk of any kind.”70
The 1893 ban coincided with the Paris Tribunal that resulted in a temporary
agreement between the United States and the British Empire concerning pe
lagic fur sealing in the w aters around the Pribilof Islands. Although tensions
remained in the Bering Sea due to the entry of sealers from Japan and Canada,
the number of vessels engaged in pelagic hunting in Alaskan w aters decreased
sharply in the years following the Paris Tribunal.71 Canadian companies began
sending sealers to the southern hemisphere. In 1901 the schooner Edward Roy
brought 1,600 fur seal skins from the “Cape Horn” region to Halifax.72 The fol
lowing year the Victoria Sealing Company sent two of their best schooners and
experienced masters to the Falkland Islands.73
Canadian sealers, primarily from Nova Scotia, engaged in pelagic hunt
ing in the South Atlantic, including the Falklands, where the government
had banned unlicensed hunting in 1899. Although Governor Allardyce of the
Falkland Islands confessed to “a certain feeling of satisfaction” that the illegal
hunting did not benefit “foreigners” (i.e., Chileans), Canadian sealing activi
ties brought few economic benefits to the region.74 When the Falkland Islands
government imposed a tariff on the transshipment of furs through Port Stanley
in 1903, fur sealers responded by boosting exports during the grace period
(1903–4) and subsequently bypassing Port Stanley in favor of Punta Arenas
and Montevideo, Uruguay. For example, the Canadian vessel E. B. Marvin
transshipped 1,148 skins from Punta Arenas and 1,014 from its homeport of
Halifax to London in 1905–6. In 1907 the E. B. Marvin transshipped a mere 640
from Port Stanley. That year, amid growing local protest over lost business,
the Falkland Islands government lifted the tariff, but by that point most of the
sealing fleet had left.75
In 1911 the North Pacific Fur Seal Convention banned pelagic seal hunting
in the North Pacific Ocean. Signed by a president (United States), a king (Great
Britain), an emperor (Japan), and a tsar (Russia), the accord was one of the first
38 john soluri

multilateral agreements signed by territorial states to protect wildlife. Ten years
later (1921) the Falkland Islands government banned fur sealing throughout its
jurisdiction. In Chile a ban on hunting and trading fur seals took effect in 1929;
neighboring Argentina imposed a similar ban in 1937.76 Commercial fur seal
hunting in the southern hemisphere had all but ceased. Fur seal hunting would
continue in Alaska under the direct control of the U.S. government, which con
tinued to contract Unangan labor into the 1970s.77
Transgressive Environmental Histories

By tracking their wide-ranging movements during a “long” nineteenth century,
this essay reveals several ways that fur sealers transgressed geopolitical bound
aries. A sealing ship leaving New E ngland for China in the early nineteenth
century might routinely pass through territories claimed by indigenous socie
ties, South American republics, and European empires; fur sealing, like whal
ing ventures, linked Atlantic and Pacific worlds. Investors in the United States
financed fur sealing expeditions largely on the expectation of market demands
in two different empires: first, Qing China and, later, Victorian Britain. Following
the Civil War, fur seals caught in the U.S. territory of Alaska often ended up
in retail stores in New York City, but they continued to pass through London
auction houses and workshops until the onset of the Great War. In the late
nineteenth century, Chilean, Canadian, and U.S. fur sealers operated in Tierra
del Fuego, where they undermined the sovereignties of indigenous societies.
Throughout the nineteenth century, then, the fur seal trade was simultaneously
translocal, transnational, and transimperial in its organization and historical
significance.
Following fur sealers demonstrates that U.S. power stretched across oceans
well before 1898. Refocusing on maritime actors and movements challenges
both chauvinistic and critical accounts of “westward” expansion by demon
strating that projections of U.S. power during the first half of the nineteenth
century took multiple forms and trajectories, entangling maritime Americans
in the multidimensional imperial politics of the nineteenth century. Yankee
whalers and fur sealers reached California, Alaska, and Tierra del Fuego before
their gold-seeking compatriots. Fur sealers clashed with indigenous p eople on
littorals and islands long before U.S. soldiers fought Filipino nationalists. If the
scale of violence was far less than what would take place in the Philippines, the
long-term outcomes of sealer-indigenous contact w ere every bit as significant:
in many cases, fur sealers were at the forefront of processes that would result in
the destruction of indigenous societies.

Histories of fur sealing also point to the limits of power based on territo
rial sovereignty. In the northern Pacific, a growing U.S. commercial presence,
including whalers and sealers, helped to compel the Russian Empire to sell
Alaska to the U.S. government. The United States subsequently created a lu
crative fur seal business run by a private concessionaire that in turn depended
on British markets and industries in order to transform animal tissue into an
item of high-end exchange. At the same time, Canadian and Japanese fur seal
ers challenged U.S. territorial sovereignty via their open-sea hunting practices.
Sealing activities in the North Pacific sent waves as far as Cape Horn, where
fur sealing briefly reemerged in the late nineteenth century fueled by the same
London markets that purchased Alaskan furs. Fur sealing in Cape Horn served
to strengthen the central authority of the Chilean state by giving an economic
boost to its southernmost territorial claim, but the presence of U.S. and later
Canadian sealers served as a frequent reminder to Chilean authorities of the limits
of their power. The crosscutting effects of long-distance trade on sovereignty,
then, are not unique to early twenty-first-century “globalization.”
The trajectory of the fur seal trade transgresses familiar historical periodiza
tions. Fur trades and whaling are familiar topics for colonial North America and
the antebellum United States. However, by extending the story of the com
mercial fur trade into the early twentieth century, we gain an appreciation for
the seldom acknowledged role that the products of commercial hunting played
in processes of industrialization. A staggering variety and volume of animal
pelts, skins, and feathers reached London auction houses in the second half
of the nineteenth century. Fur seal skins were prized for the manufacture of
luxury garments, but marine mammals supplied a much more diverse range
of products, including illuminants, lubricants, detergents, and furnishings.78
In other words, industrialization in the North Atlantic world did not replace
hunting economies but rather increased their scale and scope in the late
nineteenth century as guns, clubs, and wind-powered sailing vessels became
integrated with telegraphs, railroads, and steamships that spanned and con
nected empires.
Finally, fur sealers not only prompted and challenged claims to political
sovereignty; they also unsettled ecosystems by killing millions of fur seals, car
nivorous marine mammals whose populations s haped the marine environments
they inhabited. Although it is difficult to determine the potentially cascading
ecological effects of the mass killing of a high-level predator like fur seals, the
transoceanic history of fur sealing is highly suggestive of the power of capitalis
tic markets to deplete resources even without the benefit of fossil fuel–powered
technologies. Scientists do not presently categorize either northern or southern
40 john soluri

fur seals as endangered, yet current population levels for the two species do not
approach population estimates for the early nineteenth century.79
If the long-term effects of fur sealing on marine biodiversity remain unclear,
the impacts on indigenous societies are less debatable: commercial fur sealing
played a major role in destroying the sovereignty of indigenous groups caught
up in tides of change that swept over much of the nineteenth-century world and
spawned a contemporary era of unprecedented socioenvironmental transforma
tions marked by transgressions that are again destabilizing territorial sovereignty.
Environmental histories of the modern world, therefore, should not be limited
to transnational frameworks but should also “power up” to consider transimpe
rial interactions while simultaneously touching ground (or water!) in the par
ticular places where contests over sovereignty and resources have played out.
notes
1. Eben Townsend’s journal was published in 1888 by the New Haven Historical Soci
ety; quoted in Edouard A. Stackpole, The Sea-Hunters: The New England Whalemen during
Two Centuries, 1635–1835 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1953), 209–10.
2. For another example of U.S. sealers tangling with imperial powers, see Greg Grandin,
The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World (New York:
Picador, 2014). Note that the Neptune described here is not the same vessel as the British
slave ship at the center of Grandin’s book.
3. Anthony B. Dickinson, “Early Nineteenth-Century Sealing on the Falkland Islands:
Attempts to Develop a Regulated Industry, 1820–1834,” Northern Mariner/Le Marin du
nord 4 (1994): 39–49.
4. Alexander G. Monroe, “Commander Silas Duncan and the Falkland Islands Affair,”
Log of Mystic Seaport 25 (1973): 76–77.
5. Quoted in Dickinson, “Early Nineteenth-Century Sealing on the Falkland Islands,”
43.
6. U.S. Secretary of the Navy Levi Woodbury, quoted in Monroe, “Commander Silas
Duncan and the Falkland Islands Affair,” 83.
7. Dickinson, “Early Nineteenth-Century Sealing on the Falkland Islands,” 46.
8. Charles L. Williams v. The Suffolk Insurance Company (1839), in Reports of Cases
Argued and Adjudged in the Supreme Court of the United States, vol. 38 (New York: Banks
Law Publishing, 1903).
9. For Stonington’s role in early nineteenth-century sealing, see Richard M. Jones,
“Sealing and Stonington: A Short-Lived Bonanza,” Log of Mystic Seaport 28 (1977):
119–26.
10. Mark Cioc, The Game of Conservation: International Treaties to Protect the World’s
Migratory Animals (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009); Camilo Quintera Toro, Birds of
Empire, Birds of Nation: A History of Science, Economy and Conservation in United States–
Colombia Relations (Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes, 2012); Kurkpatrick Dorsey, The

Dawn of Conservation Diplomacy: U.S.-Canadian Wildlife Protection Treaties in the Progres-
sive Era (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998).
11. Helen M. Rozwadowski, “The Promise of Ocean History for Environmental History,”
Journal of American History 100 (2013): 136–39; Karen Wigen, “ahr Forum: Oceans of His
tory: Introduction,” American Historical Review 111 (2006): 717–21. For examples of scholar
ship, see Greg Cushman, Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2013); David Igler, The G reat Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to
the Gold Rush (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Lance E. Davis, Robert E. Gallman,
and Karin Gleiter, In Pursuit of Leviathan: Technology, Institutions, Productivity, and Profits in
American Whaling, 1816–1906 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
12. For accessible introductions to biological approaches to fur seals, see National
Audubon Society, Guide to Marine Mammals of the World (New York: Knopf, 2002);
William F. Perrin, Bernd Würsig, and J. G. M. Thewissen, eds., Encyclopedia of Marine
Mammals (New York: Academic Press, 2002); Ronald W. Nowak, Walker’s Marine Mam-
mals of the World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
13. The tensions that could arise from seeking to maximize profits in a dangerous
environment lay at the heart of James Fenimore Cooper’s novel The Sea Lions or, the Lost
Sealers (1860), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10545/10545-h/10545-h.htm.
14. Ryan Tucker Jones, Empire of Extinction: Russians and the North Pacific’s Strange
Beasts of the Sea, 1741–1867 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 84.
15. Jones, Empire of Extinction, 94–96.
16. Jones, Empire of Extinction, 17.
17. Dorothy Miriam Jones, A Century of Servitude: Pribilof Aleuts under U.S. Rule
(Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1980), http://arcticcircle.uconn.edu
/HistoryCulture/Aleut/Jones/jonesindex.html.
18. D. M. Jones, A Century of Servitude.
19. R. T. Jones, Empire of Extinction, 196.
20. Briton Cooper Busch, The War against the Seals: A History of the North American
Seal Fishery (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1985), 100; R. T. Jones, Empire
of Extinction, 204–7; D. M. Jones, A Century of Servitude, chapter 1.
21. John R. Bockstoce, Furs and Frontiers in the Far North (New Haven, CT: Yale Uni
versity Press, 2009), 260–95.
22. Busch, The War against the Seals, 107–10.
23. U.S. Congress, “An Act to Prevent the Extermination of Fur-Bearing Animals in
Alaska,” July 1, 1870, https://www.loc.gov/law/help/statutes-at-large/41st-congress/session
-2/c41s2ch189.pdf.
25. Busch, The War against the Seals, 114.
26. Busch, The War against the Seals, 113.
27. Scholars have devoted little attention to the industrial-era fur trade, but see C. H.
Stevenson, “Utilization of Skins of Aquatic Animals,” in Report of Commissioner of Fish
and Fisheries for Year Ending 30 June 1902 (Washington, DC, 1904), 283–352. On twenty-
first-century tuna, see Theodore C. Bestor, “How Sushi Went Global,” Foreign Policy 121
(2000): 54–63.
42 john soluri

28. D. M. Jones, A Century of Servitude.
29. R. T. Jones, Empire of Extinction, 95.
30. D. M. Jones, A Century of Servitude, chapters 3 and 4.
31. Busch, The War against the Seals, 115–18; Bockstoce, Furs and Frontiers in the Far
North, 296–323.
32. A. B. Dickinson, “Southern Hemisphere Fur Sealing from Atlantic Canada,” Ameri-
can Neptune 49 (1989): 278–90; Busch, The War against the Seals, 129–38.
35. “Vancouver Letter,” Fur Trade Review 32 (1905): 105.
36. There is a large body of anthropological research on Tierra del Fuego’s indigenous
societies. See Luis Abel Orquera, “The Late-Nineteenth-Century Crisis in the Survival of
the Magellan-Fuegian Littoral Natives,” in Archaeological and Anthropological Perspectives
on the Native Peoples of Pampa, Patagonia, and Tierra del Fuego to the Nineteenth Century,
edited by Claudia Briones and José Luís Lanata (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002),
146; Luis Abel Orquera and Ernesto Luis Piana, La Vida Material y Social de Los Yámana
(Buenos Aires: Editorial de la Universidad de Buenos Aires, 1999).
37. Mateo Martinic, “Actividad Lobera y Ballenera en Litorales y Aguas de Magallanes
y Antartica, 1866–1916,” Revista de Estudios del Pacífico 7 (1973): 7–26.
38. H. A. Alfredo de Rodt and Oscar Viel, “Informe pasado al Sr. Ministro de Rela
ciones Esteriores sobre la caza de lobos marinos,” May 17, 1883, Chile, Ministerio de
Relaciones Exteriores, Archivo General Histórico, Fondo Histórico (hereafter “Chile,
rree”], vol. 107; Joaquín Gomez to Minister of Foreign Relations, November 6, 1880,
Chile rree, vol. 72B.
39. Mariano Guerrero Bascuñan, Memoria que el delegado del Supremo Gobierno en
el territorio de Magallanes, don Mariano Guerrero Bascuñan, presenta al señor Ministro de
Colonización (Santiago de Chile: Imprenta y Librería Ercilla, 1897), 407.
40. Marcelo Mayorga Z., “Antecedentes históricos referidos a la caza de Lobos Marinos
y su interacción con el medio geográfico y humano en el extremo Austral Americano: El
caso del lobero escocés William Low,” Magallania 44 (2016): 37–64; Mateo Martinic B.,
“Navegantes norteamericanos en aguas de Magallanes durante primer mitad del siglo
XIX,” Anales del Instituto de la Patagonia, Serie Ciencias Sociales, 17 (1987): 11–17; A. G. E.
Jones, “The British Southern Whale and Seal Fisheries,” G reat Circle 3 (1981): 20–29.
41. On the South Shetlands, see Jorge Berguño, “Las Shetland del Sur: El ciclo lobero,”
Boletín Antártico Chileno 12 (1993): 5–13. On the Juan Fernández Islands, see Busch, The
War against the Seals, 10–19.
42. Oscar Viel to Ministro de Relaciones Exteriores, May 1, 1874, Punta Arenas, Chile
rree, vol. 49A.
43. Logbook of Schooner Thomas Hunt (Stonington), entries for October 13, 1874;
September 6, 1878; September 16–18, 1878, Log 841, New Bedford Whaling Museum,
New Bedford, Rhode Island.
44. Buddington’s haul netted him $30,000; see Barnard L. Colby, For Oil and Buggy
Whips: Whaling Captains of New London County (Mystic, CT: Mystic Seaport Museum,
1990), 166.

45. Comer’s account was an affidavit cited by J. A. Allen, “Fur-Seal Hunting in the
Southern Hemisphere.” In United States, Fur Seal Arbitration v. II (Washington: Govern
ment Printing Office, 1895): 397.
46. See, for example, Fur Trade Review 31 (1904): 278.
47. Stevenson, Utilization of the Skins of Aquatic Animals; A. Howard Clark, “The
Antarctic Fur-Seal and Sea-Elephant Industry,” in The Fisheries and Fishery Industries of
the United States, edited by George Brown Goode (Washington, DC: gpo, 1884–87), 402.
Also see Federico Albert, “Los Lobos Marinos de Chile,” Revista Chilena de Historia Natu
ral 5 (1901): 33–41; Bartolomé Bossi, Exploración de la Tierra del Fuego (Montevideo: La
España, 1882), 53.
48. Thomas Bridges, “Southern Mission. Tierra del Fuego,” South American Missionary
Magazine, October 1, 1879, 221.
49. “General Intelligence,” South American Missionary Magazine, December 1, 1880,
265.
50. “The Southern Mission. Tierra del Fuego. Ooshooia,”South American Missionary
Magazine, February 1, 1884, 32; Rubén Stehberg, Arqueología Histórica Antártica: Aborí-
genes Sudamericanos en Los Mares Subantárticos en el Siglo XIX (Santiago, Chile: dibam,
2003).
51. “The Perils of Patagonia,” Whalemen’s Shipping List and Merchants’ Transcript 34
(April 11, 1876), p. 2.
52. R. W. Coppinger, Cruise of the Alert: Four Years in Patagonian, Polynesian and Mas-
carene Waters (London: W. Swan Sonnenschein, 1883), 112–13.
53. Coppinger, Cruise of the Alert, 55.
54. “The Allen Gardner Mission Yawl,” South American Missionary Magazine, March 1,
1883, 63.
55. L. Martial, “Trabajos de la Comisión Científica Francesa del Cabo de Hornos en
1882–83,” translated by Chilean Office of Hydrography, Anuario Hidrográfico de la Marina
de Chile 14 (1889): 369.
56. Dr. Hyades, “Un Año en el Cabo de Hornos,” translated by Ramón Serrano M.,
Anuario Hidrográfico de Chile 11 (1886): 488.
57. Martial, “Trabajos de la Comisión Científica Francesa,” 478–79.
58. Thomas Bridges, “The Southern Mission: Tierra del Fuego,” South American Mis-
sionary Magazine, February 1, 1884; “Tierra del Fuego: Past, Present, and Future,” South
American Missionary Magazine, January 1, 1887, 7–8.
59. Francisco Sampaio to Ministro de Relaciones Exteriores, October 27, 1880, Chile
rree, vol. 72B; Sampaio to J. M. Balmaceda, October 24, 1881, Chile rree, vol. 72A.
60. Rodt, Howland, and Viel, “Informe pasado al Sr Ministro de rree sobre la pesca
de lobos marinos,” 2.
61. Rodt, Howland, and Viel, “Informe pasado al Sr Ministro de rree sobre la pesca de
lobos marinos,” 5.
62. Rodt, Howland, and Viel, “Informe pasado al Sr Ministro de rree sobre la pesca
de lobos marinos,” 7.
63. Rodt, Howland, and Viel, “Informe pasado al Sr Ministro de rree sobre la pesca de
lobos marinos,” 10.
44 john soluri

64. Patrick Barr-Mele, Reforming Chile: Cultural Politics, Nationalism, and the Rise of the
M
iddle Class (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2001); Rafael Zarita, “Ecos de
Europa: La Representación Parlamentaria en el Chile Liberal del Siglo XIX,” Journal of
Iberian and Latin American Research 20 (2014): 98–110, https://doi.org/10.1080/13260219
.2014.888944.
65. Thomas Miller Klubock, La Frontera: Forests and Ecological Conflict in Chile’s
Frontier Territory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Florencia Mallon, Courage
Tastes of Blood: The Mapuche Community of Nicolás Ailío and the Chilean State, 1906–2001
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
66. See, for example, Charles H. Townsend, “Fur Seals and the Seal Fisheries,” Bulletin
of the Bureau of Fisheries 28 (1910): 315–22; “Destruction of the Seal,” Rocky Mountain
News (Denver CO), February 16, 1891, 2, infotrac.galegroup.com.
67. Fur Trade Review 19 (May 1892): 207.
68. Chile, Cámara de Diputados, Boletín de las Sesiones Ordinarias en 1893 (Santiago,
Chile: Imprenta Nacional, 1893), 372.
69. Decreto No. 1303 del Ministerio de Industria y Obras Públicas, Santiago, Septem
ber 12, 1893, Chile, Archivo Nacional, Fondo: Gobernación de Magallanes, vol. 3; Tomás
King to Ministry of the Navy, August 20, 1894, oficio 409, Chile, Archivo Nacional,
Ministerio de Marina, vol. 602.
70. Guerrero Bascuñan, Memoria, 408; Albert, “Los Lobos Marinos de Chile,” 41.
71. Stories of violence among sealers circulated far and wide; Rudyard Kipling’s inspiration
for “The Rhyme of the Three Sealers” came from tales that he heard while visiting Japan.
72. Fur Trade Review 28 (1900–1901): 295, 346.
73. Fur Trade Review 30 (1902–3): 34.
74. Dickinson, “Southern Hemisphere Fur Sealing from Atlantic Canada,” 283.
75. Dickinson, “Southern Hemisphere Fur Sealing from Atlantic Canada,” 287.
76. Juan Carlos Godoy, Fauna Silvestre, vol. 1 (Buenos Aires: Consejo Federal de
Inversiones, 1963); J. Agustín Iriarte and Fabian M. Jaksic, “The Fur Trade in Chile: An
Overview of Seventy-Five Years of Export Data (1910–1984),” Biological Conservation 38
(1986): 244–45.
77. For a synopsis of Pribilof Island fur sealing under U.S. government control, see
Busch, The War against the Seals, 223–41.
78. Samuel George Archibald, Some Account of the Seal Fishery of Newfoundland and the
Mode of Preparing Seal Oil (Edinburgh: Murray and Gibb, 1852), https://hdl.handle.net
/2027/aeu.ark:/13960/t8nc6jm4k.
79. T. Gelatt, R. Ream, and D. Johnson, “Northern Fur Seal: Callorhinus ursinus,” iucn
Red List of Threatened Species 2015: e.T3590A45224953, https://www.iucnredlist.org
/species/3590/45224953.

2. crossing the rift: american steel and colonial
l abor in britain’s east africa protectorate
Stephen Tuffnell
Beginning in the late 1860s, U.S. engineering firms won lucrative contracts
to erect bridges, viaducts, and railways around the globe.1 The Phoenix Bridge
Company, the leading bridge fabrication and erection firm in North America
by the 1890s, built steel bridges and viaducts in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Peru,
Costa Rica, Cuba, Mexico, Brazil, Canada, Russia, China, and Japan between
1869 and 1885.2 These far-flung projects set in motion the movement of goods,
people, and expertise across the world. For each project, gangs of American
engineers traveled overseas to supervise the erection of Phoenix’s prefabricated
designs and to manage the imported and local l abor put at their disposal. T
hese
engineers shared their experience around the world in new forums of interna
tional cooperation, such as conferences and technical journals, and incorpo
rated it into a global, professional identity.3 Joining a much larger network of
American travelers, businessmen, expatriates, conservationists, and missionar
ies laboring in the Americas, Asia, and Africa, the U.S. engineering diaspora
connected the United States to empires across the world.4
This species of transimperial connection and exchange was particularly no
ticeable in the British imperial world and is key to the writing of a new history
of American empire. Through a series of transimperial projects, U.S. capital
ist and industrial expansion became enmeshed in the proliferating networks
of communication, investment, commerce, and migration that characterized
British imperialism.5 From settler colonies to protectorates and condominiums,
American contractors helped Britain consolidate its grip on imperial power,
building strategically vital railway bridges for its armed forces and accelerating
the integration of interior regions with major ports and centers of extraction. In
1899 one of Phoenix’s major rivals, the Pennsylvania Steel Company, underbid
British competitors to build the Gokteik viaduct in Upper Burma for £100,000,
connecting important mineral fields near the town of Lashio with Mandalay,
the chief city of Upper Burma u nder British rule.6 The Burma Railway Com
pany also placed large o rders with Pennsylvania Steel and with the Maryland
Steel Company for locomotives, rails, and ties.7 In the same year, British armed
forces in the Sudan contracted the Pencoyd Iron Works of Philadelphia to build
the Atbara Bridge over the confluence of the Atbara and Blue Nile rivers. At a
cost of £6,500 and a construction time of six weeks, the bridge enabled the
supply and organization of British and Egyptian troops then advancing against
the Mahdist State near Khartoum, 177 miles to the southwest.8 In Britain’s white
settler dominions, American firms built bridges and viaducts along the Inter
colonial Railway and G rand Trunk Railways in Canada; the Nairne Viaducts in
Adelaide, South Australia; and the Nowra and Hawkesbury River Bridges in
New South Wales, Australia.9 “Money is being poured out like water in order to
secure the market for British manufacturers,” complained one British observer,
“and lo! The American steps in and carries off the contracts for building these
bridges without having incurred a penny of expense or an atom of responsibility
in opening up the country.”10
American corporations—many of which had risen to greatness by develop
ing and exploiting recently incorporated areas of the U.S. West—played major
roles in advancing the British empire of industrial extraction.11 Ten miles east
of Cape Town, Cecil Rhodes’s British South Africa Company (bsac) employed
the Californian William Russell Quinan to design and build the Cape Explosive
Works to supply dynamite for the Rand’s gold mines; similarly American min
ing engineers were employed in large numbers by the bsac, De Beers Consoli
dated Mines, and Bewick, Moering & Co. to transform the mineral industries
of southern Africa, Rhodesia, and Australia.12 North of the Atbara Bridge in the
Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, the American financier Leigh Hunt directed the Sudan
Plantations Syndicate, an experimental farming project funded by Wernher,
Beit & Co. that employed Tuskegee graduates to cultivate cotton, tomatoes, and
alfalfa.13 “Whether or not we are to have a political imperialism,” wrote one
American observer of these collaborations, “we already have an industrial im
perialism.”14
Taking these projects as its starting point, this chapter proposes a framework
of global connectivity defined by transimperial interaction as one solution to
navigating the tensions between imperial and global history.15 Empires were
Crossing the Rift 47

organized in multiple ways through degrees of entanglement with global mi
gration patterns, commodity chains and capital flows, and the communications
infrastructure and nonstate institutions that made this exchange possible. Non
state actors may have noted official boundaries, but they w ere not contained by
them: they moved regularly between empires to supervise industrial subcon
tracting, participate in colonial wars, and gather and spread knowledge. T hese
overlaid patterns of consumption and production, exchange and collaboration
are central to the transimperial character of global connectivity.
Taking center stage here are the networks of globe-crossing American en
gineers and experts who transferred ideas, expertise, and technology between
empires and who disseminated news of the lucrative industrial opportunities
offered by the British Empire to audiences at home. “Out in the broad world at
large,” wrote one American commentator, imperial Britons and Americans
“understand each other, join hands, and work shoulder to shoulder . . . in a
silent alliance.”16 Migrations of this sort linked U.S. corporations both psycho
logically and materially with a world fundamentally reshaped by British and
European imperialism. Although it was commonplace for empires to outsource
some industrial tasks, send observers to learn from other empires, and exchange
personnel for particular projects, for many Britons this form of American ex
pansion was a deeply parasitic phenomenon.17
Recognizing the work done by U.S. corporations in European colonies places
the dynamic, transimperial flow of strategies of rule between and across em
pires at the center of analysis, while also drawing attention to the nonstate ac
tors and institutions involved in these exchanges and to the exercise of power.18
Historians seeking to globalize the U.S. past require a sharper, more precise
analytical vocabulary to discuss global connectivity in the nineteenth century.
Labeling all connections “transnational” attenuates our analysis by distorting the
nature of global connectivity; the term transimperial makes visible the powerful
imperial formations that figured prominently in the border-crossing relation
ships of a world of empires. This term owes clear debts to earlier transnational
scholarship, but I am not proposing a contextual thickening of key moments in
the development of the U.S. Empire-State, as envisaged by earlier theorists of
transnationalism.19 Instead I see transimperial contacts as the vantage point for
perceiving the interwoven relationships between national, imperial, and global
scales of analysis. This conceptual framing offers one solution for historians
seeking to avoid the restrictions of metropole-periphery binaries and the poten
tially flattening terminology of globalization.20
Historians of transimperial connections can draw on the new method
ological breadth of research focusing on the practice, and politics, of imperial
48 stephen tuffnell

comparison.21 This scholarship captures one of the central dynamics of im
perial power: its control over the collection and subsequent organization of
knowledge in hierarchical terms. On the one hand, shared or comparable
concepts of race, science, and civilization lent credibility to the idea that
empires faced universal problems to which interchangeable solutions could
be applied. These assumptions underpinned the creation of horizontal cir
cuits of imperial experts dedicated to observing the administrative structures,
labor policies, and medical and sanitary reforms of other empires.22 On the
other hand, in the realm of interimperial competition, imperial comparisons
legitimized claims to exceptional status among other empires.23 In the con
text of U.S. imperial historiography, the direct comparisons between the U.S.
and British empires made by imperialists in the United States have long been
recognized, as has the utility of the politics of imperial comparison in justi
fying the transition from Spanish to U.S. rule in the Philippines, Cuba, and
Puerto Rico.24
The central achievement of scholarship examining the politics of imperial
comparison is its posing of familiar questions about U.S. imperialism from a
wider angle. Yet this approach does little to “re-engineer” the questions them
selves.25 For this reason, the geographic center of this chapter moves to Eastern
Africa—a part of the world unacknowledged in the traditional historiography
of U.S. imperialism and a region widely understood as being peripheral to U.S.
geopolitical interests in the age of European “high imperialism.”26 Stepping
outside the traditional geographic and historiographical boundaries of U.S. im
perialism, this chapter examines the Uganda Protectorate’s subcontracting of
the American Bridge Company (abc) to erect twenty-seven railway viaducts on
the Uganda Railway. The centerpiece of Britain’s project to develop the econ
omy of East Africa, this railway offers an opportunity to view the interwoven
imperial networks that characterized Anglo-American transimperial connec
tions. By focusing on a region of the world where American power was not the
primary transformative force, historians can begin to reframe the questions we
ask of the nature and geography of U.S. imperialism.
Through the abc, U.S. engineers became substantively involved in British
efforts to assert power by seizing land and coercing labor in East Africa. The in
tent h
ere is not to annex the Uganda Protectorate as an outpost of the American
Empire but to emphasize the centrality of transimperial collaboration to the pro
cesses of turn-of-the-twentieth-century imperialism—and in turn to highlight
the delimiting nature of national-imperial frameworks on U.S. imperial histo
riography. In the Uganda Protectorate, U.S. capitalist expansion, the regional
dynamics of Indian subimperialism in the Indian Ocean world, and the global

circulations of goods, experts, and labor management strategies all converged
at the railhead.27
Building the Ugandan Railway

On April 12, 1894, the Imperial British East Africa Company transferred its ter
ritorial rights to the Kingdom of Buganda to the British government, and the
Uganda Protectorate was formally declared. The Salisbury government moved
quickly to develop the colony’s infrastructure so as to advance commerce in the
region. The key to this was a proposed railway linking the coast with the inte
rior. Political, economic, and strategic priorities were entwined in the rationale
of the proposed 582-mile Uganda Railway, from Mombasa to Lake Victoria. To
its promoters, a railway from the shores of the Indian Ocean to the shores of
Lake Victoria was “the obvious method of attacking all of East Africa” and over
coming the limits of a harsh physical environment for travel and commerce.28
Imperial strategists also envisaged the line as a key element of British impe
rial defense of the Nile Valley. In their calculations, the railway would secure
control of the Nile’s headwaters and forestall French attempts to claim eastern
Sudan, thereby easing anxiety over the security of Egypt and India. Not far south
of the line lay the border with German East Africa, a territory roughly the size
of contemporary Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi combined. While the border
had been stabilized by Lord Salisbury and Leo von Caprivi in the Heligoland-
Zanzibar Treaty of 1890, the German East Africa Company remained Britain’s
preeminent commercial rival in the region. “The Germans are pushing on their
line from Tanga,” warned London’s Fortnightly Review, “with the ostensible aim
of reaching the Victoria Lake, it is surely high time we defend our own inter
ests.”29 Among the most vocal supporters of the line w ere lobbyists from the
British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society who believed it would also be the most
effective means of suppressing the inland slave trade.30
Connectivity was therefore central to the railway’s objectives. For many
missionaries, merchants, and imperial commentators, Africa was defined by
disconnection. They believed that railway technology would fundamentally
reconfigure East Africa’s place in the world, unlocking the continent’s agricul
tural potential by providing access to the interior, where vast cotton, rubber,
coffee, sugar, sansevieria (for ropes), wheat, groundnut, chili, and simsim plan
tations could be cultivated. Upon completion, the line reduced freight rates to
48 shillings per ton, compared to £100 to £300 per ton when head-loaded.31
To radical-minded mps such as Henry Labouchere, who dubbed the project a
“lunatic line,” and Fabian intellectuals during the late Victorian period, the line
50 stephen tuffnell

dangerously imperiled the Treasury’s financial integrity and was a waste of tax
payers’ money.32 British imperial historians have similarly concluded that the
overbudget and overschedule line “did little, and at great cost” to advance its
stated objectives.33
The Uganda Railway presented a series of formidable engineering chal
lenges. To connect the Indian Ocean and Lake Victoria, the tracks had to cross
large parts of the Great Rift Valley. Bordered by steep escarpments to the east
and west, the valley’s floor is broken by volcanos, lakes, and the Taru Desert—
an area of waterless scrub that stretched deep inland from around the fiftieth
mile of track. The first supply of fresh water the line would reach beyond the
Taru was the Tsavo River, 132 miles from Mombasa. Where the brush was thin,
the British engineers found the track laying easy and could lay 5,200 feet of line
in a single day. But once the town of Nakuru, west of Nairobi, had been cleared,
the route led sharply up the western side of the Rift Valley onto the Mau Escarp
ment. Beyond this the terrain fell rapidly, through a difficult country of small
valleys and riverbeds.
British engineers built temporary switchbacks to climb the steepest gradi
ents and erected wooden viaducts over some ravines, but in 1901 the consulting
engineer Alexander M. Rendel had the Foreign Office advertise in London for
steel viaducts to bridge the steep slopes. Historians of empire and technology
have shown that consulting engineers like Rendel belonged to informal profes
sional networks through which they exchanged information, advertised con
tracts, and promoted, planned, and designed imperial projects.34 The networks
that crisscrossed professional society in imperial London also extended farther
afield. The London correspondents of American professional periodicals, such
as the Engineering Record, Dun’s Review, and Iron Age, advertised colonial proj
ects to American firms. This was the most likely avenue through which the
eventual contractor, the abc, heard of the contract. In all, ten British and three
American firms submitted proposals to the crown agent. abc outbid its closest
rivals, the Pennsylvania Steel Company and the Phoenix Bridge Company, on
both time and cost, securing the contract with the lowest bid of £135,000 and a
construction time of thirty-two weeks.35
abc’s bid was ambitious, as the project required the transportation of seven
thousand tons of steel and a thirty-ton traveling crane from New York to Mom
basa.36 Eight of the twenty-seven viaducts were on the approach to the Mau
Summit, a fault scarp standing ten thousand feet above sea level. A further
nineteen descended the Mau escarpment to the railway’s terminus on the
shores of Lake Victoria.37 As a measure of the terrain’s treacherous character,
the viaducts were to be built 8,300 feet above sea level, along just seventy-two

figure 2.1. The engineers of the American Bridge Company constructed viaducts along
the part of the line beginning at the Mau Summit just below the equator at 36° longitude.
The border with German East Africa runs from the mouth of the Umba to a point east
of Lake Victoria at 1°s. At a point roughly halfway between the Indian Ocean and Lake
Victoria, George Whitehouse chose Nairobi as the logical location to place a rail depot
and maintenance workshops—helped by its access to fresh water. Mombasa-Victoria
(Uganda) Railway and Busoga Railway (1916). Used by permission of British Library,
London. © British Library Board. All rights reserved/Bridgeman Images.
miles of track. The highest was 102 feet tall, 560 feet long, and had nineteen
spans; the longest was 881 feet and twenty-nine spans (figure 2.1).38
Each viaduct was built “knocked down” in Manayunk, northwestern Phil
adelphia, at the mills of the Pencoyd Iron Works, before being shipped via
steamer to Mombasa in the winter of 1901–2. To make sense of this huge flat-
pack, the parts for each viaduct w
ere painted a different color, which w
ere then
matched and bolted together. Accompanying the prefabricated bridges was an
erection gang of twenty-one Pennsylvania laborers that included sixteen skilled
fabricators; a foreman (N. P. Jarrett of Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania); a timekeeper
(Charles N. Gemberling of Philadelphia); Edward Taylor, a restauranteur from
Selinsgrove who served as head cook; a clerk; and as superintendent a twenty-
52 stephen tuffnell

four-year-old engineer named Archibald Byron Lueder, a Cornell graduate from
Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania—all at twice their usual wages.39
On arrival in December 1901, the group traveled from Mombasa to Nairobi,
and from there to a base camp at the foot of the Mau Escarpment, where con
struction would begin. Within three days, the steel traveling crane with seventy-
foot booms was swung out over the first ravine to lift the g reat girders and bents
into place. The first viaduct was assembled in less than a week.40 After the initial
success, work slowed. The thirty-ton traveler inched along the railway on just
four sixteen-inch wheels, and the locomotives moving the steel bents derailed
several times on route to the construction site.41 Each time the team moved to
a new viaduct, camp was broken down by an army of porters, who then trans
ported it on foot to the next erection site. The American engineers, meanwhile,
advanced via train. They were obliged to live in tents while they waited for the
porters to arrive, which left them exposed to the extreme nighttime cold of such
high altitudes, leading in turn to frequent illness.42 “At this rate 1 year is required
to complete contract,” the deputy chief engineer, R. Anderson, telegrammed
home to London. “Advise putting pressure on Americans.”43
If the speed of the American work was one concern, the quality was even
more pressing. Although the American press declared that “American men,
American methods, and American machinery” had “achieved [a] notable vic
tory” over “our British cousins,” the reality was more prosaic.44 The work of the
American engineers came under close scrutiny from the project’s chief engi
neer, Sir George Whitehouse, who found many aspects of it deficient. “What
riveting has been done was very unsatisfactory,” he noted in one report, which
found that only one-quarter of the rivet holes had been filled. “This, in viaducts
which are over 80 & 90 feet high, is, I consider, dangerous,” Whitehouse noted
drily to his superiors in London.45 On viaduct bb (figure 2.2), a five-hundred-
foot-long bridge of nineteen spans, Anderson noted that some rivets w ere
46
loose and could be “shoved . . . out with his finger.” With the contract behind
schedule, Whitehouse and Anderson pressed the Railway Committee to refuse
payment to the Americans.47 Nevertheless the Americans were paid, and on
March 3, 1903, a fter just over a year’s work, the line was opened to the lake
terminus.
In one sense, this outpost of the American engineering diaspora was emblem
atic of surging U.S. commercial expansion. Like mission stations, the railhead
was an island of American commerce.48 American-made industrial equipment
such as compressors, pneumatic riveting hammers, and hoisting engines, in
addition to American-produced canned goods, seeds, and vegetables, were all
imported into the colony.49 Half a million feet of southern pine lumber was

figure 2.2. American-built viaduct bb along the Mau Escarpment, the longest of the
viaducts installed by the abc in Uganda. Source: Frederick W. Emett, “American Bridges
on the Uganda Railway,” Engineering, August 21, 1903, 249.
used to floor the bridges.50 Thirty-six locomotives from Baldwin’s Philadelphia

workshops sped along its rails, while all of the rolling stock was equipped with
American-engineered Westinghouse brakes. According to one observer, the en
tire project “indicates that the expansion of the British Empire and the opening
of new markets tend to promote American industrial interests.”51
In East Africa senior officials in the Protectorate government encouraged
the settlement of non-British personnel, especially Indians, to settle and de
velop the colony.52 American expansion occurred in the web of interregional
networks that made up the Indian subimperial system spanning the port cities
of the Indian Ocean rim from Zanzibar to Singapore, from Durban to Basra and
Penang. As Britain extended control into the interior of East Africa, it further
drew on and advanced this system. Sir Harry Johnston, the special commis
sioner sent to rationalize colonial administration in the Protectorate, mixed
imperial security concerns with a strategy for racial uplift among both Indian
migrants and black Africans. Control over East Africa and the Nile’s headwa
ters, Johnston stressed to the Salisbury government in 1901, “is necessitated
by our regard for the political future of India.” He advised that “Indian trade,
enterprise, and emigration require a suitable outlet,” noting that “East Africa
is, and should be, from that point of view an America of the Hindu.”53 The line,
then, amounted to “the driving of a wedge of India two miles broad right across
East Africa.”54
54 stephen tuffnell

Against this backdrop of encouraging nonwhite settlement in the region,
European imperialists began to view tropical climates as unsuited to European
exertion. In the view of Uganda’s rulers, white settlers would inhabit parts of
the British East Africa Protectorate, but not the interior along the line of the
railway. As Sir James Hayes Sadler, the commissioner following Johnston, ex
plained, “I do not consider that Uganda w ill ever be a white man’s country in
the sense that South Africa is and other parts of East Africa w ill prove to be. The
climate is not conducive to European colonization.”55 Indian migrants, Brit
ish officials hoped, would cultivate the interior and initiate a process of racial
improvement among the indigenous populations of East Africa by, Johnston
imagined, “carrying the Indian Penal Code, the Indian postal system, Indian
coinage, Indian clothing, right across these wastes . . . tenanted hitherto by
native savages or wild beasts.”56
To that end, an enormous labor force of Indian Sikhs and Muslims was im
ported from the Punjab into Mombasa when construction on the line com
menced in 1896. Between 1896 and 1902 a total of 31,983 Indian laborers were
engaged for service by the railway, overseen by just 107 European technicians.57
Locally engaged African laborers, driven into the labor market by hut taxes im
posed in 1900, varying in number from 1,500 to 2,500, were also employed on
the line for such tasks as clearing brush and leveling ground before the arrival of
the Indian workers laying the track (figure 2.3)—though in total Africans made
up less than 20 percent of the mostly Indian labor force.58
Indian recruitment ended in 1901 as track laying reached completion, but
the Protectorate’s Asian community proved invaluable in the lower rungs of the
colonial administration, in local commerce, and on the railway as technical and
service staff. As a result, the abc inherited a number of migrant laborers. Lueder
and the abc used gangs of Indian workers as riveters on wages of between 12
and 45 rupees ($4 to $15) a month with food; alongside these squads the abc
used several hundred black Africans as menial workers (figure 2.4).
The same labor circuits also converged on the Pennsylvania Steel Company’s
project in the Shan Hills of Burma. There the migration of Tamil and Telegu
unskilled laborers from South India swelled rapidly as the colony became one
of the world’s largest rice producers. Rice fields, paddy-processing industries,
timber yards, mineral oil refineries, and the railways were the chief sources of
employment for these free and unfree migrants.59 By 1901 Indian migrants con
stituted some 5.4 percent of the Burmese population and were concentrated
largely in Lower Burma.60 The Burma Railways Company contracted Indian
laborers to work on the Gokteik viaduct, where they w ere overseen by thirty-

figure 2.3. African and Indian laborers leveling the ground before the arrival of track.
These workers battled not only dense, tangled roots and shallow stream courses, but also
the bites of chiggers and the tsetse fly, which spread “sleeping sickness” (African trypano
somiasis), a parasitic disease that results in fevers, headaches, and joint pains before caus
ing neurological problems whose symptoms include confusion and trouble sleeping. Used
by permission of A. W. Read Collection, Weston Library, The Bodleian Libraries, The Uni
versity of Oxford.
five Americans from Pennsylvania Steel. Close to five hundred Indian riveters
pieced together more than 230,000 individual pieces of steelwork at $17 per
month.61 John C. Turk, in Burma as the chief engineer for Pennsylvania Steel,
animalized the Indian workers as having “the same respect for their European
overseers that sheep have for a collie.” The American workman, he concluded,
was equal to “at least four natives.”62
Having been pulled into this web of Indian labor migration, the abc’s en
gineers in Uganda posed as cosmopolitan race experts to imperial Britons and
U.S. audiences alike.63 “I had much to learn about handling, organizing, and
providing for this exceedingly raw and barbarous material,” Lueder reported
on his return to the United States.64 Much to his frustration, and overlooking
that the majority of laborers on the railway were contracted, he found that “the
56 stephen tuffnell

figure 2.4. When construction began in 1896, the Uganda Railway required enormous
amounts of labor: 6,000 Indians, including 4,800 Punjabi Muslims, and 17,400 male and
female Swahili-speakers, comprising 14,600 free persons, 2,650 slaves, and 150 prisoners.
By 1921 Asian migrants to East Africa amounted to 54,400. Used by permission of A. W.
Read Collection, Weston Library, The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford.
coolie had a way of organizing himself as an individual striker and refusing to

work.”65 Lueder wrote approvingly that it had been necessary “to go back to old
slave days” and to “act as police, judge, and executioner yourself.”66 The pun
ishment for striking—and the U.S.-managed side of the project was beset by
strikes—was twenty-five lashes with a rhinoceros hide cane.67
Yet the American engineers w ere not as a dept as they portrayed themselves to
U.S. audiences in technical journals and middle-class magazines such as World’s
Work. In March 1902 the chief engineer for the whole project, Sir George White
house, wrote to the Railway Committee that “the Company have had consider
able difficulty in working the Indian labour” and found that “practically all the
Indian rivetters had struck work.”68 The Americans, Whitehouse wrote home
again in June, “had no experienced supervision on their staff to look after the
men that they engaged locally,” and “many months were lost” as a result.69

Coercive power over labor was systemic to both industrial management at
home and to imperial capitalist expansion overseas. As American engineers
adapted labor regimes between industrial contexts, they paid special attention
to the management of nonwhite workers and developed a professional identity
that centered on a self-proclaimed ability to manage native labor worldwide. Es
tablishing ratios of productivity and profitability and designating competency
at skilled and unskilled tasks between white and nonwhite workers were hall
marks of the identity of the transnational American engineer. The corporations
employing elite engineers w ere tied to a variety of forms of unfree l abor—be it
the control of nonwhite laborers in the American West, the segregation of Afri
can Americans, or the coercion of laborers in the Philippines and colonial con
texts outside the United States.70 From these experiences, and others besides,
elite engineers staked claims to possessing unique knowledge of nonwhite
capacity.71 abc engineers were preoccupied with recruiting, managing, and dis
ciplining laborers, and Lueder measured the efficiency of Indian riveters at a
ratio of “one American [to] five of the African or coolies.”72 Americans found
like-minded military and civilian engineers on British industrial-imperial proj
ects who were similarly committed to the fiction that the “Anglo-Saxon race”
embodied the practices of wise management. It wasn’t simply the case that em
pires provided an outlet for these activities, but key characteristics of profes
sionalism were defined, and their prestige enhanced, through empire itself.73
Amalgamation and Empire

Focusing on the Ugandan Railway in this way also highlights new dimensions
to the complex interconnections between empire-building and the expansion
of American industrial capitalism. As Julie Greene has written, “U.S. imperial
ism and capitalism w ere profoundly intertwined,” but the empire did not simply
supply the needs of U.S. corporations.74 In the search for opportunity overseas,
U.S. corporate capitalism found expansionist opportunities in collaborations
with European empires and, in turn, sustained a global system of shared colonial
labor management. In the case of abc, two innovations are of particular note.
First, in 1899, in the midst of the spree of trust creation known as the “great
merger movement,” American Bridge became an industrywide holding company
when J. P. Morgan consolidated twenty-nine of the largest steel fabricators and
constructors in the United States into one corporate structure. The new amal
gamation accounted for 90 percent of the bridge tonnage erected in the United
States.75 This was growth by acquisition, not innovation. In 1901 abc’s absorp
tion into the newly formed U.S. Steel Corporation, encompassing 138 compa
58 stephen tuffnell

nies, strengthened this trend.76 This marked a radical change in the competitive
structure of American industry, prompting increased efficiency and technological
innovation, that in turn incentivized economies of speed (in the case of steel, it
was cheaper to convert molten pig iron into steel and roll and shape it while still
hot, than it was to reheat it), meaning these new giants were able to break into
foreign markets, and undersell foreign competitors, even at the expense of short-
run losses.77
Additional changes in the U.S. economy prepared the ground for the over
seas expansion of U.S. steel. At the turn of the twentieth century, steel was
used with increasing frequency in the construction industries, which boosted
the production of large, standardized structural shapes to cater to the enor
mous volume of bridge building in the United States. Philadelphia’s Pencoyd
Iron Works was one of the few firms rolling such shapes, and in 1899 it was one
of the firms absorbed into abc. Falling international freight rates, combined
with low-priced natural resources, an abundance of unskilled labor, and exper
tise acquired managing the massive economies of scale required for imposing
corporate will over the natural environment of the American West w ere the
78
keys to abc’s success. Stated simply: mass-produced structural steel work en
abled U.S. firms to reduce the manufacture of bridges to such simple terms that
export prices—even to Britain’s East African colonies—were not significantly
higher than those of bridges erected in the United States.79
Both Britons and Americans conceived of the mobility at the center of this
story as “invasion.”80 Of the British literature examining the so-called American
invasion, the shrewdest observers pointed out that it was U.S. corporations, not
simply products, that dominated in almost e very new industry. “The result of
the formation of the trust has been to enable the Americans to produce at lower
cost than ever before,” wrote the Scots Canadian journalist Frederick McKenzie
in his widely read and widely quoted work, The American Invaders. “American
bridge competition is typical of the w hole,” he wrote, having “reduced the work
to an exact science,” with the result that “American bridges . . . are cheaper,
simpler, better designed, and can be much more rapidly constructed.”81
The language of invasion was in some ways an effort to extract a national story
from the international entanglement at the center of capitalism’s expansion. Yet
the success of the American contract was as much attributable to the great en
gineers’ lockout between 1897 and 1898—a thirty-week strike, involving some
twenty-five thousand engineers who slowed down the work of 702 firms, para
lyzing Britain’s heavy machine business—as the quick march of commercial in
vasion.82 But, combined with the technical innovations prompted by corporate
consolidations, it does reveal the capacity of American industry to fulfill global

demands with g reat speed. A backlog in production kept British firms occupied,
leading to long delivery times, and provided the opportunity for abc to enter the
marketplace. For the same reason, thirty-six of the seventy locomotives deployed
on the Ugandan Railway were supplied by the Baldwin Locomotive Works be
tween 1899 and 1900.83 Despite vigorous debate in the British press and among
British colonial officials, the U.S. engines were deemed “better suited for rough
work during construction.”84 Transimperial connections, then, were as much
about the relations between metropolitan economies as about peripheral entan
glements. Similarly, the national was not undermined by transimperial connec
tions but heightened by them, as the language of invasion reveals.
Conclusion
Britain’s grip on imperial power was consolidated by the co-optation and
contracting of U.S. industrial capacity and technological innovation. As the
British sociologist Benjamin Kidd argued at the Royal Colonial Institute, it was
“undoubtedly a fact, from the nature of our trade and the character of our fiscal
system, that we even offer peculiar facilities” to the expansion of American
firms. This left Britain “peculiarly open,” Kidd continued, to “being drawn
deeply into the organization of trade and production now proceeding out
wards from the United States.”85 American firms exploited the overseas op
portunities offered by the British Empire’s globe- spanning commercial
infrastructure—without any of the expense of building and maintaining it. As
one American observer surmised, “The United States can co-operate only with
Great Britain in its material interests beyond its border. . . . The expansion of
England and its opening out of the world’s ports to commerce is ipso facto the
expansion of American commerce without the cost of blood and substance to
the United States.”86
But the United States was less an upstart than it was an accomplice. By
managing lucrative industrial contracts in the British imperial world, expan
sionist American corporations coproduced projects of imperial rule, and their
employees posed as the partners of British imperialists in the process of colo
nization. By the turn of the twentieth c entury, U.S. capitalism was enmeshed
in transimperial patterns of migration, trade, capital, and industry central to
the operation of imperial power around the world.87 American corporations
were both beneficiaries of the globalizing effects of transimperial connec
tion and expert assemblers of the infrastructure that enabled traffic of various
kinds to move easily across imperial boundaries. It was through these deep-
laid transimperial relationships that the modern world system emerged.
60 stephen tuffnell

notes
1. “American Contracting in Brazil,” Engineering News 9 (1882): 241; “American
Bridges in Mexico,” Engineering Record, August 31, 1901, 196–97.
2. This list was compiled from the Album of Designs of the Phoenix Bridge Company
(Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1885), 7–10; “American Bridges in Japan,” Engineering
Record, December 23, 1899, 700.
3. Ian Tyrrell, Crisis of the Wasteful Nation: Empire and Conservation in Theodore Roose
velt’s Americ a (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 26.
4. See, for example, Ian Tyrrell, “Woman, Missions, and Empire: New Approaches to
American Cultural Expansion,” in Competing Kingdoms: Women, Mission, Nation, and the
American Protestant Empire, 1812–1960, edited by Barbara Reeves-Ellington et al. (Dur
ham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 61; Ian Tyrrell, Reforming the World: The Creation
of America’s Moral Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 80, 236–37;
Emily Conroy-Krutz, Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American
Republic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015).
5. Gary Magee and Andrew Thompson, Empire and Globalisation: Networks of People,
Goods and Capital in the British World, c. 1850–1914 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge Univer
sity Press, 2010); John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-
System, 1830–1970 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
6. From Steelton to Mandalay (Steelton, PA: Pennsylvania Steel Company, 1902); Paul
Kramer, “Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule between the British
and United States Empires, 1880–1910,” Journal of American History 88 (2002): 1327–30.
7. Stuart Sweeney, Financing India’s Imperial Railways, 1875–1914 (London: Pickering
and Chatto, 2011), 28.
8. “Opening of the Atbara Bridge,” Illustrated London News, September 2, 1899, 310. For
the role of the Atbara Bridge in Kitchener’s campaign against the Mahdist state, see M. W.
Daly, Empire on the Nile: The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1898–1934 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge
University Press, 1986), 202. Also operating across imperial boundaries, an Italian firm sank
the concrete piers in the powerful stream and eddying swells where the rivers met.
9. “American Bridges in English Colonies,” Engineering News, November 28, 1885, 345;
Walter Cook, “Erection of the Nairne Viaducts, near Adelaide, South Australia,” Minutes
of the Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, 1903, 185–87; “American Bridge
Building in the Antipodes,” Engineering News, January 14, 1882, 15.
10. William T. Stead, The Americanization of the World, or, the Trend of the Twentieth
C
entury (London: Horace Markley, 1902), 362.
11. John Darwin, Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (London: Penguin,
2012), 178–88; Martin Thomas and Andrew Thompson, “Empire and Globalisation:
from ‘High Imperialism’ to Decolonisation,” International History Review 36 (2014): 145.
12. Stephen Tuffnell, “Engineering Inter-Imperialism: American Miners and the
Transformation of Global Mining,” Journal of Global History 10 (2015): 53–76; Jessica
Teisch, Engineering Nature: Water, Development and the Global Spread of American Environ-
mental Expertise (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).
13. This was also true of the German Empire: Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa:
Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Prince
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).
14. Arthur Judson Brown, “The Opened World,” American Monthly Review of Reviews,
October 1904, 461.
15. For landmark studies in these discussions, see Simon Potter and Jonathan Saha,
“Global History, Imperial History and Connected Histories of Empire,” Journal of
Colonialism and Colonial History 16 (2015), doi:10.1353/cch.2015.0009; Thomas and
Thompson, “Empire and Globalisation,” 142–70; Gareth Curless, Stacey Hynd, Temilola
Alanamu, and Katherine Roscoe, “Networks in Imperial History,” Journal of World History
26 (2015): 705–32.
16. William Elliot Griffis, “America in the Far East II: The Anglo-Saxon in the Tropics,”
Outlook, December 1898, 907.
17. Tuffnell, “Engineering Inter-Imperialism,” 58–62; Stead, Americanization of the
World, 361.
18. Julian Go, “Introduction: Global Perspectives on the U.S. Colonial State in the
Philippines,” in The American Colonial State in the Philippines: Global Perspectives, edited
by Julian Go and Anne L. Foster (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 21.
19. Thomas Bender, Nation among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York:
Hill and Wang, 2006).
20. Potter and Saha, “Connected Histories of Empire”; Lynn Hunt, Writing History in
the Global Era (New York: Norton, 2014).
21. Alex Middleton, “French Algeria in British Imperial Thought, 1830–70,” Journal of
Colonialism and Colonial History 16 (2015), doi:10.1353/cch.2015.0012.
22. See the chapter by Anne L. Foster in this volume; Laura Briggs, Reproducing
Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2002), 33–38; Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropi-
cal Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2006), 99; Natalie J. Ring, The Problem South: Region, Empire, and the New Liberal State,
1880–1930 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 209–11.
23. Ann Laura Stoler, “Considerations on Imperial Comparisons,” in Empire Speaks
Out: Languages of Rationalization and Self-Description in the Russian Empire, edited by Ilya
Gerasimov et al. (Boston: Brill, 2009), 44–45; Volker Barth and Roland Cvetkovski, “En
counters of Empires: Methodological Approaches,” in Imperial Co-operation and Transfer,
1870–1930: Empires and Encounters, edited by Volker Barth and Roland Cvetkovski (Lon
don: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 9.
24. Josep M. Fradera, “Reading Imperial Transitions: Spanish Contraction, British
Expansion, and American Irruption,” in Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the
Modern American State, edited by Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco A. Scarano (Madi
son: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 34–63; Andrew Priest, “Thinking about
Empire: The Administration of Ulysses S. Grant, Spanish Colonialism and the Ten
Years’ War with Cuba,” Journal of American Studies 48 (2014): 541–58; Andrew Priest,
“Imperial Exchange: American Views of the British Empire during the Civil War and
Reconstruction,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 16 (2015), doi:10.1353/
cch.2015.0015.
25. Paul Kramer, “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in
the World,” American Historical Review 116 (2011): 1365n50.
62 stephen tuffnell

26. David M. Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Trade and Investment: American Economic
Expansion in the Hemisphere, 1865–1900 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998);
Emily S. Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar
Diplomacy, 1900–1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Cyrus Veeser, A
World Safe for Capitalism: Dollar Diplomacy and America’s Rise to Global Power (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2002). As Paul Kramer has argued elsewhere, the category
of informal empire has delimited the geography and conception of state power in U.S.
imperial historiography (“Power and Connection,” 1374–75).
27. Potter and Saha, “Connected Histories of Empire.”
28. H. G. Prout, “The Economic Conquest of Africa,” Engineering Magazine, Febru
ary 1900, 668.
29. George S. Mackenzie, “Uganda and the East African Protectorates,” Fortnightly Review,
December 1894, 884; “Securing Uganda,” Chamber of Commerce Journal, June 1895, 97–98.
30. “The Uganda Protectorate,” Chamber of Commerce Journal, April 1894, 4–5; Richard
Huzzey, Freedom Burning: Anti-Slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain (Ithaca, NY: Cor
nell University Press, 2012), 195–96.
31. Jan S. Hogendron, “Economic Initiative and African Cash Farming,” in Colonialism
in Africa, 1870–1960, 5 vols., edited by L. H. Gann and Peter Duigan (Cambridge, U.K.:
Cambridge University Press, 1969–74), 4:313.
32. L. H. Gann and Peter Duigan, The Rulers of British Africa, 1870–1914 (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1978), 29, 279.
33. Thomas Metcalf, Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 203.
34. Casper Andersen, British Engineers and Africa, 1875–1914 (London: Pickering and
Chatto), 57–86.
35. Africa No.1, Return of the Names of the British and American Firms who tendered for
the supply of certain bridges for the Uganda Railway and the Amounts of the Various Tenders
(London: hm Stationary Office, 1901).
36. Marc Linder, Projecting Capitalism: A History of the Internationalization of the Con-
struction Industry (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), 99.
37. Henry Gunston, “The Planning and Construction of the Uganda Railway,” Transac-
tions of the Newcomen Society 74 (2004): 64.
38. Gunston, “The Planning and Construction of the Uganda Railway,” 47; Africa No. 11.
Final Report of the Uganda Railway Committee (London: hm Stationary Office, 1904), 18.
39. “American Bridge Building in Equatorial Africa,” Engineering Record, September 3,
1904, 310–11.
40. “The Uganda Exploit,” Boston Evening Transcript, July 3, 1903; “Erection of the
Uganda Railway Viaducts,” Engineering Record, August 2, 1902, 105.
41. George Whitehouse to Uganda Railway Committee (hereafter urc), September 16,
1902, co537/78, National Archives, Kew, London (hereafter na).
42. George Whitehouse to Uganda Railway Committee.
43. R. Anderson to Whitehouse, April 10, 1902, co537/77, na.
44. Joseph M. Rogers, “The American Invasion of Uganda,” American Monthly Review
of Reviews, July 1903, 44.

45. Whitehouse to urc, March 17, 1902, co537/77, na.
46. Whitehouse to urc, June 28, 1902; Anderson to Whitehouse, June 14, 1902,
co537/78, na.
47. Whitehouse to urc, June 11, 1902, co587/78, na.
48. Dun’s Review, January 4, 1902, 34; Dun’s Review, January 11, 1902, 15.
49. Rogers, “American Invasion of Uganda,” 49.
50. A. B. Lueder, “Building American Bridges in Mid-Africa,” World’s Work, June 1903, 3661.
51. “Foreign Industrial News,” Modern Machinery, January 1, 1901, 12; Rogers, “Ameri
can Invasion of Uganda,” 44.
52. Metcalf, Imperial Connections, 166–87.
53. Report by Her Majesty’s Special Commissioner on the Protectorate of Uganda (London:
hm Stationary Office, 1901), 7.
54. Quoted in Roland Oliver, Sir Harry Johnston and the Scramble for Africa (London:
Chatto and Windus, 1957), 293.
55. General Report on the Uganda Protectorate for the Year Ending March 31, 1904 (Lon
don: hm Stationary Office, 1904), 28.
56. Quoted in Oliver, Harry Johnston, 293.
57. Metcalf, Imperial Connections, 200.
58. Metcalf, Imperial Connections, 200; Colin Newbury, “Historical Aspects of Man
power and Migration,” in Gann and Duigan, Colonialism in Africa, 4:525.
59. Amarjit Kaur, “Indian Labour, Labour Standards, and Workers’ Health in Burma
and Malaya,” Modern Asian Studies 40 (2006): 430.
60. Kaur, “Indian Labour, Labour Standards, and Workers’ Health in Burma and
Malaya,” 431.
61. From Steelton to Mandalay.
62. J. C. Turk, “Building an American Bridge in Burma,” World’s Work, Septem
ber 1901, 1165.
63. David Roediger and Elizabeth D. Esch, The Production of Difference: Race and the
Management of Labor in U.S. History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
64. “The Uganda Exploit.”
65. Lueder, “Building American Bridges in Mid-Africa,” 3664.
66. A. B. Lueder, “Experience in the Erection of American Viaducts on the Uganda
Railway,” Engineering News, April 14, 1904, 346.
67. Lueder, “Building American Bridges in Mid-Africa,” 3664.
68. Whitehouse to urc, March 17, 1902, co537/77, na.
69. Whitehouse to urc, June 11, 1902, and September 16, 1902, co537/78, na.
70. Michael Adas, Dominance by Design: Technological Imperatives and America’s Civiliz-
ing Mission (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 129–82;
Roediger and Esch, Production of Difference, 11; Tuffnell, “Engineering Inter-Imperialism,”
62–67; Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s
Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge
71. See also Roediger and Esch, The Production of Difference, 98–135.
72. “The Uganda Exploit.”
64 stephen tuffnell

73. Magee and Thompson, Empire and Globalisation, 137.
74. Julie Greene, “The Wages of Empire: Capitalism, Expansion, and Working-Class
Formation,” in Making the Empire Work: Labor and United States Imperialism, edited by
Daniel Bender et al. (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 35–58, 38.
75. Linder, Projecting Capitalism, 98.
76. Walter LaFeber, The New Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, vol. 2: The
Search for Opportunity, 1865–1913 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 176.
77. Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Great Merger Movement in American Business (Cambridge,
U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 32–33; William H. Becker, The Dynamic of
Business-Government Relations: Industry and Exports, 1893–1921 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1982), 1.
78. Historians have yet to fully examine the connection between the extension of
corporate control over the American West and subsequent expansion overseas. Mining
historians have mapped some of the transnational relationships essential to the capital
ist transformation of the West; see, for example, David Igler, “The Industrial Far West:
Region and Nation in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Pacific Historical Review 69, no.2
(2000): 159–92; Samuel Truett, Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.-
Mexico Borderlands (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006).
79. Linder, Projecting Capitalism, 99; “Presidential Address before the Institution of
Civil Engineers,” Engineering News, November 30, 1899, 355.
80. Sebastian Conrad, Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany (Cambridge,
U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 395.
81. Frederick A. McKenzie, The American Invaders (London: Grant Richards, 1902),
70, 75–76. See also the extensive analysis of Andrew Williamson in British Trade and
Foreign Competition (London, 1894), 226–41.
82. Frederick W. Emett, “Physical and Economic Features of the Uganda Railway,”
Engineering Magazine, June 1901, 559; McKenzie, American Invaders, 74; B. P. Cronin,
Technology Industrial Conflict, and the Development of Technical Education in 19th-Century
E
ngland (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2001), 134, 145; “The British Defense of American
Engineering,” Engineering Record, June 15, 1901, 565–66.
83. Gunston, “Planning and Construction,” 57; Africa No. 11. Final Report of the Uganda
Railway Committee, 24. At the same time, forty-five were bought by the colonial govern
ment in East India (Iron Age, April 20, 1899, 13).
84. Africa No. 11. Final Report of the Uganda Railway Committee, 24.
85. Benjamin Kidd, “The State in Relation to Trade,” Proceedings of the Royal Colonial
Institute: Vol. 34, 1902–1903 (London: Royal Colonial Institute, 1903), 260.
86. Charles Waldstein, The Expansion of Western Ideals and the World’s Peace (New
York: Bodley Head, 1899), 185–86.
87. Paul Kramer, “Embedding Capital: Political-Economic History, the United States,
and the World,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 15 (2016): 331–62.

part ii. transimperial politics
3. “ our indian empire ” : the transimperial
origins of u.s. liberal imperialism
Michel Gobat
This essay explores the transimperial origins of U.S. liberal imperialism—

meaning the efforts of a foreign power to impose a liberal order on a subjugated
society—by focusing on the empire that William Walker and his band of about
twelve thousand colonists sought to build in Central America during the 1850s.1
The origins of U.S. liberal imperialism are typically associated with the immedi
ate post-1898 era, when the United States created overseas colonies and protec
torates under a banner of civilization, democracy, open trade, and progress.2 As
a result, the global rise of liberal imperialism in the mid-nineteenth century is
usually dissociated from Manifest Destiny expansion of the antebellum era and
instead linked with the “civilizing mission” of European powers in Africa and
Asia.3 Yet the Walker episode reveals that Manifest Destiny entailed expansion
by sea that was s haped by European efforts to merge liberalism with imperial
ism, with the European empires providing not only precedents and principles
but also personnel. Liberal imperialism is both more deeply rooted in U.S. po
litical culture and molded less by U.S. traditions than often thought.
That Walker should be viewed as a liberal imperialist might seem odd. Even
after he conquered Nicaragua in 1855 and then sought to extend his rule to the
rest of Central America, many of his contemporaries dismissed him and his
men as nothing but international criminals bent on plunder. Indeed Walker’s
initial recruits were among the many U.S. citizens who invaded Latin America
between the Mexican-American War and the Civil War. B ecause the invaders
defied their government and violated U.S. law, they were widely denigrated as
filibusters, which comes from the Spanish word for “freebooters” (filibusteros).
And the filibusters of the 1850s did fit the pirate stereotype, as many were des
perate (white) men seeking easy riches, violent thrills, and personal freedom.4
Antebellum filibusterism gained such notoriety as it went against international
efforts to criminalize nonstate violence.5 Although the United States had spear
headed these efforts with its Neutrality Acts of 1794 and 1818, filibusters easily
launched their ventures from U.S. soil. This reflected not only the weakness of
the antebellum state but also filibusterism’s popularity in a country enthralled
with Manifest Destiny. After the 1848 conquest of California, U.S. expansionists
increasingly championed filibusterism as a means to establish settler colonies
abroad. All filibuster expeditions except Walker’s failed to seize power; his was
thus the only one to mutate into a movement of settler colonists. Yet the ex
treme violence that marred Walker’s fall in 1857 only reinforced his image as a
brutish rogue.
Present-day scholars, by contrast, tend to link the Walker episode with ef
forts of proslavery U.S. southerners to extend their illiberal institution to the
tropics.6 Buttressing this view is Walker’s decree that relegalized slavery in
Central America. He cemented his proslavery infamy with an 1860 book that
equated his Nicaragua expedition with the spread of slavery.7 Because Walker’s
account aimed to secure support from U.S. slaveholders for his (failed) attempt
to reconquer Nicaragua, it both erases his long-standing Free Soil opposition to
slavery’s expansion and exaggerates the institution’s role in his imperial venture
of 1855–57.
For most of his reign, Walker and his followers instead identified their en
terprise with the spread of democracy and free-labor capitalism. Walker’s self-
proclaimed empire certainly attracted U.S. southerners who maintained that
democracy was for white people only and saw no contradiction in their efforts
to spread liberty and slavery. Yet many more of his followers were northerners
who not only opposed the expansion of slavery but also sought to uplift the
Central American masses and free them from allegedly despotic elites. Hence
Walker’s movement enjoyed much support among ordinary Nicaraguans, in
cluding radicals fighting for democracy and social justice.
Walker’s imperial project built on U.S. liberal traditions, especially the Jef
fersonian ideal of a republican “empire of liberty” and the pro-statist American
System of capitalist development. Yet it drew just as powerfully on the nascent
liberal imperialism of European powers. This European influence reflected the
view of antebellum officials and newspapers that Manifest Destiny was part and
parcel of an international trend. As the pro-Walker New York Herald asserted in
1857:
70 michel gobat

Four great nationalities are simultaneously extending the benefits of
civilization throughout the earth. The United States are carrying their
social order and industrial energy to the decaying communities of
Spanish America. England is opening Southern Africa, Australia, and a
large portion of Asia to the lights of science and the ameliorating influ
ences of commerce. France is . . . seeking to create new fields for the
employment of industry in Northern Africa. Russia is . . . impressing
upon the wandering hordes of Central Asia the elevating influences of
civilization. . . . The remnants of the barbarous ages . . . are fast disap
pearing . . . and a newer generation is rising, to rule u
nder more liberal
and enlightened policy. The world is awakened to the g reat truth that
the advance of each is best sought in the improvement of all among the
family of nations.8
This antebellum valorization of imperial cooperation at a global scale chal

lenges latter-day views that identify Manifest Destiny with “American excep
tionalism.”
While Walker and his leading men admired the liberal bent of French and
Russian imperialism, they were mainly enthralled with the British civilizing
mission in India. With good reason did the U.S. press coin the phrase our
Indian empire to refer to Walker’s Central American polity—a label that was
quickly adopted by Latin American and European papers.9 The appeal of Brit
ish imperialism to Walker’s men is puzzling at first glance. Like most agents
of Manifest Destiny, Walker deemed the British the greatest threat to U.S. ef
forts to control Central America, which had long been a geopolitical hotspot
due to its potential for an interoceanic canal that promised North Atlantic
powers easy access to the fabled Asian market. In addition, Walker and his
men never tired in denouncing the British for supporting their main Central
American foes: local “aristocracies.” Yet history shows that interimperial ri
valries do not stop empires from learning from one other even if they made
such comparisons in a selective way.10 The Walker episode neatly reveals the
now forgotten connections between Manifest Destiny and the rise of Euro
pean liberal imperialism.
Reinforcing this link was Walker’s dependency on European liberal émigrés,
especially veterans of the failed revolutions that swept the Old World in 1848.
These radicals arrived in the United States as committed imperialists and saw
no contradiction in trumpeting what they called universal democratic republi
canism and overseas U.S. expansion. Compared to Walker’s U.S. followers, how
ever, they upheld a more inclusive notion of Americanization based on cultural
“Our Indian Empire” 71

pluralism. The key role of European radicals in Walker’s venture suggests that
U.S. liberal imperialism began as a more cosmopolitan—and revolutionary—
undertaking than it would become in the twentieth century.
Encountering European Liberal Imperialism

Walker (1824–1860) was attracted to Nicaragua mainly because the California
Gold Rush of 1849 intensified U.S. efforts to construct an interoceanic canal
across the Central American isthmus. The United States eventually built the
canal in Panama (1904–14), yet in the mid-nineteenth century it deemed Ni
caragua the more appropriate site. Walker thus embodied U.S. interest in an
nexing a country of g reat geopolitical importance—an interest rooted in the
ideology of Manifest Destiny. But even before Walker set foot in Nicaragua,
his expansionist outlook had also been s haped by European notions of liberal
imperialism.
Because Walker evolved into the main U.S. symbol of slavery expansion
following his 1857 expulsion from Nicaragua, it is easy to overlook his early
embrace of European liberal imperialism. The Tennessee native steadfastly
defended the South’s “peculiar institution” yet opposed its spread from early on,
largely for fear that it would unleash a U.S. civil war. His opposition was rein
forced by the antislavery settings that marked much of his adulthood. A fter
studying medicine in the abolitionist bastion of Philadelphia, the nineteen-
year-old Walker spent the next two years (1843–45) in Europe, where he came
to admire its brand of liberal imperialism as well as the democratic ideals that
would drive the revolutions of 1848.11
That Walker’s European sojourn greatly impacted his outlook becomes evi
dent in his 1848–50 journalistic work for the New Orleans Crescent. A good ex
ample is his last editorial, which valorized the Old World’s liberal principles
(democracy, free trade, and “a more perfect and equitable social organization”)
but also stressed that “the people of the United States” had much to learn from
European efforts to forge overseas settler colonies.12 In fact Walker insisted that
Manifest Destiny expansion by sea go hand in hand with that of the European
powers. With the defeat of the 1848 revolutions, however, he believed that it fell
to the United States to convert “the world to democracy.”13 And by “democracy”
he meant not just republican rule and universal male suffrage but also the de
struction of the privileges enjoyed by the “aristocrats” then ruling Europe and,
in his mind, Latin America. It was this prodemocracy discourse that Walker
invoked in explaining why the United States was destined to conquer the entire
western hemisphere.
72 michel gobat

In 1850 Walker moved to California, where he continued to champion the
liberal imperialism he had encountered in Europe. But the Golden State also
turned him into a filibuster. Walker was inspired by the example of Count Gas
ton de Raousset-Boulbon, a veteran of the French colonization of Algeria who
in 1852 led a failed invasion of French gold rushers against the Mexican state
of Sonora u nder a banner of civilization and freedom.14 A year later Walker
sought to replicate the count’s expedition with about two hundred U.S. adven
turers. He even tried to entice Boulbon to join forces with him, to no avail.15
Like the count, Walker aimed to create a private settler colony in a frontier
region known for its gold and silver mines. He too failed miserably, with his
group often on the run and enjoying little local support. The fiasco nonethe
less turned him into a well-known filibuster—a fame that helps explain why he
ended up in Nicaragua a year later. By then Walker had come to deem Central
America a more propitious place for his imperial dreams.
If most U.S. filibusters were invaders, Walker and his men were invited
to Nicaragua by leaders of its Liberal Party. His group was to help Liberals
win the civil war they were waging against the ruling Conservatives; in ex
change, the filibusters were promised vast tracts of uncultivated land. This
offer reflected the long-standing desire of Liberals to promote the “American
ization” of their country, with many even hoping that Nicaragua would join
the United States as a free state. (Central America had abolished slavery in
1824.) The recent U.S. conquest of Mexico’s northern half hardly dampened
Liberals’ valorization of the “northern colossus” as their model state. On the
contrary, they hoped even more strongly that U.S. annexation would both
end the civil wars plaguing Nicaragua since independence and lead to the
construction of a canal that would make their country “the emporium of the
world.”16 Their pro-Americanism was reinforced by the California Gold Rush,
which led thousands of U.S. adventurers to cross the isthmus. This transit
became especially popular after the New York tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt
inaugurated his Nicaragua Line in 1851. While some U.S. travelers antago
nized Nicaraguans, most fascinated the local population with what we now
call the American Way of Life—an infatuation that helps explain why Walker’s
enterprise enjoyed local support.17
Yet Walker also profited from Nicaraguans’ recent encounter with European
liberal imperialists. Although Europeans had long sought to create private set
tler colonies in the region, such projects proliferated only a fter the Gold Rush
drew as much attention to the isthmus as it had attracted in the seventeenth
century. Reinforcing this boom was the anti-immigrant wave then sweeping
the United States, for it pushed European colonization agents to train their eyes

on Central America, which they deemed more welcoming. The Nicaraguan
government signed contracts with French and German colonization compa
nies seeking to create farming colonies in the country’s frontier regions.18
Nicaraguan officials eagerly courted these companies in the hope that the
Europeans would bring “civilization” with them. Although none of the colo
nization projects was realized, they served as precursors for Walker’s Depart
ment of Colonization, which organized the influx of U.S. settlers and whose
leading members included Nicaraguans previously invested in European
colonization.
European colonization projects also benefited Walker directly, as some of
its members helped shape his enterprise. None was more critical to his for
tunes than Bruno von Natzmer, a former officer in the Prussian Army. In
1851 the twenty-year-old aristocrat emigrated to Costa Rica with the Berlin
Colonization Society for Central America, which was led by Baron Alexander
von Bülow, a prominent exponent of the liberal imperialism then emerging
in Germany.19 Not by chance, then, did his society justify its colonization
scheme by claiming that it was not only strengthening German influence
abroad but also spreading “civilization” to nonwhite peoples.20 Bülow’s group
planned for four thousand German families to join them each year, so that
within twenty-five years their colony would have about half a million settlers.
Their dream quickly clashed with reality, however, and the colony folded
within a few years. While most colonists settled in the capital of San José,
Natzmer joined the Costa Rican Army. In February 1855 he fled to Nicaragua
to avoid trial for having embezzled money from his troops. When Walker
arrived a few months later with fifty-nine filibusters, Natzmer was among the
first to join his ranks and quickly became one of his most trusted intermediar
ies with Nicaraguans.21
Walker later wrote that he esteemed Natzmer for his military training,
local knowledge, and ability to speak Spanish, English, and French.22 But the
Prussian also helped infuse Walker’s project with German notions of settler
colonialism that w ere more secular and cosmopolitan than those upheld by
his U.S. followers, many of whom promoted a U.S.-centered vision of democ
racy embedded in the Protestant religiosity driving the country’s Second Great
Awakening. Indeed some Central Americans deemed the German civilizing
mission more inclusive than Manifest Destiny, even if the latter had a stronger
prodemocracy discourse. As Bülow’s Costa Rican friends noted, German colo
nists were “more supple . . . than Yankees.”23 The adaptability of Europeans
like Natzmer would prove valuable to Walker as he sought to consolidate his
rule a fter seizing power in October 1855.
74 michel gobat

Walker’s Liberal Empire
Thanks to local support, Walker became the only U.S. filibuster to rule a Latin
American country. By the time a Central American army ousted Walker’s group
in May 1857, about twelve thousand U.S. colonists had settled in his realm,
lured by the promise of rich mines and land bonanzas.24 But even as Nicaragua
filled up with the newcomers, Walker’s rule continued to rest on Nicaraguans
who hailed from all walks of life. What united them was their assumption that
the foreigners were spreading U.S.-style democracy and progress. In hindsight,
that idea seems unfathomable, for Walker’s enterprise ended in a proslavery
nightmare that brought unprecedented destruction to the isthmus. Yet Walker
issued his slavery decree only toward the end of his rule, when the tide of the
war began to turn against him. Moreover, his regime took no steps to imple
ment the decree, leading many Nicaraguans to believe that it was merely a ploy
to obtain funds from U.S. slaveholders.25 The project that the Walker regime
advanced with the greatest force was instead the liberal empire it pursued at the
height of its power—an empire that was to span all of Central America.
The liberal bent of Walker’s enterprise led prodemocracy reformers to join
his ranks. This was true of his main Nicaraguan allies: upwardly mobile Liberal
mulattoes struggling to forge a more democratic order against the ruling Con
servative Party “aristocrats,” who tended to self-identify as white. In particular,
Walker came to depend on José María Valle, a popular caudillo (strongman) of
humble origins whom local elites deemed a dangerous “communist” for having
led the failed popular uprisings that shook the country in the late 1840s.26 Like
other Nicaraguan radicals, Valle justified his support for Walker by claiming
that both were fighting for “true democracy.”27 Walker’s liberal image also com
pelled prodemocracy adherents from the United States to flock to his realm.
Among the most fascinating was Sarah Pellet, a fiery suffragist, temperance lec
turer, and abolitionist who had worked with leading antebellum reformers such
as Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Lucy Stone. After spending
two months in Nicaragua, Pellet returned to the United States, where she gave
countless speeches defending Walker’s efforts to spread “liberty.”28 Her message
was echoed by his U.S. followers and his bilingual newspaper, El Nicaraguense,
which was published in the filibuster capital of Granada.
Perhaps nothing better underscores local support for Walker’s liberal proj
ect than the refusal of most Nicaraguans to support the Costa Rican invasion
of April 1856. Fearing that Walker’s group wanted to “seize all of Central A
merica,
exterminate its population and populate it with Yankees,” Costa Rica invaded
his realm with the expectation that Nicaraguans would rise up against the

filibusters.29 Yet few locals rallied to the Costa Ricans’ cause, while Nicara
guan Liberal Party members helped Walker’s men withstand the invaders.
Costa Rican officials explained away their lack of local support by claiming that
Walker had struck such fear into Nicaraguans that they not only were paralyzed
but also considered the foreigners to be invincible.30 A more honest assessment
came from one of South America’s most influential newspapers, El Comercio of
Lima, Peru, which moaned that, even though “nobody believes it,” Nicaraguans
insisted that Walker’s men w ere “universal patriots who had come to Nicaragua
to civilize and moralize it.”31
Much of Walker’s local support rested on the promise of development that
he and the U.S. colonists represented to Nicaraguans. At the heart of his rule
stood a modernization project that has been eclipsed by the havoc his group
would later wreak. Its most grandiose plan was to enable ocean steamers to
cross the isthmus by constructing a railroad that would link both coasts. Un
like previous canal projects, the regime sought to create an interoceanic route
that did not simply serve foreign shipping companies but would also provide
local producers with better access to overseas markets. In addition, the regime
undertook great efforts to develop the rural economy. While it prioritized the
agro-export economy, it did not neglect the sector geared toward the internal
market. The regime’s modernization zeal also targeted urban centers, as when
it sought to create a “new Granada” on undeveloped land.
Lack of funds and warfare prevented the Walker regime from realizing much
of its modernization project. Still, it did enough to maintain Nicaraguans’ con
fidence in its promise of development. The most noticeable outcomes w ere the
rebuilding of war-torn towns and interdepartmental roads as well as the con
struction of new wharves. Yet the most enduring outcome consisted of land
surveys and maps. T hese seemingly mundane tasks w ere key instruments of
statecraft during the nineteenth c entury and greatly promoted economic de
velopment.32 If Walker’s surveyors first focused on frontier regions deemed
most appropriate for colonization, they eventually moved to the country’s
most populated regions. Their work was cut short in September 1856, when
a Guatemalan-Salvadoran invasion force reignited the Central American war.
The German surveyors nonetheless produced the hitherto best topographical
map of Nicaragua, which served as its official map until the first decades of the
twentieth century.33
Like most modernization projects, that of Walker created tensions within
local society. It ensured that thousands of U.S. settlers would make the jour
ney to Nicaragua. And since those colonists seemingly embodied U.S. entre
preneurialism and innovation, they reinforced the faith of many Nicaraguans
76 michel gobat

in Walker’s promise of development. But if his modernization project helped
shore up his support among ordinary Nicaraguans, it antagonized local elites,
especially those afraid of losing farmland as a result of the surveys. These ten
sions broke out into the open in July 1856, when Walker launched his self-
proclaimed revolution following the failed Costa Rican invasion.
As with most liberal revolutions of the era, Walker’s sought to democratize
the political system. Although this process led to his seizure of the presidency via
a rigged election, it did introduce the direct vote. By shifting power from elite-
dominated electoral colleges to communal authorities, the filibuster revolution
gave popular sectors a new means with which to challenge elite power. Perhaps
this helps explain why Walker retained the support of Valle and other local radi
cals fighting for democracy. T hese Nicaraguans helped radicalize the filibuster
revolution by spearheading the confiscation of elite-owned estates. While they
aimed to have the confiscation campaign benefit the rural poor, Walker wanted
U.S. colonists to acquire the seized properties. The tension between both goals
further destabilized the filibuster regime. Another source of tension was the re
gime’s crusade to improve the “social virtues” and “moral duties” of the local
masses by promoting antivagrancy laws, public hygiene, and temperance.34
While U.S. reformers and elite Nicaraguans maintained that moral uplift was
key to empowering the poor, their uplifting efforts reflected their condescension
toward the poor and an unspoken desire to control them. Small wonder that
Walker’s revolution engendered much violence that contributed to his downfall.
European Underpinnings
The violence that marred the end of Walker’s reign ensured that he and his
men would be forever remembered as destroyers and plunderers. Their most
infamous act was to burn Granada—one of the hemisphere’s oldest cities—to
the ground. But to reduce their enterprise to wanton violence would be to ig
nore how Walker’s followers had sought to create a state capable of bringing
about material progress. In many ways, their modernization efforts resembled
those carried out by liberal regimes elsewhere in Latin America. The regime’s
focus on internal improvements and moral betterment also echoed the Ameri
can System championed by the U.S. statesman Henry Clay and his Whig Party.
According to El Nicaraguense, however, Walker’s modernization project drew its
greatest inspiration from European liberal imperialism. Even his transforma
tion into the much acclaimed “Gray-Eyed Man of Destiny,” who was to liberate
Nicaraguan Indians from their local oppressors, built on a legend invented in
the 1830s by British imperialists eyeing Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast.35

Time and again, El Nicaraguense cited European cases to underscore that
Walker’s budding empire represented a broader trend in human history. While
the paper followed many other antebellum expansionists in drawing on the
ancient Greeks and Romans to justify Walker’s imperial enterprise, its main
models were contemporary forms of European expansion. It invoked the Rus
sian case to show that the ideology of Manifest Destiny was not unique to the
United States. Accordingly, the idea of “manifest destiny” was driving Russia’s
recent expansion, as evident in the Crimean War of 1853–56. By equating U.S.
and Russian expansion, the paper could maintain that “all conquest comes from
the North Southward, and will retain that direction until the mission of hu
manity is complete.”36 El Nicaraguense’s favorable view of Russian expansionism
reflected the cultural affinity between two expanding continental empires.37
Still, the paper’s main models w ere the sea-based empires that the British
and the French had recently forged in Asia and Africa. It claimed that a key pur
pose of Walker’s movement was to bolster the efforts of t hese European empires
to civilize world regions that w ere populated by nonwhite races. Valorizing “the
good that has always followed the expansive policy of France and Great Britain,”
El Nicaraguense insisted that the Walker regime was seeking nothing more than
“the same path of regeneration in Central America, which has been productive
of so much benefit in India, Africa, and islands of the sea, u nder the impulse
of European expansion.” It highlighted the economic benefits that the world
would derive from such imperial cooperation: “The regeneration of Span
ish America throws open to the communication and commerce of the world,
twenty-five millions of p eople. . . . It brings into the market millions of acres
of land adapted to the cultivation of the necessaries and luxuries of life, and
thus cheapens living. . . . With cheap living famine is banished, and revolution
goes with it. T hese are the fruits we promise to work out for Europe.”38 Political
stability via f ree trade, the development of agro-export economies, moral uplift,
and other liberal reforms—all these things, as El Nicaraguense stressed, linked
Walker’s project with the civilizing mission of European empires.
The filibuster paper clearly showcased these connections for strategic rea
sons. Above all, it sought to discourage the European powers from support
ing the Central American war against Walker. In addition, the paper sought to
bolster the regime’s efforts to obtain European funding for its expensive mod
ernization project. El Nicaraguense defended this courting of “the capitalists of
Europe” by asserting, “We require a ship canal and certain railroads—we must
have quartz machines and saw mills—all of which the State is too poor to build,
and we must therefore solicit the aid of foreigners.” And since Old World capi
78 michel gobat

tal had helped fuel the recent expansion of the U.S. transport system, Walker’s
paper wondered, “Why should we not go direct to Europe?”39
Yet the connections that El Nicaraguense drew between Walker’s imperial
project and those of European powers also reflected actual similarities. If Walk
er’s U.S. followers often claimed that his project was modeled after the expand
ing U.S. state, in reality his polity resembled more the overseas colonies of the
British and the French, especially in its dependency on local collaborators. This
similarity responded to the basic fact that both Walker’s colonists and most
European imperialists remained vastly outnumbered by the local population,
whereas U.S. westward expansion entailed the rapid and massive immigration
of settlers into sparsely settled regions.
Walker and other U.S. members of his regime valorized the European model
precisely because they opposed Nicaragua’s annexation to the United States.
They knew that the incorporation of a large Catholic and nonwhite popula
tion into the Union would be fiercely opposed by U.S. nativists grouped in the
powerful Know-Nothing Party. In addition, the escalating conflict over slavery’s
expansion into “Bleeding Kansas” made this an inopportune moment to seek
annexation of another territory that might become a battleground between
pro-and antislavery forces. But above all, annexation would have deprived
Walker and his followers of their autonomy, for the history of U.S. continental
expansion had shown them that annexed territories quickly came u nder the
control of federal officials who ruled in a heavy-handed manner. In opposing
annexation, Walker and his followers drew on the Jeffersonian idea of expan
sion, which called for U.S. colonists to create republics that would remain in
dependent of the United States.40 Just as important, they invoked the European
path of expansion, which in their eyes promised greater self-rule than U.S. an
nexation.41 For these reasons, the New York Herald contended that the Central
American “countries cannot be brought into our Union. They can only be gov
erned as India is governed.”42
The Herald was hardly alone in claiming that Walker was forging a “new In
dian empire” in Central America. Other U.S. observers believed that his regime
would replicate the corporate empire that the British East India Company had
carved out in India. A fter all, Walker’s rise to power had been facilitated by U.S.
agents of Vanderbilt’s shipping company, which, thanks to its control of the
Nicaraguan transit, exerted great influence over the country’s affairs. Hence
the New York Herald claimed that “the true North American policy in Central
America is the successful British expedient of the East Indian Company.”43 Yet
Walker proved to be anything but the pawn of Vanderbilt’s company. In fact

he confiscated all of its properties in Nicaragua—a brazen act that turned the
tycoon into one of Walker’s fiercest enemies.
Walker’s regime was more bent on following the settler colonial path that
the British and the French w ere then pursuing in places as different as Aus
tralia and Algeria. It created a Department of Colonization that was led by a
scion of a Massachusetts family with old trading ties to the French colony of
Guiana. In recruiting colonists and helping them settle in Nicaragua, the de
partment built on the work of private Belgian, British, French, and German
colonization companies that had previously sought to forge farming colonies
in Central America. While the department focused its recruiting efforts in the
United States, it also contacted European colonization agents as it was e ager to
have the Old World’s “pauper population” migrate to Walker’s realm.44 Some
agents were businessmen, such as Dr. Käsmann of Bremen (a leading port of
emigration), who signed a contract pledging to send a “mass” of German colo
nists to Nicaragua.45 Others were radical liberals who deemed Walker a kindred
spirit, as was true of the Swiss physician Wilhelm Joos, who had participated
in the French Revolution of 1848 and sought to establish a farming colony of
five hundred Swiss families in the isthmus.46 While the Central American war
cut short the schemes of Käsmann and Joos, their cases highlight the European
underpinnings of Walker’s colonization project.
The filibuster army was another state institution that benefited from the
imperial experience of Europeans. As one British observer noted, the filibus
ter chieftain attracted many “Frenchmen who had fought in Algeria [and] En
glishmen who have been in our own artillery in the Crimea.”47 Some of Walker’s
soldiers had even more far-flung combat experiences, as was true of a veteran
of the British war against the Xhosa in southern Africa and another who had
fought in the Bengal Army of the British East India Company.48 So great was
Walker’s trust in European imperial warriors that he handed over the army’s
command to the British-born Charles Frederick Henningsen, who had par
ticipated in the Russian campaign against Muslim tribes in the Caucasus.49
Henningsen used his European military training to ensure that the filibusters
became a better organized force, yet he could not prevent their ultimate defeat
at the hands of a massive Central American military coalition.
The European influence on Walker’s enterprise was further evident in the
medical realm. A good example is the Jewish surgeon Israel Moses, who took
charge of Walker’s Medical Department and spearheaded the regime’s public
health campaign.50 During his four-month stint in Nicaragua, the native New
Yorker founded a military hospital, carried out medical experiments, devised
vaccines to combat smallpox, and improved sanitary conditions in urban
80 michel gobat

centers. As Walker’s chief medical officer, Moses drew on the experiences of
British and French army surgeons as well as on research conducted by Eu
ropean scientists on tropical diseases.51 Much of his public health campaign
focused on curbing the cholera epidemic then wreaking havoc in Walker’s
realm. Moses followed his European colleagues in believing that cholera was
spread less by contagion than by unsanitary conditions, especially in poor
neighborhoods. Hence his sanitary measures, too, targeted the lifestyle of the
urban masses.
U.S. evangelical reformers in Walker’s ranks also reinforced the European
features of his liberal project. This was especially true of those whose outlook
was shaped by the British missionary understanding of empire.52 The activism
of Walker’s perhaps most outspoken reformer—the Massachusetts native Sarah
Pellet—owed much to her education at Oberlin College, a Protestant hotbed of
reform with long-standing missions in the British colonies of Jamaica and Sierra
Leone.53 The largest group of moral reformers in Walker’s Nicaragua consisted
of the military and civilian colonists who founded a chapter of the Sons of Tem
perance in Granada.54 Then the main temperance society in the United States,
the Sons had become increasingly connected with British settler colonialism,
as evident in their recent expansion to Australia and Canada.55 Even the chap
lain of Walker’s army (Reverend George May) had strong European ties: not
only was he born in England but his father was trained at a British missionary
college and later became pastor of New York City’s Dutch Reformed Church,
whose parent institution was deeply involved in Dutch overseas colonization.56
Not surprisingly, Walker’s realm also attracted Protestant missionaries. Among
those most in contact with Nicaraguans was the Methodist David Wheeler, who
had long worked for the American Bible Society in South America.57 Ever since
its founding in 1816, this New York–based organization had collaborated with
the British and Foreign Bible Society to spread its liberal brand of evangelical
ism across the globe.58
A diverse group of largely northern and antislavery reformers thus drew not
just on U.S. traditions but also on European, especially British, imperial prac
tices to help the Walker regime combat public immorality (drunkenness, gam
bling, promiscuity) and promote public health, education, and Protestantism.59
Yet because they championed the Anglo-Saxon race as the “great moral re
deemer of the world” that was destined to “control or absorb the entire human
family,” their moral crusade led the filibuster regime to more greatly emphasize
racial differences between U.S. colonists and Nicaraguans.60 If this differentia
tion was integral to Anglo-American liberal imperialism, it was also the back
drop for Walker’s most notorious illiberal act: the relegalization of slavery.

Given Walker’s current proslavery infamy, it is striking that his regime sought
to emulate indentured labor systems identified with Europe’s main antislavery
powers: Great Britain and France. Those who knew Walker in Nicaragua were
probably right to believe that his decree relegalizing slavery was a desperate
gamble to appease two rival U.S. groups whose support he urgently needed as
his rule began to crumble: wealthy slaveholders bent on torpedoing transat
lantic efforts to encircle the South with antislavery polities, and those seeking
to rid the United States of both slavery and its black population. For El Nica-
raguense, the more viable solution to the problem of labor scarcity lay in the im
port of Chinese and Indian “coolies” (indentured workers), who w ere deemed
not only productive and cheap but also “peculiarly adapted to the climate of
Central America.”61 This was the solution that Great Britain had embraced to
address the labor shortage plaguing its Caribbean colonies following the Slav
ery Abolition Act of 1833. In addition, Walker’s regime urged France to bring
from its African colonies “apprentices to the ports of Nicaragua, thus furnishing
labor to the latter republic, and increasing the trade of French ships.”62 Both
the coolie and apprenticeship systems marked European liberal imperialism of
the era as they w ere forms of indentured servitude created under the guise of
free labor. Walker’s willingness to embrace them only bolstered the U.S. view
that his Central American enterprise was “our Indian empire.”
Of course, Walker’s liberal project also departed from its European counter
parts. Most palpably, the world-famous “king of filibusters” was poor at coaxing
the U.S. government into supporting his venture. True, President Franklin
Pierce, whose attorney general called Walker “a monomaniac, buccaneer,
robber, and pirate,” eventually granted diplomatic recognition to the filibus
ter regime—an act that greatly facilitated the flow of U.S. recruits and arms
to Walker’s realm.63 In addition, the presence of U.S. warships in Nicaraguan
ports undermined the Central American war against Walker and ensured that
the filibusters were granted lenient surrender terms on May 1, 1857. Yet such
state support paled to that enjoyed by private European imperial ventures of
the era. If pro-Walker U.S. newspapers lamented that their hero did not receive
the kind of aid that the British Crown was offering to the East India Company,
a more appropriate example would be James Brooke, who had been ruling the
Asian kingdom of Sarawak in Borneo since 1842 with the support of the British
government and whose efforts to spread “civilization” to “the most perfidious,
blood-thirsty and untractable of the native tribes” had impressed Walker well
before he became a filibuster.64
For El Nicaraguense, however, the main difference separating Walker’s re
publican empire from Europe’s monarchic empires was that the former sought
82 michel gobat

to spread democracy, while the latter did not.65 Indeed British and French im
perialism of the era excluded most colonized peoples from political participa
tion, whereas the Walker regime sought to create a more democratic system
that, in theory, gave unprecedented rights to the Nicaraguan masses. Walker
even ordered his settler colonists to become Nicaraguan citizens. This peculiar
form of imperial citizenship was undercut by filibuster racism but also pre
sumed that Walker’s U.S. colonists would ultimately constitute the majority
of the population. Another key difference lies in the revolutionary thrust of
Walker’s project. If Great Britain and France tended to rule with the support of
entrenched elites, the Walker regime unleashed a revolution against the local
elite—mainly estate owners and rich merchants—in the name of the poor. This
revolution failed miserably to bring freedom and equality to the masses. Still,
the prospect of revolutionary change led many poor Nicaraguans to long main
tain their faith in Walker.
Walker’s Forty-Eighters
The filibuster revolution was spearheaded by Nicaraguan radicals of humble
origins, such as Valle. But it was also driven by radical Europeans who were
among the many non-U.S. natives in Walker’s movement. About a third of the
nearly twelve thousand U.S. residents who migrated to Nicaragua w ere born in
Europe—a figure nearly three times larger than the foreign-born share of the
U.S. population.66 Moreover many had fought in the liberal revolutions of 1848.
And it was t hese so-called Forty-Eighters and like-minded émigrés who greatly
enhanced the liberal thrust of Walker’s imperial enterprise.
Walker attracted many European liberals because they deemed him a kin
dred spirit. A number of Forty-Eighters in the United States certainly opposed
the filibuster chieftain, denouncing him as a tool of the “slave oligarchy.”67 Yet
many others viewed his enterprise as part of the global struggle that demo
crats were then waging against aristocrats who, as a pro-Walker Irish Forty-
Eighter put it, “beggared, bled and starved the p eople.”68 One such émigré was
the Swiss socialist Karl Bürkli, who would later play a prominent role in the
First International. After failing to create a Fourierist colony near Dallas, Texas,
Bürkli left for Nicaragua in January 1856, hoping it would be a better place for
a “social democratic state.”69 Bürkli claimed to have been enticed by Walker’s
embrace of “socialist ideas” during his 1844 stay in Paris.70
That radical expatriates a dopted Walker’s cause had much to do with their
belief that democracy was universal and could be spread by force. To be sure,
nearly all émigré societies in the United States were organized along national

lines and designed to rekindle the revolutionary struggle in their homelands. In
consequence, groups ranging from the German Socialist Turners and French La
Montagne to the Irishmen’s Union, the Italian and Polish democratic societies,
and the Fraternity of Hungarian and Slavic Exiles created their own militias to
prepare themselves for the upcoming struggle. But just as the 1848 revolutions
in Europe were interlinked, most émigré societies based in the United States
collaborated with each other. They publicized their internationalism by jointly
marching in street parades, waving the red flag that stood for “the solidarity
and fraternity of nations,” and singing the era’s leading revolutionary hymn, “La
Marseillaise.”71
Initially their crusade for “universal democracy” targeted the monarchies
that ruled Europe. By 1855 their revolutionary hopes had dimmed, as the old
regimes proved more resilient than expected. Walker’s conquest gave the émi
grés’ sagging spirits an unexpected boost, and many headed south in order to
liberate the Central American masses from the yoke of local “aristocracies.”
Their first recorded departure occurred on February 25, 1856, when about one
hundred French and German exiles sailed from New York.72 Two days later an
other group left from New Orleans. Both groups sang “La Marseillaise” as they
entered Walker’s realm.73 Liberal European émigrés continued to flock to Nica
ragua u ntil news of Walker’s proslavery decree reached U.S. soil. Among the last
to go were the more than one hundred French, Irish, German, and Polish émi
grés who left New York on September 12, 1856, and the slightly smaller party
of French and German exiles who departed from San Francisco a week l ater.74
These European émigrés served the filibuster regime in various ways. Some
provided critical financial support, as was the case of the Granada-based mer
chant and banker George Beschor, a German Jew who had commanded revo
lutionary forces in Saxony.75 Other Forty-Eighters furthered Walker’s project
of settler colonialism by taking their families with them and establishing new
businesses in Nicaragua. Yet others strengthened Walker’s enterprise by join
ing his army. They brought much military experience with them, for many had
waged revolutionary warfare in their homelands. Few émigrés proved more
important to Walker than the German officers who had served in monarchic
armies before switching sides in 1848. Especially valuable were those who knew
how to handle technologically sophisticated weapons, as was true of Adolph
Schwartz, who led Walker’s artillery division. This well-educated German typi
fied the Forty-Eighters in Walker’s ranks. Trained as an engineer, Schwartz had
been an artillery lieutenant in the Army of the Grand Duchy of Baden when
the revolution broke out. Like other junior officers, the then twenty-year-old
joined the Revolutionary Army of Baden.76 Following the revolution’s defeat,
84 michel gobat

Schwartz moved to New York, where he worked as an architect and married a
Baden native. In February 1856 Schwartz left his wife and two young children
to join other exiles headed for Nicaragua.77
The case of Schwartz illustrates how European Forty-Eighters were critical
to Walker’s modernization agenda. He was part of a German-led group that
carried out the all-important land surveys.78 Their leader was the engineer
Maximilian von Sonnenstern, a longtime officer in the Army of the King of
Württemberg who was forced to migrate to the United States for participating
in the revolution of 1848.79 The other members of his surveying team were all
German Forty-Eighters: they included the civil engineers Eugene Hesse and
Max Ströbel, both of whom had recently worked for survey parties in the U.S.
West.80 Sonnenstern’s reports reveal that he strongly supported the modern
izing agenda of the filibuster regime. He also shared Walker’s goal of promoting
the region’s colonization by European and U.S. immigrants, claiming that Nica
raguans w ere “not capable of improving this splendid country” and thus needed
the influx of “an industrious and active population.”81
Sonnenstern and Schwartz w ere among the many European radicals who
had no qualms about championing Walker’s imperial mission. That French
émigrés would support Walker’s endeavor should not surprise us. After all, the
filibuster’s goal of creating an empire in the name of civilization and democ
racy echoed the way French liberals and socialists had justified partaking in
their country’s brutal colonization of Algeria.82 Yet even Forty-Eighters from
Europe’s nonimperial powers had long been committed imperialists. This was
true of the largest group of liberal émigrés to join Walker: German expatriates.
In 1848 many German revolutionaries had called for the creation of overseas
settler colonies, especially in Latin America.83 In their eyes, such colonies w
ere
essential to both the formation of liberal, democratic nations and the spread of
“civilization” to the non-European world. They also invoked Manifest Destiny
to argue that settler colonialism could promote democracy.84 After the German
revolutionaries fled to the United States, they maintained their belief in the
need to spread democracy by force. They continued to advocate for overseas
colonialism, albeit now as private, not state-sponsored undertakings—the very
kind of imperial venture that Walker sought to realize in Central America.
If European radicals in Walker’s ranks reinforced the revolutionary nature of
his project, they strengthened its cosmopolitan thrust as well. And this was not
just b ecause they were non-U.S. natives but also b ecause they challenged some
of Manifest Destiny’s most ingrained ideas. They tended to view U.S. expan
sion as a secular phenomenon and thus rejected the evangelical Protestantism
espoused by many of Walker’s U.S.-born followers, especially those affiliated

with the moral reform movements then engulfing the United States.85 Equally
important, these European radicals did not follow most white U.S. expansion
ists in denigrating Latin America’s mixed races. On the contrary, some even
claimed that such “mixing of race” produced racial “greatness.”86 As a result,
Walker’s European radicals believed more strongly in granting political rights
to the Central American masses than was typically the case with his U.S.
followers. As much as these Europeans identified with the prodemocracy
discourse and universalizing impulses of Manifest Destiny, they tended to have
a more cosmopolitan view of it.
This view reflected the way Forty-Eighters had originally considered the
United States to be a culturally plural nation, one that valorized both the Ameri
canization of immigrants and the cultures of non-Anglo-Saxon whites.87 Not
surprisingly, their positive view of the United States changed after the Know-
Nothing Party burst on the scene in the early 1850s. They now feared that the
United States had come u nder the spell of bellicose nativists. Many went to
Nicaragua in the belief that Walker’s realm would be a better place to achieve a
more inclusive form of Americanization. Ironically, then, the anticosmopolitan
turn of antebellum society led Walker—the era’s most famous agent of Manifest
Destiny—to pursue an imperial project that was unusually cosmopolitan.
The cosmopolitan bent of Walker’s enterprise would later be obscured by
the violent authoritarianism marking the end of his Nicaraguan reign and his
subsequent evolution into the U.S. South’s main symbol of slavery expansion.
But no m atter how greatly Walker’s antiliberal turn shocked his radical Euro
pean supporters, some continued to believe in the viability of his original lib
eral project. As the prominent German Forty-Eighter Julius Fröbel asserted, had
Walker stuck to his F ree Soil program, his “federation of regenerated states of
Hispanic-American origins . . . would have soon included Mexico and perhaps
even California”—a federation in which, so Fröbel insisted, European liberal
émigrés would have played a leading role.88
Conclusion
The European underpinnings of Walker’s Nicaraguan enterprise suggests that
a transimperial approach can help us more fully place the study of U.S. impe
rialism in world history. It is not enough to simply embed U.S. imperialism
in a global context; we also need to trace the circulation of p eople, ideas, and
things across distinct imperial terrains. Only by considering this circulation
can we understand how Walker’s European radicals sought to reshape Manifest
Destiny’s mission to redeem the world—and why U.S. liberal imperialism thus
86 michel gobat

began as a more cosmopolitan and revolutionary undertaking than commonly
assumed.
But as we extend transnational analysis to imperial formations, we need to
be mindful of the selective ways in which rival empires seek to learn from each
other. What is so telling about the connection that Walker’s U.S. supporters
made between his empire and British India is their refusal to see the similari
ties between the wars waged against both entities. The anti-imperial struggles
in question were the Central American war that culminated in the expulsion of
Walker’s group in 1857 and the Indian Rebellion of the same year. Perhaps it was
just a coincidence that both struggles took place at the same time. It is nonethe
less revealing that they targeted empires that, in the eyes of Walker’s supporters,
enjoyed many commonalities. Unlike Walker’s group, the British survived the
anti-imperial revolt of 1857, partly by vigorously discussing the shortcomings
of their own civilizing mission.89 In sharp contrast, Walker’s downfall did not
fuel a public debate in the United States over the dismal failure of his largely
northern followers to establish an antislavery “empire of liberty” in Nicaragua.
This U.S. refusal to reckon with the Walker episode would help doom the
efforts of President Abraham Lincoln to solve the race and slavery questions
fueling the Civil War by sending over four million African American settlers
to Central America.90 Lincoln’s colonization scheme was famously lambasted
by free blacks in the United States. But just as damaging was Central Ameri
can hostility.91 With Walker fresh in their minds, Central Americans shuddered
when Lincoln’s fellow Republicans stressed that the African American colonists
would turn the isthmus into “our India.”92
Just as recognizing the importance of transimperial connections can help us
place U.S. imperialism in global context, so can keeping a close eye on events on
the ground. Along with European precedents, principles, and personnel, local
perspectives remain indispensable for grasping the nature, limits, and perils of
U.S. efforts to impose its “great experiment of liberty” on other peoples.93 To
gether, looking out and in reveals that American liberal imperialism has never
been as exclusively American as it might seem.
notes
1. A different version of this essay is published in Michel Gobat, Empire by Invitation:
William Walker and Manifest Destiny in Central America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni
versity Press, 2018). I am extremely grateful to Kristin Hoganson and Jay Sexton for their
very helpful comments. Funding for this project was provided by the National Endow
ment for the Humanities (fa-54152-0), the University of Iowa Faculty Scholar Program,
and the American Council of Learned Societies.

2. For a recent example, see Stephen Kinzer, The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark
Twain, and the Birth of American Empire (New York: Henry Holt, 2017).
3. See especially Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in
Britain and France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
4. On U.S. filibusterism, see Robert May, Manifest Destiny’s Underworld: Filibustering
in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Amy
Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (Cambridge, U.K.:
Cambridge University Press, 2005).
5. Janice Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns: State-Building and Extraterrito-
rial Violence in Early Modern Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
6. E.g., Robert May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854–1861 (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973); Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams:
Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2013).
7. William Walker, The War in Nicaragua (Mobile, AL: Goetzel, 1860).
8. “The New International Policy of the Four Great Powers of the World,” New York
Herald, June 2, 1857.
9. “The Nicaragua Meeting To-Night—Our Indian Empire and Directory,” New York
Herald, December 20, 1856; “Our India,” Boston Daily Atlas, April 2, 1857; “Del ‘Herald’
de Nueva York,” Mercurio (Valparaiso, Chile), April 15, 1857; “General Walker und die
Filibusters in Central-Amerika,” Die Gartenlaube (Leipzig, Saxony) 31 (1856): 41.
10. Ann Laura Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North
American History and (Post) Colonial Studies,” Journal of American History 88, no. 3
(2001): 863.
11. For biographies of Walker, see Alejandro Bolaños Geyer, William Walker: The Gray-
Eyed Man of Destiny, 5 vols. (Lake Saint Louis, MO: privately printed, 1988–91); Albert
Carr, The World and William Walker (New York: Harper and Row, 1963).
12. “England and Her Colonies,” New Orleans Daily Crescent, January 31, 1850.
13. “Foreign Policy of This Country,” New Orleans Daily Crescent, October 10, 1849.
14. Delia González de Reufels, Siedler und Filibuster in Sonora: Eine mexikanische Region
im Interesse ausländischer Abenteurer und Mächte (1821–1860) (Cologne, Germany: Böhlau
Verlag, 2003), 140–41.
15. Bolaños Geyer, William Walker, 2:198.
16. No title, Correo del Istmo (León, Nicaragua), May 1, 1849.
17. On the Gold Rush’s impact on Nicaragua, see Miguel Angel Herrera C., Bongos,
bogas, vapores y marinos: Historia de los “marineros” del río San Juan, 1849–1855 (Managua:
Centro Nicaragüense de Escritores, 1999); Frances Kinloch Tijerino, Nicaragua: Identidad
y Cultura Política (1821–1858) (Managua: Banco Central de Nicaragua, 1999); Gobat,
Empire by Invitation, 12–45.
18. Friedrich Streber to unknown, Granada, August 10, 1850, ma-Ko 1-Kolonisation,
Berliner Verein zur Zentralisation deutscher Auswanderung und Kolonisation bzw.
Deutsche Kolonisationsgesellschaft für Zentralamerika 1849–93, Bremen Handelskammer
Archiv; Norberto Ramírez to Ephraim George Squier, León, December 16, 1850, E. G.
Squier Papers, Library of Congress.
88 michel gobat

19. Matthew Fitzpatrick, Liberal Imperialism in Germany: Expansionism and National-
ism, 1848–1884 (New York: Berghahn, 2008), 61–63; Herbert Schottelius, Mittelamerika
als Schauplatz deutscher Kolonisationsversuche, 1840–1865 (Hamburg, Germany: Chris
tians Druckerei), 1939, 66.
20. Entwurf des Statuts der Berliner Colonisations-Gesellschaft für Central-Amerika (Ber
lin: G. Bernstein, 1849), 3, ma-Ko 1, Bremen Handelskammer Archiv.
21. Moritz Wagner and Karl Scherzer, Die Republik Costa Rica in Central-Amerika
(Leipzig, Germany: Arnoldische Buchhandlung, 1856), 181–82, 346–58; Bruno von
Natzmer to Comandante General, San José, February 5, 1855, Guerra 8639, Archivo
Nacional de Costa Rica, San José (hereafter ancr).
22. Walker, The War in Nicaragua, 68–69.
23. Wagner and Scherzer, Die Republik Costa Rica, 178.
24. This estimate was provided by the company that transported the emigrants to Ni
caragua; see Testimony of Joseph N. Scott, April–May 1861, p. 102, claim 1, box 1, entry
436, Costa Rican Claims Convention of July 2, 1860, Record Group 76, U.S. National
Archives.
25. P. Rouhaud to Ephraim George Squier, Greytown, March 28–31, 1857, roll 3, E. G.
Squier Papers, Library of Congress.
26. Bradford Burns, Patriarch and Folk: The Emergence of Nicaragua, 1798–1858 (Cam
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 145–59; Kinloch, Nicaragua, 101–41.
27. “El Coronel Valle de la fuersa expedicionaría del Medio Día,” El Nicaraguense
(Granada, Nicaragua), October 27, 1855.
28. “Lecture on Nicaragua,” Savannah (GA) Daily Morning News, May 22, 1856; “Miss
Sarah Pellet’s Lecture on Nicaragua,” New Orleans Daily Picayune, April 10, 1856; “Letter
from Miss Pellett [sic],” El Nicaraguense, April 26, 1856.
29. President Juan Rafael Mora to Edward Wallerstein, San José, February 10, 1856,
Legaciones y Consulados, 000560, caja Relaciones Exteriores (hereafter rree) 001–005,
exp. 5, ancr.
30. Costa Rican Foreign Minister to Lafond, September 11, 1856, copiadores, no. 142,
rree, ancr.
31. “Centro-América,” El Comercio, September 10, 1856.
32. Matthew Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India,
1765–1843 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Raymond Craig, Cartographic
Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes (Durham, NC: Duke Univer
sity Press, 2004).
33. Mapa de la República de Nicaragua levantado por orden del gobierno por Maximilian v.
Sonnenstern 1858 (New York: Kraetzer, 1858).
34. “Educacíon,” El Nicaraguense, July 12, 1856.
35. Gobat, Empire by Invitation, 7.
36. “Pansclavism and Americanism,” El Nicaraguense, January 5, 1856.
37. George Herring, From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 228.
38. “Europe and America,” El Nicaraguense, July 19, 1856.
39. “Two Lines of Policy,” El Nicaraguense, March 22, 1856.

40. Peter Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (Charlottes
ville: University of Virginia Press, 2000).
41. On how the U.S. territorial system of the era was apparently even more authoritar
ian than the British one that caused the American Revolution, see Julian Go, Patterns of
Empire: The British and American Empires, 1688 to the Present (Cambridge, U.K.: Cam
bridge University Press, 2011), 47.
42. “The Commercial Effects of the Nicaragua Movement—Our New Indian Empire,”
New York Herald, December 23, 1856.
43. “More Patchwork Central American Diplomacy,” New York Herald, December 9, 1856.
44. “Sentiment in the U States,” El Nicaraguense, February 16, 1856.
45. Franz Hesse to Otto von Manteuffel, Cartagena, April 2, 1856, III. MdAI Nr. 7943,
Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz.
46. Sylva Brunner-Hauser, Pionier für eine menschlichere Zukunft: Dr. med. Wilhelm Joos,
Nationalrat 1821–1900 (Schaffhausen, Switzerland: Meili, 1983); “Ein neuer Kolonisa
tor von Zentralamerika,” Der Kolonist (Lichtensteig, Switzerland), July 12, 1856; “Zur
Erläuterung des Spizeartikels der letzten Nummer,” Der Kolonist, July 19, 1856.
47. Laurence Oliphant, Patriots and Filibusters (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1860), 175.
48. “Lyster, William Saurin,” in Australian Dictionary of Biography, http://www.adb
.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A050136b.htm.
49. Charles Brown, Agents of Manifest Destiny: The Lives and Times of the Filibusters
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 366–67.
50. On Moses, who in 1855 helped found the Jews Hospital in New York (today Mount
Sinai Hospital), see Gobat, Empire by Invitation, 123–24.
51. Israel Moses, “Military Surgery and Operations Following the B attle of Rivas, Nica
ragua, April, 1856,” American Journal of Medical Sciences 33, no. 65 (1857): 34.
52. On this British influence, see Emily Conroy-Krutz, Christian Imperialism: Convert-
ing the World in the Early American Republic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015).
53. On Pellet, see Gobat, Empire by Invitation, 125–27.
55. Donald Beattie, “Sons of Temperance: Pioneers in Total Abstinence and ‘Constitu
tional’ Prohibition,” PhD diss., Boston University, 1966, 103.
56. “May (Edward Harrison),” Johnson’s New Universal Cyclopaedia (New York: Alvin
Johnson, 1880), 3:369. On the lengthy involvement of the Dutch Reformed Church in
overseas colonization, see C. R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire: 1600–1800 (New
York: Knopf, 1965), 132–54.
58. Rebecca Bromley, “Distribution Abroad,” Historical Essay no. 15, American Bible
Society Archives (New York). On how antebellum U.S. missionaries used the British
Empire to spread their ideals of Christianity and civilization abroad, see Conroy-Krutz,
Christian Imperialism.
59. On this crusade, see Gobat, Empire by Invitation, 236–43.
60. “Races,” El Nicaraguense, August 2, 1856.
61. “Coolies for Costa Rica,” El Nicaraguense, May 10, 1856. See also “What Is Needed,”
El Nicaraguense, September 13, 1856.
90 michel gobat

62. Walker, The War in Nicaragua, 269.
63. Caleb Cushing, quoted in John M. Belolavek, Broken Glass: Caleb Cushing and the
Shattering of the Union (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2005), 267.
64. “Rajah Brooke,” New Orleans Daily Crescent, January 17, 1850. On Brook as an agent
of British liberal imperialism, see Gareth Knapman, Race and British Colonialism in South-
East Asia, 1770–1870 (New York: Routledge, 2016), 154–78.
65. E.g., “The Issue” and “Exceptional Filibusterism,” El Nicaraguense, May 10 and
August 2, 1856.
66. Register of the Army of the Republic of Nicaragua (muster roll, January 1857–
April 1857), folder 120, Callander Fayssoux Collection of William Walker Papers, Tulane
University; Michael Haines, “The Population of the United States, 1790–1920,” in The
Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 2: The Long Nineteenth C entury, edited
by Stanley Engerman and Robert Gallman (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press,
2000), 156.
67. “Manifest Destiny,” Der Pionier (New York), May 4, 1856.
68. “The Nicaragua Filibusters,” New York Herald, February 23, 1857.
69. Hans-Ulrich Schiedt, Die Welt neu erfinden: Karl Bürkli (1823–1901) und seine
Schriften (Zurich: Chronos Verlag, 2002), 141–43.
70. Karl Bürkli, “Die sozialistische Expedition nach Texas,” Eidgenössische Zeitung
(Zurich), September 5, 1858.
71. E.g., “Republican Festival,” New York Times, February 25, 1854.
72. “Two Hundred Filibusters Started for Nicaragua Unmolested,” Richmond (VA)
Daily Dispatch, February 27, 1856; “Rough Sketches from My Hammock and Knapsack of
Camp Life in Nicaragua,” El Nicaraguense, March 15, 1856.
73. “Our Nicaragua Correspondence,” New York Herald, April 12, 1856.
74. Wisconsin Banner und Volksfreund, April 15, 1857.
75. George Beschor, “Bombardment and Incendiary of Greytown or San Juan de
Nicaragua,” San Juan del Norte, September 1860, folder 19, Samuel Smith Wood Papers,
Yale University.
76. Klaus Hafner, ed., Grossherzog Leopold von Baden: 1790–1852 (Karlsruhe, Germany:
Badischen Landesbibliothek, 1990), 90.
77. A. Schwartz, “Ten Months in Nicaragua,” San Francisco Pictorial Magazine 1, no. 1
(1857): 2; “New York, State Census, 1855,” Ancestry.com, http://search.ancestry.com/search
/db.aspx?dbid=7 181; General Order Book, folder 111, order 12, Callander Fayssoux Collection.
78. Schwartz, “Ten Months in Nicaragua,” 10.
79. Götz von Houwald, “¿Quién fue Maximiliano von Sonnenstern realmente?,” in
Maximiliano von Sonnenstern y el primer mapa oficial de la República de Nicaragua, edited
by Orient Bolívar Juárez (Managua, Nicaragua: ineter, 1995), 1–5.
80. Henry Barrett Learned, “William Learned Marcy,” in The American Secretaries of
State and Their Diplomacy, edited by Samuel Flagg Bemis (New York: Cooper Square,
1963), 6:245; “Letter from the Secretary of the Treasury Communicating the Report of
the Superintendent of the Coast Survey, Showing the Progress of That Work during the
Year Ending November, 1849,” in Index to Executive Documents Printed by Order of the
Senate of the United States during the First Session of the Thirty-First Congress (Washington,

DC: Belt, 1850), 60; “The Mexican Boundary Commission,” Daily National Intelligencer
(Washington, DC), August 7, 1850.
81. “Topographical and Geographical Notices of the Department of Leon by M. Son
nenstern,” El Nicaraguense, August 9, 1856.
82. Naomi Andrews, “ ‘The Universal Alliance of All Peoples’: Romantic Socialists,
the Human Family, and the Defense of Empire during the July Monarchy, 1830–1848,”
French Historical Studies 34, no. 3 (2011): 473–502.
83. Fitzpatrick, Liberal Imperialism in Germany, 27–67.
84. Jens-Uwe Guettel, German Expansionism, Imperial Liberalism, and the United States,
1776–1945 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 43–78.
85. E.g., Julius Fröbel, Aus Amerika (Leipzig, Germany: Deutsche Buchhandlung,
1857), 1:506–9, 521–22.
86. Julius Fröbel, Aus Amerika (Leipzig, Germany: Deutsche Buchhandlung, 1858),
2:609–10.
87. Alison Clark Effort, German Immigrants, Race, and Citizenship in the Civil War
(Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 32–51; Daniel Nagel, Von repub-
likanischen Deutschen zu deutsch-amerikanischen Republikanern: Ein Beitrag zum Iden-
titätswandel der deutschen Achtundvierziger in den Vereinigten Staaten 1850–1861 (St. Ing
bert, Germany: Röhrig Universitätsverlag, 2012), 388–402.
88. Fröbel, Aus Amerika, 2:613.
89. Jill Bender, The 1857 Indian Uprising and the British Empire (Cambridge, U.K.: Cam
bridge University Press, 2016).
90. Eric Foner, “Lincoln and Colonization,” in Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln
and His World, edited by Eric Foner (New York: Norton, 2008), 135–66.
91. Thomas Schoonover, “Misconstrued Mission: Expansionism and Black Coloniza
tion in Mexico and Central America during the Civil War,” Pacific Historical Review 49,
no. 4 (1980): 607–20.
92. Speech of Hon. F. P. Blair, Jr. of Missouri, at the Cooper Institute, New York City (Wash
ington, DC: Buell and Blanchard, 1860), 7–8; Robert May, Slavery, Race, and Conquest in
the Tropics: Lincoln, Douglas, and the Future of Latin America (Cambridge, U.K.: Cam
bridge University Press, 2013), 184.
93. In 1845 the United States Magazine and Democratic Review coined the term manifest
destiny by stressing that it was the “manifest destiny” of the United States to spread its
“great experiment of liberty” abroad.
92 michel gobat

4. empire, democracy, and discipline:
the transimperial history of the secret ballot
Julian Go
In the first decade of the twentieth c entury, schoolchildren across the Philip
pine archipelago sat in their civics classes and read about a new electoral sys
tem that American colonial officials had established in the islands. “In order
that the elections may be held with speed and accuracy,” instructed one text
book, “the municipalities are divided by the municipal councils into election
precincts, each of which must contain not more than four hundred voters.” The
passage continues:
At least sixty days before the election the council appoints in each of
the election precincts a place where the election s hall take place. The
council must supply this place with all the furnishings necessary for
the proper conduct of the election. The room where the voting is to
take place must contain one voting booth for every fifty voters in the
district. . . . The booths must be placed b ehind a guard rail. The object
of the booths and guard rail is to make the ballot secret. If spectators
could observe the names of the candidates for whom an elector voted
they might by threats or promises try to influence him to vote contrary
to his wishes.1
The voting procedures painstakingly described in this textbook amount to a

system known as the “secret ballot” system or, as the textbook pointed out, the
“Australian ballot” system. Replacing earlier methods of voting that had been
done publicly, the Australian ballot system enshrined secrecy as the principle of
voting. This principle is manifest in nearly every democratic state in existence
today, a “global norm” for democracies.2
But the system was not common in the early twentieth century; it was en
tirely new. The few municipal elections that had been held during Spanish rule
in the Philippines were public, through methods such as viva voce. Secret vot
ing through the Australian ballot system was not introduced u ntil the U.S. oc
3
cupation and the first municipal elections in 1899. At that time the Australian
system was just beginning to spread around the world. It made its first appear
ance in 1856 in Australia, when the Victorian Council passed the first known
law calling for secret voting (which is why it is called the “Australian ballot”
system). From there it spread to other parts of Australia, to England and Eu
rope, and to the United States. Louisville, Kentucky, was the first U.S. city to
model its electoral law a fter it, in 1888. In 1889 Massachusetts became the first
state in the Union to adopt the system. It spread throughout the country there
after, but even by 1910, when textbooks were teaching Filipino pupils about the
Australian ballot system, the states of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia,
and the territory of New Mexico had not yet adopted it. Nor had many other
countries around the world.
This is puzzling. Why the Australian ballot system? And why was it intro
duced to the Philippines so early? The fact that it was introduced into the
Philippines at all is itself a curiosity. The colonial Philippines was part of the
American Empire. American officials appointed by the U.S. president wielded
complete control over the Philippine colonial state. Elections and voting are
not often associated with empire and colonialism, which are about coercion
and suppression, not democracy and expressions of popular will. More curi
ous still: the Australian ballot was also instituted in other American colonies.
In U.S.-occupied Puerto Rico, American officials instituted it in 1900, just as
their counterparts in the Philippines were doing so. Around the same time, U.S.
military officials instituted the Australian ballot system in Cuba as well.
What was g oing on? One way to approach this curiosity is to dig deeper
into the history of the Australian ballot system itself, tracing it as a political
technology—a sociotechnical system of materials and procedures resulting from
human knowledge and meant to impact political practice.4 In this case, then,
we are dealing with a technology of modern liberal democracy, and we can
treat it analytically as we might treat any other piece of technology, namely, as
something with diverse genealogical origins that travels across space and time
and that maintains certain basic characteristics but also acquires novel mean
ings and functions as it is translated into new sociopolitical contexts. Global
histories sometimes track the movement of p eople and ideas across transna
94 julian go
tional space, but let us here track the movement of a political technology—a
technology integral to liberal political modernity. Doing so illuminates the pe
culiar relationship between ballots and U.S. Empire and foregrounds the colo
nial bases of political modernity and the transimperial development of modern
democracy.
Technologies of Democracy
The Australian ballot system was a radical innovation. The system that the Vic
torian Council in Australia had been most familiar with before passing the law
in 1856 was the English system, in which voting was animated by intense po
litical rivalries. The voting started with rowdy speeches where “heckling, boo
ing and cheering” w ere common. Voters had to walk through a succession of
bars guarded by constables and were “mocked, jeered and applauded” as they
made their way to the booth. They underwent a verbal examination and finally
presented their choice orally.5 Voting was public. Onlookers could hear and
see who was voting for whom. After the election, poll books with the electors’
names and their votes were often published.
The public nature of elections in England was intentional. Voting was con
ceptualized as a visible and public expression of status. When ideas about pri
vate voting had popped up in E ngland earlier in the nineteenth c entury, critics
dismissed them on the grounds that secret voting was “un-manly” and un-
Protestant. Secrecy was associated with the “clandestine” and “feminine shroud
of darkness” of the Catholic confessional.6 It was even thought of as antithetical
to democracy, “subversive of the public square itself,” upending “open, reasoned
argument.” Secret voting was “a rebuke to enlightenment values.”7
The introduction of state-printed paper ballots changed this system by intro
ducing privacy. Even when ballots had been used in the old system in E ngland
or the United States, they w ere printed by political parties and marked in ways
that made apparent who was voting for whom.8 Or ballots were filled out in the
presence of others, with little to no attempt at privacy. Under the new system
created by the Legislative Council of Victoria, however, the ballots were all the
same, printed at public expense by the state, and to be given at the voting place
only to officials. Furthermore a sequestered space had to be provided, “into
which the voter shall immediately retire, and there, alone and in private,” mark
their ballot. The identity of the voter was never to be made public.9
If private voting had previously been deemed undemocratic in England, the
new private system in Australia was meant to make for a more perfect democ
racy, to ensure fair and honest elections by uprooting practices that had become
Empire, Democracy, and Discipline 95

seen as corrupt. Official ballots would thwart attempts by political parties to
stuff ballot boxes. Secret voting would prevent bribery and intimidation: t hose
who bribed or intimidated would never know w hether or not voters actually
voted their way. The Australian Ballot Association, which was the first society
in Australia to promote the private ballot system, argued that such a system
would ensure “the independent exercise of [the electors’] vote” and secure the
“purity and freedom of election.”10
The Australian ballot system, in sum, was a novel sociotechnical system de
vised to impact political practice. And like other technologies, it soon spread.
From Australia it went to the United States and England and on to Belgium,
Luxembourg, and Italy before spreading to nearly all democratic systems in the
world. But the Australian ballot system was very much a political technology
in other ways too. First, like those other markers of progress and political mo
dernity, it was not the product of a single geographical site or location. Despite
its name, it was only partly an Australian invention. It was an intra-imperial one
and soon became transimperial as it moved to the United States and its Philip
pine colony. Second, exactly because it was a technology, it was multivocal. It
could acquire various meanings and serve a variety of functions, some of which
were less noble than ensuring the purity of elections.
From London to Australia and Back

Although the first secret ballot system became known as the Australian sys
tem, having come from New South Wales, it would be more precise to call it
“the imperial ballot,” for it was a product of actors and ideas that traversed the
empire. The Australian bill had been drafted by Henry Samuel Chapman in the
Victorian Legislative Council, but Chapman had been around. Born in London
in 1803, he emigrated to Quebec in 1823. T here he started a newspaper and
subsequently visited Bath, E ngland, in time to witness the first elections a fter
the Reform Bill of 1832.11 He served as an intermediary between the Legislative
Assembly of Lower Canada and allies in the House of Commons, was a member
of various commissions in E ngland, and became imbued with the ideas of the
English Philosophical Radicals before moving to New Zealand and then Victoria.
Chapman thus came to Victoria already infused with the ideas of electoral
reformers in the British Empire.
Prior to the Australian law, Philosophical Radicals like Jeremy Bentham and
James Mill in England had been arguing that a private ballot system would pre
vent electoral corruption and temper the power of the aristocracy over gov
ernment. Private voting, Bentham declared, would diminish the “joint yoke of
96 julian go
the monarchy and the aristocracy upon the neck of the swinish multitude.”12
Chartists in E ngland had also been advocating a private ballot system to curb
the excessive and undue influence of the upper classes upon the electoral pro
cess. “The suffrage, to be exempt from the corruption of the wealthy, and the
violence of the powerful, must be secret,” contended Robert George Gammage in
1854. Middle-class liberal reformers and their representatives in the House of
Commons took up the cause in the House from the Chartists.13 Among these
liberals was F. H. Berkeley, who put the ballot before the House e very year between
1848 and 1866, failing each time.14
The movement for electoral reform in Australia was the direct outgrowth
of these movements in the center of empire. Chapman identified himself as a
Philosophical Radical. Before him, the main proponents of the secret ballot,
such as t hose who founded and motivated the South Australian Ballot Associa
tion in 1851, were largely middle-class liberals who had been pushing to democ
ratize the previously appointed legislative councils. Like middle-class advocates
in England, they publicly supported principles that the Chartists had held dear,
such as universal suffrage and the equalization of electoral districts.15 Leading
proponents included vocal Chartists such as E. J. Hawksley. And waves of im
migrants to Australia from Great Britain and Ireland carried with them Chartist
ideas and related political values, thereby infusing the secret ballot system with
the same meanings that their English predecessors had.16 While the avowed
purpose of the ballot was to thwart corruption, proponents in Australia were
particularly keen on the secret ballot system as a class project: a political tech
nology to keep in check the power of the monarchy, landlords, and wealthy em
ployers. Not only would the ballot system “prevent bribery” and “secure repre
sentation”; it would more specifically protect the poorer classes and working
classes from being unduly influenced by their superiors.17
All of this evinces that the private ballot system was not purely Australian.
It was an intra-imperial development, with diverse parts coming from a variety
of sources to coalesce into a single system that was then dubbed the “Australian
ballot.” Still, Australia was indeed the originator, if only in the sense that it was
the first place to institute the ballot. England did not do so until 1872 (directly
inspired and animated by the Australian model).18 But this raises another puzzle:
Why was the movement for the secret ballot system successful in Australia rather
than in England?
Part of the answer lies in Australia’s comparably distinct social and political
institutions. In England the movement had faced repeated failure because op
position had been consistently strong. Some opposed the ballot movement on
ideological grounds: secrecy was “un-English.”19 But t here was also power, plain

and simple. For most of the early to mid-nineteenth century the very social and
political elements whose influence the ballot system targeted—the monarchy,
the aristocracy, and wealthy employers—controlled the state directly or through
their allies in Parliament. The House of Lords had continually and fiercely re
sisted all proposals for a private ballot system; the small amount of support the
ballot had received typically came from the House of Commons.20
Australia was different. While reformers in England faced opposition from
the House of Lords, there was much less resistance in Australia. Most of the
politicians in Australia were from the commercial and professional classes.
There was no aristocratic legislative house, only legislative councils consisting
of representatives of the middle classes and a smaller number of government
officials with aristocratic orientations. In addition, the suffrage was larger in
Australia than in E ngland, incorporating many male Chartists.21 It is thus notable
that the only opponents of the secret ballot system in Australia w ere the small
number of elite government officials on the Council.22 The conservative aristo
cratic powers that had thwarted ballot reform in E ngland had very little pres
ence in Australia.
Yet if Australia lacked those conservative aristocratic elements, what was
the need for the ballot at all? If the power of the conservative aristocratic estab
lishment and its wealthy government allies was already minimal, why strive so
hard to make voting secret and protect it against the tyranny of landlords, the
government, or employers? Some opponents of the ballot in Australia argued
this very same point. Secret voting was necessary in England to temper the
influence of the powerful and corrupt, but in Australia voter intimidation at
the hands of the wealthy was not as prevalent. “In England,” announced one
opponent of the ballot system at a public meeting, “a good deal of tyranny [is]
exercised, but it [is] not so here.”23
This suggests that there were other motivations behind the new system.
The particularities of the Australian colonial context made ballot reform easier
politically; they also gave the ballot movement a different meaning than that
which had obtained in England. Reformers in Australia hitched to the new
system the idea of Australian distinction. Evident in the proponents’ discourse,
for instance, are repeated references to “corruption” in England. At the Asso
ciation’s first meeting, James Allen reminded his peers that they had “by com
ing to this colony escaped many of the intolerable evils which oppressed their
countrymen at home,” so the ballot was necessary to fulfill that goal. Australia
was a new world that would not repeat the metropole’s m istakes. Against the
claim that the secret ballot system was “unmanly and un-English,” Nathanial
Hailes retorted that this was all for the better. “Rotten boroughs, bull baiting
98 julian go
and hanging the poor were once English—should South Australians rush to em
ulate England in these respects too?” Mr. Parkins, in one of the early meetings,
announced similarly, “Un-English! If it w ere so, [I hope] to see many t hings yet
more un-English into this colony.”24 An editorial in the newspaper Argus advo
cating the secret ballot recounted electoral corruption that brought England
such “shame and disgrace.” It concluded, “Let us learn to adopt [England’s]
virtues not her vices and crimes!” We should not “risk making the colonies a
sordid old Britannia.”25
The ballot reformers in Australia felt a strong sense of pride at casting off the
oppression and weight of the past that was tied to the “mother country.” The bal
lot system was to be a mark of their progressiveness, a sign of their distinction.
It should “go forward to all the world,” declared Dr. Eade at the first meeting of
the Association in 1851, that “South Australia was the first of British colonies
that adopted the safe and satisfactory system of voting by ballot.”26 In 1858,
after Victoria had enacted the secret ballot system, Legislative Council member
Thomas McCombie proudly wrote, “The objection often taken, that in America
and France the ballot is not secret, is not tenable in Victoria.”27
From Victoria to Louisville

The Australian ballot system first took hold in the United States in 1888. By
1891 thirty-two of the forty-two states had passed secret ballot laws.28 All of
these innovations w ere informed directly by Australia. The architect of the
pathbreaking Louisville bill, Arthur Wallace, had come up with the legislation
after first reading about the Australian law. Reformers such as Henry George
and the members of the Philadelphia Civil Service Reform Association had long
been advocating “the Australian ballot.” Wigmore’s The Australian Ballot System
(1889) provided reformers with a digest of over thirty different statutes on the
books for the secret ballot. Wigmore argued that Australia had “grasped the
torch of progress,” and Americans should do so too.29
What did the secret ballot mean in the context of the late nineteenth-
century United States, which was no longer a British colony and where class
and aristocratic discourse had been more muted? The general goal of undoing
corruption that had partly animated Australians and the English was operative
in the United States too. Elections in the United States had been rife with all
manner of electoral chicanery: bribery, fraud, intimidation, and, where party
ballots rather than oral votes w
ere used, ballot manipulation. In New York City
the machinery of Boss Tweed was exemplary: according to contemporary re
ports, his machine was able to buy city districts for $250 each.30 Corruption was

rife elsewhere too. Reports from Indiana found that for e very five voters t here
was one man hired by political parties to purchase their vote.31
This corruption led U.S. reformers to favor the Australian ballot. The Re
publican reformers known as Mugwumps pursued the ballot as part of their
larger program of curbing the excesses of party politics, establishing more ef
ficient and honest city governance, and chipping away at the power of the party
machines. In Louisville a series of electoral scandals had exposed the opera
tions of the Democratic Party machine and its unelected bosses. State Repre
sentative Arthur Wallace led a reform group called the Commonwealth Club,
which vowed to undo such corruption, leading to the implementation of the
Australian system.32 The key architect and proponent of the Massachusetts bill
was Richard Henry Dana III, an “arch-mugwump” who had drafted the state’s
civil service law of 1883.33 Henry George argued that only through a system of
secret voting on government-printed ballots could the influence of money in
elections be undone. Reformers within the political parties also came on board,
supporting the Australian ballot system to preserve order in the lower ranks
and discipline corruptors, as well as to save the expense of printing ballots and
buying votes.34
There was another group besides the Mugwumps, however: labor. The first
national party to put the Australian ballot on their platform was the United
Labor Party, whose leader, Henry George, had long advocated for the Australian
ballot. George ran for mayor of New York City in 1886 on the United Labor
ticket. The party platform announced, “Since the ballot is the only means by
which in our Republic the redress of political and social grievances is to be
sought, we especially and emphatically declare for the adoption of what is
known as the ‘Australian system of voting,’ in order that the effectual secrecy of
the ballot and the relief of candidates for public office from the heavy expenses
now imposed upon them, may prevent bribery and intimidation, do away with
practical discriminations in f avor of the rich and unscrupulous, and lessen the
pernicious influence of money in politics.”35
Some of the meanings and functions of the Australian ballot system were
thus imported into the United States along with the system itself, but new twists
were also turned. Consider studies on the effect of the institution of the Austra
lian ballot upon voter turnout: all show that turnout most often decreased a fter
the ballot system was instituted, often by as much as 26 percent.36 The irony
should not be lost: the Australian ballot was meant to perfect democracy, but
in the United States its enactment l imited it. One explanation for this outcome
is that the decrease in voter turnout was intentional: the new ballot system
was implemented to disenfranchise illiterate voters. The viva voce method, the
100 julian go
statement of preference to a clerk, and color-coded party ballots had not re
quired voters to read or write. The Australian ballot system changed this by
requiring uniform government-printed ballots. Unable to read the names of the
candidates, illiterate would-be voters could not vote.
The use of the ballot system to disenfranchise illiterates aligned nicely with
Mugwumps’ and other middle-class reformers’ goal of halting the urban po
litical machines. T hose machines had long relied upon immigrants, many of
whom were illiterate. The Australian ballot, noted the magazine editor George
Gunton, was a dopted to “eliminate the ignorant, illiterate voters” b ecause “too
many of our foreign-born citizens vote ignorantly.”37 But nowhere is the ne
farious function of the new system more evident than in the American South,
where white segregationists deployed the Australian ballot to suppress the Afri
can American vote. In the wake of the Fifteenth Amendment, southern Demo
crats had repeatedly sought ways to prevent African American voters from
going to the polls. In 1891 the Arkansas State Legislature passed one of the first
Australian ballot laws in the South, which included a clause that prohibited il
literate voters from receiving verbal help from friends or polling officials during
voting. The result? African American illiterate voters stayed away. As one news
paper explained, when blacks “who could not read w ere told to go to the polls
and vote, the majority of them declined . . . not caring to expose their inability
to make out their tickets unassisted.”38
Across the South various other additions to the original system were made
to ensure its new function. Ballots typically contained dozens of names, and so
in some cases the names of candidates on ballots were listed in random rather
than alphabetical order. Florida, Tennessee, Virginia, and Maryland abolished
party identifications on the ballot; Virginia printed ballots for congressional
elections in Gothic letters.39 In some states the “Repudiation party” was listed
“in order to bewilder negroes who had been laboriously taught to recognize
the word ‘Republican.’ ”40 In other states, strict time constraints w ere imposed
upon voters, presumably to lessen the time that illiterates could spend on de
ciphering the words. Complex written instructions were also imposed, such as
the instruction to mark a line across the candidates’ name only three-quarters
the length exactly. If not done properly, the validity of the ballot could be chal
lenged.41
None of this was lost on critics. “American ingenuity,” wrote Philip L. Allen
in the North American Review, after reviewing some of the devious tactics to
disenfranchise voters through the ballot, “has done much with the primitive
Australian form.”42 In Arkansas the editor of the Gazette observed, “[The] average
negro voter is decidedly inclined to vote, but lacks the necessary qualification

of preparing a valid or legible ballot. . . . It has been estimated that perhaps
three-fourths of them are incapable of preparing a ballot as required u nder the
43
Australian system.” Certain proponents of the Australian ballot in the South
were unabashed about it all. In 1892 this was a campaign song of the Demo
cratic Party in Arkansas:
The Australian ballot works like a charm,

It makes them think and scratch,
And when a Negro gets a ballot
He has certainly got his match.
They go into the booth alone
Their ticket to prepare.
And as soon as five minutes are out
They have got to git from there.44
The Australian ballot suppressed voter turnout in the South more than any
where else in the United States. While states like New Hampshire and Ohio
saw a negative 1 percent change in voter turnout after the law, Arkansas saw
a 21 percent decline, Alabama saw close to a 24 percent decline, and Virginia
almost a 26 percent decline.45 The racial component of this is clear. In Alabama
the “Negro” vote for governor declined by at least 25 percent a fter the passage
of the new ballot law; in Arkansas it declined by 46 percent, and in Louisiana
by 65 percent.46
Evidently, when Mill had written that Americans did not need the secret
ballot, he had underestimated American racism—and Americans’ penchant for
hitching new technologies to racial projects. And with this the reversal was
complete: whereas the Chartists in E ngland had originally deployed the secret
ballot to chip away at aristocratic power in the service of the masses, the rem
nants of the American plantation aristocracy in the South found in the secret
ballot a means to reinscribe its power at the expense of the masses—in this
case, the black masses whose hard-won citizenship the southern establishment
refused to countenance.
From Boston to Manila

In 1901 the American members of the Philippine Commission passed the first
municipal code permanently establishing municipal governments in the is
lands. The Municipal Code required voters to use official ballots “provided in
sufficient numbers by the provincial Governor” and to vote in a section of a
room “cut off by a railing” in “secret.”47 The new municipal code instituted the
102 julian go
Australian ballot system for Filipinos by reproducing parts of the New York and
Massachusetts laws that had been based upon the Australian bill. After the Mu
nicipal Code, the system was then extended to the elections for the first Philip
pine Assembly in 1907. As Philippine Supreme Court Justice George Malcolm
later explained, the law for those elections was “a counterpart of the ballot laws
almost universally adopted within comparatively recent times in the US, and is
generally called by text writers the Australian ballot law.”48
The system for secret voting was also instituted in American-occupied Cuba
and Puerto Rico, thereby raising this question: What could the Australian ballot
possibly mean in the margins of the American Empire? Disenfranchising illiter
ates and undesirables could not have been the goal in the Philippines because
U.S. officials had already restricted the suffrage to literate and/or propertied
resident males. So what was it all about?
As is well known, U.S. colonial officials in the Philippines and Puerto Rico
put into action a program of “democratic tutelage” aimed at transforming the
Philippine polity into the image of the officials’ idealized vision of America’s
liberal-democratic state. That project involved constructing public schools,
holding elections, and building local governments and national offices to
provide a “practical political education” to the colonized elite in the “art of
self-government.”49 Voting and elections w ere to be an important part of this
educating process. Elihu Root, the U.S. secretary of war who oversaw the colo
nial administrations, described voting as the “greatest, most useful educational
process.”50
Part of this tutelary project was about legitimation: promising eventual self-
government so as to win over the otherwise resistant elite while portraying U.S.
colonialism as exceptional.51 To be sure, military governor General E. Otis and
the first and second Philippine Commission had been well aware that elections
(with a restricted suffrage) would attract would-be and ongoing insurgents in
the archipelago. “Ballots were much better and more effective than bullets,”
said one official in 1901.52 But regardless of the motivation behind the project,
why the Australian ballot system in particular?
It is useful to recall that many of the U.S. colonial officials in the Philippines
had the mind-set of middle-class Mugwump and proto-Progressive reformers.
Elihu Root, William Howard Taft, and other administrators had various ties to
the reform movement at home.53 Given this background, the democracy these
colonial officials purported to transplant to the colonies was not just any type
of democracy; it was the idealized liberal democracy of the American reformers
that heralded as crucial “sovereign individuals,” not “organic networks” formed
through kin, ethnicity, or party machine.54 This meant that one of the obstacles

to democratic self-government in the Philippines pinpointed by U.S. officials
was the Philippine social structure. Officials perceived a binary social structure
of leaders and followers, elites and masses, and they castigated the former as
despots or caciques (as they called them), that is, masters of rural land and labor
who held tenants under their tyrannical sway. “The difficulty we find in the
Filipino people,” explained Taft, “is the ease with which an educated Filipino
who has any wealth can control and oppress his own p eople.”55 Another official
referred to this group as part of the “almost medieval system of privilege” that
Americans should endeavor to “break up” in order to implant democracy in the
islands.56 And to top it all off, these caciques presumably used political office to
perpetuate their power. “The politicians h ere are, with a few exceptions, venal
and corrupt to the last degree,” wrote Taft to his friend Henry Hoyt.57
In light of this we can see that the Australian ballot, rather than serving as
a tool to disenfranchise undesirable voters, was part of a larger project to try
to undo the power of the Filipino elite by preventing them from manipulating
elections for their own ends. Civics texts w ere clear on how the Australian bal
lot system would not only prevent bribery and abuse but also prevent landlord-
caciques from influencing the less powerful:
Voting must be strictly secret. Sometimes a rich man may want some
one elected b ecause he thinks that man w ill do him favors. He may want
the tenants on his land to vote for his candidate. They all know that man
is not a good man for an official, but the influence of the rich man is
strong and they are afraid to vote for a good man against their landlord’s
wishes. But when they can go into a small room by themselves and vote
without any one being present, neither the rich man nor any one else can
know how they voted. They can then vote for a good man without being
afraid.58
George Malcolm, one of the American Supreme Court justices in the Philip
pines, wrote further: “The English Ballot Act, commonly known as the Austra
lian Ballot System, is here in force. The privacy of the ballot, which is its most
salient characteristic, is a valuable safeguard of the independence of the voter
against the influence of wealth and power. The citizen must be allowed to vote for
whom he pleases free from improper influences.”59
In this sense, the American officials’ motivation in the Philippines was not
unlike that of their English Chartist and Australian predecessors: to curb if not
undermine traditional aristocratic power. It is thus appropriate that American
officials had referred to the Philippine social structure as a “medieval system”:
Filipino caciques were like aristocratic landlords whom the Philosophical
104 julian go
Radicals, Chartists, and Liberals in E ngland had targeted through their elec
toral reforms. Taft did not hesitate to equate the “corruption” of the Philippine
elite with aristocratic English politicians. The Filipinos, he said, “are tricky
and uncertain as w ere the statesmen in the days of George the first and Queen
60
Anne.”
Not only did officials classify the Philippines as a medieval system replete
with aristocrats and landlords impeding the development of liberal democracy,
but they also saw in the Philippines an ostensible ignorance, backwardness, and
chaos that was putatively plaguing America’s metropolises. In his 1901 essay
“Democracy and Efficiency,” Woodrow Wilson heralded “self-discipline” as the
cornerstone of liberal democratic self-government, decrying what he saw as a
lack of self-discipline in American cities. In t hose cities “the local machine and
the local boss” rule, “voters of e very blood and environment and social deriva
tion mix and stare at one another at the same voting places,” and “government
miscarries, is confused, irresponsible, unintelligent, wasteful.” Wilson then said
that Filipinos and Puerto Ricans too lacked “self-discipline” and “self-control”;
hence America’s task was to give them the “discipline” they required to eventu
ally rule themselves.61
As in the corrupt North American city, therefore, so too in the backward col
ony. American officials in the Philippines saw in their new colony the very sort
of “boss-immigrant-machine complex” that they believed plagued American
cities.62 American officials equated the Filipino masses with the immigrants of
American cities. Both ostensibly lacked the “ideas and aptitudes which fit men
to take up . . . the problem of self-care and self-government.”63 Furthermore
American officials equated the Filipino elite with the bosses leading the urban
immigrant political machines. When explaining the situation to Congress,
Governor Taft translated cacique as “boss” precisely, stating that in provinces
like Cagayan, the “condition of affairs [is] caciqueism which, freely translated,
means bossism.”64 The Manila Times advanced this view in a 1903 story about
charges of bribery during the municipal elections: “The average Filipino is no
novice at political wire-pulling. . . . He is just about as crafty in the art of poli
tics as is the average American ward heeler and other political bosses.” The
writer summarized, “I shall not be surprised if I hear in the future that some
Tomas or other, lately emigrated from the Philippines, has captured the votes of
the largest ward in New York City over the head of some redoubtable Patrick.”65
Officials in the Philippines thus saw the ballot as part of a project to undo the
power of a Filipino landed elite whom they equated with both feudal landlords
and machine politicians. Through the private ballot system, recalcitrant elites
were to be disciplined into democracy.

Still, the Australian ballot had other functions in America’s overseas colo
nies that are worth considering. As in Australia, the Australian ballot system
became a sign of attainment in the Philippines, though with different symbolic
valences. On the one hand, American officials and residents in the archipelago
enlisted the Australian ballot to mark out American exceptionalism. Ameri
cans often bragged of how their tutelary rule over the Philippines—with its
politically modernizing and liberal trappings—was an exceptional political ex
perience. They could thus hold up elections, and especially elections using the
Australian ballot, as a mark of distinction. By employing the Australian ballot,
Americans had given the colonial Philippines a shiny new political technology
signifying progress and hence the benignity of American colonialism. After de
scribing the electoral system in great detail, one civics textbook asserted, “This
method of balloting is called the ‘Australian ballot’ and has been a dopted in
several of the most progressive states of the world.”66 A Philippine lesson book
for the fourth grade said of the Australian ballot system, “It is one of the best
laws that has ever been made.”67
On the other hand, Filipino nationalists referred to the Australian ballot
not to signify American benevolence but rather to signify why American rule
should end. In 1916 Maximo Kalaw took up arguments being made that Ameri
cans had to further study conditions in the Philippines before determining that
the Filipinos were deserving of self-government: “It is not . . . necessary for the
American nation to know—and she can never thoroughly know—the minute
details of Philippine conditions, in order to be able to s ettle, once and for all,
the Philippine question. She did not have to know the characteristics and the
skills of the people of Santiago de Cuba, or whether the city of Havana could
honestly use the Australian ballot, before she declared that Cuba should be free
and independent. It was enough to realize that an entire p eople were desper
ately fighting for liberty.”68 With the appropriate technology in place and the
desire for liberty palpable, the Philippines too should be independent.
In later writings Kalaw argued that American rule had done its job. It had
imparted democratic institutions, and time was now ripe for independence
because “a more honest and efficient system of government has been estab
lished,” involving “the principle of majority rule, equal opportunity for all, the
Australian ballot system, the peaceful acceptance of electoral results, public
office as a public trust, etc.”69 Kalaw thus concurred with his fellow nationalists
who held that “President McKinley’s ideal of teaching the people of the Philip
pines the art of self-government can now be best realized under an independent
status.”70 In other words, the Philippines had all it needed from American rule,
thank you very much—including the Australian ballot system. While American
106 julian go
officials had boasted that their rule of the archipelago was special b ecause it
imparted modern democratic institutions in the Philippines, including the Aus
tralian ballot system, Kalaw and other nationalists held them to their word,
using the ballot system as part of their discursive arsenal. This testifies to the
transimperial deployment of this important technology of political modernity.
But it also evinces the agency of the colonized subjects who deployed it.
The Transimperial Origins of Modern Democracy

We can now reach a better understanding of how and why the Australian ballot
system was adopted relatively early in the Philippines, despite the fact that it
was a colony, and despite the fact that colonialism and democracy are antitheti
cal. The point is that the Australian ballot system did not amount to a system
with a singular function or meaning. Like any technology, it was multivocal and
could serve a range of purposes. It could be used as a mark of distinction, as in
Australia; as a technology for checking the power of aristocrats, as in E ngland;
as a tool of exclusion or oppression, as in the American South and New York
City; or as part of a disciplinary project in civilizing the uncivilized, as in Amer
ica’s tutelary empire. In all of these instances, the system assumed a similar
form, but its purposes and meanings varied. Therefore, it is not surprising that
an electoral device emerged in a colonial context. Because there is no single
intrinsic function to such devices in the first place, there is nothing about them
that is intrinsically opposed to colonial usages.
While we can better see the diverse purposes and meanings of the Austra
lian ballot system, we can also see through them the diversity of empire. This
is where a transimperial analysis is fruitful. By tracking a technology or an idea
across and through empires—hence tracking it transimperially—we hold the
thing constant while varying the context of its usages. This enables us to see
something about those different contexts that we might not otherwise see.
When we do this in a world of nation-states, we track things cross-nationally.
We shine a light on social, political, or cultural differences that presumably
align with national differences. When we track something transimperially, we
track it through or across multiple empires. D oing so illuminates something
about that diversity within and across empires; it also shows us the various
projects of racialized power and fields of competition within and across those
empires—not least with our case here, of the diverse and sometimes nefarious
usages of the otherwise innocuous Australian ballot system.
There is also something substantive and not just methodological to note, for
the Australian ballot system and its principles of secrecy have not only been

important for the countries named here. They have been definitive of mod
ern democracy. As Malcolm Crook explains, as the Australian system moved
through the world, it became “upheld as a global ideal” and today “is commonly
regarded as the natural complement to universal suffrage and democratic free
dom”—so much so that the United Nations has taken the principle of secrecy
to be a “self-evident tool of representative democracy.”71 Article 21 of its Uni
versal Declaration of H uman Rights declares, “The will of the people shall be
the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic
and genuine elections which s hall be by universal and equal suffrage and s hall
be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.”72 No doubt, in
the Australian ballot system lies one of liberal political modernity’s origins. Yet
that technology was neither a “national” nor a “colonial” invention. It did not
exactly originate in one place to then spread throughout the world. Rather it
was a technology that emerged across and through the space of empires: an
Anglo-American transimperial invention whose history should remind us of
the transimperial origins of America’s political system—and of the modern
world more broadly.
notes
1. Prescott F. Jernegan, The Philippine Citizen: A Text-Book of Civics, Describing the
Nature of Government, the Philippine Government, and the Rights and Duties of Citizens of the
Philippines, 3rd edition (Manila: Philippine Education Publishing, 1910), 100.
2. Malcolm Crook, “Reforming Voting Practices in a Global Age: The Making and
Remaking of the Modern Secret Ballot in Britain, France and the United States, c.
1600–1950,” Past and Present 212, no. 1 (2011): 199.
3. Report of E. S. Otis, Commanding Department of the Pacific and 8th Army Corps, Military
Governor in the Philippine Islands (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1899), 209.
4. On Foucault’s concept of “technology,” see Michael C. Behrent, “Foucault and Tech
nology,” History and Technology 29, no. 1 (2013): 54–104.
5. Frank O’Gorman, “The Secret Ballot in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” in The Hidden
History of the Secret Ballot, edited by Romain Bertrand, Jean Louis Briquet, and Peter Pels
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 21.
6. Mark McKenna, Building “a Closet of Prayer” in the New World: The Story of the
Australian Ballot, London Papers in Australian Studies (London: Menzies Centre for
Australian Studies, 2002), 4.
7. David Gilmartin, “Towards a Global History of Voting: Sovereignty, the Diffusion of
Ideas, and the Enchanted Individual,” Religions 3 (2012): 413.
8. Tracy Campbell, “Machine Politics, Police Corruption, and the Persistence of Vote
Fraud: The Case of Louisville, Kentucky, Election of 1905,” Journal of Policy History 15,
no. 3 (2003): 271.
108 julian go
9. Eldon Cobb Evans, “A History of the Australian Ballot System in the United States,”
PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1917, 85.
10. South Australian Register, January 28, 1851, 2.
11. R. S. Neale, “H. S. Chapman and the ‘Victorian’ Ballot,” Historical Studies: Australia
and New Zealand 12, no. 48 (1967): 506–21.
12. Jeremy Bentham, Plan of Parliamentary Reform, in the Form of Catechism, with
Reasons for Each Article (London: John McCreery, 1817), clxxxii.
13. Ernest Scott, “The History of the Victorian Ballot,” Victorian Historical Magazine 8,
no. 1 (1920): 4–5.
14. McKenna, Building “a Closet of Prayer” in the New World, 16.
16. Paul A Pickering, “A Wider Field in a New Country: Chartism in Colonial Austra
lia,” in Elections: Full, Free and Fair, edited by Marian Sawer (Sydney: Federation Press,
2001), 28, 42.
17. Argus, December 20, 1855, 5.
18. L. E. Fredman, The Australian Ballot: The Story of an American Reform (East Lansing:
Michigan State University Press, 1968), 3–5.
19. Peter Brent, “The Australian Ballot: Not the Secret Ballot,” Australian Journal of
Political Science 41, no. 1 (2006): 40.
20. O’Gorman, “The Secret Ballot in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” 24.
21. Robert Murray, The Making of Australia: A Concise History (Kenthurst, Australia:
Rosenberg, 2014), 67.
23. South Australian Register, February 4, 1851, 4.
24. South Australian Register, February 4, 1851, 4.
27. Crook, “Reforming Voting Practices in a Global Age,” 221.
29. John Wigmore, The Australian Ballot System as Embodied in the Legislation of Various
Countries (Boston: Boston Book Co., 1889), 1.
30. John E. Milholland, “The Danger Point in American Politics,” North American
Review 164, no. 482 (1897): 94.
31. Robert LaFollete Jr., “The Adoption of the Australian Ballot in Indiana,” Indiana
Magazine of History 24 (June 1928): 113.
32. Campbell, “Machine Politics, Police Corruption, and the Persistence of Vote
Fraud,” 271.
33. Fredman, The Australian Ballot, 36.
34. Alan Ware, “Anti-Partism and Party Control of Political Reform in the United States:
The Case of the Australian Ballot,” British Journal of Political Science 30, no. 1 (2000): 1–29.
35. John H. Hopkins, A History of Political Parties in the United States (New York: G. P.
Putnam’s Sons, 1900), 404.
36. Jac Heckelman, “The Effect of the Secret Ballot on Voter Turnout Rates,” Public
Choice 82, nos. 1–2 (1995): 111.

37. J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the
Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880–1910 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1974), 52.
38. Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics, 213.
39. Evans, “A History of the Australian Ballot System in the United States,” 43.
40. Philip Loring Allen, “The Multifarious Australian Ballot,” North American Review
191, no. 654 (May 1910): 609.
41. John Crowley, “The Secret Ballot in the American Age of Reform,” in Bertrand
et al., The Hidden History of the Secret Ballot, 60.
42. Allen, “The Multifarious Australian Ballot,” 608.
43. John William Graves, “Negro Disenfranchisement in Arkansas,” Arkansas Historical
Quarterly 26 (1967): 214.
44. Graves, “Negro Disenfranchisement in Arkansas,” 212–13.
45. Heckelman, “The Effect of the Secret Ballot on Voter Turnout Rates,” 111.
46. Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics, 55.
47. Government of the Philippine Islands, The Municipal Code and the Provincial Gov-
ernment Act, Being Act No. 82 (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1905), 11.
48. Government of the Philippine Islands, The Municipal Code and the Provincial Gov-
ernment Act, 609.
49. Julian Go, American Empire and the Politics of Meaning: Elite Political Cultures in the
Philippines and Puerto Rico during U.S. Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2008), 20.
50. Go, American Empire and the Politics of Meaning, 28.
51. Julian Go, “The Provinciality of American Empire: ‘Liberal Exceptionalism’ and
U.S. Colonial Rule,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 49, no. 1 (2007): 74–108.
52. Bernard Moses, 1901, Philippine Diary, entry for February 27, 1901. Bernard Moses
Papers, Bancroft Library, uc Berkeley.
53. Patricio Abinales, “Progressive Machine Conflict in Early Twentieth-
Century U.S. Politics and Colonial State Building in the Philippines,” in The American
Colonial State in the Philippines: Global Perspectives, edited by Julian Go and Anne L.
Foster (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 148–81; Paul Kramer, “Reflex Ac
tions: Colonialism, Corruption and the Politics of Technocracy in the Early Twentieth
Century United States,” in Challenging U.S. Foreign Policy: America and the World in the
Long Twentieth Century, edited by Bevan Sewall and Scott Lucas (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011), 14–35.
54. John D. Buenker, “Sovereign Individuals and Organic Networks: Political Culture
in Conflict during the Progressive Era,” American Quarterly 40, no. 2 (1988): 187–204.
55. U.S. Senate, Committee on the Philippines, Affairs in the Philippines: Hearings be-
fore the Committee on the Philippines of the United States Senate, Senate Document No. 331,
57th Congress, 1st Session (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1902), 51.
56. W. Cameron Forbes, The Philippine Islands, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1928), 1:166.
57. William Howard Taft to Henry M. Hoyt, September 8, 1900, Clarence Edwards
Papers, I, 1.16, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston.
110 julian go
58. W. O. Beckner, “Studies in Civics for Fourth Grade Classes,” Philippine Education 9,
no. 6 (December 1911): 250.
59. George Malcolm, The Government of the Philippine Islands: Its Development and
Fundamentals (Rochester, NY: The Lawyers Co-operative Publishing Co., 1916), 607–8,
emphasis added.
60. Taft to Henry M. Hoyt, September 8, 1900.
61. Woodrow Wilson, “Democracy and Efficiency,” Atlantic Monthly, March, 1901, 297.
62. Buenker, “Sovereign Individuals and Organic Networks,” 188.
63. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign
Peoples at Home and Abroad (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 193.
64. U.S. Senate Committee on the Philippines, Affairs in the Philippines, 51.
65. Manila Times, November 30, 1903, 1.
66. Jernegan, The Philippine Citizen, 100.
67. Beckner, “Studies in Civics for Fourth Grade Classes,” 251.
68. Maximo M. Kalaw, The Case for the Filipinos (New York: Century, 1916), xii–xiii.
69. Kalaw, The Case for the Filipinos, 151–52.
70. Teodoro Kalaw, ed., Epistolario Rizalino, vol. 1: 1877–1887 (Manila: Bureau of Print
ing, 1930), 150.
72. United Nations, “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” article 21, http://www
.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights. For a further discussion of secret voting
today, see Romain Bertrand et al., “Introduction: Towards a Historical Ethnography of
Voting,” in Bertrand et al., The Hidden History of the Secret Ballot, 1–15.

5. medicine to drug: opium’s transimperial journey
Anne L. Foster
Both disease and opium long circulated throughout Southeast Asia without
much restriction from colonial governments. Disease moved with relative free
dom across borders and from person to person. In the nineteenth c entury, med
ical knowledge was just developing an understanding of contagion and how to
promote prevention effectively. Governments w ere just beginning to take the
first halting steps toward international public health and quarantine measures
for the region.1 For centuries opium use had followed disease. Often opium
was a useful medicine rather than a recreational drug, since it offered effective
symptom relief at a time when the materia medica provided few cures. Individu
als and governments alike also profited from opium. Few perceived any reason,
even if there had been capacity, to restrict its movement.
In the late nineteenth century, however, colonial governments in Southeast
Asia increased their efforts to control both opium and the spread of disease.
Colonial officials drew on new medical knowledge that diminished the medi
cal usefulness of opium and were motivated by new ideas about the purpose
of colonial rule. Strategies for control developed in a transimperial context.
Sometimes this context was affirmative and celebrated: doctors and govern
ment officials developed transimperial relationships and took educational and
professional journeys across borders. At other times, transimperial collabora
tion reflected the limits of colonial state power. The transimperial context in
which opium policies and practices developed in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries demonstrates how the very measures colonial states took
to shore up their power might undermine it and, simultaneously, how shar
ing power, which seemed to weaken or divide it, might make the state more
resilient. Transimperial measures to control opium seemed, paradoxically, to
both erase boundaries and reinscribe them as doctors and officials worked eas
ily across borders, enacted measures to control opium crossing borders, and
observed those measures being evaded.
More generally during the late nineteenth century, as imperial states grew
in scope and reach, they attempted to extend their control of bodies, promote
public health, and enforce borders by taxing and enumerating commodities.
But they constantly confronted the limits of their power; each new enforce
ment created additional resistance. This is the dilemma of late imperialism.
The system looked robust, as imperial states honed instruments of surveillance
and control, encouraged more extensive and technologically advanced planta
tion agriculture and extractive technology, fully embraced participation in a
global economy, and neatly, it appeared to them, balanced enticements for in
digenous elites who cooperated with increasingly harsh repression of resisters.
The imperial state appeared to have enduring power.2
But as the collapse of the global imperial system in the aftermath of World
War II indicates, imperial states were brittle. Even around the turn of the twen
tieth century, many colonial officials sensed that the challenges facing the sys
tem might be greater than the resources it had available to protect itself. This
sense of looming challenge combined with improved technologies of travel and
communication to encourage colonial officials to collaborate with one another
to shore up the imperial system. In highly visible venues, such as the growing
numbers of international conferences and the League of Nations, and in less
visible ones, such as regular visits of colonial officials with their counterparts
elsewhere, educational circuits, joint policing and surveillance, and sharing of
publications, colonial officials learned from one another, forged some policies
in common, and exchanged information about threats.3
Scholarly attention to this work is modest and so far has focused, not surpris
ingly, on how colonial officials collaborated in their responses to cross-colonial
threats to the imperial system, most notably from revolutionaries, especially those
inspired by political or religious ideologies not linked to a given nation-state.
As we see in this volume too, the mobility of labor and capital and boundary-
crossing trade have also invited attention to the ways competition and col
laboration shaped a common imperial system. Scholarship in these areas is
sufficiently developed to facilitate attention to the more quotidian aspects of
life that also contributed to transimperial collaborations. Ideas about health,
medicine, and opium developed in a transimperial context during the late
Medicine to Drug 113

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.4 For colonial states, the challenge
came from the imperative to control opium and disease, neither of which could
easily be prevented from crossing borders and both of which had potential to
undermine the health of empire.5 The transimperial movement of disease
and drug prompted transimperial responses, similar policies, and circulation of
knowledge and personnel.
Before 1890 few p eople questioned opium’s central role in the medicine
chest, the government’s revenue, and the social life of Asian colonies. In 1890
germ theory was just beginning to prompt changes in hygienic practices that
allowed safe surgery as well as clean water supplies. Antibiotics were not yet
invented; aspirin was a few years in the future. Vaccines existed, but for few ill
nesses, and were not yet globally adopted.6 The late nineteenth-century world
was one in which people everywhere were highly likely to spend a good por
tion of their life ill and in pain, with little effective medical relief other than
opium. In Southeast Asia opium for centuries had been an important medicine
to alleviate aches and pains, from headache to the effects of cancer; to reduce
symptoms of malaria; and, through what today is usually considered an un
welcome side effect (constipation), to bring relief from dysentery and other
stomach ailments.7
Before European imperialism, few people in Southeast Asia smoked opium
purely for pleasure. Europeans found that opium served empire well, how
ever. It was a consumer good that manufactured its own demand. Providing
opium to workers in dangerous and difficult jobs, such as tin mining, clearing
land for plantations, and dock work, meant workers worked harder and longer
than would ordinarily be possible and w ere reluctant to leave their supplier-
employer. And since European governments maintained a monopoly over the
legal import of opium and controlled the right of sale, it was highly profitable.
In the late nineteenth c entury European colonial governments in Southeast
Asia derived at least 15 percent and as much as 50 percent of their revenue
from opium.8 Even as opium seemed an integral part of the fabric of medical
practice, economics, and society in colonial Southeast Asia, anti-opium sen
timent grew in each colony, especially after the 1880s. Because many of the
first anti-opium activists embraced a number of reforms or w ere missionaries,
historians have not much questioned why anti-opium activism gained traction
at this time, resulting in ever-increasing regulation during the first part of the
twentieth century.9
One explanation has been offered: the changing nature of the regular opium
consumer, from a sympathetic and deserving user to a frightening and alien
addict. David Courtwright has painted a compelling picture of the transition in
114 anne l. foster

the United States, noting that the mid-nineteenth-century addict was usually
presented as a Civil War veteran addicted to opium because of the physical, and
perhaps psychic, pain resulting from military service, or a middle-class white
woman who took a little laudanum to deal with the stresses of daily life. By the
early twentieth c entury the prevailing image in the United States of an opium
user was more threatening: an ethnic Chinese man smoking opium in the alien
space of an opium den and luring innocent white w omen to immoral behav
ior there.10 The death of Civil War veterans removed the most valorous user of
opium in the United States and suggests why it was easy to perceive opium users
differently in that country. It does less to explain the concurrent transition in
other parts of the world. Anti-opium activists worked to change the image of an
opium user from benign or pitiable to menacing or degenerate. They succeeded
in part b ecause the perceived “legitimate medical use” of opium declined, and
recreational use therefore appeared to increase.
In colonial Southeast Asia, existing distinctions between methods of con
sumption reinforced new understandings of the appropriate medicinal use of
opium. Europeans used opium for medical purposes and took it in laudanum
or pill form; smoking opium was reserved for pleasure and was a transgres
sive act for Europeans. Ethnic Chinese and indigenous p eoples traditionally
consumed opium by smoking, whether for a medicinal or a recreational pur
pose. Europeans historically tolerated opium smoking by Asians, criticizing
it only when Asians were addicted and unable to fulfill work or family duties.
Beginning in the 1890s, however, anti-opium activists argued with growing
success that opium smoking was always harmful, disregarding traditional
medical uses.11
At the turn of the twentieth century both medicine and public health began
to develop in ways that sharpened the distinction between types of opium con
sumption. Doctors and public health providers learned from each other across
imperial boundaries, increasingly thinking of themselves as practitioners of
“tropical medicine,” expert in diseases of w hole regions, rather than merely
serving within a particular colony or country.12 Knowledge of disease, of mea
sures to prevent it, and of the treatment for it circulated throughout the re
gion. As these health-care providers began to believe themselves better able to
prevent and cure disease, they were less likely to see opiates as an appropriate
response except in limited circumstances. P. N. Gerrard, author of a widely
circulated pamphlet titled On the Hygienic Management of Labour in the Trop-
ics, practiced in the Federated Malay States. His pamphlet referred to practices
he had learned from p eople he viewed as colleagues in Sumatra and Ceylon,
including a fellow British physician who oversaw Dutch rubber plantations in

Sumatra. His pamphlet circulated throughout the region, providing guidance
to plantation managers in a variety of imperial settings. Gerrard did advocate
some use of opiates, mostly the patent medicine chlorodyne, to treat dysentery
and diarrhea. But this recommendation always came at the end of discussion of
a disease, a fter pages of how to prevent disease through proper siting of hous
ing, provision of clean water supplies, encouragement of mosquito netting, and
other public health measures.13 In his pamphlet opiates w ere the response to
the failure of modern medicine.
At the end of the nineteenth c entury, modern medicine and public health
innovations in hygiene promised a much healthier environment. Imperial gov
ernments, both to fulfill the civilizing mission which they increasingly used to
justify their rule and to ensure a reliable workforce and unfettered circulation
of goods, worked to facilitate t hese innovations. They began the process of im
proving water delivery and sewage disposal.14 They pursued initiatives to clean
up cities and provide more healthy urban environments.15 They began funding
health clinics and training indigenous health-care providers.16 And they ex
changed information among colonial officials about the best implementation
strategies, visiting one another and adapting and critiquing the policies of other
imperial powers.17 One result of these initiatives was supposed to be a healthier
population, relying on “modern” medicine and less frequently using traditional
remedies such as opium. Ordinary Southeast Asians, however, had l ittle access
to these modern innovations. Modern sewer systems existed in only a few cit
ies, and usually in only parts of t hose.18 And as William Collins, a participant in
many of the opium conferences of the early twentieth century noted, in many
parts of Asia “thousands of the population never come into contact with a medi
cal man.” Collins was mindful of the harm opium could cause but cognizant of
the uneven distribution of care. He quipped that “these drugs” did not seem
to “lose their efficacy b ecause they [were] not prescribed or administered by
a registered medical practitioner.”19 The few truly effective medicines, such as
pharmaceutical quinine, were too expensive for almost all Asians.20 Ideas about
what was an appropriate medicine had begun to change, but p eople’s access to
that standard of care lagged behind.
Learning from One Another

The critique of opium’s pervasive role in society took hold throughout South
east Asia beginning in about 1890, in part because doubts about its legitimate
medical use began to surface. Even if few people had access to the range of pub
lic and private health innovations that would prevent the conditions for which
116 anne l. foster

opium was commonly used, the existence of those methods began to undercut
opium’s status as useful medicine. The critique also developed in a transimpe
rial context, in which anti-opium reformers, government officials, and health
professionals all traveled to, reported on, and learned from other imperial pow
ers. The colonial government in the Netherlands Indies was the first to send a
representative to another colony with the explicit purpose of learning about
opium policy. Concern about corruption and smuggling prompted by the distri
bution method for opium had led to an internal investigation and some policy
changes as early as the 1860s, but corruption remained. In the late 1880s, when
Dutch officials had come to the conclusion that they might need to adopt a new
distribution system, they decided to send W. P. Groeneveldt, a Dutch member
of the colony’s advisory council and an expert on China, to French Indochina to
study their government monopoly system.
The study trip, made in early 1890, displayed the trappings of both international
relations and the common imperial mission of these colonial neighbors. The state-
to-state relationship was evident in the official letter requesting that Groeneveldt,
the official heading the small delegation, be permitted to conduct this study
and be given courtesies of information and introduction to appropriate French
and Vietnamese officials. A fter the visit, too, the Dutch government awarded
the prestigious Order of the Netherlands Lion to the top French officials who
had helped Groeneveldt, in “accordance,” as one historian wrote “with interna
tional courtesies.”21 Both the language of the report and the policy recommen
dations emphasized the close comparisons of conditions in the two colonies
made by Dutch officials and reflect Groeneveldt’s perception that because the
French and Dutch tasks were essentially similar, the Dutch could build easily
on French policy innovations. The French, for instance, had lowered the price
of opium in an effort to undercut smuggling, leading to an apparent increase in the
number of smokers, so Groeneveldt recommended against this approach and in
favor of a strong antismuggling police force. Soon after the report appeared, the
Dutch adopted an opium monopoly in Java and Madura, modeled on the one
operating in French Indochina.
The Dutch had little concern about levels of opium consumption but wor
ried about corruption associated with opium sales. In 1890 policy was not yet
driven by a critique of opium smoking or arguments that the colonial govern
ments should stop selling opium in order to protect indigenous people’s welfare.
Groeneveldt made nearly no effort to distinguish between what l ater came to be
called “legitimate” medical use and other uses. His sole attention to opium as
medicinal was in observing that some “Annamite doctors” prescribe it for “in
testinal ailments” to “excellent effect” and, in the conclusion to the study, the

observation that opium is a “stimulant” and, when used properly, has beneficial
effects for the consumer.22
Groeneveldt paid little attention to the effects of consumption, but worries
about corruption and smuggling of opium prompted a broader discussion of the
issue in the Indies both before and a fter he made the study trip. In a widely cir
culated pamphlet, an apothecary named J. Haak noted that the opium ordinary
people purchased through the existing opium farm system had a widely varying
morphine content. People who used farm opium for a medical purpose could
not tell if the amount of opium they had purchased was sufficient for their
needs, or perhaps too strong and likely to promote addiction. As an apothecary,
he had a professional interest in encouraging p eople to purchase medicines
from professionals, but in his pamphlet he argued for adoption of the govern
ment monopoly system so that opium could be produced more scientifically,
resulting in more consistent morphine contents.23 The Dutch debate was the
first to take place within a transimperial context for assessing how to approach
opium distribution, and it hinted at the ways future criticism of opium con
sumption would rest on distinctions between legitimate medical uses and more
problematic recreational uses.
An Imperial Inquiry and Its Regional Consequences

In Britain, however, a broad critique of opium use had existed for some years.
This critique initially reflected perceived problems with opium use in England.
Press attention to high infant mortality associated with overuse of opiates by in
fants and children prompted government inquiries and was at least partially re
sponsible for the 1868 Pharmacy Act, an early effort to medicalize and thereby
restrict opiate use.24 In 1874 reformers and missionaries founded the Society
for the Suppression of the Opium Trade, initially focused on ending the opium
trade from British India to China. Debates in Britain, and among British colo
nial officials, reveal the growing clash of perceptions about appropriate use of
opium, particularly regarding whether opium smoking and eating could be con
sidered medicine or were always recreational. British sales of opium in China
so obviously fed recreational consumption that the Society for the Suppression
of the Opium Trade gained traction in public opinion for their critique of
British opium policy, and by the early 1890s had sufficient influence to demand
a massive parliamentary study of the opium problem. This 1893–94 inquiry
focused primarily on British involvement in the opium trade between India
and China. In an effort to demonstrate the broader ill effects of a British impe
rial policy resting on production (in India) and sale (in China, in the rest of the
118 anne l. foster

British Empire, and in other Asian empires) of opium, the inquiry extended to
the rest of Asia.
The inquiry team sent questionnaires to British consular representatives in
French Indochina and the Netherlands Indies, asking primarily for amounts
consumed and distribution methods. Their survey also contained a question
about whether users typically became addicts, and one about the effects of opium
usage on “public health.” In Indochina the acting British consul, J. L. O’Connell,
answered the questions directly, claiming that most users “become slaves to
the habit” and that the effect on public health was “prejudicial, especially on
Europeans.”25 The acting British consul in Batavia, A. F. MacLachlan, solicited
a report from the Dutch government, which directed a response through their
consul in Calcutta. The Dutch report provided more detail about amounts and
distribution and preparation methods, but completely evaded the questions on
addiction and effects on public health.26
The Commission visited only India, but while there interviewed people of
many different nationalities and experiences, including doctors, missionaries,
merchants, and business o wners, from India, Britain, China, the United States,
and Europe. And to gain knowledge about the experience in the rest of the Asian
colonies, the Commission sent a list of questions to the governors of Hong Kong
and the Straits Settlements. The governor general of the Straits Settlements re
ceived a list of eighteen questions and consulted with thirty-five men, many of
them local officials but also physicians, businessmen, and religious leaders. Al
most all of them (twenty-nine) had European names. Of the remaining six, four
had Chinese names, and two w ere identified as prominent Muslims, meaning
27
Malay in ethnicity. As a group they w ere sanguine about opium use in the colony,
believing most opium smokers to be moderate users, and reporting t here was no
resentment in the colony about the British opium policy. They also reported that
both Chinese and Malay inhabitants tended to believe in the medicinal powers
of opium and to see it as necessary. This report focused exclusively on opium
consumed by smoking, thereby allowing the respondents to evade the topic of
European opium consumption and exploring only slightly the question of opium
as medicine. Overall, although a few respondents opposed opium smoking as a
matter of principle, the majority of those questioned favored the current opium
system, and their answers reflected their desire that it not be questioned.28 Eu
ropeans in the colony assuredly did consume medicinal opium, possibly in ways
that w ere also recreational, so the fact that in this report such consumption was
not even seen as, let alone reported as, opium use demonstrates that t here was a
perception, as yet not much voiced, that there were legitimate medical uses for
opium and that t here were other kinds of uses, possibly not legitimate.

The Commission also explored opium policy in Burma by interviewing sev
eral British colonial officials and private citizens who lived in Burma when
the Commission was in India. Britain had only recently (in 1886) extended
its rule over the northern part of Burma, where opium historically had been
grown. After 1886 it appeared that opium consumption throughout the colony
increased, and especially that ethnic Burmans in lower Burma, who w ere be
lieved not to have a tradition of recreational opium consumption, had started
to smoke and were becoming addicted in large numbers. A new law was com
ing into effect in 1894, forbidding ethnic Burmans from smoking opium recre
ationally after that date, allowing existing consumers of opium who registered
with the government to continue to purchase opium from government opium
shops and stipulating who was licensed to distribute medicinal opium.29 This
approach of registering existing users, disallowing new recreational users, and
permitting medicinal use provided a model for nearly all the colonial govern
ments in Asia during the next fifteen years. The most significant variation came
in how colonial officials defined appropriate medical use.
As the Burmese law demonstrated, the British definition was broad. Among
those licensed to possess significant quantities of opium for distribution and
provide it to others were British doctors and pharmacists as well as any doctor
with a degree from an Indian medical school or qualified u nder the English
Medical Acts, meaning nearly all doctors in the colony. The rationale provided
by the British government for this broad licensing: “There is no danger that
gentlemen of this class will deal in opium illicitly.”30 The testimony did not
touch on what kinds of medical conditions called for opium. British law also
permitted tattooers to possess a large amount of opium for distribution, since
they needed to relieve pain.31 Although British law made a distinction between
recreational and medicinal use of opium, and approved the latter more than the
former, it did not provide strict guidance about what constituted an appropri
ate medical use or specify that some preparations of opium w ere medicinal and
others recreational. British officials justified the policy in part by the need for
Asians to be able to follow traditional medical practice, especially since few had
access to modern health care. In a 1904 report, for example, which often em
phasized the difficulties in controlling illicit traffic in opium, W. J. Keith, sec
retary to the financial commissioner of Burma, concluded, “There is in Burma
as elsewhere a distinction between abuse and use.” In Burma, however, the me
dicinal use was more extended than in some other places, since “the habitual
use of the drug as a preventive of fever and dysentery [was] practically a neces
sity to the dwellers on the sea-coast and in or near the hills and to fisherman
in the delta.”32 Keith echoed a common British sentiment: controlling access
120 anne l. foster

to opium was a legitimate activity of government but needed to be done in
ways appropriate to the specific circumstances in an area. A fter 1894 the debate
among leaders of countries in Asia increasingly revolved around the question of
the nature of legitimate medical use, and not w hether there was a distinction
between medicinal and recreational use.
The massive investigation done for the British Royal Commission, with the
reports and transcripts of interviews running to seven volumes, had no sig
nificant immediate policy result in Britain, which continued to support trade
in opium with China and to sell opium in its Asian colonies. The pro-opium
opponents of the inquiry succeeded both in protecting the opium trade and in
focusing the bulk of testimony on India and China. But the wide range of the
British Empire in Asia, and the public, voluminous nature of the evidence gath
ered by the inquiry, meant that its evidentiary base and conclusions, as well as
the debates in the testimony, supporting evidence, and results about the useful
ness and effects of opium consumption, had a broader audience than just the
British Parliament. The anti-opium forces redoubled their efforts, particularly
working to attract doctors to their side since the testimony of physicians during
the Royal Commission that opium was relatively harmless seemed to have been
damaging to their cause. Anti-opium publications such as Friend of China (Brit
ish) and Opiumvloek (Dutch) expanded their efforts, but the most important
lead was taken by missionaries in China and their supporters.
A group of British, American, and Chinese physicians in China came to
gether in 1896 to form the Anti-Opium League in China. One of their first acts
was to send a questionnaire to all the physicians in China they could identify.
The respondents, numbering slightly more than one hundred, w ere nearly all
English, American, or Chinese, but t here were significant numbers of Scottish
respondents and some Canadians, Irish, and Germans as well. Not surprisingly,
given the source of the questionnaire, no one had anything positive to say about
the consumption of opium. At best, comments noted that consumers with
sufficient funds could stave off ill effects longer than those who were poor.33
The survey phrased its medical questions in a leading way. One asked whether
smoking opium worked as a prophylactic against malaria, fever, or rheumatism,
another w hether local Chinese believed it to be a prophylactic, and then finally
whether Chinese medical practitioners prescribed opium smoking for chronic
illnesses, and if so, did it provide relief. The questions asked only about smoking
opium, not the methods of opium use common to Europeans and Americans.
Part of drawing the sharp line between inappropriate and appropriate use was
putting the practice of smoking into the purely recreational category. Nearly
three-quarters of respondents said opium was not a prophylactic, and nearly

two-thirds said the Chinese did not believe it was, but in each case about one-
quarter did not answer this question. Nearly everyone said that Chinese prac
titioners did recommend or prescribe opium, but equally reported that relief
was only temporary.34 These answers could easily have been given by physicians
who w ere neutral or favorable to opium, since they reflected the contemporary
medical knowledge that opium was useful for treating symptoms but neither
prevented nor cured disease. When deployed by physicians, however, this rhe
torical strategy, of deemphasizing its usefulness as a medicine and emphasizing
the addictive nature of the drug, was persuasive. During the 1890s European
colonial governments had begun to control distribution of opium to prevent
corruption and had taken the first halting steps toward modern sanitation and
medical facilities, which would decrease widespread palliative use of opium.
Colonial governments were not, however, taking steps to eradicate nonmedici
nal use. Activists, like those in the Anti-Opium League, prepared to challenge
that complacency.
Opium and U.S. Rule in the Philippines

The first president of the Anti-Opium League of China, H. C. DuBose, was
an American missionary who was also turning his attention to the new U.S.
colony in the Philippines. DuBose used his contacts with U.S. politicians as
well as other missionaries in the region to advocate against opium and alco
hol for the Philippines soon a fter the United States acquired it as a colony. In
1899 DuBose, who had been born in South Carolina, wrote to John McLaurin,
that state’s junior senator, to encourage him to oppose plans to allow sale of
opium in the Philippines.35 McLaurin, though a Democrat, had recently sided
with the Republicans in voting to ratify the Treaty of Paris, ending the war with
Spain and annexing the Philippines. DuBose seems to have hoped that the rul
ing Republicans would listen to their new supporter on the Philippines. His
letter was passed to the departments of state and war and prompted a debate
about the proper policy. In the midst of many competing and urgent priorities
in U.S. colonial policy in 1899–1900, however, U.S. officials defaulted to the
same opium policy for the Philippines that existed in the United States: no
regulation other than an import tax. This approach seemed s imple and likely to
bring in revenue.36
American missionaries in the Philippines took up the anti-opium cause from
their compatriots in China, lobbying President Theodore Roosevelt and Secre
tary of War Elihu Root through their churches and reform groups in the United
States, as well as directly lobbying Governor General William Howard Taft.37
122 anne l. foster

In 1903 they delayed implementation of an opium farm system, modeled on
the previously common system in European colonies of Southeast Asia. They
also pressed successfully for a commission that would travel to Asian countries
to study the systems in place and recommend a policy for the United States.38
This commission consisted of Reverend Charles H. Brent, Episcopal bishop of
Manila; Edward C. Carter, commissioner for public health; and Jose Albert, a
physician from Manila. Although two of the three commissioners w ere medi
cal experts, the investigators focused more on recreational than medical usage.
This U.S. commission pursued an ambitious transimperial learning project
in an effort to decide about the best opium policy for the Philippines. Progres
sives in the Roosevelt administration approached difficult policy decisions by
first studying the problem and how others had approached it. This impulse fit
well with the growing tendency in colonial Southeast Asia for imperial offi
cials to see themselves as engaged in a common endeavor and to share books,
advice, and information, as well as build personal relationships. The trip was
an extensive one, lasting from mid-August 1903 to early January 1904, with ad
ditional interviews in the Philippines in February 1904. Commissioners visited,
in this order, Hong Kong (for organizational purposes), Japan, Formosa, China
(Shanghai), Hong Kong, French Indochina (Saigon), Singapore, Burma, and
Java. In each place they met with local officials and sometimes with doctors,
local businessmen, and religious leaders. The official report of the commis
sion praised “foreign officials and representatives of the American Govern
ment” who provided “interested, prompt and efficient aid.” They noted that
commission members w ere “conscious of the wider aspect of the problem” and
hoped this report would “be the starting point of a new investigation in other
countries.”39 Despite the differences in goals for opium policy, officials in each
country wanted to improve their ability to control the opium trade and to learn
about medical innovations and how to combat abuse.
The report’s findings and recommendations section starkly contrasted ap
propriate “medicinal” use of opium with harmful recreational use. The com
missioners held up as a model the strict prohibition in Japan, where even the
gear for smoking opium was distributed only by pharmacists and only with a
doctor’s prescription. Even though most Europeans interviewed by the com
mission noted that opium was used in Southeast Asia in ways that blurred the
distinction between medicinal and recreational use, the American commis
sioners tried to draw a strict line. They had been charged with investigating
opium in other countries in order to “reduce and restrain the use of opium” in
the Philippines.40 This investigation was not open-ended, then, but was meant
to figure out how to best limit opium use. Perhaps because of this mandate,

the commissioners did not ask searching questions about the nature and ef
fectiveness of medicinal use. But their questions and findings reflected the still
confused thinking about the medicinal role of opium.
Some parts of the report grudgingly presented opium as useful. In the find
ings on China, the report noted, “We administer morphine to relieve pain. The
life of the indigent Chinese coolie is pain, caused by privation. The opium sot
is an object of pity rather than of contempt.”41 The pity was mixed with blame,
though. This part of the report echoed American missionary critiques of the lack
of healthy food and sport in China and of the economic and political structure
of society, which perpetuated stultifying inequality, to the detriment of rich and
poor alike.42 The report also explained that p eople who lived in the “unhealthful
districts” of Java might use opium at higher rates, and Burma had more casual
rules about opium in order to combat malarial chills and due to their tradition of
extensive tattoos. Tattooers w ere allowed to distribute opium in the same way as
medical professionals.43 These conditions may have justified opium use, but they
were problems to be solved, not acceptable over the long term.
Transcripts of interviews at the various stops suggest the commissioners
had little interest in exploring medicinal needs or the ways in which opium
was used that may have had medicinal purposes. The specific questions dif
fered from person to person, but the main subjects of interest w ere whether
moderate opium use was possible, whether opium use always caused serious
harm, whether opium or alcohol use was worse, and the differences in opium
use among different ethnic groups. Commissioners commonly asked about the
insurability of opium users (for life insurance) as well. They did speak to at
least one doctor in most of the places they visited, but rarely asked different
questions of the doctors than of government officials, missionaries, and busi
nessmen.
Sometimes medical issues came up in the midst of answers to these other
questions. In Singapore, Mrs. Blackstone, a member of the W oman’s Chris
tian Temperance Union, testified that opium was used “very largely” among
women, who “begin taking it as a medicine, but it gets such a hold on them that
they can not give it up.” Asked about whether children were given opium, she
replied that it was given to European and Chinese children, “as paregoric is,”
to help them sleep.44 With no further elaboration of either of these statements,
the report left the line between medicinal and recreational use of opium un
clear. What illness or injury prompted the women to take opium long enough
to become addicted? And was Mrs. Blackstone unaware that paregoric con
tained opium? Respondents in Burma were most likely to mention the need for
opium as a response to malaria and call it necessary.45 As with earlier reports,
124 anne l. foster

the method of consumption seemed to m atter in assessments regarding when
opium was a medicine. Paregoric and other tinctures were acceptable; smok
ing was not; recent increases in cases of injected morphia prompted universal
concern among interviewees.46
No definitive picture of opium consumption and its effects could be painted
by relying on the testimony gathered for this report. Those interviewed dis
agreed wildly about the percentage of p eople who smoked, the immediate and
long-term effects, the methods for controlling access, and the effectiveness of
existing laws. Nearly everyone did agree, however, that government policies
should focus on reducing overall consumption of opiates and increasing medical
oversight. The Philippine Commission agreed. It argued that where the habit of
opium smoking was well-established, immediate prohibition was impossible.
In their 1905 report they recommended a government monopoly registration of
opium smokers and gradual movement t oward prohibition, “except for medical
purposes,” within three years.47 These policies borrowed heavily from similar
ones in effect in Formosa and the Netherlands Indies. As with those plans, it
left the definition of medical purposes vague, perhaps deliberately so.
The Philippines did adopt the recommendation for prohibition of opium
within three years, and by 1908 Philippine local law and U.S. federal law com
bined to prohibit use of opium in the Philippines except u nder a doctor’s pre
scription. The Philippine government did not adopt a government monopoly
during the 1905–8 period. That level of government bureaucracy was deemed
too complicated, especially for such a short time. Anti-opium forces also decried
the possibility of the government’s directly selling opium, making it clear that the
political consequences of an opium monopoly would be negative.48 Passing a
law to prohibit opium use was simple; prohibiting opium use was not. In 1907,
the last year opium could be freely imported into the Philippines (subject only
to a high tariff), imports reached record levels of more than 728,000 pounds.
And already in early 1909 James F. Smith, governor general of the Philippines,
stated that it would be “very difficult to enforce prohibition” without the “aid”
of other countries. U.S. officials perceived a need for a regional solution to the
opium problem and invited states having “possessions and direct interest” in
the region to jointly investigate the issue.49 This resulted in the 1909 Shanghai
Commission, which brought together the most significant opium-producing
and -consuming nations. The Commission’s task was to investigate and share
information about opium consumption and control, but attendees believed that
it was a likely first step toward a convention or treaty. They therefore negotiated
carefully to preserve and advance imperial interests, one of the most important
of which was the right to define legitimate medical use.

Hints of the disputes that would emerge during the course of the conference
about medical use appeared in the information countries chose to include (or
not include) in their reports for the Commission and in the composition of the
delegations. The United States, Japan, and China all included medical doctors
among their delegates. Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Portugal included
only consular and colonial officials, the latter mostly from the opium bureaus
or tax departments.50 The instructions for the investigatory reports did not in
clude requests for any information about medical use of opium, and nearly no
country included that information. This Commission, which might have been
expected to represent the culmination of the growing global understanding of
the benefits of modern medicine, the appropriate limits on the use of opiates,
and the myriad ways that improvements in infrastructure and public health
could improve health more than distribution of opiates, instead revealed that
colonial powers would still assert the unique needs of their own empires when
necessary. Dr. Hamilton Wright, an anti-opium activist and head of the U.S.
delegation, attempted several times to get agreement on a resolution restrict
ing opium to “legitimate medical use.” Sir Cecil Clementi Smith, head of the
British delegation, skillfully deflected and avoided this discussion for most of
the conference but in the end was forced to directly state the British position:
“To put it perfectly plainly, and to be entirely frank, the British Delegation is
not able to accept the view that opium should be confined simply and solely to
medical uses.”51 Wright and Clementi Smith retired to a private conference, re
turning with a resolution flexible enough to earn unanimous approval. It called
for “gradual suppression” and noted that “use of opium in any form otherwise
than for medical purposes [was] held by almost e very country to be a matter
for prohibition or for careful regulation.”52 Each country could interpret this
language in its own way, as was the intention, but claim to be working toward
a common goal.
The 1909 Shanghai Opium Commission revealed both the limits of the trans
imperial process of learning, exchange, and collaboration that had occurred in
colonial Southeast Asia since 1890 regarding opium, and the ways in which
that transimperial process would change a fter 1910 u nder the commitment to
“gradual suppression.” Even as British colonial officials such as Clementi Smith
asserted Britain’s right as a sovereign imperial power to define legitimate medi
cal use for its colonial subjects, opium, and the disease symptoms for which
opium offered relief, remained stubbornly resistant to control by the imperial
state. The resolution calling for gradual suppression concluded by noting “the
desirability of a re-examination of their systems of regulation in the light of the
experience of other countries dealing with the same problem.”53 Since 1890
126 anne l. foster

colonial officials in Southeast Asia had been d oing just that, sharing knowledge
of disease, medicine, and appropriate regulations for opium. In the aftermath
of the U.S. decision to pursue prohibition, and of the other imperial powers to
endorse gradual suppression, the transimperial threat posed by opium shifted.
When imperial officials claimed subjects still needed access to opium to combat
malaria or dysentery, they invited criticism of their insufficient public health
measures. Smuggling threatened state authority, not just opium farmers’ prof
its. These threats prompted ever closer collaboration, especially intelligence
sharing about smugglers, even while imperial officials disagreed about how best
to control opium for the benefit of their subjects.
notes
1. Mark Harrison, Contagion: How Commerce Has Spread Disease (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2012). See especially chapter 7, 174–210.
2. A selective list of some of the works that have most informed my thinking about
the late imperial state include Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, “Empires and the
Reach of the Global,” and Emily S. Rosenberg, “Transnational Currents in a Shrinking
World,” both in A World Connecting, 1870–1945, edited by Emily S. Rosenberg (Cam
bridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 285–434, 815–998; Alfred W. McCoy,
Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines and the Rise of the Surveillance
State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009); Rudolf Mrazek, Engineers of Happy
Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2009); James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human
Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); Eric Tagliacozzo,
Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States along a Southeast Asian Frontier,
1865–1915 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).
3. The essays in Julian Go and Anne L. Foster, eds., The American Colonial State in the
Philippines: Global Perspectives (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003) remain in
dispensable. See also Aidan Forth and Jonas Kreienbaum, “A Shared Malady: Concentra
tion Camps in the British, Spanish, American and German Empires,” Journal of Modern
European History 14, no. 2 (2016): 245–67; Daniel E. Bender and Jana K. Lipman, Making
the Empire Work: Labor and United States Imperialism (New York: New York University
Press, 2015); Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco Scarano, eds., Colonial Crucible: Empire in
the Making of the Modern American State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009).
From a somewhat different perspective, see J. P. Daughton, “Behind the Imperial Cur
tain: International Humanitarian Efforts and the Critique of French Colonialism in the
Interwar Years,” French Historical Studies 34, no. 3 (Summer 2011): 503–28.
4. Warwick Anderson has pioneered work on disease and empire in comparative
perspective. See especially “The Colonial Medicine of Settler States: Comparing Histo
ries of Indigenous Health,” Health and History: Journal of the Australian and New Zealand
Society for the History of Medicine 9, no. 2 (2007): 144–54, and Warwick Anderson and
Hans Pols, “Scientific Patriotism: Medical Science and National Self-Fashioning in

Southeast Asia,” in Endless Empire: Spain’s Retreat, Europe’s Eclipse, America’s Decline,
edited by Alfred W. McCoy, Josep Fradera, and Stephen Jacobson (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 2012), 265–72. See also Robert Peckham and David M. Pomfret, eds.,
Imperial Contagions: Medicine, Hygiene, and Cultures of Planning in Asia (Hong Kong: Hong
Kong University Press, 2013); José Amador, Medicine and Nation Building in the Americas,
1890–1940 (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2015); Anne-Emanuelle Birn and
Theodore M. Brown, eds., Comrades in Health: U.S. Health Internationalists, Abroad and at
Home (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013).
5. The spread of plague in Asia in the late nineteenth century provides a dramatic
example. See Robert Peckham, “Infective Economies: Empire, Panic and the Business of
Disease,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 41, no. 2 (2013): 211–37.
6. Most histories of medicine focus on discovery, not adoption, of new techniques and
drugs. The historian of medicine Roy Porter rightly called the mid-nineteenth-century
insights about bacteriology “one of medicine’s few true revolutions,” but it took decades
for the benefits to be globally dispersed. Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A
Medical History of Humanity (New York: Norton, 1997), 428.
7. Carl A. Trocki, Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy: A Study of the Asian
Opium Trade, 1750–1950 (New York: Routledge, 1999), 13–26.
8. Trocki, Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy, 137–52; Anne L. Foster,
“Opium, the United States and the Civilizing Mission in Colonial Southeast Asia,” Social
History of Alcohol and Drugs 24, no. 1 (Winter 2010): 8–9.
9. For discussion of rising anti-opium sentiment, see James R. Rush, Opium to Java:
Revenue Farming and Chinese Enterprise in Colonial Indonesia, 1860–1910 (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1990), 198–241; Carl A. Trocki, Opium and Empire: Chinese
Society in Colonial Singapore, 1800–1910 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990),
183–219; Ashley Wright, Opium and Empire in Southeast Asia: Regulating Consumption in
British Burma (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
10. David T. Courtwright, Dark Paradise: A History of Opiate Addiction in America (Cam
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 35–84.
11. See, for example, the discussion of opium smoking in Joshua Rowntree, The Impe-
rial Drug Trade (London, 1905), 139–46.
12. Deborah Neill, Networks in Tropical Medicine: Internationalism, Colonialism, and the
Rise of a Medical Specialty, 1890–1930 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012),
12–43.
13. P. N. Gerrard, On the Hygienic Management of Labour in the Tropics (Singapore:
Methodist Publishing House, 1913), xi–xiv, 1–28. Using an opiate for dysentery is men
tioned on 25; for diarrhea on 28.
14. Warwick Anderson’s Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race and
Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006) is the most suc
cinct introduction. See also Brenda S. A. Yeoh, “Urban Sanitation, Health and W ater
Supply in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Colonial Singapore,” South East
Asia Research 1, no. 2 (September 1993): 143–72.
15. Robert Peckham, “Hygienic Nature: Afforestation and the Greening of Hong
Kong,” Modern Asian Studies 49, no. 4 (July 2015): 1177–209; David Brody, “Building
128 anne l. foster

Empire: Architecture and American Imperialism in the Philippines,” Journal of Asian
American Studies 4, no. 2 (June 2001): 123–45.
16. For example, see Laurence Monnais-Rousselot, “La médicalisation de la mère et
de son enfant: L’exemple du Vietnam sous domination française, 1860–1939,” Canadian
Bulletin of Medical History 19, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 113–37; Penny Edwards, “Bitter Pills:
Colonialism, Medicine and Nationalism in Burma, 1870–1940,” Journal of Burma Studies
14 (2010): 21–58; Liesbeth Hesselink, Healers on the Colonial Market: Native Doctors and
Midwives in the Dutch East Indies (Leiden, Netherlands: kitlv Press, 2011).
17. Although about a slightly later time period, see Tomoko Akami, “A Quest to Be
Global: The League of Nations Health Organization and Inter-colonial Regional Govern
ing Agendas of the Far Eastern Association of Tropical Health, 1910–1925,” International
History Review 38, no. 1 (2016): 1–23; Tomoko Akami, “Imperial Politics, Intercolonialism,
and the Shaping of Global Governing Norms: Public Health Expert Networks in Asia and
the League of Nations Health Organization, 1908–1937,” Journal of Global History 12, no. 1
(2017): 4–25. See also Bernard Hillemand and Alain Ségal, “Les six dernières confer
ences sanitaires internationales 1892 à 1926: Prémices de l’Organisation Mondiale de la
Santé (o.m.s.),” Histoire des sciences médicales 48, no. 1 (2014): 131–38.
18. Matthew Gandy, “The Bacteriological City and Its Discontents,” Historical Geogra-
phy 34 (2006): 14–25, esp. 18–22.
19. William J. Collins, The International Opium Convention: Drugs and Legislation (Lon
don: J. Bale, Sons and Danielson, 1912), 14.
20. Daniel R. Headrick, “The Tools of Imperialism: Technology and the Expansion
of European Colonial Empires in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Modern History 51,
no. 2 (June 1979): 145–47. Headrick claims that by the 1830s, quinine was inexpensive
enough to be in general use. That was true for Europeans, but not for most Asians. See
Michitake Aso, “Patriotic Hygiene: Tracing New Places of Knowledge Production about
Malaria in Vietnam, 1919–1975,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 44, no. 3 (Octo
ber 2013): 426–28.
21. Biographical information about Groeneveldt from Marinus Willem de Visser,
“Levensbericht van Willem Pieter Groeneveldt,” Jaarboek van de Maatschappij der Ned-
erlandse Kunde, 1916 (1916), Digitale bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse letteren, http://www
.dbnl.org/tekst/_jaa003191601_01/_jaa003191601_01_0016.php. Information about the
trip itself from Koos Kuiper, “Du Nouveau sur la mystérieuse mission de Batavia à Saigon
en 1890,” Archipel 77 (2009): 27–44; this information from 35–36.
22. W. P. Groeneveldt, Rapport over het Opium-Monopolie in Fransch Indo-China (Bata
via, Netherlands Indies: Landsdrukkerij, 1890), 86–87, 115. The Dutch word is matig,
which means “temperately” or “moderately.”
23. J. Haak, Opium Regie met Normaal Tandjoe (Samarang, 1889). In the 1880s and
1890s the budding anti-opium movement in the Netherlands Indies focused on ending
the opium farm system and moving to a system of government monopoly, not on ending
opium consumption. A popular anti-opium novel published in 1886 (translated into En
glish in 1888), Baboe Dalima, dramatically features the effects of opium farm corruption
on the lives of innocent Dutch and Javanese but does not call for prohibition of opium
use. The Anti-Opium Bond, established in 1889, was the vanguard of popular anti-opium

activism in the Netherlands and Netherlands Indies, and also initially merely advocated
ending the opium farm.
24. Virginia Berridge, Opium and the People: Opiate Use and Drug Control Policy in
Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century England (London: Free Association Books, 1999),
97–105, 120–22.
25. Great Britain, First Report of the Royal Commission on Opium, vol. 5: Appendices
(London, 1894), 345.
26. Great Britain, First Report of the Royal Commission on Opium, 5:344.
27. Nearly all those with European names appear to have been British, although
origins are not always possible to determine from the information provided. Of the four
people with Chinese names who were interviewed, three were then, or had previously
been, opium farmers.
28. Great Britain, First Report of the Royal Commission on Opium, 5:145–84. This is the
whole section on the Straits Settlements, with the report on 145–54, and enumeration
and summary of witness statements on 154–84.
29. Wright, Opium and Empire in Southeast Asia, especially chapters 2 and 4.
30. Great Britain, First Report of the Royal Commission on Opium, vol. 2: Minutes of
Evidence (London, 1894), 490.
31. Great Britain, First Report of the Royal Commission on Opium, 2:492–93.
32. W. J. Keith, “Report on the Working of the Revised Arrangements for the Vend
of Opium in Lower Burma during the year ended 31st March 1904” (Rangoon, Burma,
November 1904), ior/v/24/3127, India Office Records, British Library, London.
33. William Hector Park, compiler, Opinions of over 100 Physicians on the Use of Opium
in China (Shanghai: American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1899), vii–xii, 1–8. Interest
ingly, the chart listing where people came from also listed where they received their
medical education. Most people, but not all, were educated in or near their home
country.
34. Park, Opinions of over 100 Physicians, 34–40.
35. Rev. H. C. DuBose to Senator John McLaurin, extracted in memorandum, Septem
ber 23, 1899, file 1023–1, entry 5, rg 350, National Archives and Records Administration,
College Park, Maryland.
36. This development is discussed in Anne L. Foster, “Models for Governing: Opium
and Colonial Policies in Southeast Asia, 1898–1910,” in Go and Foster, The American
Colonial State in the Philippines, 96–97.
37. There was a rudimentary press campaign, especially in religious periodicals. See,
for instance, Wilbur F. Crafts, “Capital News from a Reformer’s Viewpoint: McKinley
and Missions,” The Advance, May 10, 1900, 671. Crafts was the author of a popular,
multiedition book advocating temperance for “native races.” The 1900 edition of the
book focused on the evils of alcohol in the Philippines u nder U.S. rule. Wilbur F. Crafts,
Protection of Native Races against Intoxicants and Opium (Chicago, 1900), 186–206.
38. As discussed in Foster, “Models for Governing,” 98–99, both personal lobbying and
a massive telegram campaign shaped this decision.
39. U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on the Philippines, Message of the President,
transmitting the report of the committee appointed by the Philippine Commission to investi-
130 anne l. foster

gate the use of opium and traffic therein, Senate Doc. 265 (Washington, DC, 1906), 19–20
(hereafter Traffic in Opium).
40. Traffic in Opium, 21.
41. Traffic in Opium, 29.
42. For example, see Stefan Hübner, “Muscular Christianity and the Western Civiliz
ing Mission: Elwood S. Brown, the ymca, and the Idea of the Far Eastern Championship
Games,” Diplomatic History 39, no. 3 (June 2015): 532–57.
43. Traffic in Opium, 42–44.
45. Traffic in Opium, 117, 122.
46. The final set of questions for the longer interviews was almost always about mor
phia, and the increased use of that preparation of the drug was universally condemned.
48. See the discussion of this debate and decision in Anne L. Foster, “Opium, the
United States, and the Civilizing Mission in Colonial Southeast Asia,” Social History of
Alcohol and Drugs 24, no. 1 (Winter 2010): 12–15.
49. James F. Smith to Charles Denby (U.S. consul in China), February 19, 1909, entry
33, in rg 43, Records of International Conferences, Commissions and Expositions,
National Archives and Records Administration. See the broader discussion in Anne L.
Foster, “Prohibition as Superiority: Policing Opium in South-East Asia, 1898–1925,”
International History Review 22, no. 2 (June 2000): 260–64.
50. It appears that both Germany and Austria-Hungary also had medical professionals
as delegates, but those men were simultaneously the consular officials for their countries
in China, so it seems unlikely they were chosen for their medical expertise. International
Opium Commission, Report of the Proceedings, vol. 1 (Shanghai, 1909), 3–6.
51. International Opium Commission, Report of the Proceedings, 1:46–50. The Chinese
and Japanese delegations supported the United States, while the French, Dutch, Portu
guese, and Siamese delegations supported the British position on this matter.
52. International Opium Commission, Report of the Proceedings, 1:61.
53. International Opium Commission, Report of the Proceedings, 1:61.

part iii. governing structures
6. one serv ice, three systems, many empires:
the u.s. consular serv ice and the growth
of u.s. global power, 1789–1924
Nicole M. Phelps
In the long nineteenth century, the U.S. Consular Service (uscs) helped to en
mesh the United States in a global network of trade dominated by the g reat
imperial powers and concentrated in the world’s major port cities. Working
alongside one another in these cosmopolitan cities, consular officials repre
senting governments from all over the globe advanced national and imperial
interests by collecting customs duties for government coffers and protecting
state sovereignty by restricting and channeling flows across geographic borders
(see table 6.1). Yet consular officials also played a significant role in knitting the
imperial world system together by smoothing the cross-border travels of goods,
capital, and people. To this end, consular officials at major ports provided rou
tine paperwork that could be trusted by other border officials. They also helped
governments, commercial interests, and individuals cope with jarring disrup
tions to t hese flows, from natural catastrophes and shipwrecks to illnesses and
other personal misfortunes. Their work was the stuff of both transnational and
transimperial connections.
This major port-based consular system was distinct from the nineteenth-
century diplomatic system, which was based in imperial and national political
capitals. Some of t hose political capitals w
ere also major ports, but diplomatic
and consular officials operated separately and had distinct functions. Indeed
most governments had separate diplomatic and consular institutions in the
nineteenth century, and the United States was ahead of the curve when it com
bined the uscs with the diplomatic service to create the U.S. Foreign Service
table 6.1. Cities with the Most Consular Officials, c. 1897
City Number of Consular Officials

London 25
New York City 25
Liverpool 24
Marseilles 24
Hamburg 24
Paris 23
Berlin 23
Genoa 23
Antwerp 23
Lisbon 23
Barcelona 23
Cadiz 23
Glasgow 22
Havre 22
Bremen 22
Malaga 22
Christiania (Oslo) 22
San Francisco 22
Cardiff 21
Copenhagen 21
Amsterdam 21
Naples 21
Palermo 21
Venice 21
Ghent 21
Havana 21
Valencia 21
Boston 21
Liege 20
Source: Data from National Archives and Records Administration, specifically the
various country files in collection 19: Reports on the Consular Service of Foreign
Countries, 1897, Inventory 15, Record Group 59, General Records of the Department
of State, nara; the dos-created ledger that is Volume 2 in 883: Analyses of Reports on
Consular Establishments of Foreign Powers, 1907, Inventory 15, nara; and the section
of the Register of the Department of State that lists foreign consular posts in the United
States.
in 1924. Diplomats dealt with high politics and representational functions, and
governments were limited by international norms and laws to establishing one
embassy or legation per empire or country.1
Consular officials, on the other hand, dealt with the everyday practicali
ties of keeping p eople, goods, and capital moving through the proper chan
nels across national and imperial borders. Bilateral treaties allowed them to
be posted wherever there was a perceived need, and the norm of fee-based
remuneration and relatively low salaries facilitated their proliferation in the
long nineteenth c entury (see figure 6.1). Consular agents provided official
representation not only in Europe but also in colonial entrepôts. The major
port consular system was open to any government that wanted to engage in
trade and was willing to abide by the rules and norms that had been initially
developed in Europe. This consular system, with its emphasis on trade and aid
to sailors and other travelers, is what comes to many p eople’s minds when they
think of consuls, and in the relatively sparse literature on consuls, it is what
gets much of the attention.2
But in the long nineteenth c entury, this relatively open system of major
port consular posts coexisted with two other consular systems that w ere far
more exclusive. One of these systems operated in what the U.S. Department
of State (dos) referred to as “non-Christian countries,” including the Ottoman
Empire and China.3 Its defining feature was extraterritoriality, with sending
governments having the right to exercise direct jurisdiction over their citizens
or subjects in the host country. This system was explicitly unequal because
the “non-Christian” governments did not have reciprocal rights in Europe
or the Americas. It relied on interimperial cooperation for its maintenance. In
the U.S. case, it also relied on cooperation with local employees to overcome
significant language barriers. This consular system was especially fragile and
prone to corruption b ecause only a few p eople had the linguistic and cultural
expertise to participate in and oversee this particular matrix of power and de
pendence. Nonetheless, like the major port consular system, it advanced U.S.
interests and power.
The third consular system was that of informal empire. In this system the
rules of the major port system applied, rather than extraterritoriality. However,
unlike in the major ports, only one government had a consular presence. The
usual effect was to forge a bilateral relationship between the sending govern
ment and the host locality that sidelined imperial and national governments,
but these consular posts could also help to generate interimperial alignments.
The U.S. government used its consular service to gain access to rival empires and
One Service, Three Systems, Many Empires 137

France 852
United States 779
Britain 723
Germany 710
Spain 705
Sweden 664
Italy 656
Netherlands 567
Belgium 557
Austria 381
Russia 374
Brazil 306
Argentina 295
Turkey 217
Chile 180
Venezuela 169
Mexico 154
Paraguay 150
Colombia 135
Ecuador 135
Dom. Rep. 113
Hawaii 93
Liberia 78
Haiti 62
Japan 37
China 14
Korea 10
0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900
figure 6.1. Size of consular services, 1897.

Source: See note 6.
to strengthen its official and commercial presence more than other governments
did, particularly in the period between the U.S. Civil War and World War I (see
table 6.2). A significant number of t hese informal empire posts w ere in Central
America and the Caribbean, where, it should be noted, there was less formal
empire with which to contend. Even more of these posts were in the British
Empire, however, and especially in Canada. T hese posts w
ere often operated
by British subjects. In addition to expanding the U.S. economic foothold in the
British dominion, uscs officials created and embodied an alignment of British
138 nicole m. phelps

table 6.2. Consular Services with the Most “Informal Empire” Posts, c. 1897
Percentage
Informal Total Consular of Informal
Country Empire Posts* Posts Empire Posts
United States 197 779 25
Spain 115 705 16
Sweden 86 664 13
Italy 78 656 12
France 100 852 12
Argentina 33 295 11
Britain 70 723 10
*“Informal empire posts” are defined as those at which only one government is represented.
Source: Data from National Archives and Records Administration, specifically the various country
files in collection 19: Reports on the Consular Service of Foreign Countries, 1897, Inventory 15,
Record Group 59, General Records of the Department of State, nara; the dos-created ledger that
is Volume 2 in 883: Analyses of Reports on Consular Establishments of Foreign Powers, 1907,
Inventory 15, nara; and the section of the Register of the Department of State that lists foreign
consular posts in the United States.
and American interests that contributed to the post–Civil War rapprochement

between the two countries.
The three consular systems, supplemented at times by the diplomatic sys
tem, furthered the transborder flow of people, goods, and capital that, in turn,
generated U.S. economic, political, and cultural power. The United States
used that power to acquire colonies, build an informal empire, and cooper
ate on an equal footing with other imperial powers to preserve and expand
imperial structures. The fact that the uscs operated within the three differ
ent systems with an annual average of 713 posts in operation across the globe
in the period from 1872 to 1906 made for an unwieldy institution that was
difficult to govern from the center in Washington.4 The uscs functioned rela
tively well, especially when its officials stayed at their posts long enough to
acquire crucial knowledge of local conditions and gain experience with the
specific consular functions required t here. A significant reform effort in 1906
produced major changes that emphasized national sovereignty and knowl
edge of uniform, dos-centered bureaucratic practices rather than inter-and
transimperial cooperation and local knowledge, but by that point the United
States had already reaped the benefits of t hose more cooperative nineteenth-
century consular efforts.

900
800
700
600
Number of Posts
500
400
300
200
100
0
1789
1794
1799
1804
1809
1814
1819
1824
1829
1834
1839
1844
1849
1854
1859
1864
1870
1875
1880
1887
1895
1900
1906
1911
1916
1925
1930
1935
Year
figure 6.2. Number of U.S. Consular Service posts by year, 1789–1939. The light line
indicates the number of posts in the British Empire and Commonwealth. Based on data
from the Register of the Department of State and its successors, the Official Register of the
United States, and Smith’s America’s Diplomats and Consuls of 1776–1865. Source: See note 4.
The Growth of the U.S. Consular Service to 1856

The uscs was not consistent in size, geographic distribution, or personnel
structure over the long nineteenth century, nor did it engage consistently in the
major port, extraterritorial, and informal empire consular systems. The history
of the uscs can be broken into four periods: two periods of relative stability,
from 1789 to 1856 and 1872 to 1906, and two periods of change, between 1856
and 1872 and 1906 to 1924. Trans-and interimperial engagement was most pro
nounced in the 1872 to 1906 period, when the uscs was actively engaged in all
three consular systems and British and American interests intermingled more
intensely, especially in Canada.
From 1789 to 1856 the uscs was characterized by a steady growth in size
and a primary engagement with the major port system (see figure 6.2). In 1790
there were nineteen posts across the globe: Canton (Guangzhou) in China;
Marrakesh, Mogador, and Tangier in the Barbary States; Lisbon in Portugal, and
Fayal and Funchal in the Azores and Madeira, respectively; Bordeaux, Havre,

Marseilles, Nantes, and Rouen in France; the Free and Hanseatic City of Ham
burg; London, Liverpool, Cowes, and Dublin in the British Isles; Cap-Haitien
and Martinique in the French Caribbean; and Paramaribo in Dutch-controlled
Surinam. By 1856 there were 269 posts, with a particular concentration around
the Mediterranean. The British Empire hosted 62 posts, or 23 percent of the
total, including 7 posts in Canada.
The growth of the service reflected the expansion of the U.S. economy and
the importance of maritime trade and customs duties to the federal budget, but
its pace and placement also reflected domestic political constraints on official
U.S. interactions with the wider world. Generations of politicians took George
Washington’s 1796 Farewell Address advice to heart and minimized political
engagement with European empires, keeping the Washington-based dos staff
and the diplomatic service small. President Washington had also advised com
mercial expansion, though, and that enabled the growth of the uscs. Many
American politicians hoped to break into European-based mercantile empires
via trade rather than diplomacy, and the exchange of consular officials was
much easier and less expensive than exchanging diplomats.
Before 1856 consular officials w ere much less expensive than diplomats
because they did not receive government salaries. They worked for fees, and
so a consular official’s income could vary dramatically depending on where he
was posted.5 The fee system—which other governments also employed—was
vulnerable to corruption, as standard prices were rarely published and the dos
and Treasury did not yet pay careful attention to the accounts.6 Before 1856
consular officials were also allowed to engage in their own private business
pursuits. Part of the compensation of the job was the prestige of the title in the
local community and the possibility of improved access to commercial informa
tion, but the most significant advantage may have been the convenience of not
needing to seek out a consular official to complete the paperwork necessary for
the transborder shipment of goods and people.
Despite the lack of financial remuneration, the functions performed by
consular officials were essential to the movement of goods, capital, and people
across imperial and national borders. Indeed the need for consular services
was so g reat that it outweighed concerns about the nationality of the p eople
performing them, and governments—including that of the United States—
frequently appointed citizens or subjects of other governments to consular
posts in an effort to make sure the necessary work got done. The work of en
abling global flows was fundamentally cooperative.
Before 1856 t here was one place where U.S. consular officials received govern
ment salaries: the Barbary States.7 T here European and American activities were

governed by the capitulation system, which had been formalized between the Ot
tomans and the French in 1500, largely out of a European desire to protect Chris
tians from Islamic rule. European and American governments—as represented
by consular officials—exercised direct jurisdiction over their subjects or citizens,
shielding them from the host government. This was not a reciprocated right: Ot
toman consular officials did not have extraterritorial privileges in European and
American countries. For states with extraterritorial privileges, an effective judi
cial system required a jail, a court with a salaried marshal, and usually at least one
reliable—one might substitute “salaried” for “reliable”—interpreter. In the uscs
the marshal and interpreter could be paid directly by the U.S. government, but
the expenses of the jail and the court came out of the consular official’s salary.
The basic uscs approach to exercising extraterritorial rights was later copied
in other, similar places. After establishing relations with the Ottoman govern
ment in 1830, the U.S. government operated a consular court in Constantino
ple. Following the 1844 Treaty of Wangxia, the uscs grew its presence in China,
operating courts at various times in Amoy (Xiamen), Chinkiang (Zhenjiang),
Foochow (Fuzhou), Hankow (Hankou), Shanghai, Swatow (Shantou), and
Tientsin (Tianjin). There was a consular court in Bangkok, Siam, from 1856 to
1921, and the extraterritorial system was extended to Japan from 1858 to 1899.8
The uscs presence in the Barbary States, Ottoman Empire, China, and Japan
was not limited to posts with consular courts. Consular officials in posts with
out extraterritorial courts funneled cases to the courts as needed. Depending
on their specific location, t hese other officials participated in the trade-focused
activities of the major port and informal empire systems or concentrated their
efforts on protecting American (and, at times, European) Christian missionar
ies and their converts, helping to carve out a distinct legal and cultural status
for these individuals in the host country.9
Everywhere the uscs participated in the extraterritorial system, it followed
in the steps of European imperial powers that had gone before, and cooperation
among those powers was crucial in keeping the system of sharp inequalities in
place. Even as they exercised the privileges of extraterritoriality, however, uscs
personnel w ere dependent on locals for the operation of the system, because
the United States did not produce sufficient numbers of Americans who were
fluent in Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, or Thai. The dos intro
duced a “student interpreter” program in 1906 in an effort to build linguistic
capacity, but supply rarely kept up with demand, and those U.S. efforts paled
in comparison with the training provided by other governments through insti
tutions like the Austrian Consular Academy or the on-the-ground training af
forded to British and French colonial officials. Although local employees helped

the uscs overcome its language deficiencies everywhere where English was
not the primary language, the deficit was greater in the extraterritorial coun
tries. The combination of interimperial cooperation to enforce the inherent
inequality of the extraterritorial system and the uscs dependence on locals for
that system’s daily operation made for a particularly fragile system that was vul
nerable to corruption. A variety of generally successful anticorruption reforms
in the uscs over the course of the nineteenth c entury had the least impact in
extraterritorial posts, especially in China.10
The Civil War and the Transimperial Service, 1856 to 1906

The expansion of the extraterritorial system in to China, Japan, and Siam coin
cided with a variety of other changes in the uscs that fundamentally altered the
institution and its relationship to imperial power. The combination of reform
legislation in 1856 and the Civil War from 1861 to 1865 prompted significant
change, including a sharp increase in the overall size of the service and a marked
expansion into the British Empire. Throughout the 1856–72 transition period
and on to 1906, the emphasis in the uscs remained on cooperation: maintaining
cross-border flows was more important than expressions of national sovereignty.
The 1856 reforms w ere designed to improve the quality of the uscs by
reducing corruption and expanding the pool of potential candidates; they
were a first step on the road to professionalization. The chief reform was to re
move some posts—especially the most lucrative ones in the major ports—from
the fee system and instead provide those consular officials with a government
salary. Those salaried officials were no longer allowed to engage in private busi
ness.11 The fees they collected needed to be accounted for in detail, and any
fees beyond $250 per quarter had to be forwarded to the Treasury. The 1856
legislation tied ranks and salaries to specific posts. London, for example, was
a consulate general at the maximum salary of $7,500 per year, and Leipzig was
a consulate at $1,500 per year.12 As it had before 1856, the Senate confirmed
nominees for specific posts, rather than to ranks, so they could not be moved
from post to post without additional Senate confirmation. Salaried posts were
supposed to go to U.S. citizens, but the legislation allowed the employment of
non-U.S. citizens when necessary.
As the 1856 legislation—and the augmented paperwork it required—was
being implemented, the Civil War began. The Union needed friends on the
ground all over the world to monitor and hopefully scuttle Confederate at
tempts to secure supplies and diplomatic recognition. Embracing their belief
in the potential of the federal government and benefiting from the absence of

southerners in Congress, the Union government roughly doubled the size of
the uscs, from 282 posts in 1860 to 497 in the peak war year of 1864 (see fig
ure 6.2). Some of this was done by creating more salaried positions, but the
bulk of it was done by adding scores of “consular agents” to the ranks. Agents
worked for fees and could pursue private business interests. They had to be U.S.
citizens only when it was practical; usually it was not. They also did not have
to be confirmed by the Senate, so appointing them was easy, and they were
largely immune from the patronage system.13 With little incentive to replace
them, agents often remained in their posts for years, providing substantial insti
tutional stability and local knowledge.14 In essence, employing agents allowed
for the combination of the flexibility of agents with the stricter administrative
practices of the 1856 reform, continued uscs engagement with all three con
sular systems, and the possibility of developing large stores of local knowledge.
The war swelled the uscs all over the world, but the most dramatic increases
were in the Portuguese and British empires. The uscs bloomed in the Portuguese
Empire, with the five posts in 1860 surging to thirty-six posts during the war and
then falling to a postwar annual average of nineteen posts in operation. The war
time expansion was not spread evenly throughout the empire: it was concentrated
on the European mainland and in the Azores. This arrangement certainly made it
difficult for Confederate ships to enter the Mediterranean unobserved. The bulk
of the posts w ere agencies operated by Portuguese subjects, raising the question of
their motivations. Potentially the Union tapped into networks of observers who
had been aiding in the enforcement of the ban on Portuguese slave trading and
activists who advocated for the extension of Portugal’s 1761 abolition of slavery in
the metropole to the entire empire; that extension came in 1869.15
As it had in Portugal, the uscs presence in the British Empire expanded
during the Civil War. Unlike Portugal, however, that expansion was sustained
and even increased after the war ended. In the British Isles, sixteen new posts
were created during the war, joining the twenty-nine that already existed. In
the British Caribbean, the Antipodes, and Africa, the uscs presence grew,
from twenty total posts to twenty-nine. The most dramatic change, though,
came in Canada, where the eight posts that had been created since the estab
lishment of a post at the major port of Halifax in 1830 were joined by forty-
four wartime posts. Immediately following the war, there was an initial effort
to reduce the size of the uscs again, but the Ulysses Grant administration
opted to reverse that trend, keeping the service large. In the period of rela
tive institutional stability from 1872 to 1906, the uscs averaged 713 posts in
operation globally in any given year. An average of 247, or nearly 35 percent,
were in the British Empire, and an average of 116, or nearly 16 percent of the

total, were in Canada (see table 6.3). In terms of numbers, the peak uscs pen
etration of the British Empire came in 1896 and 1899, when 136 posts w ere
16
operational in Canada.
This extensive network of posts allowed for voluminous exchange of people,
goods, and capital between the British Empire and the expanding U.S. empire,
integrating their economies, aligning their interests, and contributing to the
postwar rapprochement and subsequent “special relationship.”17 The consider
able number of British subjects who operated uscs posts as agents carried this
alignment even further, making them embodiments of transimperial coopera
tion.18 The British subjects in the uscs were not matched by a network of Amer
icans serving as British consular officials, nor were there a comparable number
of British consular posts in the United States and its empire. The massive U.S.
consular presence in Canada tipped into the realm of U.S. informal empire.
From the comparative data available, it appears that no other government had
such dense consular representation anywhere. The uscs did not have such a
presence even in its southern neighbor, Mexico, where posts w ere distributed
across states rather than concentrated at the border.19
Consular Functions, 1872–1906

By looking at activity in uscs posts in Canada in the 1872–1906 period, we can
see what consular officials at major ports and informal empire posts did on a
day-to-day basis to keep people, goods, and capital flowing across imperial and
national borders. Consular officials needed to strike the right balance between
keeping the system moving and making sure that the government’s sovereign
rights—including its right to have borders—were respected. Ultimately they
occupied positions of trust, providing documentation and information that
other people—be they U.S. or foreign officials or private citizens—could use to
shape the transborder flows of interest to them.
Certainly one of the two major port system functions—aid to seamen—was
important along the Canadian coasts and presumably on the G reat Lakes as
well. Seamen who developed health problems too severe to allow them to re
main on board ship were entitled to food, clothing, shelter, and medical treat
ment at U.S. government expense, organized by consular officials, if they were
U.S. citizens or in service on U.S. vessels. Expenses for the relief of seamen w
ere
supposed to be recorded in a dedicated account ledger and submitted quarterly
to the Treasury. The effects and bodies of those who died fell to consular of
ficials, who e ither worked with executors or arranged the logistics of burial
and sale of effects themselves.20 Consular officials also helped to monitor and

table 6.3. Locations of U.S. Consular Posts in Canada, 1872–1906.
Alberta Canso Chatham
Calgary Cheverie Clifton
Lethbridge Cornwallis Clinton
Cow Bay Coburg
British Columbia
Digby Collingwood
Chemanius
Glace Bay Cornwall
Cumberland
Guysborough Courtwright
Fernie
Halifax* Deseronto (Mill Point)
Nanaimo
Kempt Duart
Nelson
Kingsport Elliot Lake (Algoma)
Rossland
Lingan Fort Erie
Union Bay
Liverpool Fort William
Vancouver (Granville)
Lockport Galt
Victoria
Louisburg Gananoque
New Brunswick Lunenburg Goderich
Bathurst North Sydney Gore Bay
Campbellton Parrsboro Guelph
Campobello Island Pictou* Hamilton
Edmundston Port Hastings Kenora (Rat Portage)
Frederickton Port Hawkesbury Kingston
Grand Manan Port Joggins Lindsay
McAdam (Junction) Pugwash London
Moncton River Herbert Midland
Miramichi (Newcastle) Shelbourne Morrisburgh
Richibucto Sydney* Napanee
St. Andrews Windsor Niagara Falls
St. George Wolfville North Bay
St. John* Yarmouth Orillia
St. Stephen Oshawa
Manitoba
Woodstock Ottawa
Deloraine
Owen Sound
Newfoundland Emerson
Palmerston
Bay Bulls Gretna
Paris
Harbor Grace Wakopa
Parry Sound
Port-aux-Basques Winnipeg
Peterborough
St. John’s*
Ontario Picton
St. Vincent
Amherstburg Port Hope
Nova Scotia Arnprior Port Rowan
Annapolis Royal Barrie Port Stanley
Antigonish Belleville Prescott
Arichat Brantford Sarnia (Port Sarnia)
Barrington Brockville Sault Ste. Marie
Bridgewater Carleton Place Smith’s Falls
table 6.3. (Continued)
St. Catherines Quebec Montreal*
St. Thomas Arthabaska Paspebiac
Stratford Cabano Point Levi
Sudbury Chicoutimi Potton
Thunder Bay (Port Arthur) Clarenceville Quebec City
Toronto* Coaticook Rimouski
Trenton Cookshire Riviere du Loup
Wallaceburg Coteau-du-Lac Sherbrooke
Walton Farnham Sorel
Waterloo Frelighsburg St. Hyacinthe
Waubaushene Gaspé* Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu
Whitby Georgeville (St. John’s)
Wiarton Grand Mère Stanbridge East
Windsor Grenville Stanstead (Junction)
Wingham Hemmingford Sutton
Hereford Trois-Rivières (Three
Prince Edward Island
Hinchinbrook Rivers)
Alberton
Hochelaga (and Longeuil) Vallee-Jonction (Chaud
Cascumpec
Huntington iere)
Charlottetown*
Lachine Victoriaville
Georgetown
Lacolle
Souris Saskatchewan
Levis
St. Peter’s Bay North Portal
Lineboro
Stanley’s Bridge
Magdalen Islands Yukon
Summerside
Megantic Dawson City
Note: A U.S. consular official was posted to these places at some point in the 1872–1906 period. Posts
marked with an * were opened before 1861. The list reflects present-day, rather than historical, town
and province names. An interactive map is available at Google, “U.S. Consular Posts in Canada and
Mexico, 1872–1906,” https://drive.google.com/open?id=1G3VT_rscp6jHmz8LXsUXz7PMmRc&usp
=sharing.
Source: Statistics regarding service size and post placement are derived from the annual Register
of the Department of State, which began in 1869, and its successors, the Foreign Service List and Key
Officers of Foreign Service Posts; Walter Burges Smith, America’s Diplomats and Consuls of 1776–1865:
A Geographic and Biographic Directory of the Foreign Service from the Declaration of Independence to
the End of the Civil War (Arlington, VA: Center for the Study of Foreign Affairs, 1986), which is
drawn primarily from the dos’s file of consular cards, supplemented by other sources; and the U.S.
government’s Official Register of the United States, which was published on a roughly biannual and
then annual basis from 1816. These sources are almost entirely in agreement when it comes to
Senate-confirmed and/or salaried posts. Data on agencies are more elusive, as the U.S. Register listed
them only during some administrations. To the best of my knowledge, none of t hese sources was
published in 1890 and 1904, and in 1921, 1922, 1923, and 1924 the U.S. Register refers people to the
DOS Register for the full DOS listing, but the DOS Register was not published in those years.

regulate labor conditions aboard vessels, refereeing complaints and ensuring
wages were paid in a manner consistent with U.S. law and the ship’s articles.
They checked to make sure that the people who were supposed to be aboard a
ship actually w
ere aboard, guarding against unlawful death, impressment, de
sertion, and stowaways.21
Consular officials’ certification of the list of people aboard a ship was one
of the many documents a ship’s master needed so the vessel could clear U.S.
Customs upon arrival in the United States. Preparing people and goods to go
through U.S. Customs was the other fundamental consular function in the
major port system. Consular officials, along with the Revenue Cutter Service,
combined with the Customs Service to form and police the commercial borders
of the United States.22 This trio of institutions was created early in the govern
ment’s history and was well funded, seeing as they ensured the collection of
customs duties, which formed the main source of federal revenue prior to the
introduction of the income tax in 1913.
In terms of paperwork, the bare minimum needed to bring more than
$100 worth of goods into the United States was an invoice and a shipper’s
declaration, both certified by a U.S. consular official. Invoices had to be trip
licate originals, one copy staying in the consular archives, the second going
with the shipper, and the third posted by the consular official to the collec
tor of customs at the intended port of entry; the collector’s copy was sup
posed to arrive before the a ctual goods. In some cases additional certified
materials could be required, such as product samples—also to be collected in
triplicate—documentation of disinfection, and special declarations regard
ing artworks. In certain circumstances the packaging in which goods were
transported also needed separate paperwork, and consuls w ere supposed to
attest that the labels stating goods’ place of origin and/or manufacture were
accurate. Consular officials who suspected wrongdoing in any of this were
supposed to gather evidence and forward it to the customs officer, who would
decide whether something illegal had been done; in the most flagrant, clear-
cut cases, consular officials could refuse to issue the necessary certified docu
ments.23
Goods that moved from place to place outside the United States before
they entered it typically required documentation from the consular officials in
each stopping place along the route. Those stops could be intentional, but they
could also be accidental. For instance, if a ship had to put into a port because
of a storm, the consular official at that port could provide a certified form that
explained the circumstances and ensured that the shippers did not face extra
duties as a result of their unexpected stop. Consular officials w ere the ones to

document the journey of goods—and people—in ways that could be under
stood and trusted by U.S. officials at the border.
The U.S.-Canadian trade relationship did have unique features that influ
enced the number and placement of uscs posts. The 1872–1906 period was a
time in which Canadian goods did not enjoy free access to the United States or
lower tariff rates, and high, Republican protectionist tariffs were in effect for
much of the time. These policies incentivized U.S. authorities to make sure the
necessarily high volume of Canadian goods entering the United States did so
legally. The 1871 Treaty of Washington complicated m atters because it allowed
the duty-free transshipment of certain British and Canadian goods through
specified U.S. ports of entry, as well as mutual duty-free transshipment rights
along the waterways that connected the Great Lakes and the Atlantic.24 Al
though some goods w ere allowed to move along these paths duty-free, shippers
needed the paperwork to prove they had the right to do so. The movement of
goods from Canada to the United States by rail was also governed by a special
set of rules. Consular officials w
ere allowed to seal railroad cars at inland posts
in Canada—in Stratford, Ontario, for example—and provide them with the
necessary paperwork so they could travel all the way to inland U.S. Customs
entry points such as St. Louis, Missouri, without stopping at the geographic
border between the two countries.25 This system contributed to the prolifera
tion of posts, especially in southern Ontario, and it reduced the challenges of
integrating the Canadian and U.S. economies, helping to align Anglo-American
interests.
Inanimate objects were not, of course, the only things that had to go through
U.S. Customs. The trade in animals across the U.S.-Canadian border was also
substantial, and consular officials inspected, quarantined, and certified those
animals according to U.S. law, which varied by the species of animal and the
purposes for which the animal would be used in the United States.26 Providing
a large number of consular posts, rather than trying to move large quantities
of animals across at a few places, may have aided in keeping the animals well-
nourished and healthy.
Animals also accompanied immigrants across the border. There was a special
form to certify that teams of animals used to transport migrants and their per
sonal belongings were allowed to cross duty-free, though any horses involved
that had been or would be used for racing w ere not exempt from duties.27 It is
not hard to imagine that consular officials located right at the border provided
paperwork to people who had tried to enter the United States and failed, not
knowing what documents they actually needed to get themselves and their be
longings across the border.

As the U.S. federal government developed new, exclusionary immigration
laws and an institutional apparatus to enforce them, consular officials w ere
called upon to assist. They had already been providing weekly health and sani
tation reports to the Treasury Department so the Marine Hospital Service—
reformed and strengthened in 1871—could establish quarantines. With the in
troduction of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, passports w ere required for
the select categories of Chinese p eople who could enter the United States, and
consular officials provided one route by which passports could be obtained.
Consular involvement in the inspection of potential migrants and the issuing of
passports and visas intensified as exclusionary laws multiplied, with the most
significant growth in this area coming after 1906.28 Migration-related consular
work was particularly heavy at the major points of entry into Canada, where
U.S. consular officials provided services for both U.S. citizens and non-U.S. citi
zens who aimed to travel through Canada to the United States. uscs personnel
worked alongside significant numbers of other countries’ consular officials at
Montreal, Halifax, St. John (New Brunswick), Toronto, Quebec City, Vancou
ver, St. John’s (Newfoundland), and Victoria.29
People also crossed the border in the other direction for a variety of reasons.
The relative ease of crossing from the United States into Canada and the lack
of a comprehensive extradition treaty encouraged American fugitives to flee to
Canada, and consular officials participated in efforts to track them down.30 Un
like U.S. consular officials operating in the extraterritorial system, those posted
to Canada and most other countries did not have any judicial authority over
U.S. citizens in the area. They could render assistance to U.S. citizens who were
arrested, which might include monitoring prison conditions or recommending
a local attorney, but the dos cautioned consular officials against taking more
dramatic steps.31 In practice, consular officials often advised people who had
been released pending trial to leave the country, thus eliminating the need to
mount a defense.32
Tourism also drew Americans to Canada, though it is not clear that any uscs
posts were created to deal primarily with tourists, as was the case with European
spa towns like Carlsbad in Austria. At those European posts, consular officials
were frequently called on to put their foreign-language and social skills to work
to smooth over disputes regarding h otel bills and similar m
atters. Americans un
doubtedly got into the same kind of arguments in Canada, but, outside Quebec,
language was less of an issue. Throughout the 1872–1906 period, the Thousand
Islands and Niagara Falls were certainly tourist draws, and, as time went on,
destinations served by the Canadian Pacific Railway and its related luxury hotels
drew more visitors, especially to the Canadian Rockies and Pacific coast.

Consular officials were frequently visited by U.S. citizens who had come to
Canada looking for work, w ere traversing Ontario as the shortest route between
New England and Michigan, or, around 1896, were attempting to enrich them
selves via the Klondike gold strike. If they fell into financial difficulties, they
often asked consular officials for assistance. Officials often helped, though they
did so from their own resources; unlike most European governments, the U.S.
government did not have a public fund for this purpose. The U.S. government
did, however, have a public fund for paying pensions to Civil War veterans,
widows, and orphans. Consular officials participated in that system by hearing
and certifying the required annual oath from those pensioners living abroad
that proved they w ere still alive. They helped connect recipients with the cor
rect authorities in the United States, frequently putting in a good word for
applicants—who would, of course, be a continued drain on the consular of
ficial’s personal finances if they remained in the district. They also helped to
answer questions about pensions and smooth over problems that arose through
unexpected circumstances that were no fault of the pension recipient.33
Just as members of the public could call on consular officials with questions
or problems, so too could U.S. government agencies. These could be one-time
requests, such as the query from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (usda)
about whether Pilsner beer had to be made in the Bohemian town of Pilsen,
Austria, to be legitimately called Pilsner.34 Consular officials also provided
regular flows of information upon which U.S. government agencies acted. The
Treasury received monthly reports on currency values, and the usda received
reports on local agricultural conditions, also monthly and frequently with ac
companying samples of plants and seeds. The dos received annual reports on
local commercial conditions for publication in Commercial Relations and en
couraged monthly reports for inclusion in its Consular Reports series.
These commercial reports were made available to the public in the hopes
that they would help stimulate trade, providing businesses with news of poten
tial opportunities to seize and pitfalls to avoid. Consular officials at major ports
and especially at informal empire posts w ere also supposed to actively promote
trade by cultivating relationships with locals. How specific officials attempted
this depended on individual circumstances, but one common approach was to
maintain a publicly accessible library of U.S. commercial publications, espe
cially trade journals and directories. In some consulates the library was large
enough to be a formal reading room; others were far more modest.
It is difficult to measure the effectiveness of consular trade promotion activi
ties, but scholars have typically found them wanting.35 It is worth bearing in
mind, however, that a U.S. consular official’s very presence in a locality could

raise awareness of the possibility of trade with the United States. Much more
important, the presence of the consular official lowered the costs associated
with that potential trade by being on hand to provide all the necessary paper
work and, hopefully, to answer questions about American markets, tastes, and
regulations. In Canada—especially Anglophone Canada—where knowledge of
language, culture, markets, and financial systems was shared across the bor
der, or at least easy to come by, ready access to consular officials significantly
reduced the remaining, largely bureaucratic obstacles to trade, facilitating the
integration of key aspects of the Canadian and U.S. economies.36 uscs efforts
helped to orient the Dominion of Canada t oward the United States rather than
its imperial metropole in Britain.
Reforms and Nationalization, 1906–1924

Having consular officials close at hand made it easier for p eople to access the
services they provided and enhanced the U.S. government’s ability to exercise
its full sovereign rights. However, with nearly eight hundred posts operating
in any given year, a staff of citizens and noncitizens with relatively frequent
turnover, and the unique demands and geographies of the major port, extrater
ritorial, and informal empire systems, the uscs was difficult for the Consular
Bureau and the rest of the Washington-based dos staff to keep track of, let alone
actively manage. That the service functioned at all was something of a minor
miracle, especially given the lack of training and instruction for consular of
ficials. Like most of the world’s nineteenth-century consular services, the uscs
muddled through with an army of the willing, despite the fact that serving
resulted in financial hardships for many officials. Individual officials may not
have benefited much financially, but the United States benefited tremendously
from consular officials’ labor and local knowledge. Through uscs engagement
in major port-based trade, penetration of “non-Christian countries” via the sys
tem of extraterritoriality, and the cultivation of an informal empire, the United
States expanded its political, economic, and cultural reach across the globe by
the end of the nineteenth century.
Having accomplished that global expansion, the United States was the first
major power to reform its consular service so as to make it smaller and more
responsive to the center of government authority. While the British, French,
and German consular services continued with modest growth and the Italian
and Austrian services initiated substantial expansions designed to maintain
connections with their migrants abroad, the 1906 reform legislation in the
United States began a gradual contraction in the number of consular posts (see

1000
900
800
700
600
500
400
300
200
100
0
France USA Britain Germany Italy Austria
figure 6.3. Size of select countries’ consular services, 1897 and 1907. Source: See note 6.
figure 6.3).37 The 1906 reform also began to erode the sense of three distinct
consular systems, and, with the 1924 Rodgers Act, the distinct roles for the
consular service and the diplomatic service were erased entirely in favor of
a single U.S. Foreign Service. The reforms w ere undertaken in the name of
professionalization and efficiency, not nationalization, but in practice they
had a nationalizing effect, removing non-U.S. citizens from the ranks and em
phasizing rotation among posts rather than the cultivation of local knowledge
and relationships. From the perspective of dos officials in Washington, the
uscs did become more efficient. Those efficiencies, however, relied on a com
bination of technological changes—themselves partially a result of consular
labor—and the concentration of political, economic, and cultural power that
nineteenth-century consular officials had been so instrumental in achieving.
Out of choice or necessity, people in need of consular services had to bear
greater costs in reaching U.S. consular officials rather than relying on those
officials’ proximity.
The most important aspect of the 1906 reform law was the creation of con
suls general at large (cgals). The five cgals were each assigned to a specific re
gion of the world, and they traveled from post to post, gathering information on
employees and local practices, instructing consular officials in the performance
of their duties, and making recommendations to the dos about promotions and
severances, post closures, and other changes to consular practices. This system
of inspection was designed to be permanent, as opposed to the handful of ad

hoc inspection tours that had been done since the Civil War.38 It was the most
effective tool the dos had yet possessed for fostering uniformity of practice
and scrupulous attention to directions from Washington. The cgals preached
esprit de corps and the adoption of state-of-the-art scientific management prac
tices, with an eye toward being able to move consular officials from post to post
smoothly. The cgals envisioned a uscs in which consular officials w ere much
more clearly agents of the dos rather than people of indifferent nationalities
who worked to keep goods and people moving through specific places.
The chief casualties of the 1906 reforms w ere consular agents. The cgals
recommended raising some agencies to salaried consulates. By this point, sala
ried offices were almost entirely in the hands of U.S. citizens, and non-U.S.
citizens would not be hired for new salaried positions, so a few agents w ere out
of a job. The cgals recommended closing some agencies, either because they
were no longer needed or b ecause they thought the incumbent was not d oing
a satisfactory job and t here was no reasonable prospect of finding a U.S. citizen
to take over the agency. More research into t hese closures is needed, but it ap
pears that agents who w ere not regarded as Anglo-Saxons were immediately
let go, regardless of the length or quality of their service. By contrast, agents
in Canada—many of whom had been serving since the Civil War or shortly
thereafter—were left in place until they chose to retire or they died. Besides
post status changes and closures, several agents quit their jobs a fter the cgals
criticized their work or demanded that they do more—without, of course, re
ceiving any additional financial compensation for their expanded efforts.39
World War I accelerated the process of standardization and efficiency, eradi
cating many of the long nineteenth c entury’s norms surrounding the exchange
of personnel and dealing a death blow to the capitulation-based system of ex
traterritoriality. The experience of performing emergency consular services for
many of the world’s governments during the war encouraged dos officials to
value efficiency—and border control—to an even greater extent.40 Beyond the
collapse of the German, Austrian, Russian, and Ottoman empires, World War
I had a profoundly destabilizing effect on European empires, even as they ex
panded to encompass more territory, particularly in the M iddle East. The war
destabilized the U.S. empire as well, prompting a complete overhaul of its citi
zenship and immigration laws.41 Nation-states gradually replaced empires as the
main constituent actors in “international” affairs, and politicians—especially
American politicians—emphasized the equality of those nation-states in their
rhetoric.42 The symbolism surrounding diplomats was repurposed to meet the
demands of this new system, particularly through the elimination of ranks for
chiefs of diplomatic missions; everyone was now an ambassador. After the

Rodgers Act merged the uscs and diplomatic service in 1924, some consul
ates remained open, but as extensions of embassies, not as distinct institutional
spaces. Among career U.S. Foreign Service officers, the “consular track” that
emerged in the twentieth century did not include trade at all; instead it em
phasized passports, visas, and emergency aid to U.S. citizens abroad. Officials
who had worked to minimize the obstacles presented by borders in the long
nineteenth century’s global imperial system devoted ever more effort to border
maintenance in the twentieth century’s nation-state system.
notes
This research was supported by a University of Vermont College of Arts and Sciences
Faculty Research Support Award and a Coor Collaborative Fellows Grant from the uvm
Humanities Center. Many thanks to Daniella Bassi, Natalie Coffman, Kiara Day, and Sarah
Holmes, who assisted with data formatting.
1. On other countries’ consular service, see Jörg Ulbert and Lukian Prijac, eds., Consuls
et Services Consulaires Au XIXe Siecle = Die Welt Der Konsulate Im 19. Jahrhundert = Consul-
ship in the 19th Century (Hamburg, Germany: dobu, 2010); Ferry de Goey, Consuls and
the Institutions of Global Capitalism, 1783–1914 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2014);
Rudolf Agstner, Austria (-Hungary) and Its Consulates in the United States of America since
1820: “Our Nationals Settling Here Count by the Millions Now” (Zurich: lit Verlag, 2012);
D. C. M. Platt, The Cinderella Service: British Consuls since 1825 (London: Longman, 1971).
On the culture of nineteenth-century diplomacy, see Nicole M. Phelps, U.S.-Habsburg
Relations from 1815 to the Paris Peace Conference: Sovereignty Transformed (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2013), chapters 1 and 2.
2. See note 1, especially de Goey, Consuls and the Institutions of Global Capital-
ism. On the uscs, see Charles Stuart Kennedy, The American Consul: A History of the
United States Consular Service, 1776–1924, revised 2nd edition (Washington, DC: New
Academia, 2015). For an account that encompasses more than trade, see Bernadette
Whelan, A merican Government in Ireland, 1790–1913: A History of the US Consular Service
(Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2010).
3. U.S. Department of State (hereafter cited as dos), Regulations Prescribed for the Use
of the Consular Service of the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office,
1896).
4. Statistics regarding service size and post placement are derived from the annual
Register of the Department of State, which began in 1869, and its successors, the Foreign
Service List and Key Officers of Foreign Service Posts; Walter Burges Smith, America’s Diplo-
mats and Consuls of 1776–1865: A Geographic and Biographic Directory of the Foreign Service
from the Declaration of Independence to the End of the Civil War (Arlington, VA: Center for
the Study of Foreign Affairs, 1986), which is drawn primarily from the dos’s file of con
sular cards, supplemented by other sources; and the U.S. government’s Official Register of
the United States, which was published on a roughly biannual and then annual basis from
1816. These sources are almost entirely in agreement when it comes to Senate-confirmed

and/or salaried posts. Data on agencies are more elusive, as the U.S. Register listed them
only during some administrations. To the best of my knowledge, none of t hese sources
was published in 1890 and 1904, and in 1921, 1922, 1923, and 1924 the U.S. Register
refers people to the DOS Register for the full DOS listing, but the DOS Register was not
published in those years.
5. In the long nineteenth century, consular officials were men. On occasion wives and
daughters might fill in or assist, and after midcentury women might have clerical posi
tions, but the positions listed in official registers were all held by men.
6. Data on other countries’ services come from the various files in 19: Reports on the
Consular Service of Foreign Countries, 1897, Inventory 15, Record Group 59: General
Records of the Department of State, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration,
College Park, Maryland (hereafter cited as nara); the dos-created ledger that is Volume
2 in 883: Analyses of Reports on Consular Establishments of Foreign Powers, 1907,
Inventory 15, nara; and the section of the dos Register that lists foreign consular posts in
the United States. See also note 1.
7. The U.S. government established relations with Morocco in 1786. Treaties with
Algeria, Tripoli, and Tunis followed in 1795, 1796, and 1797, respectively.
8. The U.S. and Siamese governments opened relations in 1833, but that original treaty
did not include extraterritorial provisions.
9. Ruth Kark, American Consuls in the Holy Land, 1832–1914 (Detroit, MI: Wayne State
10. The lack of change in China resulted in special investigations that w ere not paral
leled in other parts of the world. See, for example, 136: Reports of Treasury Agents on
U.S. Consulates, 1870–1873; and 889: Records relating to Charges against John Goodnow
and Robert McWade, 1902–1906, both in Inventory 15, nara.
11. Officials on “Schedule B” drew salaries between $1,500 and $7,500, depending on
the post, and they could not engage in private business. Those on “Schedule C” drew
significantly smaller salaries—not more than $1,000—and could still engage in business.
12. In addition to consulates general and consulates, there were a handful of free-
standing vice consulates, commercial agencies, and consular agencies. Consuls general
were nominally in charge of lesser consular officials in their country or empire, but that
does not appear to have been universally observed.
13. For descriptions of the types and qualifications of consular officials, see dos, Regu-
lations, 4–18.
14. In 1903 the 376 agents for which appointment data are available had served an
average of nine years at post; 55 of them had been at their post for twenty years or more.
The average length of service would likely be longer if the 1872–1906 period is consid
ered as a w
hole, because many of the agents who signed on during the Civil War or in
the 1870s had died shortly before 1903 a fter serving for decades. dos, Register (1903).
15. The Portuguese government banned its slave trade north of the Equator in 1815
and south of the Equator in 1842.
16. See note 4.
17. Entry points into the scholarship on Anglo-American relations include Stuart
Anderson, Race and Rapprochement: Anglo-Saxonism and Anglo-American Relations,

1895–1904 (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1981); Kathleen Burk,
Old World, New World: Great Britain and America from the Beginning (New York: Atlantic
Monthly Press, 2008).
18. In 1903 there were 148 British subjects serving in the uscs, of which 139 were
agents; 124 were serving in the British Empire, and 120 of those were agents. Of those
in the British Empire, 58 were in Canada and 31 were in the British Isles. dos, Register
(1903). The figures here include the few people whose place of birth was listed, but not
their place of appointment; their citizenship status is not entirely clear, but they have
been counted as what is most likely.
19. See note 6. An interactive map of U.S. posts in Canada and Mexico is available at
Google, “U.S. Consular Posts in Canada and Mexico, 1872–1906,” https://drive.google
.com/open?id=1 G3VT_rscp6jHmz8LXsUXz7PMmRc&usp=s haring.
20. Consular officials performed these services for U.S. citizens who were not seamen
as well. dos, Regulations, 154–64.
21. dos, Regulations, 61–141. On consular management of shipboard labor, see Matthew T.
Raffety, The Republic Afloat: Law, Honor, and Citizenship in Maritime America (Chicago: Univer
sity of Chicago Press, 2013); Brian Rouleau, With Sails Whitening E very Sea: Mariners
and the Making of an American Maritime Empire (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2014).
22. Although not mentioned by the authors, consular officials could be characterized as
part of the “government out of sight” or the “outward state.” Brian Balogh, A Government
Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge,
U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Andrew Wender Cohen, “Smuggling, Global
ization, and America’s Outward State, 1870–1909,” Journal of American History 97, no. 2
(2010): 371–98.
23. dos, Regulations, 276–317. See also Robert E. May, “Culture Wars: The U.S. Art
Lobby and Congressional Tariff Legislation during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era,”
Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 9, no. 1 (2010): 37–91.
24. Great Britain and the United States, Treaty of Washington (1871), articles 29–30.
25. dos, Regulations, 298–99.
26. dos, Regulations, 153, 300–301. See also Kristin L. Hoganson, “Meat in the M iddle:
Converging Borderlands in the U.S. Midwest, 1865–1900,” Journal of American History 98,
no. 4 (2012): 1025–51.
27. dos, Regulations, 301.
29. In 1897 there were at least fifteen countries with consular posts in Montreal; Hali
fax, St. John, and Toronto had eleven; Quebec City had ten; Vancouver had nine; and
St. John’s and Victoria had seven each. 19: Reports on the Consular Service of Foreign
Countries.
30. Katherine Unterman, “Boodle over the Border: Embezzlement and the Crisis of
International Mobility, 1880–1890,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 11, no. 2
(2012): 151–89.
32. For examples, see Phelps, U.S.-Habsburg Relations, chapter 3.

33. In 1903 the dos surveyed its consular officials about requests for aid. The re
sponses are contained in 885: Reports of Consuls on Aid to U.S. Citizens, 1903, Inventory
15, nara. See also dos, Regulations, 178–79.
34. According to the Austrians, it did need to come from Pilsen (Plzeň). Acting
Secretary of Agriculture to Secretary of State, Washington, April 6, 1911, file 611.634/3,
decimal file 1910–29, nara.
35. See, for example, de Goey, Consuls and the Institutions of Global Capitalism;
David M. Pletcher, “Rhetoric and Results: A Pragmatic View of American Economic
Expansionism, 1865–89,” Diplomatic History 5, no. 2 (1981): 93–106.
36. In Consuls and the Institutions of Global Capitalism, de Goey argues that, in general,
nineteenth-century consuls fed global capitalism by reducing transaction costs.
37. See note 6.
38. cgal reports and correspondence are spread throughout the dos archives; a key
collection is 865: Inspection Reports on Foreign Service Posts, Inventory 15, nara.
Earlier, ad hoc inspection reports can be found in files 869–872, Foreign Service Inspec
tion Records; and in 136: Reports of Treasury Agents on U.S. Consulates, Inventory 15,
nara.
39. See, for example, the numerous recommendations and responses contained in
874: Correspondence of Inspector Alfred L. M. Gottschalk, Inventory 15, nara.
40. Phelps, U.S.-Habsburg Relations, chapter 3.
41. Christopher Capozzola, “Legacies for Citizenship: Pinpointing Americans during
and after World War I,” Diplomatic History 38, no. 4 (2014): 713–26.
42. On the transition to a new nation-state system, see Eric D. Weitz, “From the
Vienna to the Paris System: International Politics and the Entangled Histories of H uman
Rights, Forced Deportations, and Civilizing Missions,” American Historical Review 113,
no. 5 (2008): 1313–43; Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the
International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007);
Phelps, U.S.-Habsburg Relations.

7. transimperial roots of american anti-i mperialism: the
transatlantic radicalism of f ree trade, 1846–1920
Marc-William Palen
“The clear connection between the anti-imperialist movement and earlier

movements for liberal reform has never received much attention,” Christopher
Lasch observed sixty years ago. Despite the distance of time, his observation
still remains remarkably salient today. Most scholarship on the American Anti-
Imperialist League (ail, 1898–1920) has continued to focus narrowly on the
period between its founding in 1898 during the Spanish-American War and the
end of the U.S. war in the Philippines in 1902. This chronological narrowing
not only sidelines the continued anti-imperial activities of the ail leaders in the
years that followed; it also hides U.S. anti-imperial efforts to thwart transimpe
rial projects in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Asia-Pacific in the decades that
preceded the formation of the ail.1
Considering that historians have long associated free trade with late nine
teenth-and early twentieth-century Anglo-American imperialism, this story
begins at what, at first sight, might seem an unlikely starting point: the mid-
nineteenth- century Anglo- American free- trade movement. Although this
probably brings to mind imperial ambitions of worldwide market access, mean
ing access to an entire imperial world system, free-trade ideas in fact spurred
U.S. anti-imperialism at the turn of the twentieth century. Going well beyond
opposition to mercantilist policies intended to benefit particular empires, they
contained a far larger imperial critique. Paying closer attention to the free-
trade ideas that spurred turn-of-the-century American anti-imperialists can
help us locate what Jay Sexton and Ian Tyrrell recently described as “the lost
cosmopolitanism of anti-imperialist adherents in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries.”2
The economic cosmopolitan motivations of American anti-imperialists
have been either misrepresented or marginalized or both.3 Recent scholarship
on American anti-imperialist ideologies has tended to focus on culture and
politics rather than economics.4 The older Wisconsin School of diplomatic
history did place due importance upon the economic ideas of ail leaders.
However, using a New Left brush, the Wisconsin School took the opportunity
to paint the leading turn-of-the-century anti-imperialists as informal imperi
alists. Wisconsinite scholars deemed all forms of U.S. economic expansion—
including peaceful, noncoercive foreign market expansion—as imperialis
tic. Even the widespread pacific ail advocacy of free-trade internationalism
struck these scholars as an example of what the Wisconsin School founder,
William Appleman Williams, described as “imperial anti-colonialism.”5 This
New Left rebranding thereby hid the extent to which the era’s leading anti-
imperialists opposed not only formal imperialism but also informal economic
imperialism.6
This essay argues that the ail leadership’s widespread subscription to free-
trade ideas, emanating from the metropolitan heart of the British Empire, un
derpinned their anti-imperial moralism. The British-born free-trade ideas of
the 1830s and 1840s—what Richard Huzzey calls “the moral economy of free
trade”—conditioned the institutions and ideas of American anti-imperialism
from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth c entury, when the U.S. imperial
project came to encompass large swaths of the Caribbean and the Asia-Pacific
formerly u nder the sway of the Spanish Empire.7 Businessmen and nationalists
in the former Spanish colonies, desiring to control their own tariff policies and
to have free access to the U.S. market, thereupon embodied the broader anti-
imperialist critique of U.S. protectionist imperialism. American anti-imperial
activism, intersecting as it did with the British, Spanish, and U.S. empires, must
therefore be understood as a transimperial phenomenon. As Michael Cullinane
demonstrates, the U.S. anti-imperialist movement was far from a purely domes
tic affair; strong transatlantic ties connected American anti-imperialists with
their European counterparts.8 But this anti-imperial story is incomplete with
out a study of ail leaders’ commitment to British free-trade ideas. Their eco
nomic cosmopolitanism—their conviction that free-trade internationalism laid
the economic foundations for world peace and prosperity—was a crucial com
ponent of what Leslie Butler describes as the ail’s “progressive Anglo-American
tradition.”9 Their subscription to British free-trade ideas was thus also in part
an attempt to counter the widespread prevalence of Anglophobia and empire-
160 marc-w illiam palen

building among the Republican Party’s protectionist majority.10 Considering
the Anglophilia of most of the ail leaders, the transatlanticism of their eco
nomic beliefs should come as little surprise. It should be less surprising still
considering that economic ideas had long been entwined with Anglo-American
anti-imperial debates.11
Misrepresentations of both the turn-of-the-century American political econ
omy and the ill-named Open Door Empire as free trade in character have hid
den the radical nature of anti-imperialists’ economic cosmopolitanism.12 The
predominance of economic nationalist ideas and policies in late nineteenth-
and early twentieth-century American trade politics underpinned the gop’s
push for an American Closed Door Empire and informed the British-influenced
free-trade critique of U.S. colonialism. Whereas Britain had turned to free trade
at midcentury, protectionist ideas and policies triumphed in the United States
from the 1860s onward.13 From the crucible of the Civil War, the Republican
Party emerged as the party of economic nationalism. It dominated the execu
tive branch of government for more than half a century. Only two Democrats,
Grover Cleveland (1885–89, 1893–97) and Woodrow Wilson (1913–21), held
the presidency during the seventy-two-year period between 1861 and 1933. The
gop also controlled a good portion of the Supreme Court and Congress for
much of this time, including both houses of Congress between 1897 and 1911,
the era’s most significant period of U.S. colonial expansion and policymaking.14
The resulting protectionist makeup of the U.S. imperial economic system in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries catalyzed the economic cosmo
politanism of American anti-imperialists.
American anti-imperial understandings of protectionist economic policies
were shaped by a British anti-imperial free-trade tradition stretching back to
the late eighteenth century. Writing The Wealth of Nations (1776) amid the out
break of the American Revolution, Adam Smith had condemned mercantilist
protectionism for breeding state-sponsored monopolies and for drumming
up nationalistic support for expensive and unnecessary colonial enterprises.15
Smith’s mid-nineteenth-century disciples in Europe and North America, most
notably the British radical politician Richard Cobden (1804–1865), developed
this connection further, drawing a direct ideological line between economic
nationalism and imperialism, and, conversely, economic cosmopolitanism and
anti-imperialism.16 In 1962 the historian Oliver MacDonagh termed this ideo
logical confluence of economic cosmopolitanism, peace, and anti-imperialism
within Britain “the anti-imperialism of free trade.”17 This Anglo-American Cob
denite anti-imperial tradition was rich, giving birth to the even more radical
free-trade ideas of the American political philosopher Henry George in the
Transimperial Roots of American Anti-Imperialism 161

1870s and 1880s. These same free-trade ideas, crisscrossing the Atlantic between
the 1840s and the First World War, animated anti-imperial opposition to the
American Empire.
Transimperial Emergence of the Economic Cosmopolitan

Critique of Imperialism
The economic cosmopolitan critique of imperialism made its controversial
entry into mainstream British politics in the 1830s and 1840s. Its arrival was an
internationalist offshoot of the era’s British free-trade movement. Spearhead
ing both was the Liberal radical parliamentarian, Manchester manufacturer,
abolitionist, and peace activist Richard Cobden. He and the other leaders of
the Anti–Corn Law League (acll), active from 1839 to 1846, set out to elimi
nate Britain’s protective tariffs on foreign grain for three key reasons: to provide
cheap bread to the starving masses, to undermine the undue political influ
ence of the country’s militant landed elite, and to create a more peaceful world.
Building upon the pacific internationalist elements of Smith’s The Wealth of
Nations and David Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage, Cobden and his
disciples—known as Cobdenites or the Manchester School—believed that cre
ating a globally integrated marketplace through free trade would eliminate the
main political and economic causes of war and imperial expansion. Following
the termination of the Corn Laws in 1846, Cobden and his followers set out to
spread his anti-imperial gospel of free trade to the rest of the world. Cobden
himself became an outspoken critic of British imperialism and a leader of the
midcentury international peace movement, as did many of his disciples within
the rising American Empire.18
Beyond the borders of the United Kingdom, Cobden’s economic cosmopoli
tanism found its most numerous subscribers in the American Northeast. These
American Cobdenites were involved in myriad transatlantic reform movements
throughout the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including the
closely related international peace, anti-imperialist, and abolitionist move
ments.19 Cobden’s American free-trade disciples included abolitionists from
Boston and New York City like William Lloyd Garrison, Charles Sumner, Wil
liam Cullen Bryant, and Henry Ward Beecher. For these abolitionists, free trade
was thought to be the next peaceful and prosperous step in the emancipation
of mankind, whereas protectionism shackled consumers and laborers to the
dictates of special interests, fostering in the process monopolies and geopoliti
cal tensions that too often led to militarism and war.20 In the 1850s this radical
minority of northeastern Cobdenites supported the newly formed Republican

Party, owing to its ideological dedication to f ree labor, free soil, and antislavery.
The members of the Republican Party’s Cobdenite minority w ere well aware
that they were outnumbered by the party’s economic nationalists, but they w ere
not put off; freeing American slaves was a more immediate priority than freeing
American trade.
When the U.S. Civil War broke out, the primary underlying cause of
slavery was initially obfuscated across the Atlantic. As a result, Cobden and
other British abolitionists w ere at first confused about its c auses; the North’s
initial unwillingness to make emancipation a war aim made it seem to many
Britons as though the conflict pitted a free-trade South against a protection
ist North. This common British misperception was corrected by 1863, owing
to the propaganda efforts of various transatlantic Cobdenites and Lincoln’s
Emancipation Proclamation.21 Upon the war’s end in 1865, these indepen
dent Republican free-traders, seeing direct parallels between themselves
and the small but well-mobilized acll in Britain, hoped to duplicate British
free-traders’ successes.22
The Cobdenite free-trade-and-peace movement in the United States picked
up pace immediately following the U.S. Civil War, with the founding of Lon
don’s Cobden Club. The Club was established soon after Cobden’s 1865 death,
and one of its goals was to overturn the American protectionist system. More
broadly, the Club desired world peace through international arbitration, nonin
terventionism, and f ree trade. The Cobden Club’s pacific global economic vision
was enshrined in its motto: “Free Trade, Peace, and Goodwill among Nations.”
In emulation of the acll, the American F ree Trade League (aftl) was estab
lished in New York City just after the Civil War in order to spread Cobdenism to
the United States. Its founders (or marquee members) included the abolitionists
William Cullen Bryant, editor of the New York Post; Horace White, editor of the
Chicago Tribune; the Ohio politician Jacob D. Cox; and Boston’s Edward Atkin
son. In the decades that followed, regional affiliates of this first national Ameri
can Cobden Club popped up across the American North and West. The aftl’s
“Declaration of Principles” declared free trade to be “the natural and proper
term in the series of progress after Free Speech, Free Soil and F ree Labor.” The
aftl’s monthly newspaper, The League, was named after the acll’s circular, and
the aftl newspaper took for its motto a line from Cobden: “Free-Trade: The
International Common Law of the Almighty.” In 1868 The League, rebranding
itself The Free-Trader, saw its circulation jump from four thousand to sixteen
thousand between 1869 and 1870 alone, and its articles reportedly made their
way to “nearly e very newspaper in the United States.”23 As it grew in influence,
the aftl continued to work closely with London’s Cobden Club. The Club’s in

ternational membership roles, in turn, swelled with the addition of large num
bers of aftl members.24
David Ames Wells, an economist and independent Republican, soon took
charge of the post–Civil-War Cobdenite movement in the United States. Fol
lowing a trip to E ngland in the late 1860s, Wells, a protectionist, had come
around to the belief that universal free trade was “in accordance with the teach
ings of nature” and was “most conducive to the maintenance of international
peace and to the prevention of wars.”25 He became president of the aftl in 1871
and was deputized as the American secretary of the London Cobden Club not
long after.
Under Wells’s leadership, the aftl quickly developed a nationwide propa
ganda campaign. Henry Ward Beecher, Edward Atkinson, William Lloyd Gar
rison, and the legalist David Dudley Field, among others, lent the American
free-trade movement gravitas and publicity with their aftl-sponsored speak
ing tours across the country. Other notable early aftl members included the
transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson; Reverend Joshua Leavitt, founder of
the Liberty Party; the founding editor of the Nation, E. L. Godkin; and a young
journalist from San Francisco named Henry George.26
A desire to ease Anglo-American tensions helped motivate transatlantic
Cobdenite peace and anti-imperial efforts, especially when it came to Canadian-
American relations. Cobdenite critics of imperialism and war shared a desire
to end Canadian-American conflict, which loomed large in the years after 1865
thanks to Fenian radicalism and calls for U.S. annexation, by liberalizing trade
between the British settler colony and the United States.27
A British émigré named Goldwin Smith took a lead role in the North Ameri
can free-trade-and-peace movement. The English-born radical journalist and
Cobden Club member had been the Regius Professor of Modern History at
Oxford before immigrating to the United States in 1868 to teach at Cornell
University. Finding the anti-British sentiment of the times too much to handle,
Smith moved to Toronto three years after his American arrival.28 There he be
came probably the most outspoken Cobdenite advocate of devolving the British
Empire through the emancipation of its colonies while maintaining informal
free-trade relations. Pro-imperial opponents dubbed this the “Manchester
Colonial Theory.”
Thanks to Smith’s efforts, the Cobdenite Manchester School’s call for devolv
ing imperial control over the colonies had become popular in Canada at mid
century. Smith was among the most prominent within the Manchester School
in criticizing the British Empire for being atavistic, undemocratic, and unnec
essarily expensive. He and others of the Manchester School instead advocated

for the empire’s devolution and dissolution, which earned them the moniker
“Little Englanders.” They proposed that the ties between the motherland and
her colonies could peacefully and profitably be maintained through f ree trade,
free migration, and friendly relations.29 As early as 1863 Smith had advocated
for greater political and fiscal autonomy for the empire’s settler colonies, and
he became a vocal proponent of Canadian independence. After Canadian con
federation in 1867, Smith became the leader of the Canadian movement for
commercial union between Canada and the United States. For Smith, it was
only natural that the two countries should become economically integrated,
considering their already strong trade links, alongside their common Anglo-
Saxon heritage and geographic proximity.
Smith found numerous free-trade-and-peace allies among America’s Cobde
nite Anglophiles. The aftl lobbied on behalf of Canadian-American trade reci
procity, and David Ames Wells, William Cullen Bryant, Arthur Latham Perry,
and Cyrus Field also lent their support to the short-lived American Commercial
Reciprocity League, with the aim of informing U.S. public opinion about the po
tential benefits of Canadian-American trade liberalization. In his popular book
Protection or F ree Trade (1886), Henry George, an aftl and Cobden Club member,
similarly advocated for Canadian-American free trade, “fraternity and peace” to
counter the era’s “spirit of protectionism . . . national enmity and strife.”30 These
North American Manchester School efforts claimed tangible success in the late
1880s when the Canadian Liberal Party endorsed American commercial union in
its party platform. Canada’s protectionist Conservative Party instead supported
closer trade ties within the British Empire through a policy of imperial trade
preference. Following Republican passage of the protectionist McKinley Tariff of
1890 (which excluded Canada from establishing reciprocal trade with the United
States), the Conservatives narrowly came out on top in Canada’s 1891 federal elec
tion, resulting in further Canadian-American trade disputes and mutual fears of
military invasion by one side or the other for decades to come.31
In the Caribbean sphere, American Cobdenite leaders similarly opposed the
Republican Party’s imperial designs on annexing Santo Domingo in the 1870s
and 1880s. In 1870 the former Ohio governor and aftl cofounder Jacob D. Cox
resigned as President Ulysses S. Grant’s interior secretary over the annexation
issue; Charles Sumner was forced out of his chairmanship of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee owing to his opposition; and David Wells was fired from
his position as special commissioner of the revenue.32 When the Republicans
again raised the specter of annexation in the early 1880s, New York City’s R. R.
Bowker asked why the United States should not instead try to gain access to
the markets of Santo Domingo “without the cost of annexation” through the

anti-imperialism of free trade? And why limit U.S. market expansion just to
Santo Domingo, when the United States might also trade freely with South
America, Canada, the w hole world even, thereby making America “the apostle
among nations of the gospel of ‘peace on earth, good-will among men’ ”?33
New Left scholars have portrayed calls like Bowker’s for free trade with
Santo Domingo and the world as bids for informal imperialism. Through a neo-
Marxist lens, all forms of foreign market expansion appeared imperialistic, re
gardless of the tactics, ideologies, or policies involved in expanding U.S. trade
abroad. But Bowker did not join with the economic nationalists of the Republi
can Party in calling for coercively opening up the markets of the world; rather
he suggested that the U.S. adopt free trade as an anti-imperial policy for peaceful
market expansion through mutual “good will.” Much as MacDonagh argued for
British Cobdenites, the U.S. Cobdenite espousal of the anti-imperialism of f ree
trade should not be misconstrued as informal imperialism.
That said, some American anti-imperialists did gaze upon the British Em
pire with rose-tinted glasses owing to their Anglo-Saxonist leanings. For some
of the most extreme Cobdenite Anglophiles, their belief in the superiority of
what they considered to be a shared Anglo-Saxonism informed their belief that
British free trade was good not only for the United States but also for the world.
This meant that even as American anti-imperialists demonstrated a critical
awareness of the Republican Party’s imperialism of economic nationalism,
they sometimes turned a blind eye to the coercive implementation of British
free-trade imperialism in places like India and South America.34 But such in
stances were exceptional cases rather than the rule. As David Patterson notes,
by and large “while they admired the British tradition of liberty and British
achievements in literature, commerce, and industry, they had l ittle sympathy
with British imperialism.” They w ere careful to distinguish “between its ‘false’
imperialistic tradition of Benjamin Disraeli, Joseph Chamberlain, and Cecil
Rhodes and the ‘true’ E ngland of Richard Cobden, John Bright, John Morley,
and William Gladstone, all anti-imperial Liberals.”35
Inspired by these British anti-imperial Liberals, American Cobdenites w ere
able to steer American anti-imperial policies more directly during the two
nonconsecutive Democratic administrations of Grover Cleveland (1885–89,
1893–97). President Cleveland surrounded himself with American Cobdenites
as cabinet appointments (including his secretaries of state, war, agriculture,
treasury, and the interior) and as unofficial economic advisors. As a result,
Cleveland’s administrations sought out more amicable Anglo-American relations
and demonstrated a clear Cobdenite propensity for foreign policy noninterven
tionism and trade liberalization to create a more peaceful world order.

The new administration’s anti-imperial leanings became evident almost as
soon as Cleveland entered the White House in 1885 through its opposition to Re
publican imperial projects in Latin America, Africa, and the Asia-Pacific. In Latin
America, for example, whereas Republican economic nationalists like James G.
Blaine of Maine—the Republican presidential nominee in 1884—sought U.S.
imperial control over any canal attempts in Central America, Cleveland and his
cabinet opposed the Republican Party’s planned construction of a Nicaraguan
canal and the annexation of the territory surrounding it.36 Cleveland’s protec
tionist opponents were quick to attack his administration’s early Cobdenite
anti-imperial tendencies and pro-British sympathies.
With regard to Africa, Cleveland and his Cobdenites continued their opposi
tion to coercive Republican imperialism by distancing the United States from
the previous administration’s imperial designs in the Congo, where the issue of
free trade once again played a controversial role. American Cobdenites looked
askance upon the 1884 Berlin Conference resolutions and their implications
for possible U.S. territorial annexation and political entanglements in Africa,
despite attempts by proponents of the imperialistic resolutions to couch the
initiative in free-trade verbiage.37 In 1885 Cleveland and his cabinet w ere quick
to revoke U.S. recognition of the Berlin Treaty and refused to submit it for con
gressional approval.38
In the Asia-Pacific, Cleveland’s Cobdenite anti-imperial approach once again
contrasted with that of his Republican counterparts when, in a January 1887 spe
cial message to Congress, Cleveland “insisted that autonomy and independence
of Samoa should be scrupulously preserved.” At the Washington Conference held
later that year, Cleveland’s Cobdenite secretary of state, Thomas Bayard, fought
for Samoan independence, insisting that “the independence and autonomy” of
Samoa “be preserved free from the control or preponderating influence of any
foreign government.” Cleveland thereafter attempted to devolve American in
formal influence entirely from Samoa during his second administration.39 Upon
entering the Oval Office for a second term in early 1893, Cleveland also reversed
his Republican presidential predecessor’s recent attempts to annex Hawai‘i. The
Cobdenite Carl Schurz lobbied the cabinet against annexation, and Roger Q.
Mills denounced annexation in the Senate. Pro-free-trade news outlets like the
New York World, the New York Times, the New York Evening Post, and the Nation
castigated Hawai‘i’s U.S.-dominated “Sugar Trust” for fomenting the annexation
ist agitation.40 From the Congo to Samoa to Hawai‘i, Cleveland’s Cobdenites had
begun implementing the anti-imperialism of free trade.
When Cleveland’s Cobdenites denied the Republican economic national
ists their colonial prizes in the Asia-Pacific, they took aim at the cabinet’s

British-influenced anti-imperialism of free trade. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge
(R-MA) railed against the Democratic Party’s abandonment of its once g reat Jef
fersonian legacy of territorial expansion. He charged the Cleveland administra
tion with conspiring “to overthrow American interests and American control in
Hawaii” and “to abandon Samoa.” The Democratic leadership had “been success
fully Cobdenized.” This was “the underlying reason for their policy of retreat,”
Lodge asserted. “We have had something too much of these disciples of the
Manchester school.” Theodore Roosevelt, Lodge’s protégé, privately expressed
similar sentiments to Lodge: “As you say, thank God I am not a free-trader. In
this country pernicious indulgence in the doctrine of free trade seems inevitably
to produce fatty degeneration of the moral fibre.” He also suggested that the
incarceration of the pro-free-trade, “peace at any price” editors of the New York
Evening Post and the New York World would bring him “great pleasure.”41
Roosevelt and Lodge’s protectionist worries about the demise of the Ameri
can imperial spirit proved to be unwarranted. The timing of the U.S. declara
tion of war against the Spanish Empire soon a fter William McKinley, the gop’s
“Napoleon of Protection,” moved into the White House and the Republicans
gained control of both h ouses of Congress in 1897 was no coincidence. The
subsequent colonial spoils catalyzed renewed anti-imperial mobilization from
American economic cosmopolitans.
The Anti-Imperialism of Free Trade’s Transimperial Crossings

The anti-imperialism of free trade crossed into the transimperial terrain of the
Spanish Empire in 1898. The ail, founded by American Cobdenites soon
after the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, became the country’s most
visible U.S. anti-imperialist organization, with local chapters spread through
out the country. Historians long have noted that the anti-imperialists of 1898
were a diverse group. But ail officers w ere connected by the underappreciated
common denominator of the transimperial free-trade movement. Tracing
the history of the American Cobdenite free-trade movement illuminates how
the vast majority of ail officers w ere free-traders involved in a variety of Cob
denite free-trade-and-peace organizations (see figure 7.1). Their subscription
to peaceful economic cosmopolitanism was, for many of them, foundational
to their anti-imperial activism. They opposed the formal American colonial
acquisitions obtained from the Spanish Empire in the Caribbean and the Asia-
Pacific, as well as the subsequent informal coercive protectionist policies
that the gop forced upon Cuba and the formal U.S. colonies of Puerto Rico,
Hawai‘i, and the Philippines.

120
100
80
60
40
20
Free Traders Protectionists
figure 7.1. The economic cosmopolitanism of the ail. The graph illustrates the ideo
logical prevalence of free trade among the officers of the ail. Courtesy of the author.
An ideological adherence to Cobdenite free-trade principles, particularly its

close association with peace and anti-imperialism, moved ail leaders to action
after 1898. Their anti-imperialism of free trade was put on further display in their
post-1898 opposition to the informal and formal economic dimensions of what
April Merleaux calls the “U.S. sugar empire.”42 Beginning with the 1901 Downes
v. Bidwell decision, the U.S. Supreme Court legalized the protectionist framework
of the American closed door empire by allowing the federal government to levy
tariffs against the country’s own colonies so as to insulate domestic U.S. sugar
growers from competition with the empire’s newly acquired sugar-producing
colonies. American Cobdenites unsuccessfully opposed this economic nationalist
imperial legislation. For example, Erving Winslow, an officer of both the ail and
the aftl, was quick to castigate the Supreme Court decision b ecause it meant
that not just Puerto Rico but also the Philippines would remain “outside the Con
stitution” and their tariff rates “subject to the arbitrary power of Congress.”43 ail
leaders continued to oppose subsequent instances of informal U.S. imperialism in
the Caribbean. In 1915, for example, Jane Addams, an ail officer, led the Woman’s
Peace Party, a women’s suffrage and free-trade-and-peace organization, against

the Wilson administration’s attempt to coerce Haiti into signing a treaty grant
ing twenty years of U.S. control over its finances and customs.44
Opposition to U.S. closed-door imperialism expanded into an even broader
transimperial phenomenon once local critics among the former colonies of the
Spanish Empire joined the free-trade fight. Cubans and Filipinos were among the
loudest in voicing their dissent against U.S. imperialism of economic nationalism.
Cuba became an informal American colony a fter the island gained osten
sible independence from Spain in 1898. The question of Cuban-American trade
reciprocity soon followed. In 1902 it became one of the most hotly debated
issues in Congress. Republican imperialists, at odds with both the ail and anti-
expansionists within their own party, wanted to implement protectionist reci
procity and control the island’s finances and foreign trade. Cuban nationalists
instead lobbied Congress for Cuban-American trade liberalization and greater
local autonomy over the island’s tariff policy. To this end, Luis V. de Abad, rep
resenting the tobacco interests and “all the laboring classes” of Cuba, asked
the U.S. House Committee on Reciprocity with Cuba for a substantial decrease
of the duties on Cuban cigars and raw tobacco. He argued that these protec
tive tariffs w
ere artificially lowering profits and creating unemployment on the
island, added to which, “under the United States tariff it has been impossible
for us to go into any foreign market.” Luis V. Placé from Havana, representing
a prominent group of Cuban merchants called the Corporaciones Económicas,
argued, “As a Cuban I would like to give the United States f ree trade. The w hole
of American products imported into Cuba ought to be free. . . . The proper so
lution of the Cuban problem is virtually free trade with both countries.” He also
expressed his awareness of the issue’s imperial power dynamics: “I ask for free
trade on the understanding it is for you to grant it; we beg.”45
The final version of the reciprocity treaty was a far cry from the free-trade
version requested by the ail, Cuban merchants, and independence leaders, as it
ended up providing only a 20 percent discount on U.S. tariff rates. Disillusioned
independence leaders like Juan Gualberto Gómez, head of Cuba’s Liberal Party
and an ally of José Martí in the Cuban independence movement, came out in
opposition to reciprocity in its final form b ecause, according to Mary Speck, the
U.S. “had shown so little commitment to free trade.” Other Cuban nationalists,
however, gave their pragmatic support to the treaty, warning that to do other
wise would risk U.S. annexation. To them the message was clear: Cubans must
either embrace informal U.S. imperialism through protectionist reciprocity or
risk formal U.S. colonialism.46
A handful of years l ater, the side effects of the Republican Party’s closed-door
policy toward the Philippines w ere beginning to show. The U.S. government’s

protectionist policies were creating high prices on basic necessities, harming
poverty-stricken Filipino consumers and various local businesses.47 The pro
tectionist policies soon sparked Filipino nationalist protests. On July 11, 1908,
a large gathering took place in Manila “to endorse the mass petition for the free
entry of Philippine goods to American markets . . . prompted by the apparent
indifference of the U.S. Senate” to the ill effects of its colonial protectionist
policies. Three hundred Filipino businessmen convened what became the Phil
ippines’s first Committee on Free Trade. Its officers included pro-independence
advocate Pedro Guevera, a future member of the Philippine Congress (1909–
12, 1916–22) and the Nationalist resident commissioner for the Philippines
(1923–36), and Don Luis Hidalgo, a trade unionist and cofounder, in 1903,
of the Chamber of Commerce of the Philippines. Similar meetings were held
across the islands, resulting in the signatures of thousands of supporters.48 The
gop’s turn-of-the-century protectionist imperial policies thus garnered sub
stantial opposition not only from the ail but also from nationalists in Cuba and
the Philippines.
Free-Trade Radicalism’s Anti-Imperial Networks

The transimperial dimensions of this anti-imperial story become even more
visible with closer examination of the Cobdenite ideas at play. Digging deep
into the economic cosmopolitanism of the ail reveals that free-trade ideas
crossed the Atlantic in both directions. One particular Cobdenite offshoot was
the free-trade ideology that became known in the United States as the single
tax or Georgism, named a fter the American journalist and political economist
Henry George. George’s ideas crisscrossed U.S. and British imperial bound
aries, becoming the leading vein of U.S. free-trade thinking to influence British
Cobdenites.
The positions of George’s followers on both sides of the Atlantic concerning
free trade, anti-imperialism, and peace became even more radical than those of
the more orthodox followers of the Manchester School. George first formulated
his single tax theory—which held that a country could derive all of its revenue
through a direct tax on the potential value of land—in his internationally best-
selling book Progress and Poverty (1879). This single tax on land, according to
George, was a panacea that would at once provide a steady revenue stream for
local and federal governments, discourage land monopolization by incentiv
izing land development, and eliminate the need for all other forms of direct
and indirect taxation, including tariffs. For George and his followers on both
sides of the Atlantic, eliminating land monopolies and all other barriers to trade

would undermine the economic c auses of imperialism and war and thus bring
prosperity and peace to the world.
George considered his land tax proposal a natural outgrowth of the transat
lantic Cobdenite free-trade-and-peace tradition. Indeed land reform had long
been tied to Cobdenism, as George and his transatlantic disciples were keen to
emphasize. In 1898, for example, amid scathing critiques of President McKin
ley’s warmongering and autocratic maneuverings, the second issue of the newly
launched Georgist publication the Public emphasized the movement’s Cobde
nite connections.49 Georgists maintained their strong opposition to American
colonialism through the Public and in their involvement in the ail.50
George himself had converted from protectionism to Cobdenism in the
1860s, at which point he put his faith “in the international law of God as Cobden
called free trade.” George became an American member of the Cobden Club in
1881, taking an active role in various American Cobden Clubs, including the aftl
and the New York F ree Trade Club. Following his conversion to Cobdenism, he
aligned himself politically with the independent Republican Cobdenites who be
came known as Mugwumps a fter they threw their support behind Cleveland in
the 1884 presidential election. He praised Cleveland’s 1887 message to Congress
as “a manly, vigorous, and most effective free-trade speech” and stumped for
Cleveland’s reelection amid the “Great Debate” of 1888.51 George also supported
Cleveland’s 1892 presidential run, predicting to his friend and single tax disciple
Louis F. Post that a world united “in the bonds of commerce and its guarantee of
peace among the nations” was now near at hand.52
Following the 1879 publication of Progress and Poverty, George and his grow
ing transatlantic following argued that Georgism was a natural extension of
Cobdenism. Because of this, his single tax theory found an even stronger recep
tion within F ree Trade E ngland than it did in Protectionist America. George
himself spent a g reat deal of time during the 1880s traveling between the United
States and G reat Britain in an effort to popularize his free-trade ideas. The first
British edition of Progress and Poverty appeared in 1881. It sold 100,000 copies
within three years, spurring George to claim that his book had “circulated in
Great Britain as no economic work had ever circulated before.” His arrest and
imprisonment during an 1881 visit to Ireland as a reporter for the Irish World
only lent his ideas more transatlantic notoriety and sympathy in advance of his
subsequent lecture tours in Britain. His radical ideas swept across Great Britain
from the early 1880s onward, and modified versions of his single tax theory
were a dopted by Liberal and Labour Party platforms at the turn of the century.53
Jane Cobden—a daughter of Richard Cobden and active in Britain’s turn-of-
the-century anti-imperial, Irish home rule, free trade, and women’s suffrage

movements—was among those sympathetic to Georgism. She connected the
single tax movement to her f ather’s midcentury push for “free trade in land,” as
did other British Cobdenites fired up by George’s single tax philosophy.54
Even though Georgism was too radical for some orthodox Cobdenites in
the United States, the two wings remained wedded to the transatlantic anti-
imperialist struggle. Their internal differences over fiscal reform stemmed
mainly from the fact that the Georgist position took an even more absolutist
stance on free trade than did the Cobdenite doctrine that inspired it. In par
ticular, where orthodox Cobdenites supported indirect taxation through mini
mal tariffs for revenue purposes only, George’s new proposal suggested that all
tariffs—and every other form of taxation, for that m atter—ought to be replaced
by a single direct tax on the estimated value of land. Georgists thus expounded
a more absolute commitment to free trade than orthodox Cobdenites. Never
theless, despite their differences in degree concerning free-trade cosmopoli
tanism, the two Cobdenite camps stood side by side in their common causes
of anti-imperialism and peace through the ail and other anti-imperialist and
peace organizations between 1898 and 1920.
The transimperial ties between Cobdenite anti-imperialists on both sides of
the Atlantic grew substantially with the addition of George and his disciples,
and were strengthened further through the efforts of ail officers Lucia and
Edwin D. Mead. Lucia was, according to John M. Craig, “an uncompromising
adherent to ‘free trade’ economic theories” and opposed U.S. colonialism, naval
ism, and the Monroe Doctrine. Edwin was a member of the New E ngland Free
Trade League and the American Peace Society, a cofounder of the Twentieth
Century Club, and director of the World Peace Foundation upon its founding in
1910. Lucia and Edwin’s peace internationalist worldviews crystalized following
a trip to E
ngland in 1901, where they met with pro-Boer editor William T. Stead
and British Cobdenite J. A. Hobson.55 Hobson’s critiques of the Boer War had
a sizable impact upon Lucia and Edwin’s subsequent anti-imperial critiques;
Lucia described their private meetings with Hobson and other British anti-
imperialists as an “intellectual Thanksgiving.”56
Soon thereafter, in late 1902, Edwin’s Twentieth C entury Club in Boston
invited Hobson and a fellow British anti-imperialist, George H. Perris, to lunch
with the members of the New England branch of the ail, just as Hobson’s Im-
perialism: A Study was making its transatlantic debut.57 Hobson again addressed
the ail in 1903. Perris, an antimilitarist and absolute pacifist, likewise furthered
transimperial ties through his anti-imperialist lecture tour that took him to
seven U.S. cities. The American Peace Society’s publication The Advocate of
Peace reported that Perris’s last lecture, at Cooper Union in New York, attracted

around one thousand attendees.58 It was also more than coincidental that Hob
sonian critiques of U.S. financial imperialism became more pronounced at ail
meetings and in American anti-imperial writings during and after Hobson and
Perris’s U.S. visit.59 Nor did Hobson shy away from criticizing the U.S. protec
tionist system in the years to come.60
Even as more orthodox Cobdenites like Hobson strengthened the lines of
communication within the transatlantic anti-imperial movement, Georgist
Cobdenites w ere working across Anglo-American imperial boundaries to argue
for anti-imperial policies. The propagandistic efforts of Joseph and Mary Fels,
for example, built upon these anti-imperial networks following their relocation
to London from Philadelphia. Joseph, a wealthy retired U.S. soap manufacturer
and ail officer, and his wife, Mary—a radical suffragist and peace advocate
who eventually became the editor of the anti-imperial Georgist publication
the Public—provided the single tax movement in Britain with much-needed
financial bolstering at the turn of the c entury. Georgist reformers in Britain
were among the main recipients of the Felses’ international largesse, leading
to the formation of the United League for the Taxation of Land Values (as the
Georgist movement was known in Britain), as well as numerous local chapters
scattered throughout the British Empire. The League sought to spread George’s
land policies throughout the British colonies and thereby break up the land
monopolies of the empire’s aristocratic elites. Writing from London, Joseph
laid this out in an open letter to Andrew Carnegie in 1910 entitled “Free Trade
and the Single Tax vs. Imperialism.” In it, Joseph argued that “if conditions of
absolute free trade had prevailed,” there would have been no Russo-Japanese
War and no need for U.S. control of the Philippines: “If Japan maintained no
custom houses, the power that would try to rob her of her independence would
have nothing to gain and very l ittle to lose. Henry George made this clear in his
Protection or Free Trade. . . . The interests which dragged the United States into
the disgraceful Philippine adventure would not and could not have succeeded
in doing so, had not the existence of land monopoly at home made it evident
that the same institution would surely be continued by our government in the
Philippines.” The unnatural “need of foreign markets,” he continued, “which
is so frequently used as an argument to justify wars of criminal aggression is a
‘need’ that would not be felt if the aggressing nation enforced justice at home”
through adoption of the single tax and absolute f ree trade with the world.61 As
Mary similarly described it in 1916, just before taking part in the transatlantic
travails of the Ford Peace Expedition, free trade through Georgist land reform
would undermine colonialism by dismantling imperial demands for foreign
markets and transportation networks wrought from protective tariffs.62

Anti-imperial and peace leaders like Joseph and Mary Fels thus believed
that Georgism would undermine imperial expansion in three key ways. First,
developing land to maximum efficiency would increase the global supply of
raw materials, thereby undercutting a principal driver of imperial expansion.
Second, it would undermine the militant influence of the landed aristocracy, a
long-held goal of Georgists and orthodox Cobdenites alike. Third, absolute f ree
trade would eliminate the market inefficiencies wrought from protectionism
and monopolies, which they believed to be another key force behind the impe
rial search for foreign markets.
Conclusion
It may seem ironic that some of the leading anti-imperialist theories in the
turn-of-the-twentieth-century United States came from the leading empire
of the day, but transimperial crossings were never limited to strategies of im
perial rule; they also advanced anti-imperial dissent. Transatlantic free-trade
cosmopolitanism—whether orthodox Cobdenism or its more radical Georgist
variant—fueled a major strain of Anglo-American anti-imperialism from the
1840s until the ail’s dissolution in 1920. The vast majority of ail officers were
Cobdenite free-traders, influenced by British anti-imperialist thought. In a time
of U.S. political, military, and economic assertion, they drew on principles ex
pounded by British radicals.
The anti-imperialism of free trade was a transimperial phenomenon that
came to encompass the British, American, and Spanish empires. Especially in
the British Empire and its rising American associate, Cobdenites struggled to
replace the economic logic that undergirded imperialism with the free-trade
principles they believed would undermine empire and foster peace. This associa
tion of free trade with anti-imperialism was also embraced by businessmen, con
sumers, and nationalists within U.S. colonies in the Caribbean and Asia-Pacific
following the Spanish-American War. Traveling across imperial boundaries, anti-
imperial economic theories sought to undo the world that had produced them.
notes
1. Christopher Lasch, “The Anti-Imperialists, the Philippines, and the Inequality
of Man,” Journal of Southern History 24 (August 1958): 330n28; Adam Cooke, “ ‘An
Unpardonable Bit of Folly and Impertinence’: Charles Francis Adams Jr., American
Anti-Imperialists, and the Philippines,” New England Quarterly 83 (June 2010): 313–38;
Robert L. Beisner, Twelve against Empire: The Anti-Imperialists, 1898–1900 (New York:

McGraw-Hill, 1968); Frank Freidel, “Dissent in the Spanish-American War and the Phil
ippine Insurrection,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 81 (1960): 167–84;
Fred H. Harrington, “The Anti-Imperialist Movement in the United States, 1898–1900,”
Mississippi Valley Historical Review 22 (September 1935): 211–30; John M. Gates, “Philip
pine Guerillas, American Anti-Imperialists, and the Election of 1900,” Pacific Historical
Review 46 (February 1977): 51–64; Gerald E. Markowitz, ed., American Anti-Imperialism
1895–1901 (New York: Garland Library of War and Peace, 1976); Erin Leigh Murphy,
“Anti-imperialism during the Philippine-American War: Protesting ‘Criminal Aggression’
and ‘Benevolent Assimilation,’ ” PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
2009; Daniel Schirmer, Republic or Empire: American Resistance to the Philippine War
(Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 1972); Richard E. Welch Jr., Response to Imperialism: The
United States and the Philippine-American War, 1899–1902 (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1979); Richard E. Welch Jr., “American Atrocities in the Philip
pines: The Indictment and the Response,” Pacific Historical Review 43 (May 1974):
233–53; James A. Zimmerman, “Who Were the Anti-Imperialists and the Expansionists
of 1898 and 1899? A Chicago Perspective,” Pacific Historical Review 46 (November 1977):
589–601; Jim Zwick, “The Anti-Imperialist League and the Origins of the Filipino-
American Oppositional Solidarity,” American Journal 24 (Summer 1998): 64–85.
2. Ian Tyrrell and Jay Sexton, eds., Empire’s Twin: U.S. Anti-Imperialism from the Found-
ing Era to the Age of Terrorism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 16.
3. Lasch even went so far as to assert that American anti-imperialists ignored the
imperialists’ economic policies and ideas (“The Anti-Imperialists, the Philippines, and
the Inequality of Man,” 322).
4. Tompkins notes briefly that “there was a logical correlation between their free-trade
views and their anti-imperialism, as there had been for Cobden and Bright, by whom
they were also influenced in both respects.” E. Berkeley Tompkins, “The Old Guard:
A Study of the Anti-Imperialist Leadership,” Historian 30 (May 1968): 375. See also
E. Berkeley Tompkins, Anti-Imperialism in the United States: The Great Debate, 1890–
1920 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970); David Patterson, Toward
a Warless World: The Travail of the American Peace Movement, 1887–1914 (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1976), 74, 80. Cultural and political studies include Michael H.
Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987);
Eric T. Love, Race over Empire: Racism and U.S. Imperialism, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Gill H. Boehringer, “Black American Anti-
Imperialist Fighters in the Philippine American War,” Black Agenda Report, September 15,
2009; Brandon Byrd, “To Start Something to Help These People: African American
Women and the Occupation of Haiti, 1915–1934,” Journal of Haitian Studies 21 (2015):
127–53; Kristin L. Hoganson, “ ‘As Badly Off as the Filipinos’: U.S. Women’s Suffragists
and the Imperial Issue at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” Journal of Women’s History
13 (Summer 2001): 9–33; Erin Leigh Murphy, “Women’s Anti-imperialism: ‘The White
Man’s Burden,’ and the Philippine-American War: Theorizing Masculinist Ambivalence
in Protest,” Gender and Society 23 (2009): 244–70; Allison L. Sneider, Suffragists in an
Imperial Age: U.S. Expansion and the Woman Question, 1870–1929 (New York: Oxford

5. See, especially, William Appleman Williams, Roots of the Modern American Em-
pire: A Study of the Growth and Shaping of Social Consciousness in a Marketplace Society
(New York: Vintage Books, 1969); Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of
American Expansion, 1860–1898 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1963); Thomas J.
McCormick, China Market: America’s Quest for Informal Empire, 1893–1901 (Chicago:
Ivan R. Dee, 1967); Carl P. Parrini and Martin J. Sklar, “New Thinking about the Market,
1896–1904: Some American Economists on Investment and the Theory of Surplus
Capital,” Journal of Economic History 43 (September 1983): 559–78; Paul Wolman, Most
Favored Nation: The Republican Revisionists and U.S. Tariff Policy, 1897–1912 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1992).
6. Anti-imperialists abhorred the Republican Party’s coercive economic nationalist
imperial policies. See Marc-William Palen, “The Imperialism of Economic Nationalism,
1890–1913,” Diplomatic History 39 (January 2015): 157–85; April Merleaux, Sugar and
Civilization: American Empire and the Cultural Politics of Sweetness (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2015), 30–31; Michael Patrick Cullinane, Liberty and Ameri-
can Anti-Imperialism 1898–1909 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 109–10; Tomp
kins, Anti-Imperialism in the United States, 245–49.
7. Richard Huzzey, Freedom Burning: Anti-Slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 108.
8. Michael Patrick Cullinane, “Transatlantic Dimensions of the American Anti-
Imperialist Movement, 1899–1909,” Journal of Transatlantic Studies 8 (2010): 301–14.
9. Leslie Butler, Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal
Reform (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 243.
10. On American Anglophobia, see especially Jay Sexton, “Anglophobia in Nineteenth-
Century Elections, Politics, and Diplomacy,” in America at the Ballot Box: Elections and
Political History, edited by Gareth Davies and Julian E. Zelizer (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 98–117; Stephen Tuffnell, “ ‘Uncle Sam Is to Be Sacrificed’:
Anglophobia in Late Nineteenth-Century Politics and Culture,” American Nineteenth
C
entury History 12 (March 2011): 77–99; William C. Reuter, “The Anatomy of Politi
cal Anglophobia in the United States, 1865–1900,” Mid-America 61 (April–July 1979):
117–32; Edward P. Crapol, America for Americans: Economic Nationalism and Anglophobia,
1876–1896 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973).
11. Richard Seymour, American Insurgents: A Brief History of American Anti-Imperialism
(Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012), xv. In comparison to the American side, t here is a
wealth of scholarship on the economic ideologies of British anti-imperialists. See P. J.
Cain, “Capitalism, Aristocracy and Empire: Some ‘Classical’ Theories of Imperialism Re
visited,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 35 (March 2007): 25-47; Gregory
Claeys, Imperial Sceptics, 1850–1920 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press,
2010); Anthony Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846–1946 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1997); Stephen Howe, Anticolonialism in British Politics: The Left and the End of Em-
pire, 1918–64 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Bernard Porter, Critics of Empire:
British Radicals and the Imperial Challenge (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007); Bernard Semmel,
The Liberal Ideal and the Demons of Empire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1993).

12. Stephen Howe, “New Empires, New Dilemmas—and Some Old Arguments,”
Global Dialogue 5 (Winter/Spring 2003), http://www.worlddialogue.org/content.php?id
=216. Rare exceptions to this free-trade portrayal include Tom Terrill, The Tariff, Politics,
and American Foreign Policy, 1874–1901 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973); Crapol,
America for Americans.
13. Marc-William Palen, “Empire by Imitation? U.S. Economic Imperialism in a
British World System,” in Oxford History of the Ends of Empire, edited by Martin Thomas
and Andrew Thompson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), doi:10.1093/ox
fordhb/9780198713197.013.12.
14. On the turn-of-the-century American Closed Door Empire, see Mary Speck,
“Closed-Door Imperialism: The Politics of Cuban-U.S. Trade, 1902–1933,” Hispanic
American Historical Review 85 (August 2005): 449–84; Marc-William Palen, The “Con-
spiracy” of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalisation,
1846-1896 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Palen, “The Imperialism of
Economic Nationalism”; Merleaux, Sugar and Civilization.
15. Marc-William Palen, “Adam Smith as Advocate of Empire, c. 1870–1932,” Historical
Journal 57 (March 2014): 179–98.
16. Some of the era’s popular economic nationalist theorists, most notably the German
American theorist Friedrich List (1789–1846), were quite explicit in their support of
colonialism. See Mauro Boianovsky, “Friedrich List and the Economic Fate of Tropical
Countries,” History of Political Economy 45 (2013): 647–69; Onur Ulas Ince, “Friedrich
List and the Imperial Origins of the National Economy,” New Political Economy 21 (2016):
380–400; Palen, The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade, chapter 1.
17. Oliver MacDonagh, “The Anti-Imperialism of Free Trade,” Economic History Re-
view 14 (April 1962): 489–501.
18. Peter Cain, “Capitalism, War, and Internationalism in the Thought of R ichard
Cobden,” British Journal of International Studies 5 (October 1979): 229–47; David Nicholls,
“Richard Cobden and the International Peace Congress Movement, 1848–1853,” Journal
of British Studies 30 (October 1991): 351–76; Richard Francis Spall, “Free Trade, Foreign
Relations, and the Anti-Corn-Law League,” International History Review 10 (August 1988):
405–32; Anthony Howe and Simon Morgan, eds., Rethinking Nineteenth-Century Liberal-
ism: Richard Cobden Bicentenary Essays (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2006); R. A. Fletcher,
“Cobden as Educator: The Free-Trade Internationalism of Eduard Bernstein, 1899–1914,”
American Historical Review 88 (June 1983): 561–78.
19. Marc-William Palen, “Free-Trade Ideology and Transatlantic Abolitionism: A
Historiography,” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 37 (June 2015): 291–304;
Anthony Howe, “Free Trade and the International Order: The Anglo-American Tradi
tion, 1846–1946,” in Anglo-American Attitudes: From Revolution to Partnership, edited
by Fred M. Leventhal and Roland Quinault (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2000), 142–67;
Stephen Meardon, “Richard Cobden’s American Quandary: Negotiating Peace, F ree
Trade, and Anti-Slavery,” in Howe and Morgan, Rethinking Nineteenth-Century Liberal-
ism, 208–28; W. Caleb McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Gar-
risonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 2013).

20. Marc-William Palen, “Foreign Relations in the Gilded Age: A British Free-Trade
Conspiracy?,” Diplomatic History 37 (April 2013): 217–47; Palen, “Free-Trade Ideology and
Transatlantic Abolitionism”; Palen, The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade.
21. Marc-William Palen, “The Great Civil War Lie,” New York Times, June 5, 2013;
Marc-William Palen, “The Civil War’s Forgotten Transatlantic Tariff Debate and the
Confederacy’s Free Trade Diplomacy,” Journal of the Civil War Era 3 (March 2013): 35–61;
Palen, The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade, chapter 2.
22. Palen, The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade, chapter 1.
23. League, June 1867; Free-Trader, June 1868, 1; Free-Trader, January 1870, 125, 127;
Free-Trader, March 1870, 168.
24. Constitution of the American Free Trade League and List of Members (1865), New York
Public Library; League, June 1867; Free-Trader, June 1868, 1; Free-Trader, January 1870,
125, 127; Free-Trader, March 1870, 168; Address of the Free Trade Association of London,
to the American Free Trade League, New York (London: P. S. King, 1866), 4; Howe, “Free
Trade and the International Order,” 145; “Appendix: Alphabetical List of U.S. Cobden
Club Members,” in Palen, The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade, http://admin.cambridge.org
/academic/subjects/history/economic-history/conspiracy-free-trade-anglo-american
-struggle-over-empire-and-economic-globalisation-18461896.
25. “In Times of Peace, etc.,” Free-Trader, May 1870, 207; David Ames Wells, “The
Creed of Free Trade,” Atlantic Monthly (August 1875), 15; David Ames Wells, Freer Trade
Essential to Future National Prosperity and Development (New York, 1882), 3–4; David
Ames Wells, F ree Trade (New York: M. B. Cary, 1884), 294; David Ames Wells, A Primer
on Tariff Reform (London, 1885), 9.
26. League, September 1867, 40; Edward Atkinson to Henry Ward Beecher, June 25,
1867, carton 14, Atkinson Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston; Mahlon
Sands, The Free Trade League to Its Subscribers and the Public (unidentified publisher,
1869); Charles DeBenedetti, The Peace Reform in American History (Bloomington: Indi
ana University Press, 1980), 63, 64; Constitution of the American Free Trade League and List
of Members (1865).
27. On Fenian radicalism and U.S. foreign policy, see David Sim, A Union Forever: The
Irish Question and U.S. Foreign Relations in the Victorian Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univer
sity Press, 2014).
28. Paul T. Phillips, The Controversialist: An Intellectual Life of Goldwin Smith (London:
Praeger, 2002), 45–53; Christopher A. Kent, “Smith, Goldwin (1823–1910),” in Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography, edited by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Ox
ford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
29. Craufurd D. W. Goodwin, Canadian Economic Thought: The Political Economy of a
Developing Nation 1814–1914 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1961), 59–70.
30. Memorial of the American Free Trade League to the Senate and House of Representa-
tives, February 1866, New York Public Library; Melville Egleston to David Wells, Janu
ary 11, 1876, reel 4, microfilm 15, 662–9p, David Ames Wells Papers, Library of Congress,
Washington, DC; New Century, December 1875, 3–6; New Century, February 1876, 53–54;
Henry George, Protection or Free Trade: An Examination of the Tariff Question with Especial
Regard to the Interests of Labor (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1886), 352–53.

31. Palen, The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade, chapters 6–7.
32. Andrew L. Slap, The Doom of Reconstruction: The Liberal Republicans in the Civil War
Era (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 122.
33. R. R. Bowker, Free Trade the Best Protection to American Industry (New York: New
York Free Trade Club, 1883), proof copy, Box 89, R. R. Bowker Papers, New York Public
Library, New York City.
34. Palen, The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade, 250–52. On British free-trade imperialism
in India and South America, see, for instance, Peter Harnetty, “The Imperialism of Free
Trade: Lancashire, India, and the Cotton Supply Question, 1861–1865,” Journal of British
Studies 6 (November 1996): 70–96; John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, “The Imperi
alism of Free Trade,” Economic History Review 6 (1953): 1–15.
35. Patterson, Toward a Warless World, 74.
36. Harlen Eugene Makemson, “Images of Scandal: Political Cartooning in the 1884
Presidential Campaign,” PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2002,
145–46; Terrill, Tariff, Politics, and American Foreign Policy, 91; Patrick Cudmore, Bu-
chanan’s Conspiracy, the Nicaragua Canal and Reciprocity (New York: P. J. Kennedy, 1892);
Patrick Cudmore, Cleveland’s Maladministration: Free Trade, Protection and Reciprocity
(New York: P. J. Kennedy, 1896); James Morris Morgan, America’s Egypt: Mr. Blaine’s
Foreign Policy (New York: Hermann Bartsch, 1884).
37. Nation 40 (January 1, 1885): 8–9. See also Milton Plesur, America’s Outward
Thrust: Approaches to Foreign Affairs, 1865–1890 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University
Press, 1971), 144–56; LaFeber, New Empire, 53; Murray Lee Carroll, “Open Door Impe
rialism in Africa: The United States and the Congo, 1876 to 1892,” PhD diss., University
of Connecticut, 1971.
38. U.S. Department of State, Index to the Executive Documents of the House of Repre-
sentatives for the First Session of the 49th Congress (Washington, DC: Government Printing
Office, 1885–86), 259.
39. Grover Cleveland, The Public Papers of Grover Cleveland Twenty-Second President of
the United States March 4, 1885 to March 4, 1889 (Washington, DC: Government Print
ing Office, 1889), 471; “Protocol of First Samoan Conference,” June 25, 1887, in Foreign
Relations of the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1890),
204–5; Henry C. Ide, “Our Interest in Samoa,” North American Review 165 (August 1897),
155–58; Stuart Anderson, “ ‘Pacific Destiny’ and American Policy in Samoa, 1872–1899,”
Hawaiian Journal of History 12 (1978): 53–54.
40. Thomas J. Osborne, Annexation Hawaii (Waimanalo, HI: Island Style Press, 1998),
17–39; Allan Nevins, Grover Cleveland: A Study in Courage (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1933),
549–62.
41. Henry Cabot Lodge, “Our Blundering Foreign Policy,” Forum 19 (March 1895),
15; Roosevelt to Lodge, December 27, 1895, in Selections from the Correspondence of
Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1925), 1:203–5. See also Theodore Roosevelt to Alfred T. Mahan, December 13, 1897, in
Theodore Roosevelt Letters, 8 vols., edited by Elting E. Morison (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1951–54), 1:741.
42. Merleaux, Sugar and Civilization.

43. Erving Winslow to Herbert Welsh, December 7, 1901, Box 2, Herbert Welsh Pa
pers, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
44. Harriet Hyman Alonso, Peace as a Women’s Issue: A History of the U.S. Movement for
World Peace and Women’s Rights (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1993), 72. On
the transimperial influence of free trade within the international women’s peace move
ment, see Marc-William Palen, “British Free Trade and the International Feminist Vision
for Peace, c. 1846–1946,” in Imagining Britain’s Economic Future, c. 1800–1975: Trade,
Consumerism and Global Markets, edited by David Thackeray, Richard Toye, and Andrew
Thompson (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 115–31.
45. U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, “Reciprocity with Cuba,” Hearings before
the Committee on Ways and Means, 57th Cong., 1st Sess. (Washington, DC: Government
Printing Office, 1902), 144–45, 149, 91, 94–95. On the U.S. insular empire, see especially
A. G. Hopkins, American Empire: A Global History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2018).
46. Speck, “Closed-Door Imperialism,” 455–58.
47. Palen, “Imperialism of Economic Nationalism,” 176–77.
48. Raul Rafael Ingles, 1908: The Way It Really Was (Quezon City, Philippines: Diliman
Univ. of the Philippines Press, 2008), 172; El Renancimiento (Manila), July 13, 1908,
Garrison Family Papers, Box 178, Folder 15, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College,
Northampton, MA.
49. “Cobden on Land Value Tax,” Public 1 (April 16, 1898), 13.
50. John M. Gates, “Philippine Guerrillas, American Anti-Imperialists, and the Elec
tion of 1900,” Pacific Historical Review 46 (Feb. 1977), 54.
51. George quoted in Thomas Hudson McKee, ed., Protection Echoes from the Capitol
(Washington, DC: McKee, 1888), 155; Henry George, Protection or Free Trade (New York:
Henry George, 1886), 324; Elwood P. Lawrence, Henry George in the British Isles (East
Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1957), 83, 84; Louis F. Post, The Prophet of San
Francisco: Personal Memories and Interpretations of Henry George (New York: Vanguard
Press, 1930), 114–24; John L. Thomas, Alternative America: Henry George, Edward Bellamy,
Henry Demarest Lloyd and the Adversary Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1983), 320; Charles Albro Barker, Henry George (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1955), 72–78, 142.
52. Henry George to Louis Post, March 31, April 2, 1891, reel 5, Henry George Papers,
New York Public Library, New York City.
53. Henry George, A Perplexed Philosop her (New York: C. L. Webster, 1893), 73; Law
rence, Henry George in the British Isles; George J. Stigler, “Alfred Marshall’s Lectures on
Progress and Poverty,” Journal of Law and Economics 12 (April 1969): 181–226; John D.
Wood, “Transatlantic Land Reform: America and the Crofters’ Revolt 1878–1888,” Scot-
tish Historical Review 63 (April 1984): 79–104; Peter D’A. Jones, “Henry George and Brit
ish Socialism,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 47 (October 1988): 473–91;
Bernard Newton, “The Impact of Henry George on British Economists I: The First Phase
of Response, 1879–82. Leslie, Wicksteed and Hobson,” American Journal of Economics
and Sociology 30 (April 1971): 179–86; Bernard Newton, “The Impact of Henry George
on British Economists II: The Second Phase of Response, 1883–84. Marshall, Toynbee

and Rae,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 30 (July 1971): 317–27; Bernard
Newton, “The Impact of Henry George on British Economists III: The Third Phase of
Response, 1885–1901. Rogers, Symes and McDonnell,” American Journal of Economics and
Sociology 31 (January 1972): 87–102.
54. Jane Cobden, The Land Hunger: Life under Monopoly (London: T. Fisher Unwin,
1913); Anthony Howe, “The ‘Manchester School’ and the Landlords: The Failure of Land
Reform in Early Victorian Britain,” in The Land Question in Britain, 1750–1950, edited by
M. Cragoe and P. Readman (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010): 74–91; Antony Taylor,
“Richard Cobden, J. E. Thorold Rogers and Henry George,” in Cragoe and Readman,
The Land Question in Britain, 146–66. On the radical activism of Cobden’s daughters, see
especially Sue Millar, “Middle Class Women and Public Politics in the Late Nineteenth
and Early Twentieth Centuries: A Study of the Cobden Sisters,” MA thesis, University of
Sussex, 1985; Sarah Richardson, “ ‘You Know Your Father’s Heart’: The Cobden Sister
hood and the Legacy of Richard Cobden,” in Howe and Morgan, Rethinking Nineteenth-
Century Liberalism, 229–46.
55. Hobson, in turn, had been influenced by the imperial theorist Gaylord Wilshire.
See P. J. Cain, “Hobson, Wilshire, and the Capitalist Theory of Capitalist Imperialism,”
History of Political Economy, Fall 1985, 455–60. For Hobson and Cobdenism, see P. J.
Cain, “J. A. Hobson, Cobdenism and the Radical Theory of Economic Imperialism,
1898–1914,” Economic History Review 31 (November 1978): 565–84.
56. John M. Craig, “Lucia True Ames Mead: American Publicist for Peace and Interna
tionalism,” in Women and American Foreign Policy: Lobbyists, Critics, and Insiders, edited by
Edward P. Crapol (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987), 67–90, 72–73.
57. Report of the Fourth Annual Meeting of the New England Anti-Imperialist League (Bos
ton: New England Anti-Imperialist League, 1902), 8; “Imperialism: J. A. Hobson’s New
Book on Its Growth and Its Influence in British Politics,” New York Times, November 15,
1902.
58. Report of the Fifth Annual Meeting of the New England Anti-Imperialist League (Bos
ton: New England Anti-Imperialist League, 1903), 11; “Mr. Perris in America,” Advocate
of Peace 65 (January 1903): 9–10.
59. Report of the Fifth Annual Meeting of the New England Anti-Imperialist League,
5–7; Report of the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Anti-Imperialist League (Boston:
Anti-Imperialist League 1909), 34–35. The American sociologist and imperial theorist
Thorstein Veblen, for example, reviewed Hobson’s Imperialism quite favorably upon its
publication and agreed with Hobson’s central thesis. See Cain, “Capitalism, Aristocracy
and Empire,” 31–32.
60. J. A. Hobson, The Fruits of American Protection (New York: Cassell, 1906).
61. Joseph Fels, “Free Trade and the Single Tax vs. Imperialism: A Letter to Andrew
Carnegie,” December 1910, School of Cooperative Individualism, http://www.cooperative
-individualism.org/fels-joseph_free-trade-and-the-single-tax-vs-imperialism-1910.htm.
62. “Public Opinion Force to End Great Wars, Mrs. Fels Declares,” unknown news
paper, July 31, 1916, Folder 7, Box 5, Joseph and Mary Fels Papers, Historical Society of
Philadelphia.

8. the permeable south: imperial interactivities
in the islamic philippines, 1899–1930s
Oliver Charbonneau
“Example is contagious,” José Rizal wrote about the desire for empire in an
1890 piece for La Solidaridad. “Perhaps the great American Republic, which
has interest in the Pacific and does not share in the spoils of Africa may some
day think of ultramarine possessions.”1 Rizal’s prediction manifested less than
a decade later, when the United States took possession of the Philippines from
Spain. The Filipino nationalist correctly diagnosed the character of empire dur
ing a period of accelerated Euro-American territorial acquisition, when empires
simultaneously competed with and drew from one another. Example was conta
gious, extending to shared governance strategies, inclusionary and exclusionary
cultural codes, modes of violence, and extractive goals. An emergent body of lit
erature on European empires has parsed the “mentalities, images, stereotypes,
narratives, and ideologies” circulating through the late nineteenth-and early
twentieth-century world in an effort to locate “reservoirs” of imperial knowl
edge production.2 Although important theoretical groundwork is in place,
countless sites of transfer and overlap remain underanalyzed. This is especially
true in the case of U.S. imperialism, which has been obscured through popular
amnesia, nationalist disavowal, and historiographic absence.
This essay approaches transimperial connection and exchange by focusing
on their manifestations in the Islamic Philippines under U.S. rule. The Muslim
South’s American occupiers acquired incompletely colonized territories from
the Spanish, who had struggled to control the dynamic maritime sultanates of
Mindanao-Sulu for centuries.3 After assuming sovereignty over the region, the
PHILIPPINES
SULU
SEA MINDANAO
Area of
detail Marawi
Lake Lanao
Malabang
Cotabato
Davao
Zamboanga
Basilan
Jolo
Sandakan O
Jolo
L AG
Siasi I PE CELEBES SEA
Tawitawi CH N
BO R NEO AR
LU 0 50 100 mi
SU
0 50 100 150 km
Bongao I. Siminul I.
map 8.1. Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago. Drawn by William L. Nelson.
American colonial administration in Manila partitioned it from the Christian

North and designated it as the Moro Province, a militarized substate where U.S.
Army officers doubled as civilian administrators. Colonial authorities believed
the separation to be a necessity, citing the dangers posed by “semi-savage”
Moros and questioning the ability of Filipino leaders to reform and integrate
hostile Muslim populations into their nascent (and continuously postponed)
nation-state.4 After the end of military rule in 1914, the South saw its govern
ment bureaucracy undergo a process of Filipinization, which for most Muslims
meant replacing one foreign interloper with another. Americans continued to
guide policy in the region well into the 1930s, formally from Manila and in
formally through networks of white elites in communities like the port city of
Zamboanga, in southern Mindanao (map 8.1). Throughout this series of colo
nial transitions Mindanao-Sulu remained a frontier zone in both American and
Filipino imaginaries.5
While scholars of Southeast Asia have increasingly integrated the southern
Philippines into their border-crossing histories, the literature on the U.S. co
lonial period has yet to move very far beyond contained studies of American-
Moro-Filipino relations.6 In this essay I explore how global, regional, and local
184 oliver charbonneau

interactions molded the colonial cultures of the Muslim South. The first sec
tion analyzes American rule in Mindanao-Sulu through its myriad linkages with
other empires. Connectivity came ready-made to the U.S. regime in the form
of Spanish colonial inheritances. Americans extended and deepened t hese con
nective webs through diverse exchanges with the Dutch, British, French, and
German empires. Colonial agents also responded to the challenges of govern
ing an Islamic population with its own global relationships by turning to the
Ottoman Empire for guidance. The second section considers the preexisting
networks Americans encountered in Mindanao-Sulu and how U.S. officials
worked with, against, and around them. I argue that a range of transimperial
intersections, operating well beyond the traditional power centers in Manila
and Washington, shaped the colonial state in the southern Philippines.
Recent studies that situate U.S. history within global imperial currents in
form this essay, helping to place it outside what Pierre-Yves Saunier calls “self-
narratives of autonomous production.”7 This approach does not deny American
power its own specificities but stipulates a reading of the colonial encounter
that incorporates multiple zones of reciprocal connection involving “outside”
actors. Studying the resultant cross-pollinations—with their adaptations, cri
tiques, hybridities, and rejections—allows for a richer conceptualization of the
period that bypasses national-exceptionalist and colonial-exceptionalist models.
Heeding Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton’s call to move beyond “the
metropole-colony binary that has organized so much writing on empires,” I il
lustrate how colonial power was s haped and mediated by traffic between em
pires (Western and non-Western alike) and also through the surprising ability
of specific regions and localities to assert themselves against broader preroga
tives of control and reconfiguration. In doing so I recenter the imperial fringe
of Mindanao-Sulu within heterogeneous webs of exchange and provide a win
dow onto the contingent and coproduced qualities of U.S. imperial rule t here.8
Inheritance and Exchange

The many borrowings of the American colonial state in the Islamic Philippines
began with ethnographic and environmental knowledge acquired from Spain.
Initially press coverage of the Spanish-American War emphasized a morally
debased Spanish colonial culture at odds with the progressive outlook of the
American republic. Whereas the Spanish authorities w ere irredeemably cor
rupted by their incestuous relationship with missionary Catholicism, Americans
saw themselves as beyond such conflicts due to their elevated Protestant sen
sibilities.9 Likewise American colonials believed their transformational visions
The Permeable South 185

for the people of the Philippine Archipelago would not be compromised and
fragmented like the Spanish versions, which they viewed in racial terms as
products of a corrupt Latinate culture. Rationalized colonial governance would
replace the tyranny and inefficiency of the religious orders in managing under
developed lands, and the p eoples of the archipelago would be uplifted from ne
glected squalor via modern sanitary technologies, secular education, and hon
est wage labor.10 These strategies of differentiation did not survive the practical
challenges of managing a colonial possession. Americans looked to Jesuit scientific
production in reorganizing the Philippine Meteorological Service, recognizing the
significant accomplishments of the religious order at their Manila Observatory.
Elsewhere economic experts studied Spanish monetary policies to reduce the
frictions of colonial transition. The state called upon Spanish elites in Manila
and other cities to provide intelligence on the intrigues of Filipino ilustrados.11
While public pronouncements on the Spanish continued to emphasize the “re
ligious despotism and greed” of their colonial enterprise, the Americans in the
Philippines were also learning from their predecessors.12
In the South, early negotiations over U.S. sovereignty took place throughout
the summer of 1899. Brigadier General John Bates and Sultan Jamalul Kiram
II of Sulu each relied on treaties the Tausūg Moro royals had made with the
Spanish in the previous half-century. Bates and his staff paid close attention to
material in previous treaties on the suppression of piracy, the purchase and sale
of firearms, the exclusive use of the Spanish flag, the treatment of missionaries,
matters of trade and taxation, and salaries for the sultan and other important
Tausūg leaders. Bates also took notes on the 1851 agreement that stipulated
the Spanish not interfere in Tausūg religion and customs.13 In interviews with
Kiram and leading datus, he sought a revised version of the 1878 treaty between
Spain and the Sulu sultanate, wherein the Spanish assumed sovereignty over
the islands of the archipelago. Elwell S. Otis, military governor of the Philip
pines, did not mince words, explaining, “The Kingly prerogatives of Spain, thus
abridged by solemn concession, have descended to the United States, and con
ditions existing at the time of transfer should remain.” Otis continued, saying
the Moros were “entitled to enjoy identical privileges” to those they maintained
under the Spanish “until abridged or modified by future mutual agreement.”14
With limited information available from English-language sources, military
officers posted in the South relied upon Spanish texts to interpret their sur
roundings. American authorities translated the Jesuit priest Francisco X. Bara
nera’s Compendio de la Historia de Filipinas into English during the first year of
occupation. The book contained long descriptions of the physical characteristics
of the islands, including flora and fauna, mineral resources, and crop-growing

strategies. More important for incoming administrators, Baranera’s text was a
blueprint for Spanish colonial rule, providing military garrison numbers by dis
trict, outlining efforts to establish a school system, and detailing commercial
operations.15 Other Spanish assessments of the Moros instructed Americans
how to approach their new wards. A translated Jesuit account in the possession
of John Pershing described the Moros as “very cunning characters, hypocritic,
treacherous, suspicious, cowardly, not serviceable and beggarly beyond expres
sion” and suggested they possessed “souls habituated t owards crime.” The text
continued in this vein, mixing condemnatory proto-anthropological observa
tion with more sedate data on physical geography and trade.16 Many Americans
stationed in Mindanao-Sulu inherited Spanish outlooks on fighting and govern
ing Moro populations with little alteration.17
After the animosities of the Spanish-American War ebbed, U.S. officials
praised their erstwhile adversaries. During his time as governor of the Moro
Province, Tasker Bliss gave a ringing endorsement of the Spanish colonial leg
acy. He claimed that when the Americans came to the southern Philippines,
they encountered “in operation a form of government and code of laws not ill
adapted to the requirements of the p eople, which had been evolved by the intel
ligence and the experience of a long line of Spanish rulers during 300 years.”
The buildings, roads, and other infrastructural projects left behind by Spain
demonstrated “skill,” while the “heroic labors of Spanish priests who carried
the Cross and its influence into the most remote regions of the province” were
honorable.18 Rather than dismissing them, Americans adopted and transformed
the remnants of Spanish colonialism in the southern Philippines. While U.S.
colonial agents believed they would pacify and transform the region in ways
a decayed European monarchy could not, they were still eager to utilize the
intellectual and physical byproducts of Spain’s three centuries of engagement
with Mindanao-Sulu. After its retreat from Asia at the close of the nineteenth
century, the Spanish Empire lived on through what it transmitted to the United
States.
Americans sought out more current knowledge on colonial governance
among other European empires. The British, in particular, provided a familiar
template from which to draw symbolic and practical lessons. Sharing histori
cal, cultural, and economic linkages, many British and American elites bought
into a conjoined sense of Anglo-Saxon mission in the colonized world, which
they applied to everything from joint business ventures to globe-spanning
moral reform movements.19 A range of important figures in the shaping of
Mindanao-Sulu saw British successes (and some failures) as a blueprint upon
which to model their own colonial future, borrowing and refining where

necessary. This extended to the highest levels of the colonial state. In order
to better manage an Islamic population, the governor-general of the Philip
pines W. Cameron Forbes met repeatedly with the famed Lord Cromer at the
Foreign Office in London and visited Egypt, where he weighed the merits of
British irrigation projects and wage labor schemes. After climbing the Great
Pyramid, attempting (unsuccessfully) to acquire an Arabian stallion for polo,
and reflecting on the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in idle moments, Forbes re
turned to the Philippines by way of the Suez Canal and Indian Ocean. Five
months later he put the ideas he gathered abroad to work on an extended
inspection trip to the Moro Province.20 Charles Brent, the Episcopalian mis
sionary bishop at the heart of cultural and religious life in the American
Philippines, likewise visited Cromer, writing letters to officials in Zamboanga
about how the military project in Mindanao was the talk of the colonial estab
lishment in Cairo. Brent, who remained actively involved in education and
state-building projects in the Muslim South until the end of his life, possessed
an unflagging affinity for the British, believing that Americans could learn
much about ruling subject populations from figures like Cromer, General
Charles Gordon, and Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston.21
The first governor of the Moro Province, Leonard Wood, took lessons in
being colonial through travel. Alongside his aide Frank McCoy, Wood con
ducted a series of “pilgrimages” to European capitals in 1902, before visiting
colonial possessions in North Africa and Asia the following year en route to the
Philippines. McCoy took assiduous notes on the state of India, and his view that
the civilizing project in the Raj would be “a question of centuries” anticipated
later Republican opposition to Philippine independence. The group was espe
cially dazzled during their ten-day inspection tour of the Dutch East Indies,
drawing the conclusion that the civil service system used there could be rep
licated in the soon-to-be-formed Moro Province. McCoy was fascinated by the
method the Dutch used to subdue (and sometimes kill) Malay subjects who had
“run amok”—a problem that Americans used the adopted Spanish term jura-
mentado to describe.22 The Dutch model, considered to be the most austere and
efficient of the Southeast Asian colonial states, impressed high-ranking Ameri
cans and regularly factored into their administrative considerations. In 1902
George Davis, military commander of the southern Philippines, advocated for
a native army of Moros and Christian Filipinos under the command of officers
drawn from a new class of American settler families modeled on the Dutch ex
ample. He also looked to the Dutch East Indies (and British India) for medical
expertise in containing beriberi and cholera outbreaks.23 Building up the town
of Dansalan in 1908, the district governor of Lanao John McAuley Palmer also

mimicked the Dutch, experimenting with the “enforced or directed” agricul
tural labor programs found on Java. A punishment-and-reward system for the
conscripted Moros, he wrote to the provincial governor Tasker Bliss, would be
“similar to the method employed by the Dutch to secure the loyalty of the na
tive chiefs on Java.”24
Transimperial influences likewise shaped the middle and lower tiers of the
state apparatus. The “circuits of expert knowledge” Emily Rosenberg identifies
as symptomatic of the late colonial period featured prominently in the Muslim
South. The province worked hard to attract engineers, who brought “essential
components of the civilizing mission” through their labor.25 A junior engineer
in Zamboanga named Manly typified the phenomenon of the border-crossing
specialist. After graduating from the Indiana College of Agricultural and Me
chanical Arts, he worked in Central America, South America, New Zealand,
and Australia. On Mindanao, Manly directed the construction of roads, bridges,
docks, and buildings. A fter departing the Philippines, he worked on sewage
systems in Canton, for Standard Oil in Burma, and on the railway line through
Kenya.26
Americans also prized the violent expertise of military men like Oscar
Preuss, another global wanderer who served the Philippine Constabulary as a
traveling expert on the elimination of banditry. Born in Germany, Preuss had
a truly global résumé: enlistment in the German and Austrian armies; service
in the Boxer Rebellion, German East Africa, and the Boer War; and stints in
“various South and Central American revolutions.”27 After serving in the U.S.
3rd Cavalry, Preuss joined the Constabulary as lieutenant and earned a legend
arily brutal reputation as a “ruthless” Moro killer. Preuss’s field reports con
tained unblinking descriptions of the violence he and his men meted out. Con
fronted by superiors over rumors he had personally killed 250 Moros, Preuss
bragged the number was in fact 265. His unit took to shaving the ends off their
bullets to create dum-dums that “blew a hole in a man as large as a bucket.”28
Preuss left the Philippines in 1911 to serve under W. Morgan Shuster in the
American gendarmerie in Persia before returning to the German Army and
fighting on the Galician front during the First World War.29
Non-European imperial formations and actors also factored into the dy
namics of colonial Moroland. In 1899 the U.S. ambassador to Turkey, Oscar
Straus, convinced the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II to draft a directive to the
Muslims of the Philippine Islands “forbidding them to enter into any hostilities
against the Americans, inasmuch as no interference with their religion would
be allowed under American rule.”30 Nevertheless Moros fighting the U.S. Army
in the early years of colonial occupation used the “Sultan of Stanboul” as a figure

of protection, exaggerating their links to the Ottoman Empire as leverage in
the hopes of intimidating their adversaries. Part of John Pershing’s negotiat
ing strategy in the 1902–3 campaigns to conquer the Lanao region included
convincing recalcitrant datus of U.S. friendship with the Sublime Porte.31 Par
ticipation in the hajj pilgrimage and the presence of Arab-speaking imams in
Mindanao-Sulu meant that the Islamic world remained a vital cultural counter
weight to Euro-American colonial modernity for many Moros.
Successive provincial governors denounced the influence of the “Arab priest”
and worried about the radicalizing potential of the hajj. Missionary figures like
Charles Brent conjured visions of the Islamic world as a “unified and sensitive
organ” that was a “plague spot” in Europe, British India, and Southeast Asia.
Brent called for a halt to “Arabian immigration” to Mindanao-Sulu, condemn
ing Islamic interconnection as vociferously as he praised the phenomenon
among Western empires. “A word in Europe to the Turk sets the wild Pathan
tribes in Asia aflame,” he warned his congregation in Manila.32
More enterprising colonial agents sought to harness Islam and direct it
toward civilizational reconfiguration. In 1906 the superintendent of schools
for the Moro Province, Charles Cameron, attempted to launch a “datu school”
for the c hildren of the Moro elite, recruiting an Arab teacher to combine re
ligious instruction with the imperatives of the colonial state.33 This approach
crystallized in the multiyear attempt by the district governor of Zamboanga,
John Finley, to transform Moro populations “through the instrumentality of
modern Mohammedanism” as practiced in Ottoman lands. Between 1911 and
1914 Finley drafted petitions, traveled to Constantinople, and circumvented
official channels to arrange for an Ottoman representative to be sent to the
southern Philippines. In 1914 Sayyid Wajih al-Kilani, a religious scholar and
official, toured Mindanao and Sulu and adopted the title “Shaykh al-Islam” of
the Philippines. U nder the tutelage of Wajih, Finley argued, Moros would learn
to be “frugal, temperate, industrious, obedient to the laws, and respectful of the
authorities.” To lend legitimacy to his plan, the district governor cited British,
French, and Dutch antecedents, contending that the integration of native cus
toms had salutary effects on colonial rule and did not “endanger the mainte
nance of proper control by the home government.”34 Other American officials
disagreed with this assessment, labeling Wajih a “Mohammedan propagandist”
who stoked rumors of a coming holy war against Christendom. According to
J. Franklin Bell, military commander of the Philippines, Finley’s actions w ere
“objectionable from a military point of view,” and he quickly became persona
non grata among his peers in government.35 Authorities “obliged” Wajih to
leave the Philippines within a few months, and Finley was transferred back to

the United States, where he continued to advocate for closer ties between the
Moros and the Ottoman Empire.36
The “good-will and fact finding” missions Wood and his coterie took in
1902–3 continued as a preferred mode of imperial learning into the later phases
of American rule. In 1931 Governor General Dwight F. Davis toured French In
dochina, Siam, British Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies, declaring in a speech
that the “countries of the Far East” could profit from an “interchange of ideas.”
His forty-five-day trip covered six thousand miles through Southeast Asia.
Davis found himself “continually . . . comparing things and places . . . [to] con
ditions as they exist in the Philippines.” The party visited an impressive array of
sites: banks, post offices, scientific stations, hospitals, farms, schools, museums,
tin mines, automobile factories, and even opium plantations. This ambitious
itinerary allowed Davis and accompanying officials to map out broad compari
sons between the Philippines and other colonial regimes, as well as exchange
political, technical, governmental, and cultural information with them.37 After
the trip the governor general sent a memorandum to the Department of War in
Washington containing more pointed observations and critiques. The missive
assessed European colonies in terms of their physical conditions, governmental
systems, policies, personnel, revenues, expenditures, and commercial disposi
tions. It also reviewed the role of the native elite, the living conditions of the
native peasantry, and the role and organization of the military in the colony.
Davis dedicated the majority of the memorandum to the two colonial posses
sions with Muslim-majority populations, British Malaya and the Dutch East
Indies, perhaps because of continued uncertainties over the fate of the Muslim
South after decolonization.38
Intermediaries and Border-Crossings

Durable flows of cultural and economic exchange gave Mindanao-Sulu a perme
able quality of its own, predating American rule and shaping the colonial state
in unexpected ways. For centuries the sultanates of Sulu and Maguindanao—
situated in the titular island chain in the Sulu Sea and along the western Min
danao littoral, respectively—proved remarkably resilient in maintaining their
positions as small but dynamic polities in Island Southeast Asia. Ethnically sub
divided yet linked through Islam and vigorous maritime commerce, the South’s
inhabitants chafed at the accelerating consolidation of Euro-American colo
nialism in the late nineteenth century.39 This supraregional fluidity ran counter
to American boundary-making initiatives that sought to monopolize and har
ness outside transmissions and entanglements. Faced with a host of practical

obstacles to their demarcating agendas, colonial authorities looked toward hy
bridic interlocutors and ad hoc imperial coordination to shore up control of
Mindanao-Sulu. The platonic ideal for imperial exchange remained studious,
rigorously applied adaptations of European expertise. In practice, however, ne
gotiating rule in porous spaces often meant pragmatic concessions to a region
with its own entrenched linkages, as previously shown in American dealings
with the Ottoman Empire.
Zamboanga, the provincial capital, maintained a cosmopolitan character
throughout the American period. A dopted by the Spanish as their southern hub
in 1635, for centuries the community remained the only real imperial foothold
in western Mindanao. By the time U.S. forces arrived in 1899, it was home to
a variety of p eoples: Spanish military officials and traders; Christian Filipino
descendants of deportados exiled from the North for political offenses; creole
Zamboanguenos, who claimed both Filipino and Spanish identities; a Chinese
merchant class; assorted Europeans; and, on the perimeters of the settlement,
Samal Moros. Under American rule, military officers and their families repre
sented the upper strata of colonial society, establishing racially segregated clubs,
entertaining visiting dignitaries from other empires, and having their domestic
needs met by native servants.40 The white population also included small busi
ness owners, professionals, and even some aspiring frontiersmen who struck
out for the Mindanaoan interior to establish plantations. European representatives
of banking concerns, steamship lines, and trading companies also filtered through
the Muslim South. In the 1930s, for instance, a Scottish banker named Ian Mc
Dougal represented the Charted Bank of India, Australia, and China and served
as the British consul in Zamboanga. In his memoirs Philippine Scouts officer
Charles Ivins recalls debating military issues with McDougal, golfing together,
and attending parties featuring “white coated bare-footed Filipino boys” as
servers. Among well-heeled Americans and Europeans in the provincial capital
racial-civilizational kinship often trumped national competition.41
Outside of the rationalized spaces of central Zamboanga, officials relied
on intermediary figures who acted as conduits between the colonial regime
and the various Moro and Lumad groups. In the Sulu Archipelago, the Schuck
family often filled this role. The patriarch, Herman Schuck, was a German
trader-explorer based out of Singapore who developed a friendship with the
sultan of Sulu in the 1860s. The Tausūg Moro leader liked Schuck enough to
grant him land on the island of Jolo and in Sandakan Bay in North Borneo. The
German used his new allotments to create his own Singapore-based trade net
work. Schuck moved opium, firearms, tobacco, and other goods from Singapore
to Tawi-Tawi, exchanging them for slaves, which he in turn bartered on Jolo

for mother-of-pearl shell. He served as an advisor to the sultan on the latter’s
previously discussed 1878 treaty with Spain, ran a large plantation on Jolo, and
maintained links with German colonial enterprises in Southeast Asia. After he
died of cholera in 1887, his five sons, one of whom was from a Tausūg wife,
remained in the archipelago.42
The Schuck brothers—Edward, Charles, Herman, William, and Julius—
solidified their positions in Tausūg society by marrying local women. It is dif
ficult to overstate how frequently U.S. authorities turned to the Schucks. Few
Americans had any knowledge of Sulu or its people, and the Schucks, bridging
Westerners and natives, were ideal middlemen. They acted as interpreters, ad
visors, guides, amateur police detectives, militia leaders, and government of
ficials. Edward Schuck served as translator during the Bates Treaty negotiations
in 1899; Charles translated for Colonel Joseph Duncan during the 1906 expedi
tion that ended in the Bud Dajo massacre; William was the deputy governor of
Tawi-Tawi in the 1920s; and Julius was involved in government affairs on Jolo
during the 1930s.43
The Chinese in Mindanao-Sulu, whose presence dated back centuries but
had grown rapidly in the nineteenth century, often served state purposes.
Many of them moneylenders or merchants, they existed in a space between
the Americans, Filipinos, Moros, and Lumad groups. Although subject to racist
tropes, the Chinese functioned as useful “others” for the authorities. Gover
nor Bliss declared that the Chinese residents of the Moro Province w ere “hard
at work improving and developing the country,” reflecting the commonly held
American view that the Chinese w ere more pliable than native populations.44
On Jolo white residents turned to the merchant Ah Wah On for suit tailor
ing, new shoes, food, and “Moro curios.”45 In the Cotabato district, colonial
officials relied heavily on a local leader of Chinese descent named Datu Piang.
Born to a Chinese father and a Moro m other in 1846, Piang grew up in the
court of the Maguindanao ruler Datu Uto and as an adult gained political power
through collaboration with the Spanish.46 Recognizing opportunity in a time
of imperial transfer, he raised the American flag in Cotabato before U.S. Army
troops arrived there.47 Unlike more traditionally minded local strongmen in
the southern Philippines, he understood that the integration of Southeast Asia
into larger colonial trade regimes signaled the end of Maguindanao as a politi
cally independent space. In an era of increased commercial regulation, Piang
adapted to new realities better than most, leveraging the goodwill of U.S. mili
tary authorities (who viewed him as the ideal Moro) to expand his commercial
holdings, all while exercising firm control of a regional despot. Piang’s liminal
origins and considerable natural abilities allowed him to negotiate the power

dynamics of the Maguindanao elite as well as successive colonial regimes. He
enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship with the Americans until his death
in 1933.48
Regional relationships also s haped the U.S. colonial state in Mindanao-Sulu,
especially those with British North Borneo. Acquired through negotiations be
tween British businessmen and the sultans of Brunei and Sulu, the territory
received a royal charter in 1881, and the resulting British North Borneo Char
tered Company attempted to develop it for the profit of its shareholders and the
glory of the empire.49 Viewing the resulting demarcations (rightly) as revenue-
generation schemes by their leaders, the inhabitants of Sulu and North Borneo
made a limited distinction between the territories. In the years following the
Spanish-American War, the southern Philippines maintained closer links with
Sandakan than they did with the North. On a practical level, this meant Zambo
anga was a nodal point for commercial and political networks operating out of
London and Singapore rather than Washington and Manila. Recognizing t hese
important linkages, John Bates attempted to secure the services of the British
academic Nicholas Belfield Dennys—then working for the North Borneo Com
pany at Sandakan—during his treaty negotiations with Sultan Jamalul Kiram in
1899.50 American military officials saw their own fortunes reflected in the Brit
ish experiences on Borneo. The district governor of Sulu Hugh Scott felt Rajah
James Brooke of Sarawak’s efforts to reduce banditry and build a “substantial”
government provided strong examples for the United States to emulate.51 Not
all Americans approved of British methods on the island, however. Visiting
Sandakan in 1922, one administrator, John C. Early, sneered at the British, who
lived off the “wages of shame” by legalizing and regulating vice. The British had
failed in their paternal mission, he believed, by running the colony like a busi
ness (which, in effect, it was). This disavowal of the “uplift movement” caused
a state of dissipation so acute that opium-addicted Chinese laborers fled to Sulu
and Mindanao to escape their intolerable conditions.52
Despite their best efforts, Americans had a difficult time controlling traffic
between the southern Philippines and Borneo. Authorities snuffed out trans
border slaving and smuggling rings only to have others reappear. Plans to regu
late trade, migration, and vice foundered in the face of entrenched regional
practices driven by kinship and commercial networks. Apart from the “constant
ingress of Chinese from Borneo through the southern islands” that bothered
officials such as John C. Early, population transfers also occurred during times
of famine or epidemic. A variety of challenges confronted Americans, from re
sponding to Sandakan brothel owners who petitioned for permission to op
erate in Zamboanga, to chasing, detaining, and deporting illegal migrants.53

E. L. Cook, a customs inspector in Jolo, found the smuggling of people and
goods so vexatious that he submitted plans to Manila aimed at reorganizing the
entire district. The situation never resolved itself u nder the Americans. Two
decades later the government experimented with travel passes aimed at “mini
mizing the smuggling of aliens between the southern islands and the colonies
near Mindanao, like Borneo and the East Indies.”54
The unchecked movement of goods and peoples through the Sulu Sea led
Americans to work directly with other empires. British and Dutch authorities
already coordinated to limit the illicit trade of firearms and munitions between
their respective spaces and were soon joined by their U.S. counterparts. The
“enormous flows” of weapons traveling through the smuggling routes of Sulu
troubled American military figures, ultimately leading to sustained campaigns
to disarm the Moros.55 Dialogues on intercolonial policing and surveillance
began as early as 1899, when the head of the Philippine Commission, Jacob
Gould Schurman, liaised with R. M. L ittle, the British resident at Labuan. A fter
establishing a system of colonial policing in Sulu, the Americans t here regularly
swapped information and coordinated actions with the British Bornean posses
sions. The theft of ivory from a museum in Sandakan, for example, elicited the
execution of searches on U.S.-controlled Siminul. In 1905 a Sulu-based outlaw
named Pala raided a settlement in North Borneo, killing thirty-five before re
turning to Jolo. Signaling the severity of the crime, District Governor Hugh
Scott received an official arrest and extradition request from the British gov
ernment at Whitehall. Some 1,200 men from the U.S. Army, Philippine Scouts,
and Moro Constabulary moved against Pala and his followers, killing nearly
all of them in close-quarters fighting.56 Similar incidents occurred in Dutch
possessions. In 1909 seven Moros from the island of Manuk Manka in the Sulu
Archipelago robbed and killed two planters on Sulawesi. Chased by a Dutch
gunboat, they fled back to U.S. territory and disembarked before they could be
captured. The Dutch contacted the Americans at Bongao, who took the attack
seriously enough that they sent four companies of infantry from Jolo to aid in
tracking the fugitives. The Dutch gunboat patrolled the w aters while U.S. forces
searched the island for the outlaws, and the suspects were soon apprehended.57
Pervasive Connections
Speaking before an assembled crowd at Baguio in 1932, John C. Early com
memorated Leonard Wood and Charles Brent. Quoting Cecil Rhodes, he called
the governor general and Episcopal missionary “gentleman adventurers,” plac
ing the career army officer and the moral reformer alongside colonial legends

from both sides of the Atlantic. Early believed the British political officer John
Nicholson, in particular, remained a “vivid personality” to the Pashtuns of the
North-West Frontier, and he claimed Wood and Brent would similarly be “living
personalities” in the hearts of Moros and Filipinos. Early’s sentimental address
bonded the grand figures of two empires within a unified moral history.58 As
evidenced, this romanticism emerged from numerous border-crossing linkages.
In constructing a colonial state in the Islamic Philippines, Americans con
sciously drew from other empires. Inherited Spanish infrastructure provided
the foundations for development projects, and Jesuit ethnographies and regional
histories informed views of the Moros. An aspirational desire to emulate and
surpass the successes of the British Empire drove American colonial elites,
while inspection tours of Dutch and French colonies inspired administrative
and cultural policies in the Moro Province. Personnel with experience across
empires alternately contributed to constructive and destructive state impulses.
In turn, the imperial world took interest in the Muslim South. Annual reports
from the Moro Province reached the commander of British forces in Lahore,
the French ambassador to Spain, Lord Cromer, the British minister in Havana,
Dutch officials on Java, a representative of Standard Oil in Batavia, a major in
the German imperial army, members of the Panama Canal Commission, and
an assortment of European and American academics and journalists.59 Moro
groups also looked afield, using pilgrimages and Ottoman pan-Islamism as
spiritual and temporal bulwarks against U.S. colonial encroachment. Viewing
the religious realm as a Trojan horse for civilizational reform, some Americans
tried to co-opt Islam by utilizing foreign imams and importing emissaries from
the Ottoman Empire. All of this took place amid a maritime environment with
its own connections, forcing Americans to negotiate rule through intermediary
figures and coordinate across borders that w ere often more notional than real
to the region’s inhabitants.
If territorial boundaries are “illusory means of keeping histories apart,”
imperial historiographies have added to this illusion by staying within the
bounds of particular empires.60 Though ostensibly the hinterland of America’s
Pacific possessions, the Muslim South was actually a site of pervasive connec
tivities linking it to the wider world through durable transregional networks.
Mindanao-Sulu became sequestered only through narrow interpretations of
empire that served the historiographic imperatives of the nation-state. Map
ping the American period, then, requires multiscalar and multidirectional
methodologies that track interactions across localities, provinces, nations,
and empires.61 The occupiers of the southern Philippines wrestled with the
heterogeneous and overlapping social geographies of the region, while also

a ctively constructing reciprocal avenues for transfer with other empires. These
dense relational webs and their “uneven pulses” shaped how Americans, Moros,
Filipinos, Europeans, and a variety of other groups positioned themselves rel
ative to one another.62 Studying the Islamic Philippines from the outside in
uncovers the coproduced character of the U.S. Empire in the early twentieth
century, while viewing it from the inside out illustrates how preestablished re
gional connections shaped a colonial state. By relocating an erstwhile periph
ery, these approaches reveal the composite character of American rule and the
societies Americans ruled over in the Pacific.
notes
1. José Rizal, “Filipinas Dentro De Cien Años—IV,” La Solidaridad 18 (January 31,
1890): 48.
2. Christoph Kamissek and Jonas Kreienbaum, “An Imperial Cloud? Conceptualising
Interimperial Connections and Transimperial Knowledge,” Journal of Modern European
History 14, no. 2 (2016): 167. Literature on European empires has steered scholarship on
transimperial interactivities in new directions. See Volker Barth and Roland Cvetkovski,
eds., Imperial Co-operation and Transfer, 1870–1930: Empires and Encounters (New York:
Bloomsbury, 2015); Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Jürgen Kocka, eds., Comparative and
Transnational History: Central European Approaches and New Perspectives (New York:
Berghahn Books, 2009).
3. Jeremy Beckett, “The Datus of the Rio Grande de Cotabato under Colonial Rule,”
Asian Studies 15 (1977): 46–64; Samuel K. Tan, Sulu under American Military Rule,
1899–1913 (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1968). The relationship be
tween commerce and mobility figures heavily into regional histories of Sulu and western
Mindanao. See James Francis Warren, The Sulu Zone: The Dynamics of External Trade,
Slavery, and Ethnicity in the Transformation of a Southeast-Asian Maritime State (Singapore:
National University of Singapore Press, 2007); James Francis Warren, Pirates, Prostitutes,
and Pullers: Explorations in the Ethno-and Social History of Southeast Asia (Crawley: Uni
versity of Western Australia Press, 2008).
4. The problematic and reductive construction of “Moro” identity first by Spanish and
then U.S. colonial administrators is given the space it deserves in Michael C. Hawkins,
Making Moros: Imperial Historicism and American Military Rule in the Philippines’ Muslim
South (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2013), 3–53.
5. Patricio Abinales, Making Mindanao: Cotabato and Davao in the Formation of the Phil-
ippine Nation-State (Quezon City, Philippines: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2000),
61–65; Oliver Charbonneau, “Civilizational Imperatives: American Colonial Culture in
the Philippines, 1899–1942,” PhD diss., University of Western Ontario, 417–23; Carl N.
Taylor, “Powder Keg in Mindanao,” T oday Magazine, March 7, 1936.
6. Two important exceptions venture into comparative and transimperial territory:
Donna J. Amoroso, “Inheriting the ‘Moro Problem’: Muslim Authority and Colonial Rule in
British Malaya and the Philippines,” in The American Colonial State in the Philippines: Global

Perspectives, edited by Julian Go and Anne L. Foster (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2003), 118–47; Karine V. Walther, Sacred Interests: The United States and the Islamic
World, 1821–1921 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 157–240. The
standard account of the Moro Province and the Department of Mindanao and Sulu
remains Peter G. Gowing, Mandate in Moroland: The American Government of Muslim
Filipinos, 1899–1920 (Quezon City, Philippines: New Day, 1983).
7. Pierre-Yves Saunier, Transnational History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 7;
Michael Adas, “From Settler Colony to Global Hegemon: Integrating the Exceptionalist
Narrative of the American Experience into World History,” American Historical Review
106, no. 5 (2001): 1692–720; Julian Go, Patterns of Empire: The British and American
Empires, 1688 to the Present (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2011);
Anne L. Foster, Projections of Power: The United States and Europe in Colonial Southeast
Asia, 1919–1941 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Frank Schumacher, “The
United States: Empire as a Way of Life?,” in The Age of Empires, edited by Robert Aldrich
(London: Thames and Hudson, 2007), 278–303; Ian Tyrrell, Reforming the World: The
Creation of America’s Moral Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).
8. Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, “Empires and the Reach of the Global,” in
A World Connecting: 1870–1945, edited by Emily Rosenberg (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2012), 296.
9. Susan K. Harris, God’s Arbiters: Americans and the Philippines, 1898–1902 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011), 3–37.
10. Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked
the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1998), 15–42; Greg Bankoff, “The Science of Nature and the Nature of Science in the
Spanish and American Philippines,” in Cultivating the Colonies: Colonial States and Their
Environmental Legacies, edited by Christina Folke Ax et al. (Columbus: Ohio University
Press, 2011), 78–108.
11. Aitor Anduaga, “Spanish Jesuits in the Philippines: Geophysical Research and
Synergies between Science, Education and Trade, 1865–1898,” Annals of Science 71, no. 4
(2014): 519–21; Bankoff, “The Science of Nature,” 88–91; Allan E. S. Lumba, “Imperial
Standards: Colonial Currencies, Racial Capacities, and Economic Knowledge during
the Philippine-American War,” Diplomatic History 39, no. 4 (2015): 603–28; Alfred W.
McCoy, Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the
Surveillance State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 59–125.
12. John Foreman, “Spain and the Philippine Islands,” Contemporary Review 74 (1898):
32–33.
13. Memorandum I, 1899, Folder 9, Box 2, John C. Bates Papers, U.S. Army Heritage
and Education Center, Carlisle, PA (henceforth usahec).
14. Elwell Otis to John Bates, July 3, 1899, Folder 1, Box 2, John C. Bates Papers,
usahec.
15. Francisco X. Baranera, Compendio de la Historia de Filipinas (Manila: Estableci
miento Tipo-Litografico de M. Perez, 1884), 120–21.
16. Untitled Spanish history of the southern Philippines, Box 319, John J. Pershing Pa
pers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC (henceforth loc-md).

17. “Wearing the Khaki: Diary of a High Private,” 1901–2, Box 1, Walter L. Cutter
Papers, usahec; John Finley to John Pershing, January 1, 1910, Box 320, John J. Pershing
Papers, loc-md; Memorandum on Policy for the Province of Sulu, September 8, 1934,
Folder 4, Box 30, Joseph Ralston Hayden Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of
Michigan, Ann Arbor (henceforth bhl).
18. Speech, February 1907, Folder 5, Box 43, Tasker Bliss Collection, usahec.
19. Paul A. Kramer, “Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule between
the British and United States Empires, 1880–1910,” Journal of American History 88, no. 4
(2002): 1326; Frank Schumacher, “The American Way of Empire: National Tradition and
Transatlantic Adaptation in America’s Search for Imperial Identity, 1898–1910,” ghi Bulle-
tin 31 (2002): 42; Ian Tyrrell, “The Regulation of Alcohol and Other Drugs in a Colonial
Context: United States Policy towards the Philippines, c. 1898–1910,” Contemporary Drug
Problems 35 (2008): 539–69.
20. Patrick M. Kirkwood, “ ‘Lord Cromer’s Shadow’: Political Anglo-Saxonism and the
Egyptian Protectorate as a Model in the American Philippines,” Journal of World History
27, no. 1 (2016): 1–26; Carnes Lord, Proconsuls: Delegated Political-Military Leadership
from Rome to America Today (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 79;
Journal of W. Cameron Forbes, vol. 3, January 1909, W. Cameron Forbes Papers, loc-md.
21. Charles Brent to Frank McCoy, April 17, 1905, Folder 1, Box 11, Frank Ross McCoy
Papers, loc-md; “Bishop Brent at Zamboanga,” Hartford (CT) Courant, January 15, 1913;
Charles Henry Brent, The Inspiration of Responsibility and Other Papers (New York: Long
mans, Green, 1915), 161–64.
22. Andrew J. Bacevich, Diplomat in Khaki: Major General Frank Ross McCoy and Ameri-
can Foreign Policy, 1898–1949 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989), 22–27; Frank
McCoy to Margaret McCoy, September 3, 1903, Folder 2, Box 15, Hermann Hagedorn
Papers, loc-md.
23. George W. Davis, Annual Report of Major General George W. Davis, United States
Army, Commanding Division of the Philippines, from October 1, 1902 to July 26, 1903 (Manila:
N.p., 1903), 12–110.
24. John McAuley Palmer to Tasker Bliss, January 12, 1908, Folder 11, Box 1, John
McAuley Palmer Papers, loc-md.
25. Emily Rosenberg, “Transnational Currents in a Shrinking World,” in Rosenberg,
A World Connecting, 919–20; Michael Adas, Dominance by Design: Technological Impera-
tives in America’s Civilizing Mission (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 2007), 150.
26. “Address to be Delivered by Major General Frank R. McCoy at Graduation Exer
cises, New Mexico College of Agricultural and Mechanical Arts,” May 23, 1933, Box 82,
Frank Ross McCoy Papers, loc-md.
27. “Lieutenant Preuss Wounded in Action,” Box 1, Sterling Loop Larrabee Papers,
usahec; Vic Hurley, Jungle Patrol: The Story of the Philippine Constabulary (New York:
E. P. Dutton, 1938), 286–87; John Pershing, My Life before the World War, 1860–1917: A
Memoir, edited by John T. Greenwood (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013),
572; Robert Fulton, Moroland: The History of Uncle Sam and the Moros, 1899–1920 (Bend,
OR: Tumalo Creek Press, 2009), 407–9.

28. Hurley, Jungle Patrol, 287; “Official Reports relating to Punitive Expedition to
Lake Numungan, “1911, Folder 2, Box 2, Sterling Loop Larrabee Papers, usahec; “The
Horseman’s Album: A Tribute to Sterling Loop Larrabee, Master of the Old Dominion
Foxhounds,” January 1935, Folder 3, Box 2, Sterling Loop Larrabee Papers, usahec.
29. “Shuster’s Gendarmerie in Persia,” August 1912, Folder 2, Box 2, Sterling Loop Lar
rabee Papers, usahec; Pershing, My Life before the World War, 573.
30. John Finley, “The Mohammedan Problem in the Philippines,” Journal of Race Devel-
opment 5, no. 4 (1915): 357–58.
31. “Conversation with Datu Gundar, Datu Dumiar, Datu Ali, and Datu Acoti,” June 21,
1902, Box 319, John J. Pershing Papers, loc-md.
32. Leonard Wood and Tasker Bliss, Annual Report Department of Mindanao—From
July 1, 1905 to June 30, 1906 (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1906), 9; “Sermon by Charles
Brent Preached at the American Cathedral in Manila,” December 22, 1912, Box 42, Bur
ton Norvell Harrison Family Papers, loc-md.
33. “Prospectus of the Proposed Datu School to Be Established in Zamboanga,” Sep
tember 24, 1906, Box 320, John J. Pershing Papers, loc-md.
34. “A Review of the Moro Petition, Its Origin, Scope and Purpose, and How Its Object
May Be Realized in Aid of the American System of Control,” 1912, Folder 1, Box 1, John P.
Finley Papers, usahec; Joshua Gedacht, “Holy War, Progress, and ‘Modern Mohammed
ans’ in Colonial Southeast Asia,” Muslim World 105, no. 4 (2015): 459.
35. Frank Carpenter to Francis Burton Harrison, February 8, 1914, Box 41, Burton
Norvell Harrison Family Papers, loc-md; J. Franklin Bell to Francis Burton Harrison,
February 11, 1914, Box 41, Burton Norvell Harrison Family Papers, loc-md.
36. Wajih took his role seriously and in 1915 traveled to the United States to petition
President Wilson to allow him to return to the Philippines. His persistence vexed
officials in the Philippines, although the affair resolved itself in an unspectacular man
ner in May 1916, when Wajih fell ill and died in a sanatorium in Richmond, V irginia.
Governor Frank Carpenter, of the newly formed Department of Mindanao and Sulu,
called his death “timely.” For a full account of the Shaykh al-Islam of the Philippines,
see William G. Clarence-Smith, “Wajih al-Kilani, Shaykh al-Islam of the Philippines
and Notable of Nazareth, 1913–1916,” in Nazareth History and Cultural Heritage:
Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference, Nazareth, July 2–5, 2012, edited by
Mahmoud Yazbak et al. (Nazareth, Israel: Municipality of Nazareth Academic Publica
tions, 2013), 172–92.
37. “Speech by Dwight F. Davis at Manila H otel,” April 14, 1931, File 18865–55, Box
916, General Classified Files 1898–1945 (1914–45 Segment), Record Group 350.3—
Entry 5, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD (henceforth
nara-cp).
38. Dwight F. Davis to Patrick J. Hurley, File 18865–55, Box 916, General Classified
Files 1898–1945 (1914–45 Segment), rg 350.3—Entry 5, nara-cp; Anne L. Foster, Projec-
tions of Power: The United States and Europe in Southeast Asia, 1919–1939 (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2010), 39–41.
39. James Francis Warren, “The Sulu Zone, the World Capitalist Economy and the
Historical Imagination: Problematizing Global-Local Interconnections and Interdepen

dencies,” Southeast Asian Studies 35, no. 2 (1997): 177–83; Eric Tagliacozzo, Secret Trades,
Porous Borders: Smuggling and States along a Southeast Asian Frontier, 1865–1915 (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 307–9.
40. Domingo M. Non, “Moro Piracy during the Spanish Period and Its Impact,” South-
east Asian Studies 30, no. 4 (1993): 401–10; Charbonneau, “Civilizational Imperatives,”
268–83.
41. “The Monkeys Have No Tails in Zamboanga,” unpublished memoirs of Charles
Ivins, Box 1, Charles Ivins Papers, usahec.
42. Volker Schult, “Sulu and Germany in the Late Nineteenth C entury,” Philippine
Studies 48, no. 1 (2000): 80–99. For a more detailed account of Herman Schuck’s
life, see Michael Schuck Montemayor, Captain Herman Leopold Schuck: The Saga of a
German Sea Captain in 19th-Century Sulu-Sulawesi Seas (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i
Press, 2006).
43. “Report by John Bates on Trip to Jolo,” August 21, 1899, Folder 1, Box 2, John Bates
Papers, usahec; “Proceedings of a Board of Officers Convened at Jolo,” December 13,
1903, Folder 6, Box 55, Hugh Lenox Scott Papers, loc-md; “Report of Engagement with
the Enemy on Bud Dajo, Island of Jolo,” March 10, 1906, Folder 6, Box 217, Leonard
Wood Papers, loc-md; James Fugate to Henry L. Stimson, September 1, 1928, Folder 28,
Box 29, Joseph Ralston Hayden Papers, bhl; James Fugate to Joseph Hayden, Decem
ber 28, 1933, Folder 29, Box 29, Joseph Ralston Hayden Papers, bhl.
44. Tasker Bliss, The Annual Report of the Governor of the Moro Province—for the Fiscal
Year Ended June 30, 1907 (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1907), 23.
45. Programme of the Jolo Agricultural and Industrial Fair (Jolo, Philippines: R. B. Hayes
Printer, 1906), 10.
46. Patricio Abinales, “From Orang Besar to Colonial Big Man: Datu Piang of Cotabato
and the American Colonial State,” in Lives at the Margin: Biography of Filipinos Obscure,
Ordinary, and Heroic, edited by Alfred W. McCoy (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila
University Press, 2000), 200; Thomas M. McKenna, Muslim Rulers and Rebels: Everyday
Politics and Armed Separatism in the Southern Philippines (Berkeley: University of Califor
nia Press, 1998), 91–92.
47. John Bates to 8th Army Chief of Staff, December 17, 1899, Folder 13, Box 2, John
Bates Papers, usahec.
48. Abinales, “From Orang Besar to Colonial Big Man,” 208
49. Amity Doolittle, “Colliding Discourses: Western Land Laws and Native Customary
Rights in North Borneo, 1881–1918,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 34, no. 1 (2003):
99–100; Nicholas Tarling, “Further Notes on the Historiography of British Borneo,”
Borneo Research Bulletin 36 (2005): 213–28.
50. Vic Hurley, The Swish of the Kris (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1936), 79–80; John Bates
to Adjutant General, August 21, 1899, Folder 1, Box 2, John Bates Papers, usahec.
51. “Killing of Moros,” Washington Post, March 20, 1906.
52. “Reminiscences of John C. Early,” 1920s, Box 1, John C. Early Papers, bhl.
53. John C. Early to Dwight F. Davis, December 20, 1930, Folder 29, Box 28, Joseph
Ralston Hayden Papers, bhl; Otama to William Kobbé, February 27, 1901, Folder 7, Box
3, William August Kobbé Papers, usahec.

54. E. L. Cook to W. Morgan Shuster, August 11, 1906, Folder 66, Box 15, Tasker Bliss
Collection, usahec; “Passes for Moros,” August 29, 1926, Folder 11, Box 30, Joseph
Ralston Hayden Papers, bhl.
55. Tagliacozzo, Secret Trades, 308–10.
56. R. M. Little to U.S. Navy Commander, August 23, 1899, Folder 2, Box 1, John Bates
Papers, usahec; Kramer, “Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons,” 1352; George Dun
can to Adjutant General, November 1, 1902, Folder 3, Box 55, Hugh Lenox Scott Papers,
loc-md; “Report from Leonard Wood to Military Secretary on 3rd Sulu Expedition,”
May 22, 1905, Folder 2, Box 11, Frank Ross McCoy Papers, loc-md; Fulton, Moroland,
242–44.
57. John Pershing, Annual Report of Brigadier General John J. Pershing, U.S. Army, Gov-
ernor of the Moro Province, for the Year Ending August 31, 1910 (Zamboanga, Philippines:
Mindanao Herald, 1910), 19–20.
58. “Gentlemen Adventurers,” speech given at Baguio, February 1932, Box 1, John
Early Papers, bhl.
59. “Mailing List for Annual Reports of the Governor—Moro Province,” Folder 4, Box
217, Leonard Wood Papers, loc-md.
60. Prasenjit Duara, “Transnationalism and the Challenge to National Histories,” in
Rethinking American History in a Global Age, edited by Thomas Bender (Berkeley: Univer
sity of California Press, 2002), 43.
61. Kamissek and Kreienbaum, “The Imperial Cloud,” 180–81; Durba Ghosh, “Another
Set of Imperial Turns?,” American Historical Review 117 (June 2012): 778–79.
62. Shane Ewen, “Lost in Translation? Mapping, Molding, and Managing the Trans
national Municipal Moment,” in Another Global City: Historical Explorations into the
Transnational Municipal Moment, 1850–2000, edited by Pierre-Yves Saunier and Shane
Ewen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 174.

part iv. living transimperially
9. african a merican migration and the climatic
language of anglophone settler colonialism
Ikuko Asaka
In 1830 leaders from northern free black communities convened in Philadel

phia in response to the founding of the Wilberforce colony, a settlement es
tablished by black migrants who had fled to Upper Canada from Cincinnati’s
deteriorating political environment.1 The Philadelphia meeting offered bless
ings and pledges of material support to the settlement and kicked off the black
convention movement, an annual conference series in which delegates dis
cussed abolitionist strategies and the social and political conditions of northern
African Americans. By 1832, however, the wisdom of free African Americans’
migration to Canada had already been called into question. When the conven
tion learned that the Upper Canada House of Assembly had passed antiblack
resolutions in reaction to the Wilberforce colony, it “turned its attention more
to the elevation of our people in this, our native home,” although the convention
“did not wholly abandon the subject.”2
Even as Upper Canada lost much of its appeal as a practical way to advance
the lives of northern African Americans, it took on symbolic significance.
Upper Canada served the convention in its fight against a bane of northern
black Americans: the American Colonization Society (acs), which promoted
the removal of f ree and freed African Americans to the colony of Liberia in West
Africa. In 1833 the convention called Upper Canada “a region of country pos
sessing all the advantages of a healthy and salubrious climate, fertile soil, and
equitable laws.” This contrasted favorably with “the desolate regions of Africa,”
where emigrants scorched by the “rays of a meridian sun” would “be compelled
to sacrifice their lives in the insalubrious climate of Liberia, provided for them
by the American Colonization Society.”3 This statement was emblematic of the
general trend among northern African Americans to compare Canada and Li
beria in climatic terms. The simultaneous claim of African Americans’ com
patibility with Canada’s environment and their unfitness for Liberia’s pervaded
northern black discourse on the Wilberforce colony. Support of the colony and
opposition to Liberia went hand in hand in an effort to rebut the biological
foundations of the Liberian colonization scheme—the belief that Africa offered
a climate naturally suitable for African Americans.
Northern black Americans’ strategic invocation of the Wilberforce colony
came in response to essentialist arguments made by supporters of Liberia who
denied the compatibility of the black body with Canada’s climate and, by impli
cation, with any northern clime. Advocates for removal to Liberia denounced
migration to Canada as unnatural and claimed that their project adhered to the
natural law of black fitness for the tropics. Biological assertions about black
people’s unfitness for Canada also appeared in British advocacy of Liberian
colonization. Such assumptions about climate and habitation gave legitimacy
to the project to remove free African Americans from U.S. northern states and
Canada; they also undergirded ongoing white settler colonialism in the British
and U.S. empires.
Behind the opposition to the Wilberforce colony lay presumptions of the in
evitability of white settler dominance in North America. When supporters of
the acs justified Liberian colonization with climatic arguments, they commonly
lumped Canada and the United States as a site for unceasing and inevitable
white expansion and domination unfavorable to free blacks’ social and political
advancement. Thomas Hodgkin, a British physician with a humanitarian bent,
added concern for Indigenous peoples to the mix, maintaining that black migra
tion to Canada, which he opposed on biological grounds, would further encroach
on the already diminished Native land in the province. Although Hodgkin’s de
sire to protect Native populations differentiated him from U.S. supporters of
Liberian colonization, he too viewed white control over Indigenous land and
peoples as destined. Importantly, both British and U.S. advocates of Liberia un
derstood black freedom within a transimperial geographic framework. They col
lectively developed an image of a white settler Anglophone North America in
which free African Americans figured as a deviant population.
Examining how these settler colonial dynamics unfolded in British and U.S.
discourse on Liberia adds to a growing body of work that foregrounds connec
tions and parallels between settler colonial formations in the United States and
the British Empire.4 According to Zoë Laidlaw, scholars of British imperial
206 ikuko asaka

history have been “extending their discussion of settlers beyond the formal limits
of Britain’s nineteenth-century empire.” Laidlaw’s own work analyzes how Hodg
kin’s support for Liberia formed a constitutive part of his criticism of the empire’s
white settler colonies. She demonstrates that Hodgkin championed Liberia—a
“non-British settler society” ostensibly established for antislavery and “civilising”
purposes—as a model for more benign “settler-Indigenous relations” in British
settler colonies. Laidlaw characterizes the African settler society as a site where
“seemingly disconnected places and topics” converged.5 Her work compels us
to recognize “the benefits of placing the post-revolutionary United States in the
same frame as the British Empire” so as to understand the broad intellectual
framework of British humanitarian attitudes t oward settler colonialism.6
Bronwen Everill likewise shows the value of placing U.S. and British African
colonization efforts in the same frame. She compares and connects the develop
ment of Liberia and the British colony of Sierra Leone, arguing that they both
demonstrated the imperialistic nature of British and U.S. humanitarian inter
ventions driven by nonwhite settlers and metropolitan antislavery allies. Such
interventions, she notes, led to the disruption of “local economies, power struc
tures, ideologies, and religions in much the same way that settlers in Australia
or North America overcame the aboriginal p eoples.”7 Highlighting the parallels
between Anglo-American white and nonwhite settler colonies, her work situ
ates the interconnected formation of Liberia and Sierra Leone within broader
studies of British and U.S. settler colonialism and points to the transimperial
nature of the antislavery politics that combined emancipation and relocation.
This essay offers another example of such transimperial dynamics in Britain
and the United States. Discourses surrounding the Wilberforce colony lay bare
white Britons’ and Americans’ interlocking pursuit of white settler dominance
and building of Liberia as a place of black freedom. Furthermore, in both Brit
ain and the United States, the language of climate justified a racialized geog
raphy that divided a white North America and a black Africa, with the impor
tant exception of South Africa, which British discourse considered a temperate
climate.8 Because climatic essentialism was a biological language, it gave form
to a geographic view that traversed Canada and the United States. Faced with
such an encompassing system of categorization, African American leaders in
the U.S. Northeast felt compelled to highlight black successes in Canada, not
only to refute colonizationists’ opposition to the Wilberforce colony but also to
secure their positions at home.
The Wilberforce colony was a product of white animosity against the rising
number of black newcomers in Ohio. The historian Nikki Taylor details how
black migration into the state spurred a series of laws designed to deter the
African American Migration 207

arrival of formerly enslaved refugees and f ree black people. In 1804 Ohio passed
a law that required all African Americans to register themselves. It levied fees
on every person registered, including children. The law also provided that
anyone who settled after June 1, 1804, produce a certificate of freedom. Three
years later another act to inhibit black settlement passed. This time, all African
Americans settling in Ohio w ere ordered to obtain a certificate of settlement by
posting a $500 bond. T hese laws w
ere not enforced for decades, but an increase
of black arrivals between 1800 and 1830 led to a movement to revive the 1807
statute. During those three decades the number of black Ohioans grew from
9,568 to 376,673, the majority of whom settled in the state’s urban areas. React
ing to an enlarged African American population, white inhabitants of Cincin
nati, which saw its black population increase by 400 percent between 1820 and
1829, called for the enforcement of the 1807 law. The ominous development led
to a meeting of the city’s black residents to elect two representatives to survey a
site in Upper Canada for a colony.9
According to Taylor, black Ohioans responded by moving to Upper Canada to
realize their aspirations of becoming landowning settlers. Their representatives
met with the lieutenant governor of Upper Canada, General John Colbourne,
and reportedly received these affirming words: “Tell the Republicans on your
side of the line that we Royalists do not know men by their color. Should you
come to us you w ill be entitled to all the privileges of the rest of His Majesty’s
subjects.” The agents arranged a contract to purchase a tract of land from the
Canada Company, the royal chartered company established to promote the co
lonial development of the province. Subsequently black residents left the city in
the summer of 1829 for a new colony located in Biddulph Township, a secluded
community surrounded by thick forests. Ensuing recruiting efforts brought in
settlers from other northern cities, and by 1832 there were thirty-two families
in the new settlement, which was named a fter the British abolitionist William
Wilberforce.10
The Wilberforce colony rankled white colonists in its vicinity. In no time,
local residents submitted petitions to the provincial parliament to “prohibit the
general influx of colored population from entering their limits.”11 In response,
the House of Assembly passed a series of resolutions, one of which read, “The
sudden introduction of a mass of Black Population, likely to continue without
limitation, is a matter so dangerous to the peace and comfort of the inhabitants,
that it now becomes necessary to prevent or check, by some prudent restric
tions, this threatened evil.”12
The resolutions fused the colonial settlers’ antiblack sentiment and their
discontent with metropolitan and oligarchical dominance over provincial af
208 ikuko asaka

fairs. The assembly viewed the Canada Company’s sale of land as a disregard
of white settlers’ welfare by the metropolitan government and colonial elites
who had ties to the company. The assembly members charged that “the Canada
Company seems not to have duly reflected on the danger in which it involves
the peace and happiness of the people.” “The act of Imperial Parliament, con
stituting this Company,” they declared, “marks the subject of t hese resolutions,
as one of the many evils which must result from Legislation, by the Imperial
parliament in matters of the internal concerns of this Province.”13
From the Canada Company’s standpoint, the Wilberforce settlers provided
readily available labor for the cultivation of land and for the construction of a
railroad. Some of the residents were contracted to work on six and a quarter
miles of the stretch of rail line running from “the district of London to the
village of Goderich, a distance of about forty miles.”14 But the company’s in
ducement of black migrants impressed the colonists as a glaring example of the
overarching reach of metropolitan and oligarchical powers. Such frustrations
soon exploded in the Rebellion of 1837, in which opponents of the F amily Com
pact took up arms.
News of the assembly’s denouncement of the black migrants quickly reached
the United States, leading acs supporters to propagate the view that the Ca
nadian frontier had joined the new state of Ohio as off-limits to free blacks.
Calling the migrants “unwelcome intruders,” the African Repository, the offi
cial organ of the acs, characterized Upper Canada as equally adverse as Ohio
to black residence. B ecause of the province’s comparable racial hierarchy, the
paper opined, it “never expected any beneficial results, from the attempt of
the coloured p eople in Ohio, to settle themselves in Canada.”15 Black exclusion
was not limited to the United States; it was par for the course in British North
America as well.
John Russwurm, an African American convert to the cause of Liberian colo
nization, put forth a racial geography of the Atlantic world in which Canada
and the United States, unlike Liberia, signified denial of equal status to black
people. Russwurm, one of the founding editors of the first African American
newspaper, the Freedom’s Journal, did an about-face on his position on Libe
ria in early 1829 and later that year left for the colony to become superinten
dent of Liberian schools and editor of the colony’s first newspaper, the Liberian
Herald.16 Upon hearing of Upper Canada’s antiblack resolutions, he wrote in
the Herald that the Wilberforce migrants proved “ignorant” of the “prejudices”
about which “the Resolutions of the Legislature of Upper Canada speak vol
umes.” The doctrine of black exclusion operated across borders, making the two
Anglophone North American settler societies into a whites-only space. This

white North America, in his geographic view, racially contrasted with a black
Africa: “It requires no prophetic eye to foretell that to them and their posterity,
there is no abiding place on the other side of the Atlantic.”17
After being reprinted in the African Repository, Russwurm’s editorial reached
a wider audience of colonization supporters in the United States. Concurring
with Russwurm, the New York State Colonization Society called the migra
tion to Upper Canada “unfortunate and injudicious.” It drew a parallel between
the province and the United States, classifying both as inimical to free African
Americans. “These poor p eople,” it concluded, “must t here be u nder the same
unfavorable circumstances, in regard to their advancement and improvement,
as they were in the United States.”18 Neither the United States nor the British
colony offered equitable or favorable prospects to free blacks.
The bleak outlook accompanied imagery of unstoppable white expansion.
Henry Clay, a founder of the acs who later became its president, rhetorically
asked where free blacks should go when “the South casts them out, the North
has no place for them, the West pushes them onward, Canada repels them.”
Should they start moving further west “toward the setting sun?” The answer
was no, for “the tide of population would ere long push them into the Pacific.”
With the unceasing expansion that would soon reach the Pacific, “in Africa
alone can they escape the ruinous rivalry of the white man, for there the white
men dare not follow them.” Clay’s remark revealed two t hings: his recognition
that black persecution traversed North America’s Anglophone white settler
societies and his belief in the integral role that Liberian colonization should
play in the establishment of a white North America.19
Supporters of whites-only settler societies worked to naturalize their visions
through the racialized concept of black tropical fitness. This ideology had played
a major role in British discourse on the black Loyalists’ relocation to Sierra
Leone in the aftermath of the American Revolution.20 By the 1830s references
to climatic fitness had spread from discussions of Sierra Leone to discussions of
nearby Liberia. Therefore, when the Wilberforce colony entered the conversa
tion, the acs quickly turned to the familiar language of climate. Even before the
migrants had lived in the province for a full year, the African Repository jumped
to the conclusion that “neither the Government, the p eople, nor the climate of
Canada, are favorable to their wishes.” The paper saw no need to collect empiri
cal evidence, for it believed that the black body’s inherent unfitness for cold cli
mates had already been proven true by the black Loyalists who had moved from
Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone. Failing to acknowledge the role of inequitable land
distribution in driving the Loyalists from Nova Scotia, the African Repository
ascribed their departure solely to climatic reasons: “It o ught to be remembered,
210 ikuko asaka

that the coloured p eople who joined the English in the Revolutionary War, and
had lands assigned to them in Nova Scotia, entreated the British Government,
to remove them from that frosty region, to Sierra Leone, and that a compliance
with that request alone, probably saved them from destruction.”21
George Washington Parke Custis, an avid supporter of the acs, likewise em
ployed climatic language when he joined in the chorus of objections to black
migration to Canada. Much like Clay, he juxtaposed a black Africa and a white
Anglophone North America, envisioning white Americans’ destined monopoly
on Indigenous land:
Some say, colonize in Canada. Is that the region, Sir, for the children
of the sun, who are barely comfortable at a temperature of 98 of Faren
heit [sic]? The idea is ridiculous—absurd. Others say, establish colonies
of free colored people in the far West. I say no. We want all the West for
ourselves.—“Westward the star of empire takes its way,” and soon our
own citizens will tread the shores of the Pacific. By oceans alone, are we
to be bound. No, Sir; let us return the children of Africa under their own
blazing vertical sun; the climate best adapted to their nature and habits.22
Custis’s remarks exhibited the degree to which Liberian colonization served

white settler colonial interests by claiming the North American West only for
whites. He drew on biological language to make black exclusion seem both hu
manitarian and inevitable. In resorting to such language, he promoted a geo
graphic outlook that transcended national distinctions. According to this line
of thinking, social and political differences between Britain’s Canadian colony
and the United States held little meaning because racial biology outweighed
nationally distinct f actors in the explanation of a group’s relationship to a place.
African Americans in the U.S. North were well aware of the racially es
sentialist grounding of Liberian colonization advocacy. This was manifest at
a meeting of “the colored citizens of Boston,” convened in early 1831 “for the
purpose of expressing their sentiments in a remonstrance against the d oings
of the [Massachusetts] State Colonization Society.” In protesting against “the
plan of dragging us to Africa,” the participants rebutted the colonizationist as
sertion that “the climate w ill be more congenial to our health” with evidence of
debilitation among the migrants: “What better proof do we want of its salubrity,
than to know that of the numerous bodies who have embarked [in Liberia], a
large portion of them have immediately fallen victims, on their arrival, to the
pestilence usual to that place?”23
The Boston meeting also brought to light African Americans’ awareness of
the white settler impulse underlying the Liberian colonization project. The

black Bostonians objected to “one of the leaders of the newly formed Society
[the Massachusetts State Colonization Society]” who “argued that in case a col
ony was formed for the blacks in the United States, they would in a short time
be removed, as has been the case with the poor Indians.” They protested against
this outlook “on the ground of t here being sufficient land in the United States,
on which a colony might be established that would better meet the wishes of
the colored people.”24
Black residents of Trenton, New Jersey, expressed similar sentiments. They
enumerated the main arguments peddled by the acs, which included climatic
essentialism and black exclusion from settler expansion in the western ter
ritories and states, and they called the organization their e nemy because of
those objectionable positions. In addition to negative characterizations of Af
rican Americans, disregard of their American identity, and opposition to their
education, “opposition to our having a part of the West appointed to us” and
“false statements in relation to the health of the colony at Liberia” made the
acs “our greatest foe.”25 Since slaveholders were seizing the Southwest for
themselves, the areas of colonial settlement they desired access to were those
in the Northwest.
The Wilberforce colony became politically significant in this larger context.
African Americans were cognizant that Liberian colonizationists’ opposition to
the colony served to buttress their claim that Africa was the natural home of
free African Americans. In rebuttal, black northerners publicly expressed their
support of the Wilberforce colony in climatic terms at anticolonization meet
ings. At “a respectable meeting of Afric-Americans” in Columbia, Pennsylvania,
convened “with a view of taking into consideration the novel scheme of the
American Colonization Society,” the attendees referred to the Canadian settle
ment in their protest of the African scheme. In addition to citing cultural and
linguistic affinity with Canada, they explained their “support [for] the colony
at Canada” in terms of “the climate being healthier, better adapted to our con
stitutions.”26
Similar juxtapositions of Africa and Canada suffused anticolonization meet
ings in other parts of the North. Black residents in Brooklyn espoused “Upper
Canada; a place far better adapted to our constitutions, our habits, and our mor
als” than Liberia.27 Their counterparts in Rochester, New York, contrasted Af
rica and Upper Canada in similar fashion: “We never w ill remove to Africa; but
should any of our brethren wish to emigrate, we would recommend Canada as a
country far more congenial to our constitutions.”28 And in Harrisburg, Pennsyl
vania, an anticolonization meeting resolved, “That we w ill support the Colony
in Canada, the climate being healthy and the rights of our brethren secured.”29
212 ikuko asaka

The Wilberforce colony thus became a locus through which questions of race
and belonging unfolded in the United States. Opponents and supporters of Li
berian colonization weighed in on the settlement by way of presenting their
views on African Americans’ place in the expanding settler republic.
The U.S. supporters of Liberian colonization w ere not the only ones who re
jected the Wilberforce colony as senseless and unnatural. Thomas Hodgkin, the
English physician, jumped into the fray. His support of Liberia was conjoined
with his disapproval of the Canadian settlement. He framed his opposition in
biological language and characterized Canada as a white settler society out of
bounds to black residence. His defense of black exclusion, however, proved
slightly different from that of white Americans. Hodgkin’s backing of Liberia
stemmed from a combination of two strands of British humanitarianism: older
antislavery commitments and the emergent concern about anti-Indigenous vio
lence in the empire’s new white settler colonies.30
In regard to the first issue, Liberia offered him a means to precipitate
gradual abolition of U.S. slavery and the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade
by promoting “legitimate commerce.”31 This antislavery impulse intersected
with another concern of British abolitionists during this time: the future of
the emancipated p eople in the British Caribbean. These people came into
the picture when Hodgkin established a London-based organization to pro
mote the colonization of Liberia. Because British abolitionists proved unre
ceptive to the acs, Hodgkin felt the need to set up a base independent of the
acs: the British African Colonization Society. This organization, founded in
July 1833, sought to build British-led settlements at Cape Mount (in present-
day northwestern Liberia), with the attendant goal of repressing the Atlantic
and African slave trade through British merchants’ “co-operation, to intro
duce a mutual and beneficial commerce.” The settlements’ residents would
come from local Indigenous people, “a few individuals from Liberia,” and
emancipated p eople from the British Caribbean. The promotion of British
commerce and the introduction of Caribbean emancipated people made this
endeavor “more exclusively British”: “It turns its attention to our own colo
nies, and opens a field of promising and laudable enterprise to some of their
emancipated slaves.”32
With regard to the issue of settler colonial violence, Hodgkin agreed with
U.S. opponents of the Wilberforce colony that white settler colonists would
inevitably oppress blacks in Upper Canada. He warned that “this or any other
colony of Blacks, e ither within or closely-adjoining territories already in the
occupation of Whites,” would surely fail b ecause “the colonists [would] neces
sarily have to compete with the Whites, and at the same time to contend with

the violent and general prejudice against themselves,” as was plainly displayed
by “the Authorities of Canada.”33
But Hodgkin’s view of settler colonial relations departed from that of his
American colleagues in one respect: his interest in Indigenous protection. Such
an attitude reflected the rise of humanitarian interest that accompanied the
historical “proliferation of new encounters between emigrant Britons and In
digenous peoples between 1820 and 1860” in Britain’s white settler colonies
in North America, Oceania, and South Africa.34 Faced with the new settler
frontiers in which abuse, violence, and dispossession ran rampant, the govern
ment appointed a Select Committee on Aborigines to survey white-Indigenous
relations in Britain’s expanding settler empire and to devise a proper strategy.
Hodgkin arranged witnesses and evidential material for the committee and
went on to found the Aborigines Protection Society with some of the members
of the select committee to ensure that the government implemented the com
mittee’s policy recommendations.35
Hodgkin’s objection to black migration to Canada was part of his effort to
restrain the rapacious dispossession of Indigenous people in British settler col
onies. This did not mean that he contested colonization itself. He saw colonial
expansion as inevitable and aimed only for regulation and reform. He urged im
perial intervention to rein in avaricious settlers, regulate land grabs, and train
and educate Indigenous groups in British social, l egal, and political customs as
a tool for self-protection within the colonial system.36 As Laidlaw rightly notes,
the “attempt to protect or elevate the uncivilized” involved “the removal (even
if temporary and voluntary) of children for education in Britain, the conversion
of heathens to Christianity and the inherently destructive process of ‘civilis
ing’ societies.”37 In short, Hodgkin never acknowledged the right of Indigenous
peoples to exist as autonomous, sovereign entities.
Although white settlers were responsible for Indigenous dispossession in
both the British and U.S. settler empires, Hodgkin focused his ire on black
settlement in frontier regions in Upper Canada and the United States. He pre
dicted that “in proportion as it [black settlement] succeeds, it must tend to
accelerate the extinction of another race, the yet more unfortunate victims of
European and American policy—I mean that of the North-American Indians.”
The humanitarian physician expressed his “heartfelt regret, that . . . nothing
effectual should be undertaken for that interesting but most-injured Race,
once the sole possessors of that vast territory now appropriated by the United
States.”38 In this statement, Hodgkin cast his opposition to the Wilberforce
colony as a means to a righteous end: reducing the erosion of Indigenous
land. Instead of calling for a halt to white expansion, Hodgkin opposed free
214 ikuko asaka

blacks’ settlement in North America and advocated for their relocation to
Africa.
Biological essentialism buttressed such racial mapping. Hodgkin’s leading ob
jection to the Wilberforce colony was climatic incongruity. “In the first place,”
he wrote, “the climate presents an insuperable physiological objection to the
settlement, as a Negro colony. . . . The attempt to colonize the African race in
the North appears to me to be in evident opposition to the indications of na
ture; and to be very much like attempting to substitute the palm-trees of the
same continent for the pines on the mountains of Norway.”39
Hodgkin drew on “the valuable researches of Dr. Prichard, in support of
the assertion, that a population of African Race is not calculated to be perma
nent in the latitude of the Wilberforce Settlement.”40 James Cowles Prichard,
a physician and ethnologist, was one of the founding members of the Aborigi
nes Protection Society. A believer in monogenesis, Prichard maintained that
Indigenous peoples, originating from the same species as Europeans, had the
capacity of civilizational advancement equal to Westerners.41 But his monoge
netic belief also held that different races had various climatic compatibilities.
Such an idea, as contemporaries pointed out, closely resembled the polygene
tic notion of “the peculiar fitness of different races of men to inhabit different
climates.” An adherent of distinct racial origins noted comparability between
Prichard’s theory and polygenism: “The Caucasian he [Prichard] pronounces
best suited to temperate, and the African to torrid regions. He even confesses,
that by an interchange of climate, planting the former under a tropical, and the
latter under a northern sky, the health of each is materially injured.”42
Indeed Prichard wrote in his treatise Researches into the Physical History of
Mankind that “the diseases to which both kinds of p eople are subject in the cli
mate appropriated to the other, is the impediment which had prevented large
colonies of whites from forming themselves and multiplying in tropical Africa,
and of Negroes in the North.” However, his monogenetic theory on how “the
varieties of mankind likewise are in a degree suited to certain climates” differed
from its polygenetic counterpart in that the former explained the variations
without denying common ancestry of the races. That is, Prichard argued that
each race’s peculiar suitability resulted from its long-term adaptation to “par
ticular local situations.” He called this process “local adaptation,” a process that
“appears to have been accomplished by the original modification of a genus into
a variety of species.”43
Hodgkin’s monogenetic strand of climatic essentialism did ideological work
commensurate with Custis’s enlistment of determinist theories. Hodgkin dis
tinguished the West African coast and Anglophone settler societies into two

separate geographic categories along a black-white axis. In a letter to the 1840
World Anti-Slavery Convention—a meeting organized in London by the lead
ing British abolitionist society, the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society—
he contrasted the “colonization of American colored p eople” with the efforts of
“Europeans to emigrate to America, South Africa, or New Zealand.” The latter
regions were considered temperate, while “the coast of Africa” was by nature a
black destination, “where, had I a colored skin myself to enable me to endure
the scorching, yet enriching influence of the sun, together with sufficient ambi
tion for the enterprise, I would seek the magnum imperium ubi virtus enitescere
posset [the great government where a man’s valor could shine].”44
Hodgkin’s demurral to the Wilberforce colony was precipitated by the visit
of Nathaniel Paul, an African American pastor who had moved from Albany,
New York, to the Canadian settlement in 1830. Sent by the colony’s board of
managers, Paul took a four-year tour in England, from 1832 to 1836, to collect
donations for the newly established settlement. His call for support of the Wil
berforce colony coincided with an upswing in British opposition to Liberian
colonization. His campaign solidified anti-Liberian sentiment already perva
sive among British abolitionists, thanks to the transatlantic flow of American
abolitionist newspapers, and impressed on Elliott Cresson, an acs agent sent to
Britain in 1831 to muster British support for the society, that “success of [Cres
son’s] agency depended on the ability of the acs to undermine the Canadian
Colony’s credibility with British humanitarians.”45 It was against this backdrop
that Hodgkin, along with Cresson, established the British African Coloniza
tion Society to discredit Canadian migration and shore up the cause of African
colonization.46
From Hodgkin’s point of view, African Americans’ preference of the Wilber
force colony over Liberia seemed illogical. In his mind, Liberia could become
what the Canadian settlement was advertised to be: “a place of retreat or refuge
for those Blacks who wish to remove from the pains and penalties to which
prejudice subjects them in the United States.” “In granting this merit to the
colony of Wilberforce,” he continued, “it may very fairly be urged, that Liberia
possesses the same advantages.”47
Hodgkin did not understand that African Americans’ support of the Wil
berforce colony was inseparably tied to their antipathy toward the limiting
racial ideas underlying Liberian colonization. Neither have scholars of black
abolitionism fully discussed this aspect of black support of the Wilberforce col
ony. Much has been said about the importance of the Canadian settlement as
a means to demonstrate African Americans’ capacities for U.S. citizenship. In
Robert Levine’s words, Paul presented the Wilberforce colony “as a voluntary
216 ikuko asaka

black community near the borders of the U.S. (wholly unlike the comparatively
involuntary colony of Liberia) that would demonstrate blacks’ capabilities of
becoming productive citizens in the U.S.”48 But proof of civic virtue was not the
only value African Americans attached to the Wilberforce colony. The repeated
emphasis on the environmental advantage of Canadian migration testified to
an urgently felt need to combat the racial determinism lying at the core of Li
berian colonization. The Wilberforce colony served as a means to prove African
Americans’ fitness for life in the U.S. Northeast and in settler frontiers on both
sides of the U.S.-Canadian line.
To that end, black northerners criticized Hodgkin’s pro-Liberia stance,
painting a positive picture of black life in Canada. They charged that, if given a
choice, any black person would choose Canada over Africa as their new abode.
In its critique of Hodgkin’s letter to the World Anti-Slavery Convention, New
York’s Colored American invoked the Saluda incident, in which some passengers
on the Liberia-bound ship (all of them had been freed on condition of coloniza
tion to Liberia) chose to migrate to Canada “with their own choice” when an
occasion arose.49 The transatlantic voyage began as a pro-colonization propa
gandist enterprise but served the opposite cause in the end. Samuel Wilkeson,
a judge from Buffalo, New York, arranged for African Americans to navigate the
Saluda with a view to “affording them an opportunity of showing their capacity
for the management of their own affairs.” With an advance of $3,000 granted
by the acs, Wilkeson executed the project. The ship sailed from New York to
Liberia a fter stopping at Norfolk, Virginia, to pick up more migrants.50 After
departing from Norfolk, the Saluda, suffering a leak, anchored at Philadelphia
for repairs. During the stop some of the manumitted passengers “bade farewell
to the Saluda, and changed their course for this British asylum, where they now
are ‘contented and happy’ alike beyond the power of the cruel monster, slavery,
and the pestiferous, gangrenous, murderous influence of colonizationism, and
man slaying missionaries.”51 Black opponents of colonization cited this incident
to refute Hodgkin, claiming that it represented “one of the many instances that
would occur, if the same opportunity was offered.”52
Despite the initial enthusiasm, the Wilberforce colony eventually dis
banded following internal feuds.53 A fter the dissolution, Irish migrants moved
to the area in the late 1840s, overwhelming the already shrunken black pop
ulation. These settlers went to great lengths to expel the remaining black
residents, resorting to acts of intimidation and demanding that the Canada
Company not sell any more land to blacks. Eventually the Irish took over the
Wilberforce settlement altogether by purchasing the property and appropri
ating its buildings.54

On the other side of the Atlantic, Hodgkin’s appeal at the World Anti-Slavery
Convention fell on deaf ears. Paul’s mission in England had played an essential
role in consolidating the British rejection of Liberian colonization.55 In dismay,
in late 1834 Hodgkin wrote to Cresson that the British African Colonization
Society had become defunct because of waning interest among its members.56
The plan of building settlements at Cape Mount evaporated as inquiries about
land received no replies from Liberia.57
The rejection of Liberian colonization by British abolitionists did not mean
that they were above climatic essentialism. In the coming decades the British
and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society labored to remove self-emancipated people
living in Canada to the British Caribbean plantations with help from the ideo
logical authority of biological determinism. American supporters of Liberian
colonization continued to work within the same racial paradigm. The notion
of black tropicality became so deeply entrenched in U.S. popular and politi
cal discourse that it went on to define the contours of Republican debates on
emancipation during the Civil War.58
Correspondingly, challenging and negotiating this ideology came to con
stitute a main strand of black politics in both Canada and the United States.
Recourse to national specificity—emphasizing the distinction between a slave
holding republic and a free monarchy, for instance—still held political appeal
and enjoyed abolitionist currency, but free African Americans also fought a
mode of dominance that transcended the nation in its significance and opera
tion. Faced with biological language, they pressed for political rights and social
inclusion as they insisted on their capacity to thrive in the “temperate” settler
societies of North America.
notes
1. Constitution of the American Society of Free Persons of Colour, for Improving Their Condi-
tion in the United States; for Purchasing Lands; and for the Establishment of a Settlement in
Upper Canada, also The Proceedings of the Convention, with Their Address to the Free People
of Colour in the United States (Philadelphia: J. W. Allen, 1831), 9, in Minutes of the Proceed-
ings of the National Negro Conventions, 1830–1864, edited by Howard Bell (New York:
Arno Press and New York Times, 1969).
2. Minutes and Proceedings of the Second Annual Convention, for the Improvement of the
Free People of Color in These United States, held by adjournments in the city of Philadelphia,
from the 4th to the 13th of June inclusive, 1832 (Philadelphia: Published by order of the con
vention, 1832), 17, 18, 20, in Minutes of the Proceedings of the National Negro Conventions.
3. Minutes and Proceedings of the Third Annual Convention, 23, in Minutes of the Proceed-
ings of the National Negro Conventions.
218 ikuko asaka

4. James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-
World, 1783–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty:
Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788–1836 (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2011); Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global
Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cam
bridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
5. Zoë Laidlaw, “Breaking Britannia’s Bounds? Law, Settlers, and Space in Britain’s
Imperial Historiography,” Historical Journal 55, no. 3 (2012): 817.
6. Zoë Laidlaw, “Slavery, Settlers and Indigenous Dispossession: Britain’s Empire
through the Lens of Liberia,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 13, no. 1 (Spring
2012), doi:10.1353/cch.2012.0005. See also Zoë Laidlaw, “ ‘Justice to India—Prosperity to
England—Freedom to the Slave!’ Humanitarian and Moral Reform Campaigns on India,
Aborigines and American Slavery,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and
Ireland 22, no. 2 (2012): 300.
7. Bronwen Everill, Abolition and Empire in Sierra Leone and Liberia (Houndmills, U.K.:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 178.
8. On European views on South Africa, see Brett M. Bennett, “Naturalising Australian
Trees in South Africa: Climate, Exotics and Experimentation,” Journal of Southern African
Studies 37, no. 2 (2011): 265–80; John Edwin Mason, Social Death and Resurrection: Slav-
ery and Emancipation in South Africa (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003),
124–25.
9. Nikki M. Taylor, Frontiers of Freedom: Cincinnati’s Black Community, 1802–1868 (Ath
ens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 21, 28, 32–33, 51, 58, 61.
10. Taylor, Frontiers of Freedom, 61, 67.
11. Minutes and Proceedings of the Second Annual Convention, for the Improvement of the
Free People of Color in These United States, 17.
12. “Colony of Coloured People in Canada,” African Repository and Colonial Journal 6,
no. 1 (March 1830): 28.
13. “Colony of Coloured People in Canada,” 28.
14. Report from the Select Committee on the Extinction of Slavery throughout the British
Dominions; with the Minutes of Evidence, and General Index (London: J. Haddon, 1833),
216.
15. “Colony of Coloured People in Canada,” 27.
16. Winston James, The Struggles of John Brown Russwurm: The Life and Writings of a
Pan-Africanist Pioneer, 1799–1851 (New York: New York University Press, 2010).
17. Quoted from editorial remarks in Liberia Herald, February 1830; “Liberia Herald,”
African Repository and Colonial Journal 7, no. 1 (March 1831): 26.
18. New York State Colonization Society, African Colonization: Proceedings of the New
York State Colonization Society, on Its Second Anniversary; Together with an Address to the
Public, from the Managers Thereof (Albany, NY: Webster and Skinners, 1831), 19.
19. “We Deem the Intrinsic Merit of Mr. Clay’s Address,” African Repository, and Colo-
nial Journal 6, no. 1 (March 1830): 26.
20. Ikuko Asaka, Tropical Freedom: Climate, Settler Colonialism and Black Exclusion in
the Age of Emancipation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).

21. “Colony of Coloured People in Canada,” 27–28.
22. American Colonization Society, The Sixteenth Annual Report of the American Society
for Colonizing the Free People of Colour of the United States with an Appendix (Washington,
DC: James C. Dunn, 1833), xvii.
23. William Lloyd Garrison, Thoughts on African Colonization: Or an Impartial Exhibition
of the Doctrines, Principles and Purposes of the American Colonization Society, together with
the Resolutions, Addresses and Remonstrances of the Free People of Color, Part II (Boston:
Garrison and Knapp, 1832), 17–19.
24. Garrison, Thoughts on African Colonization, 20.
25. Nathaniel Paul, Reply to Mr. Joseph Phillips’ Enquiry respecting “the Light in which the
Operations of the American Colonization Society Are Viewed by the Free People of Colour in
the United States” (London: J. Messeder, 1832), 4.
26. Garrison, Thoughts on African Colonization, 31–33.
30. Alan Lester and Fae Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Gov-
ernance: Protecting Aborigines across the Nineteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge,
U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 14.
31. Quoted in Laidlaw, “Slavery, Settlers and Indigenous Dispossession.”
32. “Dr. Hodgkin’s Remarks on the African Colonization Society,” African Repository
and Colonial Journal 10, no. 10 (December 1834): 309–10. On the British African Colo
nization Society, see also Laidlaw, “ ‘Justice to India,” 310; Laidlaw, “Slavery, Settlers and
Indigenous Dispossession”; R. J. M. Blackett, “Anglo-American Opposition to Liberian
Colonization, 1831–1833,” Historian 41, no. 2 (February 1979): 292; Amalie M. Kass and
Edward H. Kass, Perfecting the World: The Life and Times of Dr. Thomas Hodgkin, 1798–1866
(Boston: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), 234.
33. Thomas Hodgkin, An Inquiry into the Merits of the American Colonization Society:
And a Reply to the Charges Brought against It, with an Account of the British African Coloniza-
tion Society (London: J. and A. Arch, 1833), 18.
34. Lester and Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance, 23.
35. Michael D. Blackstock, “Trust Us: A Case Study in Colonial Social Relations
Based on Documents Prepared by the Aborigines Protection Society, 1836–1912,” in
With Good Intentions: Euro-Canadian and Aboriginal Relations in Colonial Canada, edited
by Celia Haig-Brown and David A. Nock (Vancouver: University of British Columbia
Press, 2006), 51–71, 58; James Heartfield, The Aborigines’ Protection Society: Humanitarian
Imperialism in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Canada, South Africa, and the Congo, 1836–1909
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 7–10; Kass and Kass, Perfecting the World,
270–71.
36. Zoë Laidlaw, “Heathens, Slaves and Aborigines: Thomas Hodgkin’s Critique of Mis
sions and Anti-slavery,” History Workshop Journal 64 (Autumn 2007): 143; Laidlaw, “Slavery,
Settlers and Indigenous Dispossession”; Laidlaw, “ ‘Justice to India,” 303; Patrick Bratlinger,
Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cor
nell University Press, 2003), 93; Heartfield, The Aborigines’ Protection Society, 43.
220 ikuko asaka

37. Zoë Laidlaw, “Indigenous Interlocutors: Networks of Imperial Protest and Human
itarianism in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” in Indigenous Networks: Mobility, Connections
and Exchange, edited by Jane Carey and Jane Lydon (New York: Routledge, 2014), 117.
38. Hodgkin, An Inquiry into the Merits of the American Colonization Society, 19.
41. See Michael T. Bravo, “Ethnological Encounters,” in Cultures of Natural History,
edited by N. Jardine, J. A. Secord, and E. C. Spary (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge Univer
sity Press, 1996), 340; Laidlaw, “Heathens, Slaves and Aborigines,” 137; Heartfield, The
Aborigines’ Protection Society, 26; Kass and Kass, Perfecting the World, 260.
42. Charles Caldwell, Thoughts on the Original Unity of the Human Race (New York:
E. Bliss, 1830), 15.
43. James Cowles Prichard, Researches into the Physical History of Mankind, vol. 2,
2nd edition (London: John and Arthur Arch, 1826), 571, 574, 575.
44. “Interesting Letter,” New York Observer and Chronicle, October 24, 1840.
45. Blackett, “Anglo-American Opposition,” 284, 278. See also R. J. M. Blackett, Build-
ing an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830-1860
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983).
46. Blackett, “Anglo-American Opposition,” 292.
48. Robert S. Levine, “Fifth of July: Nathaniel Paul and the Construction of Black
Nationalism,” in Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic, edited by Vincent
Carretta and Philip Gould (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), 242–60, 251.
49. “Thomas Hodgkin and Colonization,” Colored American, October 31, 1840.
50. Colonization Society of the City of New York, Seventh Annual Report of the Coloni-
zation Society of the City of New York (New York: Mercein and Post’s Press, 1839), 12.
51. “Letter from H. Wilson to J. Leavitt,” Colored American, September 19, 1840.
52. “Thomas Hodgkin and Colonization.”
53. By the middle of 1832 a grave rift had emerged between the colony’s board of man
agers, led by Austin Steward and Israel Lewis, who was accused of embezzling the funds
he collected during his fund-raising agency.
54. Taylor, Frontiers of Freedom, 78–79.
55. Laidlaw, “Heathens, Slaves and Aborigines,” 153.
56. Blackett, “Anglo-American Opposition,” 292.
57. Kass and Kass, Perfecting the World, 238.
58. See Asaka, Tropical Freedom.

10. entangled in empires: british antillean
migrations in the world of the panama canal
Julie Greene
British Antilleans of African descent migrated by the tens of thousands from

their home islands during the early twentieth c entury for jobs on the Panama
Canal construction project as dynamiters, diggers, blacksmith helpers, laun
dresses, railroad workers, and similar occupations. Their travels took them
from the world of sugar plantations to a highly regimented and industrialized
construction project, and from the British Empire to territory controlled by
the United States. In this way Afro-Caribbeans became entangled in new land
scapes of empire as well as work discipline regimes. As they traveled, these
mobile imperial subjects drew upon resources developed in British colonies
such as Jamaica, Barbados, and Antigua to navigate work and life u nder U.S.
rule in Panama; they also developed new strategies that leveraged their unique
position of circulating within two empires.
Focusing on cosmopolitan migrants as they journeyed across the Americas
provides an opportunity to explore the transimperial realm from the bottom
up. In reading between the lines of scant primary sources to determine how
these migrants felt about the empires with which they contended or how les
sons learned in one shaped approaches to another, we should keep in mind
that they were moving not just from one empire to another but also across dis
tinctive social and economic landscapes and work regimes created by those
empires. Imperial politics did not always figure largely in the consciousness of
these workers, but a sense of British subjecthood profoundly affected strategies
of resistance to U.S. rule. And adaptations to work on British colonial sugar
plantations likewise shaped strategies in the more bureaucratic industrial re
gime of the Panama Canal Zone.
To explore such dynamics, this essay draws on testimonies written for a 1963
competition. The Isthmian Historical Society solicited submissions for the “best
true story of life and work” during the construction of the Panama Canal. The
competition was open only to non-U.S. employees, and it particularly encour
aged submissions from British Caribbean men. The Society received 113 en
tries. All but two were from men, and nearly all were written by West Indians.
They ranged greatly in length and level of detail: some w ere mere fragments,
a few sentences long, while others were five or six pages in length. The entries
evoked powerful, harrowing portraits of deadly disease, fatal or crippling ac
cidents, and systemic racism. They constitute the best first-person accounts by
Afro-Caribbean canal workers during the early twentieth century.1
Most of the testimonies say little or nothing about the islands from whence
canal workers came. In several cases we are not even able to determine their
origin. Most often, like the canal workforce more generally, they hailed from
Barbados or Jamaica. Others traveled from Antigua, Martinique, St. Vincent,
Grenada, St. Lucia, Dominica, Trinidad, Honduras, Nicaragua, Colombia, and
the Republic of Panama. They told stories of leaving their homes in Barbados
and Jamaica, of working hard as diggers, dynamiters, or blacksmith helpers.
They spoke of premature dynamite explosions, avalanches, and train accidents.
The men writing these testimonies were now older, some nearing death or cop
ing with deafness or loss of sight. Even as they looked back with pride and as
tonishment at the work they had done forty-odd years earlier, they also recalled
dramatic accidents and hardships. To broaden our understanding of these
workers’ lives, I connect their testimonies to personnel records of canal em
ployees held at the St. Louis National Personnel Records Center. T hese make
it possible to trace shifting occupations over the years, workers’ problems with
the U.S. government, and, as the decades wore on, their struggles with disabil
ity, old age, and death. Together with Colonial Office Records from the National
Archives of the United Kingdom and records from the Jamaican National Ar
chives, these sources provide insight into the life strategies of ordinary workers
as they tangled with the British and American empires.
Empire and the Land Left Behind

Albert Peters, a young carpenter from the city of Nassau in the Bahamas, sat
reading the paper one day: “I saw where they were digging a canal from ocean
to ocean on the Isthmus of Panama and needed thousands of men.” It was the
Entangled in Empires 223

summer of 1906. Peters was twenty-one years old. He talked over the news
with two friends. “We were all eager for some adventure and experience.” His
parents opposed the idea, warning that he would confront yellow fever and ma
laria, “but I told them I and my pals are just going to see for ourselves.”2
Albert Peters’s words provide a rare glimpse into the thinking of a young man
who made the journey to Panama. Although he mentions the allure of adventure,
structural considerations also prompted labor mobility. Across the British Carib
bean colonies, a small white planter-merchant class controlled virtually all access
to power, and Afro-Caribbeans worked long, hard days of agricultural labor with
wages so low that starvation often proved a very real danger. Most workers’ con
nection to the British Empire came indirectly, via their labor within the dominant
plantation economy. Most islands historically focused on sugar production, and
most also confronted economic crisis in the late nineteenth c entury as a result
of competition from sugar beet producers in Europe and changing British tariff
policies. Exports fell, causing even more economic distress for working men and
women. As estates went bankrupt, some islands abandoned export-oriented sugar
production; diversification often became the key to economic survival. Compar
ing conditions in Jamaica and Barbados, the two main sources of migrant labor to
Panama, reveals different responses to the crisis of the late nineteenth c entury, as
well as the ways t hese responses shaped migration patterns.
The Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865 demonstrated ex-slaves’ determination to
fight for true equality in Jamaica, but the colonial government brutally crushed
that uprising. In the decades that followed, a slowly increasing number of
peasants came to own a bit of land and, typically, combined that with work on
someone’s estate to bring cash into their h ousehold. Afro-Jamaicans’ landhold
ings w
ere small and the quality of their land often inferior. Needing some cash
for taxes and duties, farmers could not survive solely on subsistence agricul
ture. Some peasants, unable to own the land they worked, managed to squat
on Crown land or lease a bit of acreage. A few achieved a degree of financial
prosperity, enough that we might consider them part of the black m iddle class,
but the vast majority lived lives of insecurity. When they needed more cash than
they could earn, they faced an exploitative credit system organized by shop
keepers. Those who had to lease land faced the uncertainly of not knowing from
one year to another whether their contracts would be continued. The sugar
crisis of the late nineteenth c entury made life even more precarious: work
on estates became more sporadic, and the full-time agricultural laborers who
purchased small farmers’ produce lost purchasing power as their wages were
slashed. Increased banana and logwood production, as the economy diversified,
reduced small-scale farmers’ access to land.3
224 julie greene

Compared to other Caribbean islands, Jamaica had a relatively robust black
iddle class. In addition to relatively prosperous small farmers, professionals
m
(teachers and constables, for example), and shopkeepers, there was a signifi
cant class of artisans: blacksmiths, carpenters, masons, bricklayers, painters,
tailors, hatters, and shoemakers. Jamaica’s black middle class lost income dur
ing the late nineteenth c entury due to Jamaica’s broader economic crisis as
well as increased competition from cheap imported goods. Yet the vast ma
jority of black Jamaicans who worked as landless agricultural laborers fared
worse, since they possessed no financial cushion in times of need.4 The urban
trades became more attractive to t hose who could secure a foothold, b ecause
the decline of sugar and the rise of banana production decreased the need
for agricultural labor. Gradually urban populations expanded and with them
the number of artisans, professionals, and small shopkeepers. The number of
higglers (petty traders) also increased, providing a source of income for urban
women in particular.5
In all these ways, conditions in Jamaica differed from those in Barbados, the
other island that sent the most laborers to Panama. If anything, the plantation
system in Barbados proved crueler. Black Barbadians were more completely en
trapped in landless agricultural labor. The plantation elite in Barbados strenu
ously resisted selling any land to laborers, preferring to maintain an agricultural
proletariat with few options. There were no Crown lands upon which laborers
might squat, as in Jamaica. Indeed, according to the historian Hilary Beckles,
the government and planters collaborated in overappraising the value of land
in order to keep it out of the hands of black Barbadians. The typical Barbadian
thus rented a small chattel house and a quarter acre of land for growing some
food but relied primarily upon cash wages earned by laboring on a neighboring
sugar estate. Only a precious few people escaped their fate as landless laborers,
which not only constrained the amount of surplus income available to the black
population as a whole but also suppressed the development of a robust profes
sional or artisanal class. Similar conditions characterized Antigua and St. Kitts,
where, as in Barbados, sugar production dominated the economy into the twen
tieth century and employed most of the black population.6
The sugar crisis hit Barbados as it did Jamaica, but with a different con
sequence. Estates that w ere put on the market were typically purchased by
resident merchants, leading to the creation of a new merchant-planter elite,
and rather than diversify, as in Jamaica, Barbadian planters further impover
ished their laborers to make ends meet. Poverty had long been a favored form
of discipline, with planters believing that laborers would become idle as soon
as they had enough food to eat. But when economic crisis hit in the late

nineteenth century and lasted well into the twentieth, planters cut wages by
some 20 percent, thereby pushing the workers below starvation level. Mortality
rates and malnutrition r ose, and when disease hit (such as typhoid and dysen
tery a fter the 1898 hurricane), the laboring classes suffered mightily. Reports
circulated of starvation across the countryside, and food scavenging became
common. With the high population density on the island (highest in the West
Indies) and no available land on which to take refuge, laborers had few options.
Sporadic outbreaks of protest occurred. Workers engaged repeatedly in potato
raids during the 1880s and 1890s, cane fires occurred daily, and broader riots
and social unrest became endemic.7
If Barbados and Jamaica thus represented two divergent histories of eco
nomic transformation resulting from the sugar crisis, the other islands that sup
plied workers for the Panama Canal fell somewhere between the two. Most,
like Jamaica, experienced a strengthening of the peasant class. But as economic
crisis hit the British Caribbean, life became more challenging for black work
ers, adding to the appeal of migration as a means of escape. From the days of en
slavement onward, internal migration and emigration had been key strategies
for islanders locked into poverty and backbreaking labor, and colonial govern
ments had encouraged this to varying degrees.8 Since emancipation, some Bar
badians had migrated from rural to urban areas of the island, particularly dur
ing times of economic crisis, and they emigrated to British Guiana and Trinidad
as well to seek the higher wages offered there. Jamaicans likewise emigrated in
small numbers throughout the nineteenth c entury, with 1,500 to 2,000 travel
ing to the Isthmus of Panama to help build the first transcontinental railroad in
the 1850s. In the 1880s Jamaicans provided the French with a major source of
labor during their doomed effort to build a canal across Panama, and a smaller
number of Jamaicans traveled to Costa Rica for railroad construction jobs. In
1888, when the French canal project failed, thousands of Jamaicans stranded
on the isthmus relied upon the Jamaican government for repatriation, at g reat
expense to the latter.9 The massive emigration also caused acute labor shortages
for Jamaican planters. Consequently the Jamaican government passed laws to
prevent further exoduses on this scale. Most significantly Law 23, passed in
1902, allowed the government to require that an exit permit be purchased for
25 shillings.10
Thus when the United States in 1903 began planning its own canal construc
tion project—and locating a source of labor loomed large—it immediately had
to contend with the priorities of the British Empire. U.S. officials found negoti
ating difficult with many of the British colonial governments. Although U.S. of
ficials promised the Jamaican government that its men would be treated well—
226 julie greene

even offering to hire Jamaicans as foremen so they would not have to work
under Americans—colonial officials refused to allow a recruiting station on the
island and adhered to its law requiring an exit permit. Other islands, including
St. Kitts, Antigua, Montserrat, and Grenada, likewise refused to allow recruit
ing agents in their domains. R. E. Wood, the recruiting agent for the U.S. gov
ernment, observed to his dismay that recruiters were forced to “wander from
island to island, picking up men here and there, like discredited fugitives.”11
These circumstances made Barbados an especially important source for
labor. Its colonial government was agreeable to labor recruitment, and the
island had a surplus of English-speaking laborers whom U.S. recruiters con
sidered polite, obedient, and orderly. As early as 1893 the Barbadian colonial
government had begun to consider sponsored emigration schemes as a safety
valve that could help their impoverished laborers. A fter U.S. officials presented
a sample labor contract, Barbadian government officials agreed to allow a re
cruiting station on the island. Established in 1905, within a year or two the of
fice was sending several ships a week to Panama. Laborers made a mass exodus
from the estates, creating a remarkable sight as they marched across the island
to Bridgetown. People began to speak of a fever for traveling to Panama. To
many, if not all, of the men who signed contracts for Panama, the attraction was
certainly a desire to throw off the yoke of impoverishment, exploitation, and
backbreaking work on plantations. Planters expressed dismay at the large num
ber of laborers heading to the recruiting office. Police struggled to maintain
order as thousands showed up at a time. One man heading with other laborers
to Bridgetown had shouted to a gang of sugar workers, “Why you d on’t hit de
manager in de head, and come along wid we!”12
As word of the job opportunities spread across the Caribbean, workers trav
eled to Bridgetown from other islands in hopes of securing a contract and pas
sage to Panama. Gradually many Barbadians who could not win a contract,
including women and c hildren, began looking for money to pay their own
way to Panama. Such strategies make it difficult to determine with precision
how many workers from Barbados ultimately traveled to work on the canal.
Bonham Richardson estimates that twenty thousand (male) contract laborers
traveled from Barbados to Panama, and as many as forty thousand more men
and women traveled without a labor contract, a remarkable number consid
ering that Barbados’s population at the time was only some 180,000 people.
The Panama movement constituted the largest emigration in Barbadian his
tory. T hose who stayed in Barbados used the new labor scarcity to bargain for
higher wages, but planters resisted this by hiring women to do work previously
assigned to men. As Richardson has demonstrated, Barbadians in Panama sent

home remittances (nearly 546,000 pounds) and returned home with money
that allowed a significant number of p eople to purchase land. In these ways,
“Panama fever” exerted a seismic impact on the Barbadian society.13
Transimperial labor recruiting proved more difficult in the case of Jamaica.
The Jamaican government would not allow its citizens to become contract la
borers for the canal unless the United States agreed to pay insurance for each
individual. Chief Engineer John Wallace refused, worried that paying an in
surance fee would constitute labor trafficking. Unable to reach agreement, the
Jamaican government held to its 25 shilling requirement for emigrants. De
spite these obstacles, Jamaicans headed to Panama in large numbers, as many
as eighty thousand making their way there. The Jamaican author Herbert G. de
Lisser alluded to challenges faced by the migrants who traveled alongside him
to Panama in 1910: “For weeks and months before they left their homes they
had been thinking of this voyage and preparing for it. They had saved a little
money, but most likely had found it was not enough; so the household gods
were sacrificed, the chairs and tables, perhaps even the bed, had to be sold be
fore the necessary sum could be made up to pay for the passage and to lodge in
the Treasury the 25s. demanded by the Government for repatriation purposes.”
The financial requirement ensured that t hose who departed Jamaica possessed
somewhat more access to money than did men and w omen from other islands.
Consequently the profile of the typical Jamaican who headed to Panama was
quite distinctive: few w ere landless laborers; most were artisans, small shop
keepers, and peasants who owned some land. As a result, when Jamaicans ar
rived in Panama, they were more likely to acquire jobs as craftsmen, foremen,
teachers, or policemen. The many who returned to Jamaica a fter construction
ended often displayed their wealth conspicuously. Jamaicans writing up their
memories decades later recalled how the men returning from Panama often
flashed gold teeth as well as a gold watch and chain.14
By the end of the canal construction era, some 150,000 to 200,000 people
had traveled to the Canal Zone from the islands of the Caribbean. Many traveled
on their own from across the Caribbean; others made the trip to Bridgetown
and signed a labor contract with the U.S. government. However they journeyed,
they sold belongings and packed bags for an uncomfortable journey across the
sea to Panama. Harrigan Austin was among the first to depart for Panama, leav
ing Bridgetown in October 1905 for a “hazardous trip, of thirteen days of bad
weather, bad accommodation in general with sparing meals on a Crowded Ship,
we were all more or less hungry.” Mary Couloote left her home in Castries,
St. Lucia, traveling on the ship La Plata along with a sister. They stopped in
Jamaica and then headed across the Gulf of Mexico. When a heavy storm hit,
228 julie greene

crew members ordered everyone downstairs. Sailors working up top had chains
around their waist. “When we reach colon,” she said, they called everyone’s
name but “5 men where [sic] missing.” Undoubtedly relieved to be in Panama,
Couloote headed to Pedro Miguel to join her mother and brother.15
The migrants climbing aboard ships to Panama were typically quite young
men and women, in their late teens and early twenties. They had grown up in
a culture where emigration was an important life strategy; most had known
relatives or family friends who left their home islands for work across the Carib
bean and Central America, if not farther afield. A sense of cosmopolitanism was
in the air they breathed. And they undoubtedly found some pleasure in fleeing
the hard lives ahead of them, mired in colonial exploitation, racism, and impov
erishment as landless laborers in Barbados or St. Lucia or as peasants struggling
to make ends meet in Jamaica.
John Altyman Richards explained the appeal of Panama in his competition
entry: “Many years ago while still yet a young man in Jamaica I was intrigued
by the Canal Construction done in this beautiful tropical country. I discussed
the possibilities of working in a different country and of learning a strange
language with my relatives; as soon as permission was granted I partook for
Panama in 1914.” Like other migrants across time and place, Richards had sur
veyed his current life and determined that Panama beckoned as an improve
ment. There w ere good Yankee jobs building the canal. Migrants could make
enough money to open a business or buy some land upon their return. As
de Lisser wrote, “The West Indian peasant dreams of Panama as the coun
try where fortune awaits him, and where a few months of effort will bring a
golden reward.”16 The same held true for those who traveled to Panama not
for canal jobs but to create their own businesses; thus E. W. Martineau, for
example, left his home in Grenada, equipped with aerated water equipment,
to set up shop as a soda factory.17
Hopes for economic opportunity certainly pushed migrants like these to the
Canal Zone as they sought to escape the extreme poverty on their home islands.
Yet in addition Afro-Caribbeans had ample reason to feel let down by the Brit
ish Crown. The racist and undemocratic structures of colonialism, the oppres
sion exerted by the planter elite, and the devastation caused by economic crisis
all suggested their denial of rights as British subjects. Furthermore, on these
islands the enslavement of men and women was not too distant a memory. One
Jamaican recalled his days as a young boy in the 1870s, when many formerly
enslaved men w ere still alive. Every August 1 the town of Negril would gather
at the Presbyterian Chapel to sing hymns and hear a sermon about life u nder
slavery. Then some of the freedmen would climb up on the stage to tell stories

of their lives. Afterward everyone would adjourn outside for a feast, drinks, and
dancing to celebrate emancipation.18
In this environment, with enslavement a close memory and landlessness
offering little beyond toil and impoverishment, the planter elite strenuously
promoted a cult of the British Empire and the monarchy as a glue that might
hold society together. As Brian Moore and Michele Johnson have explained, the
lower classes w ere “encouraged to remember they w ere part of a mighty w hole,
at the centre of which was a power so distant yet so omnipotent and worthy
that only displays of adoration w ere deemed appropriate.”19 Planters celebrated
love and loyalty to the m other country and the queen as central to respectability
and civilization. Although one should not exaggerate the degree to which impe
rial and monarchic fervor pervaded the lower classes of the islands, it is clear
that Afro-Caribbeans shared in the pride of British culture, education, and lan
guage. Furthermore, they had their own reasons for royalist Anglophilia: his
torians have observed that Afro-Caribbeans linked the emancipation of slaves
to Queen Victoria. Great sadness pervaded the islands when she died in 1901.
Upon her death Victoria Day was changed to Empire Day, and efforts to incul
cate in children a pride in British imperialism and a strong connection to the
mother country grew even more robust.20
The ships steaming toward the Isthmus of Panama, then, brought young
emigrants carrying wide-ranging ideas and loyalties in addition to their bags
and deck chairs. As they entered the Canal Zone, with its harsh industrial dis
cipline, Caribbeans’ loyalties to monarch and empire would become entangled
with new strategies they developed to resist exploitation at the hands of Ameri
can officials.
Confronting the Industrial Empire of the United States

The United States created a regimented, disciplined, authoritarian, impersonal,
and industrialized operation in the Panama Canal Zone. Government officials,
engineers, surveyors, and medical personnel hustled to begin work as soon as
the ink had dried on the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty that gave the United States
permanent and complete control over the vast swath of land, the Panama Canal
Zone, that cut through the heart of the young Republic of Panama. In the early
years of 1904 and 1905, red tape and mosquito-borne diseases befuddled U.S.
officials, but by 1906 a vast industrial society had blossomed across the Zone.
The United States developed the ability to carry more than thirty thousand
people to and from the worksite each day by train and carry away the spoils
of digging; it built showcase towns for the thousands of white American em
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ployees and family members, complete with essential trappings of home, and
much more rustic housing for Afro-Caribbeans and Europeans; it constructed
police headquarters, prisons, hospitals, health clinics, and vast machine shops
that serviced steam shovels and other equipment. The harshness Caribbean mi
grants confronted in the Canal Zone undoubtedly made them look anew at the
British emphasis on royalism and imperial belonging on their home islands.
In the eyes of U.S. officials, the tens of thousands of men from Barbados, Ja
maica, Grenada, St. Lucia, and other islands were essential tools of the produc
tion process to be managed and disciplined as efficiently as possible. They had
settled upon Caribbeans as their major source of labor for many reasons, chief
among them the perception that Antilleans w ere “harmless and law-abiding,”
childlike, and easily controlled. That Jamaican laborers had worked well, over
all, during the 1880s French construction effort, and that they spoke English,
was an added benefit.21
Yet these essential tools of production were young, exhausted men who
found conditions in the new industrial empire extremely difficult. Harrigan
Austin described a difficult trip from his home island of Barbados: thirteen
days on rough seas, a crowded ship, and very l ittle food. He was only eighteen
years old. He and the others arrived hungry, and as they disembarked they saw
piles of brown sugar: “And the whole crowd of us like ants fed ourselves on that
sugar without questioning any one, and no one said any t hing to us e ither.” The
officials sent Austin to a tent camp and assigned him a cot. He arrived with
experience as a carpenter and his own tools, so he landed a good job repairing
quarters. Nonetheless he found the work to be harrowing. West Indians worked
often in the rain. If it rained so hard that they had to stop, their pay was cut. The
food was so bad they could barely eat it. They bathed and washed their clothes
in the same river used by horses and cattle. They succumbed to malaria, and
when they took quinine to fight disease, some went deaf from its effects. Too
many men Austin knew died from disease, railroad accidents, or premature
dynamite explosions, and the doctors and nurses lacked the training to restore
good health to so many sufferers—especially in the early years. Occasionally
men tried to heal themselves when sick, g oing into the bush to try a homemade
remedy, but if caught they “would be brutalized and some time carried to jail.”
Remembered Austin, “Life was some sort of semi slavery, and t here was none
to appeal to, for we w ere strangers and actually compelled to accept what we
got . . . and the bosses or policemen or other officials right or wrong could
be always winning the game.”22
In some ways their situation—the feeling of “semi slavery,” as Austin put it—
must have felt familiar to Caribbeans accustomed to British colonialism and the

stranglehold over the economy by the planter elite. In both old and new worlds,
white men ruled over them like slave d rivers. Eric Walrond, the Trinidadian
author who wrote so eloquently of Panama, portrayed a West Indian m other
in the Canal Zone scolding her aimless son in his short story “Panama Gold”:
You must work, she declared, because otherwise where will I get any food? She
admonished him to accept the authority of his foreman, using the Jamaican
patois term for a white man in authority and rooted originally in slave relations:
“Boy yo’ bes’ mek up yo’ min’ an’ get under de heel o’ de backra.”23 As in Barba
dos and Jamaica, workers found that organized mass protests w ere difficult or
impossible to achieve. The new stranglehold they faced stemmed from the in
finite authority of U.S. officials, who could deport or imprison anyone deemed
troublesome or unproductive. Officials also maintained a vast surplus of Carib
bean workers and made a point of bringing workers from diverse islands and
from Spain, Italy, and Greece in order to manage and control them more easily.
Together t hese conditions forced workers e ither to accommodate themselves to
the harsh regime or develop hidden forms of resistance.
Officials’ reliance on a vast surplus provides one indication that Afro-
Caribbeans asserted themselves when they could. In the earliest, most cha
otic and disease-ridden days of construction, the first and final act of rebellion
for some workers involved a lesson learned back on their home islands, when
slaves fled into the hills or plantation workers feigned illness to avoid work:
many simply jumped back onto a ship and fled for home. In l ater years the typi
cal work pace was so intense that workers routinely stayed away from the job,
particularly on rainy days or when they had earned enough money to get by
for a while. Some workers went beyond taking a break for a day or two to slip
away to their home island for a visit. The engineer D. D. Gaillard, who oversaw
the work on Culebra Cut, noted that he had to keep a workforce of fourteen
thousand men in order to ensure that at least ten thousand would show up on
any given day.24
Workers also resisted by eluding the control and surveillance of U.S. authori
ties, and again they surely drew upon strategies developed after emancipation
to elude colonial control. Dissatisfaction with the quality and price of food in
government cafeterias generated a mass exodus out of government housing.
Rent outside the U.S.-controlled Zone, in Panama City or Colon, was terribly
high, yet most Antillean workers preferred either moving to those cities or
making a home for themselves in the Panamanian bush. And although offi
cials quickly responded by ending the requirement that employees purchase
meal tickets, the number of residents in government housing never rebounded.
Living on their own meant they could cook for themselves, and it also meant
232 julie greene

freedom from much of the government’s surveillance and harsh discipline, in
cluding roundups and possible imprisonment for skipping a day of work.25
U.S. officials tended to see Caribbean workers as a homogeneous group, but
in fact they followed very different paths in Panama. B ecause Jamaicans had
to pay an emigration tax to go to Panama, and b ecause a larger independent
peasantry and black middle class existed on that island, those in the Canal Zone
were often more skilled, more likely to possess some resources, and more likely
to receive plum jobs as teachers, policemen, foremen, or skilled workers. As
a result, Jamaicans w ere often feared or distrusted by other Antilleans. Other
Caribbean workers saw them as most likely to support and enforce the U.S.
government’s authoritarian regime. Over time the occupational landscape of
the Antillean community in the Canal Zone grew more complex as U.S. offi
cials, seeking to save money, began training Caribbeans to do skilled work that
had previously been carried out by white U.S. workers. Although still generally
referred to as “helpers,” kept on the lower-status silver payroll rather than the
gold roll (which was reserved for white U.S. workers), and paid far less than
white men, these skilled Caribbean workers received training and became car
penters, machinists, plumbers, railroad conductors, firemen, brakemen, and
switchmen. Widening job opportunities improved life for many silver employ
ees: their pay increased, their work became easier than that of diggers and dy
namiters, and their greater access to resources afforded them more freedom
from U.S. government surveillance.26
As workers adjusted to the Americans’ regime on the Isthmus of Panama,
as they confronted racism, harsh discipline, extremely difficult and dangerous
working conditions, widespread disease, poor food, and uncomfortable or ex
ploitative housing, they found they had l ittle recourse. It was dangerous at worst
and often futile at best to complain to a supervisor or foreman. Silver employees
had no union to represent them. George Washington Goethals, chief engineer
of the construction project from 1907 to 1914, opened his office e very Sunday
morning to any resident or employee who had a grievance and hired one full-
time inspector to investigate problems and suggest potential remedies. The rec
ords of that inspector demonstrate that complaints were indeed investigated, but
they also show that most grievances w ere filed by white U.S. men and w omen,
not silver roll workers. Considering the demographics of the Zone, and that the
number of Afro-Caribbeans far overwhelmed the number of white U.S. citizens
(somewhere above thirty thousand for the former vs. fewer than five thousand
for the latter), Goethals’s grievance system could hardly have been sufficient.27
The other recourse for Caribbeans, and one that made a greater impact on
their daily lives, kept them entangled in the British Empire even as they toiled

for the Americans. Although the United States dominated the Zone, diplomatic
representatives from the British Empire watched over and reported on the con
ditions facing tens of thousands of subjects. The colonial governments of each
Caribbean island—from Martinique and Haiti to Barbados, St. Lucia, Grenada,
and Jamaica—played a role as well. But the most intense observation and most
powerful interventions were provided by the British Consul’s Office. Claude Mal
let, the man in charge, had a full-time job representing the subjects of his queen.
Mallet had lived in Panama since 1879, when his father began serving as
British consul. He served on the consulate staff for the next forty years, becom
ing consul himself in 1903 and minister to Panama and Costa Rica in 1914.
Some Antilleans wrote directly to London for help, or to inform the diplomatic
corps of an injustice, but most relied on Consul Mallet. They informed him
of problems ranging from poor food to unsatisfactory housing, mean or racist
foremen, bad job assignments, undeserved incarceration, and bad treatment by
Panamanian police.28
Mallet often found Caribbeans’ grievances annoying. That he regarded West
Indians as harshly as any white American can be seen in his response to riots
on a United Fruit Company (ufco) plantation in Limon, Costa Rica, in 1910.
Migrants from St. Kitts demanded to be repatriated after many of their group
had fallen ill and some had died, while ufco did little or nothing to help. Mal
let deemed their protest “preposterous.” He bragged that he had handled many
strikes during the French and now the American phases of construction: “What
I have always done has been to get the employer to do what is just towards
the men and then tell them in unmistakable language to work, and if they do
not work they w ill starve, and that if they disturb public order the government
counts upon enough force to keep the peace, and their acts be upon their own
heads if they suffer in consequence of defying armed forces.”29
Mallet himself was a transimperial actor, of course, a representative of
emerging Anglo-American cooperation and collaboration in the Caribbean and
beyond during the early twentieth century. And unfortunately for laborers, he
saw the Americans as a vast improvement on the French construction project
and felt little sympathy for British colonial subjects. In 1906 Mallet wrote to
the governor of the Canal Zone, “The conditions of the labouring man in the
Canal Zone, as regards his treatment, are better to-day than they have ever been
within my recollection.” That same year, when President Theodore Roosevelt
visited the isthmus and inquired of Mallet how the West Indians were doing,
the British consul admitted he had not personally inspected the housing or food
provided to laborers: “[But] since the negro is quick to bring a grievance to the
attention of the Consul . . . [and] at the present time, they were so few and
234 julie greene

trivial I generally found upon investigation that they had no foundation and
therefore was convinced the labourers must be well treated and well cared for
by the Commission.”30
Conditions undoubtedly w ere better than they had been during the French
construction era, but that they were nonetheless problematic is also beyond de
bate. J. Keir Hardie, a British Socialist member of Parliament, wrote the Colo
nial Office a fter hearing complaints about treatment of West Indians: “Surprise
is expressed among American officials at the non-interference of the British
government.” Hardie had no doubt that conditions would improve if the Brit
ish intervened. British Colonial Office officials required Mallet to report on
the matter. Privately they noted they had been right not to promote Mallet to a
higher position, suggesting that they, like Hardie, saw him as too sympathetic
to U.S. officials’ way of handling laborers.31
When laborers pushed Consul Mallet to provide help, they often emphasized
their rights as subjects of the Crown. One man wrote Mallet to ask him to help a
friend who had been unjustly imprisoned in Panama. “Sir I am not his Counsil
But I am an English subject also I has a great knowledge of this Law I know
what you can do from what you cant Therefor I ask you to take a Part of that
young man life as I do remember the Laws of E ngland.” When Mallet refused
to help, many laborers pleaded to their diplomatic representatives in England.
One man wrote for help a fter an accident required amputation of his leg and
he had received neither compensation nor even a wooden leg from the U.S
government: “I know that my Mother Court will not forsake these few lines.”32
In the end, the problem lay not just with Mallet: British officials generally
seem to have shared his willingness to see racism in the Canal Zone as inevita
ble and, perhaps, justified. In 1910 Caribbeans in the Zone reacted with horror
when a white U.S. citizen killed a West Indian and then was acquitted despite
strong evidence against him. The American, Louis Dennison, shot his victim
in the heart with no provocation. Mallet noted that West Indians w ere very
upset and believed that the case showed “that a white American can kill a negro
with impunity in the Canal Zone.” Mallet confessed, “There is certainly good
grounds for that belief, and I agree . . . that it is unlikely a jury composed of
Canal employees will ever convict a white American and a fellow employee for
the murder of a negro.” Dennison had even confessed to the crime, saying, “I
have only killed a nigger, don’t be too hard on me boys.” A. Mitchell Innes, a Brit
ish official based in Washington, DC, reflected on the incident: “All t hose who
are accustomed to dealing with the evidence of coloured people know how hard
it is to obtain from them a consistent, truthful, unvarnished tale, and unless
the witnesses have concocted a story beforehand, irreconcilable discrepancies

arise which are fatal to the case of the prosecution.” A handwritten note added
to this one, by someone in the London office of Foreign Secretary Edward Grey,
stressed that Dennison was undoubtedly guilty, yet since the writer believed
West Indians could not be trusted he saw no way to remedy the situation.33
Many observed that Afro-Caribbeans, when in a pinch, stressed their rights
as subjects of the British Empire. William J. Karner, who served briefly as act
ing chief engineer in the early days of construction, commented on his dis
like of the Jamaican laborers: “They are sort of an i.d.w.w. class (I don’t want
to work u nless driven to it). As British subjects, they think they are close to
royalty and quite superior to white laborers from the U.S.” When ordered too
curtly by a foreman to do something, he related, “the laborer would straighten
himself up and say, ‘I wish you to understand, sir, that I am a British subject,
and if we cannot arrange this matter amicably we will talk to our Consul about
it.’ ” Labor supervisors like Karner undoubtedly found it difficult, amid their
assumptions of racial and national superiority over Caribbean laborers, that
they had to contend with self-assertion, a fluency with the English language,
and even perhaps the backing of the British Empire when seeking to order
their workers about.34
In the end, it is difficult to judge how dearly Caribbeans held the British
Crown in their hearts and minds. The writer Eric Walrond wrote in the 1930s
that West Indians possessed too much admiration for the English, suggesting
that he at least observed a true affection and pride in their British citizenship.
But at the very least it is clear that Caribbean workers leveraged their posi
tion as British subjects against the Americans when it served their purpose. In
his short story “Panama Gold,” Walrond explores this theme through a charac
ter who returns to Barbados after having lost a leg working on the Canal. The
man, Mr. Poyer, brags that his status as a British subject forced the canal au
thorities to pay him damages. Poyer threatened action if he were not paid: “I’ll
sick de British bulldog on all yo’ Omericans!” He added, “I let dem understand
quick enough dat I wuz a Englishman and not a bleddy American nigger! A’ En
glishman . . . And dat dey couldn’t do as dey bleddy well please wit’ a subject o’
de King!”35
Reena Goldthree’s research on the British West Indies Regiment during
World War I also supports the notion that British citizenship became partic
ularly important to the migrants working on the Panama Canal. Caribbean
migrants on the isthmus—or their children—were some of the first and most
enthusiastic to sign up for military service, and ultimately more than 2,000
of the regiment’s 15,600 soldiers came from Panama. It seems likely that the
intensity of West Indians’ patriotism resulted from their experiences under U.S.
236 julie greene

imperial rule. In that context, stressing their loyalty to a rival empire proved
useful—so useful that a Flag Day fund-raiser in 1915 saw crowds of “loyal Brit
ishers” parading down the streets of Bocas del Toro, Panama. W omen and girls
sold Union Jack pins and raised hundreds of dollars in Panamanian silver for
the British war cause.36
West Indian migrants remained entangled with both the American and Brit
ish empires throughout their time in the Canal Zone, and often beyond it as
well. Upon completion of the canal construction project, when many towns of
the Zone w ere shut down, with forced relocations so the flooding of Gatun Lake
could take place, most employees w ere let go. Years of chaos and uncertainty
followed, as tens of thousands of workers had to find new jobs in Panama or, in
many cases, return to their home islands or s ettle into new lives in other parts
of Central or South America, the Caribbean, or the United States.37 This com
plex transition required careful collaboration between American and British of
ficials, who worked alongside ufco representatives and colonial governments
on the home islands to find the best places to send laid-off employees. The
transimperial negotiations that characterized the entire construction project
continued long after the grand opening of the canal.
Conclusion
Caribbean laborers in the Panama Canal Zone lived difficult and dangerous lives
and had few resources to fall back on for help. The racism and discrimination
they experienced in the Canal Zone must have seemed reminiscent in many
ways of dynamics they had known in Jamaica, Barbados, and other islands.
Some felt they had replaced one “backra” with another, and they responded to
their American foremen as they had to overseers on the plantation at home:
they struggled to improve their lives by their own accord. Shifting back and
forth between the British and American empires, Afro-Caribbeans developed
strategies where they could, moving out of government housing, refusing gov
ernment food, changing jobs, or taking time off. Yet moving across imperial
boundaries opened up a new strategy for resistance: playing one empire against
another. This began, to a degree, with the decision to leave for Panama, a choice
that played out against episodic loyalty to the British Empire. Once they joined
the massive, regimented workforce of the Canal Zone, however, Caribbean
workers’ identities as British subjects took on much greater significance. From
their vantage point in Panama, Caribbean workers found ways to deploy the
British Empire, and their status as its subjects, as a resource—which in turn fu
eled their resistance. They found tactics developed in coping with one empire

helped them create limited space for independence in another. Along the way
Caribbeans’ work for the United States fostered their claims on and attachment
to the British Empire.
notes
1. “Isthmian Historical Society Competition for the Best True Stories of Life and Work
on the Isthmus of Panama during the Construction of the Panama Canal,” Panama Col
lection of the Canal Zone Library-Museum, Box 25, Folders 3–4, Manuscript Division,
Library of Congress, Washington, DC. The testimonies are also available online at the
University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries, http://ufdc.ufl.edu/AA00016037
/00001. The author heartily thanks Jay Sexton and Kristin Hoganson for their excellent
editing, and James Maffie and Diana Paton for their advice on the manuscript.
2. Albert Peters, “Isthmian Historical Society Competition,” http://ufdc.ufl.edu
/AA00016037/00001, accessed September 2, 2017.
3. On the aftermath of Morant Bay, see Brian L. Moore and Michele A. Johnson,
Neither Led nor Driven: Contesting British Cultural Imperialism in Jamaica, 1865–1920
(Mona, Jamaica: University of West Indies Press, 2004). On class structure and landhold
ing, see Patrick Bryan, The Jamaican People, 1880–1902: Race, Class, and Social Control
(Mona, Jamaica: University of West Indies Press, 2012), 8–9, 132–33.
4. Bryan, The Jamaican People, 218–27.
5. David C. Wong, “A Theory of Petty Trading: The Jamaican Higgler,” Economic Journal
106 (March 1996): 507–18; Bryan, The Jamaican People, 133.
6. Bonham Richardson, Panama Money in Barbados, 1900–1920 (Knoxville: University
of Tennessee Press, 2004), 53–57. On similar conditions in Antigua and St. Kitts, see
Robert Cassá, “The Economic Development of the Caribbean from 1880 to 1930,” in
General History of the Caribbean, vol. 5: The Caribbean in the Twentieth Century, edited by
Bridget Brereton (New York: unesco and Macmillan, 2004), 7–41, 10–11.
7. Henderson Carter, Labour Pains: Resistance and Protest in Barbados, 1838–1904 (Kings
ton, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2012); Hilary Beckles, Great House Rules: Landless Emancipa-
tion and Workers’ Protest in Barbados, 1838–1938 (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2004);
Aviston D. Downes, “Barbados, 1880–1914: A Socio-Cultural History,” PhD diss., York
University, 2004, 41–48; Bonham C. Richardson, “Depression Riots and the Calling of the
1897 West India Royal Commission.” New West Indian Guide 66, nos. 3–4 (1992): 169–91.
8. For an overview of Caribbean migrations, see Bonham Richardson, “The Migration
Experience,” in Brereton, General History of the Caribbean, 5:434–64.
9. Gisela Eisner, Jamaica, 1830–1930: A Study in Economic Growth (Manchester, U.K.:
Manchester University Press, 1961), 147–49.
10. Eisner, Jamaica, 150.
11. See Julie Greene, The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal
(New York: Penguin Press, 2009), 51; R. E. Wood to John Stevens, October 22, 1906,
Isthmian Canal Commission Records, 2-e-1, “Labor Recruiting.” Record Group 185, U.S.
National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland.
238 julie greene

12. Quoted in Richardson, Panama Money in Barbados, 106; from Debates lc, July 16,
1907, 85–87.
13. The estimates for how many Barbadians headed to Panama come from Richardson,
“The Migration Experience,” 441. See also Downes, “Barbados,” 54. For the full story
of Panama money’s impact on Barbados, see Richardson, Panama Money in Barbados.
The amount of remittance money comes from Hilary Beckles, History of Barbados: From
Amerindian Settlement to Nation-State (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press,
1990), 145.
14. Notes of meetings held on December 6 and 12, 1904, Colonial Secretariat Rec
ords, 1b/5/76/3/152 Emigrants Protection Law, Jamaican National Archives, Kingston;
Herbert G. de Lisser, In Jamaica and Cuba (Kingston, Jamaica: Gleaner, 1910), 154–55,
http://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00080939. The figure of eighty thousand Jamaicans migrating to
Panama is from Richardson, “The Migration Experience,” 441. On memories of returning
Jamaicans displaying their wealth, see, for example, the entries of Rev. R. A. L. Knight,
Kingston, and H. R. Milliner, Falmouth, in the Jamaican Memories Collection, Competi
tion held by the Jamaican Gleaner, 1959, Jamaican National Archives, Kingston.
15. Testimonies by Harrigan Austin and Mary Couloote are in the Isthmian Historical
Society Competition, http://ufdc.ufl.edu/AA00016037/00010. Information that Austin
came from Barbados is in the Isthmian Canal Commission Silver Roll Personnel Records,
National Personnel Records Center, St. Louis, Missouri. For the figure of 150,000 to
200,000 Caribbeans traveling to Panama, see Michael Conniff, Black Labor on the White
Canal: Panama, 1904–1981 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985), 25–29.
16. De Lisser, In Jamaica and Cuba, 154.
17. Martineau submission to the Isthmian Historical Society Competition.
18. Daniel B. Tait, born 1874, Jamaican Memories Collection.
19. Moore and Johnson, Neither Led nor Driven, 281.
20. Moore and Johnson, Neither Led nor Driven, 293–97.
21. Hearings before the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce of the House of
Representatives, on the Isthmian Canal (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office,
1906), 1:53; John Stevens to Theodore Shonts, December 14, 1905, Isthmian Canal
Commission Records, 2-e-1, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, College
Park, Maryland.
22. Information on Harrigan Austin’s experiences comes from his submission to the
Isthmian Historical Society Competition and from the Personnel Records (Silver Roll) of
the Isthmian Canal Commission, National Personnel Records Center.
23. Eric Walrond quotation is from his story “Panama Gold” in Tropic Death (New
York: Collier Books, 1954), 103. For a useful discussion of Walrond, see James Davis,
Eric Walrond: A Life in the Harlem Renaissance and the Transatlantic Caribbean (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2015), particularly chapter 5.
24. Greene, The Canal Builders, 146–47.
25. For more on this, see Greene, The Canal Builders, chapter 3.
26. The silver and gold payroll system became central to the U.S. effort to segregate
and discipline its workforce. For more on this aspect of U.S. l abor management, see
Greene, The Canal Builders.

27. The work of T. B. Miskimon, Goethals’s inspector, can be traced by examining his
personal papers: to cite just one example, see T. B. Miskimon to Goethals, April 25, 1907,
Folder 1, T. B. Miskimon Papers, ms 86–5, Special Collections, Ablah Library, Wichita
State University, Wichita, Kansas.
28. Mallet’s role can be traced by examining correspondence in the Foreign Office
Records of the U.K. National Archives. For background information on Mallet, see Mat
thew Parker, Panama Fever: The Epic Story of the Building of the Panama Canal (New York:
Anchor Books, 2007).
29. Claude Mallet to Consul Cox, December 8, 1910, Foreign Office 371/944, U.K.
National Archives, London.
30. Mallet to Governor Magoon, January 17, 1906, Foreign Office 371/101, General
Correspondence of the Foreign Office; Mallet to Sir, November 19, 1906, Foreign Office
288/98, both from U.K. National Archives, London. For more on Mallet’s c areer (and a
more positive interpretation of it), see Parker, Panama Fever.
31. J. Keir Hardie to Colonel Seely, Colonial Office, November 24, 1908, Foreign Office
Records, 271/494; see also the handwritten note on Mallet’s letter to Sir, November 19,
1906, Foreign Office 288/98, both from U.K. National Archives.
32. No author to Mallet, September 26, 1914, Foreign Office 288/160, Miscella
neous Consul Records, U.K. National Archives; Jacob Marsh to Foreign Secretary of
State, United Kingdom, January 7, 1911, fo 371/1176, U.K. National Archives. For other
examples of Caribbean workers appealing to their rights as British subjects, see Greene,
The Canal Builders, e.g., 264.
33. Claude Mallet to Sir Edward Grey, May 6, 1910; H. O. Chalkley, Vice-Consul, to
C. C. Mallet, May 3, 1910; and A. Innes to Grey, October 21, 1910; all fo 371/943, U.K.
National Archives.
34. William J. Karner, More Recollections (Boston: T. Todd, 1921), 41.
35. Walrond, Tropic Death, 42; Davis, Eric Walrond, 163.
36. See Reena Goldthree, “ ‘A Greater Enterprise than the Panama Canal’: Migrant
Labor and Military Recruitment in the World War I–Era Circum-Caribbean,” in the
special issue on empire, edited by Julie Greene and Leon Fink, Labor: Studies in Working-
Class History of the Americas, 13 (3–4), December 2016, 57–82, especially 58–59.
37. On the number of workers employed during the construction decade, see Con
niff, Black Labor on the White Canal. On the vast project to dismantle historic towns of
Panama as construction of the canal wrapped up, see Marixa Lasso, Erased: The Untold
Story of the Panama Canal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019).
240 julie greene

11. world war ii and the promise of normalcy:
overlapping empires and everyday lives in the philippines
Genevieve Clutario
Filipinos found themselves firmly wedged between two imperial powers when
World War II reached the Philippines in December 1941. Immediately a fter the
bombing of Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces destroyed the U.S. Air Force Station
at Clark Field. Under the command of General Douglas MacArthur, the United
States Army Forces Far East, which combined the U.S. military with the Phil
ippine Army, left Manila to combat Japanese soldiers in Bataan and Corregidor.
In late December, Manileños experienced, not for the first time, a military
invasion in the name of “liberation.” Much as U.S. forces had once contended
that they were fighting to liberate the Philippines from Spanish tyranny, Japa
nese occupiers promised to free Filipinos from an oppressive U.S. colonial
regime. Just as in the Philippine-American War that began in 1899, violence
again ravaged the archipelago, resulting in thousands of deaths, destruction of
homes, and devastated land.1 When U.S. forces returned to the Philippines in
late 1944, civilians w
ere once more caught in the crossfire, with an estimated
100,000 to 200,000 deaths.2
Although many Filipinos had demanded an end to U.S. sovereignty during
the U.S. colonial era, the Japanese occupation was not the endgame that Filipi
nos had envisaged. For many Filipinos, U.S. rule in the Philippines came to seem
the lesser of two evils. When the U.S. military retreated from the Philippines in
May 1942, underground radio shows and renegade print propaganda promised
Filipino listeners that a return to American colonialism would eventually lead
Filipinos to freedom. This goal could be achieved only by expelling Japanese
forces. In pursuit of that aim, Filipinos had to resist all t hings Japanese. Keenly
aware of the hardships endured by the Filipino p eople, the anti-Japanese resis
tance played up the appeal of normalcy, invoking a nostalgic vision of life before
World War II under U.S. rule.3
Having established their power in the Philippines the same way the Ameri
cans had—by force of arms—Japanese officials embarked on a public relations
campaign to c ounter Filipino resistance. In response to claims that life had
been better u nder U.S. rule, the new Japanese military government initiated
a propaganda campaign that deployed rhetoric of a happy and normal life.
Japan’s “Co-Prosperity” ideology promised Filipinos that freedom from forty
years of U.S. colonial oppression would lead to a better quality of life, with
bountiful food, clean clothing, and housing for all.4 The new normal of a more
prosperous life would manifest only under a Pan-Asian alliance, led by Japan.
Yet even as the Japanese aspired to make a clean and decisive break from U.S.
power, capital, commodities, and culture, Japanese occupiers occasionally ac
commodated the sense that normality for Filipinos meant adherence to past
practice.5 Try as they might to lay the groundwork for a new vision of Japa
nese dominance, they could not completely expunge all traces of the American
Empire from the Philippines. Though nominally in control, Japanese imperial
forces navigated a landscape in which the U.S. occupation was still, in many
ways, part of everyday life.
Japanese imperial expansion ignited sudden and terrifying changes that
rippled through all modes of Philippine life. The personal written accounts
of Filipino w
omen and girls grappled with the disruptions of war and living be
tween empires through a framework of normalcy. Helen Mendoza, a teenager in
Iloilo in 1941, later remembered the war as the rupture of routines and accepted
norms of everyday life, provoking an “unusual calling for unusual adaptation.”6
She recalled how daily schedules at school and home shifted to accommodate
new customs like enforced blackouts and air raid drills. In Manila, Pacita Pestaño-
Jacinto also witnessed the Pacific War’s disruption of daily life and struggled to
“go on as usual” when “life was no longer normal.”7 Flora Gimenez’s romantic
relationship was abruptly put on hold when her sweetheart, Gim, a Filipino
rotc officer, was called to report to a U.S. military base. In a February 3, 1945,
diary entry, Lydia Gutierrez, a fourteen-year-old from Manila, reflected that
normalcy under war had come to mean “the same half-boring, half-scary life.”8
Such attention to abrupt swings between terror and routine raise questions:
Why did normalcy figure so largely in women’s accounts of the war and Japa
nese occupation? How did the transition from one imperial regime to another
affect their daily lives?9 What did it mean to live transimperial lives—in this
242 genevieve clutario

case, lives that played out u nder overlapping and competing imperial regimes?
What did gendered notions of normalcy imply in a country long subject to im
perial rule?10
Although women are all too often regarded as peripheral to imperial his
tories, this essay makes the case for the importance of w omen’s perspectives.
To dwell with w omen’s perspectives is to foreground everyday life in a time of
violent imperial transitions between the United States and Japan during World
War II. Their experiences and points of view are often obscured by histories
that focus on masculinity, diplomacy, territory, and policymaking. Too often,
civilian experiences of precarity are obfuscated in statist histories that focus
solely on casualties on battlefields. Focusing on Filipinas’ wartime narratives
can help us understand the larger range of ways in which gendered colonial
subjects have inhabited a war. By placing women’s everyday lives at the heart
of war, this essay can help us think anew life under overlapping empires. These
overlaps appeared not only in political structures and bureaucracies but also in
the creation of what was to become the new normal. Women played a central
role in trying to preserve normalcy in a time of precarity, with consequences
not only for their own well-being and that of their families and neighbors but
also for political positioning.11
Sources that focus on w omen’s experiences of World War II, including Fili
pino women’s diaries, memoirs, and letters as well as newspaper articles, pro
vide valuable insights into transimperial lives u nder the duress of war.12 This
essay depends largely on women’s written accounts, focusing particularly on
writings by Helen Mendoza, Pacita Pestaño-Jacinto, and Flora Gimenez. T hese
women represent different geographies of the mainly Christian areas of the
archipelago. Their writing provides insights into how the war impacted both
urban spaces like Manila and rural provinces in the Visayan region. For example,
food scarcity and food policies, as each of their testimonies shows, developed
differently along geographic lines. But along with revealing regional differ
ences, these women also reveal commonalities. All these women had grown
up under the U.S. regime, in areas in which the colonial state had a significant
presence. The local schools, which they attended, aimed to Americanize their
pupils. Their consequent ability to write in English is just one manifestation of
American colonialism in their e very day life.13 These Filipino women’s access
to colonial-state-run education also helped cement their status as middle-and
upper-class women. Though critical of the U.S. presence prior to 1941, these
authors had also fared relatively well under U.S. rule.
Writings on w omen and by w omen such as Mendoza, Pestaño-Jacinto, and
Gimenez reveal the amount of attention that middle-and upper-class women
World War II and the Promise of Normalcy 243

devoted to maintaining normalcy during the war. These sources pay acute at
tention to the “stuff” of everyday life during World War II, including dress,
house and home, and food. T hese writings also provide insights into the poli
tics of normalcy by showing ways in which normalcy both real and imagined
was associated with the remainders of both Spanish and U.S. imperial life.
References to normalcy reveal how vestiges of previous empires collided and
sometimes existed alongside Japanese imperial occupation.14 While historical
periodization of colonial rule might suggest a decisive changeover between re
gimes, descriptions of everyday life offer an alternative view, underscoring the
temporal layering of multiple empires.15 While references to transimperial his
tories might bring to mind histories of border-crossers, such histories can also
be found in particular places, among people who navigated different imperial
presences in the course of daily life.
War’s Threat to U.S. Colonial Normalcy

Japanese imperial interest in the Philippines and Southeast Asia had been grow
ing since the turn of the twentieth c entury. Competition and conflict between
the United States and Japan over Philippine markets and resources became
more acute during the 1930s. The United States tried to carefully maneuver
around its promise of Philippine independence, granting a ten-year transition
period (the Commonwealth period) and maintaining its own economic and
political hold on the archipelago and its people. Japan’s expansion across Asia
and the Pacific and the fact that the Philippines was a U.S. colony made the
Philippines a prime target for Japanese aggression. In Cebu, an island in the
central Visayan region, Flora Gimenez recalled, the “air was rife with rumors
of war [and] America’s presence in the country was an invitation to an invasion
by Japan.”16 The demand that soldiers on reserve call in for active duty and the
army’s urgent call for Filipino civilians to serve seemed to give credence to the
rumors. Even before the panic the bombing of Pearl Harbor produced, aware
ness of the possibility of being caught between two empires existed, causing a
slow and steady increase in anxiety.
News outlets addressed the possibility of war and what this would mean for
Filipino civilians. In July 1941 Graphic, a popular Manila-based magazine, pub
lished an issue with Filipino w omen dressed in khakis and the title “Dressed for
Evacuation” emblazoned across the cover. The magazine asked w omen, “How
will you be dressed come evacuation time? How w ill you bundle yourself off
with neatness and dispatch to safety? Call us a pessimist, if you will, but it is not
too early to start growing gray hairs over t hese and a multitude of other ques

tions.”17 While the question of dress for war at first glance might seem like an
unimportant and even frivolous concern, the article’s focus on women’s sarto
rial choices gets at the kinds of minute details civilians would consider if war in
fact came to the Philippines.
Promoting the purchase of an outfit made from American khaki, the article
suggested transforming w omen’s wear so that it could help w omen survive a
pending war. The article insisted that a woman civilian might need a coat to
be as “tough as the elements,” as evacuation would entail leaving the shelter
of home. She would also benefit from wearing pants with utility pockets and a
cap that could serve as a bag, to hold rations such as canned foods, presumably
imported from the United States.18 Even prior to Japan’s initial military attack,
Filipinas felt caught between two empires. They prepared for the invasion of
the Japanese Empire by adopting and adapting American military wear. Fear
ing the prospect of evacuation in advance of a Japanese invasion, they sought
protection in the fabric of a familiar empire, the United States.
The sense of imperial overlaps played out as rumors intensified and the
probability of war increased. Growing numbers of civilians began to evacuate
urban centers, including Manila, Iloilo, and Cebu City. According to Gimenez,
“tension was palpable in Cebu City” and houses were “disgorging themselves
of their occupants,” who sought to escape the “devastation of a war they [were]
sure was coming.”19 Although still under U.S. rule, Filipino civilians upended
their lives in anticipation of a Japanese attack. Evacuees brought with them
what they could: pots, pans, clothing, and foodstuffs that would not spoil. Men
doza described how she and her f amily were constantly relocating, from Iloilo
to various small mountain towns and villages. Her memoir describes predica
ments from life on the move that she found unusual, such as bathing in rivers
(keeping her clothes on for modesty), not having a toilet, and sleeping without
mosquito nets. The shifts were rapid and drastic, “but,” Mendoza asserted, “we
adapted.”20 Her poignant statement about this experience conveys her sense
that women and girls had to be independent and resilient under the precarious
situations that war produced.
In December 1941 the Japanese Air Force bombed Manila and Clark Air
Field Base. Japanese ground troops made their first landings at the most
northern and southern points of Luzon island. Not only did Japanese forces
expel American occupiers, but they also claimed the places Americans had
left.21 Manila architecture of the U.S. colonial period, called “America’s tri
umph” by the colonial governor William Howard Taft, had been designed to
embody American culture and power. Edifices and neighborhoods, particu
larly the large American concrete homes in Pasay and Parañaque, enclaves

of Manila, reinforced racial, social, and, class hierarchies.22 After Manila was
declared an open city, U.S. colonial officials evacuated and the Japanese mili
tary arrested the remaining American civilians, placing many in internment
camps.23
Almost immediately, Japanese high-ranking military officials moved into
U.S. colonial government buildings and grand American homes. In her diary,
Pacita Pestaño-Jacinto, a middle-class housewife, documented rumors of
Japanese “generals and the highest in command . . . liv[ing] like princes”
after seizing all “enemy” properties. She cynically commented, “They [sank]
contentedly into upholstered chairs, gorging themselves on good food.”24
Prior to the war, American colonizers had inserted themselves into daily life
through the physical presence of grand houses that demonstrated their au
thority across the colonial landscape. Filipino civilians like Pestaño-Jacinto
noted how changes in power manifested not only in terms of military force
and policy changes but also in the Japanese colonial takeover of American
spaces that had come to be accepted as symbols of power in colonial everyday
life, particularly in the capital city of Manila. Pestaño-Jacinto’s cynical reac
tion to Japanese colonial officials’ ability to live in relative comfort, while
many Filipinos faced displacement after witnessing the destruction of their
cities and neighborhoods, reveals the resentment felt by civilians dislocated
by war. In a follow-up diary entry, she expressed her contempt for Japanese
dominance over the Philippines. She noted that “pan-Asianism” urged “every
true Filipino to forget the harmful culture that thirty years of oppression
under the yoke of the white people ha[d] forced on us.” While not necessarily
disagreeing with this sentiment of “Asia for Asiatics,” she nevertheless took
issue with Japanese imperial control, writing, “Yes, but why must Japan be
the Master Asiatic?”25
Despite her own resentments of American occupation, Pestaño-Jacinto had
been able to live a relatively comfortable life as a middle-class wife of a medical
doctor. With the coming of Japanese occupation, her life dramatically changed.
She wrote, “Although business tried to go on as usual, life was no longer nor
mal. The atmosphere of war had gripped us.” She lamented that she could not
easily return to ordinary routines or the life she had become accustomed to
with the loss of her home and garden that she and her husband had purchased
as newlyweds just prior to the war.26 H ere Pestaño-Jacinto’s resentment reflects
the dissonance wrought by the war. The occupiers w ere living a lush life, while
the reality of war for Pestaño-Jacinto and many other Filipinos was one of de
privation and displacement.

Food and Transimperial Economies of the Everyday
From the moment Japan began its b attle for the Philippines in 1941 u ntil the
war’s end in 1945, the threat of being caught in the crossfire between the United
States Army Forces Far East and the Japanese military induced fear and panic.
Filipinos would live with this anxiety throughout the occupation. In urban
centers like Manila, looters raided warehouses and stores.27 Among the coveted
items taken w ere foodstuffs. As a result, many households and individuals keenly
felt the impetus to hoard canned meat, rice, and sugar.28 Pestaño-Jacinto imme
diately inventoried her household’s food supplies and sent out a household ser
vant for more canned goods, candles, matches, and extra cots.29 The threat of
the coming Japanese was felt at the everyday level of sustenance and needs. To
maintain normalcy, Pestaño-Jacinto hoarded food with the hope that she could
continue to provide meals for her family as well as prepare familiar American-
influenced dishes. The panic over the lack of imported canned meats and veg
etables was widespread. Anxieties about food were central in women’s accounts
of Japanese occupation in the Philippines.
Pestaño-Jacinto was right to worry that the Japanese presence would pro
foundly affect her family’s access to food. Plans for Japanese imperial expansion
sought to reorganize the economy of the Philippines to transfer profits from
the United States to Japan.30 Economic transformations would ideally offer the
resources that Japan needed to win the war and effectively cut off economic ties
between Southeast Asia and e nemy Western imperial regimes like the United
States.31 The Japanese military government passed strict economic regulations
and sanctions that prohibited U.S.-Philippine import and export relations.
These sanctions particularly affected the availability of food.
As part of its economic restructuring, the Japanese military administration
introduced a new paper currency. W omen described the difficulties of using the
currency in everyday life. By the end of the war, it took 500 notes to equal the
purchasing power of one peso. Lydia Gutierrez’s diary described women bring
ing bushels of notes to the market in order to purchase just one week’s food pro
visions.32 The currency deflated in value so quickly that Manila residents began
to refer to it as “Mickey Mouse money.” Thus Manileños mockingly referred to
the currency of the Japanese Empire with an American popular cultural refer
ence.33 By comparing Japanese currency to play money, Filipino civilians un
derscored that the new Japanese war notes had no value.
Middle-class Filipinos’ resentment toward the Japa nese occupation re
flected the dramatic shift in their standard of living. In the years leading up to

the war, middle-class civil servants directly benefited from U.S. education and
the colonial state’s establishment of civil servant jobs for Filipinos. Women who
attended university began to participate in new forms of white-collar jobs, such
as pharmacy and secretarial work. They witnessed their buying power “soar.”34
Even as Filipinos still worked for independence from the United States prior to
World War II, many longed for the economic comfort of the previous colonial
regime and became increasingly antagonistic toward Japanese control as their
quality of life declined.35 Inflation and the lack of resources led to severe chal
lenges to daily survival.36
In the face of Filipino skepticism about the new Japanese regime, the new
military government introduced a “Co-Prosperity” propaganda campaign that
aimed to sever the Philippines from the United States. This campaign had three
components. First, as Japanese economic sanctions suggest, Co-Prosperity em
phasized the necessity for Filipinos to become independent of American prod
ucts and cultural forms. Second, the Co-prosperity campaign bolstered local
production of agricultural products, aiming to make the Philippines agricultur
ally self-sustaining. Third, Japanese propaganda portrayed life u nder Japanese
rule as more prosperous than under that of their American counterparts.
The Japanese Propaganda Corps, a branch of the Japanese military adminis
tration, played a central part in promoting Japanese pan-Asian rhetoric. Media
regulated and funded by the Propaganda Corps widely circulated the benefits
of the Japanese imperial regime over Western empires. Corps-funded media
tried to break Filipino-American alliances and win over Filipinos, as Japan had
done in Indonesia, Burma, and Malaysia. Japanese government agencies fun
neled money to publish heavily curated and censored journals, which promised
co-prosperity between Japanese and Filipino peoples. In the midst of military
violence between Japanese and Filipino American allied forces, the Japanese
government hoped to reduce opposition by persuading Filipinos to “resume
normal lives.”37 Despite visions of pan-Asian collaboration, the disruption of
Filipino life made many wary and distrustful of the new colonial authority. A fter
military confrontations between U.S. and Japanese armed forces shut down
production and commerce, many Filipino men and w omen refused to return
to work. O thers joined guerrilla movements and continued to b attle against the
Japanese military and protest the new imperial state.38 Japanese propaganda
campaigns promoting “normalcy” attempted to assuage Filipino resistance.
Although “normal” life before the war would have meant life under U.S.
colonial rule with dependence on U.S. imports, Japanese propaganda promoted
a new normalcy that would encourage Filipinos to return to mundane routines
but not consume U.S. goods. The Co-Prosperity campaign emphasized that

Japanese authority brought even more prosperity and encouraged Filipinos to
abandon skeptical appraisals of and resistance to Japanese rule. The Japanese
colonial regime thus created a new normal which insisted that Filipinos would
experience greater prosperity under Japanese authority. A Japanese colonial
state would provide better resources for everyday life than the displaced U.S.
colonial regime.
In fact Japanese propaganda denied the existence of any social or economic
problems incited by war, using the image of happy and prosperous Filipino
women. Propagandists understood the gendered impact of war and relied on
images of women to promote the Japanese ideology of co-prosperity.39 Publica
tions like the Tribune and Shin Seiki: Bagong Araw, A New Era, a pictorial maga
zine with articles written in English, Tagalog, and Japanese, depicted w omen
as the gauge of normalcy. Newspapers and magazines consistently circulated
images of abundance in food and other necessities alongside smiling w omen.40
One issue of Shin Seiki published an image of an elderly Filipino w oman receiv
ing rice emblazoned with the script “Sapat na Bigas Ukol Sa Lahat,” with the
English translation appearing at the bottom of the page: “Enough Rice for All.”
Another photo spread exhibited middle-class women as the embodiment of an
idealized normalcy. The spread, entitled “Women at Work,” showed women in
a variety of occupations, including a tindera, or storekeeper. Behind her are
shelves filled with canned foods. Japanese propagandists who circulated this
image recognized that canned goods w ere staples of everyday life, particularly
for middle-class households. But this image makes no reference to the ways
that inflation and limited access to everyday necessities shaped the majority
of Filipinos’ lives during World War II.41 It also overlooks the imperial con
notations of canned goods. In the photo, the young Filipino w oman, dressed
in a clean fashionable dress with her hair perfectly coiffed, smilingly hands a
small girl a box of Purico shortening. Japanese propagandists no doubt regarded
Purico as a local brand produced by the Philippine Manufacturing Corpora
tion. Purico, however, was originally an American-owned coconut refinery.42
The image thus unwittingly associated the prosperity of Japanese rule with the
availability of American manufactured or imported goods.
Women’s diaries and memoirs revealed the ineffectiveness of Japanese food
campaigns. While Japanese rhetoric advocated a new and better normal, Fili
pino w omen who had to carry on with daily routines in the context of war
could not escape the difference between Japanese propaganda and the diffi
culties they faced daily. For middle-class women, the food crisis was as much
about the unavailability of certain coveted imported American foods as it was
about the shortage of food in general. Pestaño-Jacinto outright accused papers

of “evad[ing] the issue” in their refusal to recognize the conditions that ne
cessitated rationing.43 On the ground, stores and markets carried fewer and
fewer of the goods considered staples. A few months into Japanese occupation,
Lourdes Montinola expressed her panic while watching “important items . . .
[disappear] from grocery stores. T here was no butter, no refined sugar, no fresh
milk; there was a lack of most canned goods.”44 Similarly Pestaño-Jacinto noted
in her diary, “Milk, canned or powdered, has gone the way of all imported com
modities.”45
The anxiety over the lack of imported American foodstuffs reflects the deep
reach of U.S. Empire into food practices before the war. U.S. education offi
cials had taken great pains to educate young girls in “sanitary” food prepara
tion and encourage so-called better nutrition. At the same time, cookbooks that
promoted American recipes and palates circulated among mostly middle-class
Filipina consumers.46 It is important to note that not all Filipinos could afford
imported foodstuffs, and therefore imported goods came to symbolize higher
social and class status. Thus civilians, especially among the m iddle class, re
garded these economic strictures as the denial of staples considered essential
to good and healthy living during the American colonial period. The disap
pearance of these goods also threatened the symbols of middle-class status in
Filipino society.47 For elite and middle-class Filipinos, normalcy implied food
habits that had been shaped by U.S. colonialism.
Even as Japanese occupation progressed, urban middle-class women, like
Pestaño-Jacinto, continued to long for food from the U.S. colonial era. The war’s
numerous disruptions to food supplies changed what was to be expected of
day-to-day living, creating a new normal. These conditions engendered a range
of reactions and coping strategies that reflected gender and class positions.
Pestaño-Jacinto’s status and life during the American colonial period had been
largely defined by her position as a middle-class housewife. This status had en
abled her to consume “modern” household goods and food.48 She lamented that
food had become “so colorless, so prosaic” under Japanese rule. She longed
for the food of the American colonial period, what she called “real bread” as
well as muffins, waffles and bacon, cakes, asparagus tips, peas, macaroni, and
liver spread.49 The “real” bread and other baked goods would have required
imported flour made from wheat. The other products she so longingly cata
logued were also American imports. She disclosed in her diary that she and
other housewives hoarded these coveted food items. On special occasions, like
her d aughter’s baptism, Pestaño-Jacinto took from her limited supply and made
dishes introduced in the American colonial period that continued to represent
desirability and status, like stuffed turkey and chicken salad. She declared, “I

want to put the menu on record. . . . I want to remember good food when it
can no longer be had.”50 Despite living u nder Japanese occupation, middle-class
Filipino women such as Pestaño-Jacinto created a normalcy from the vestiges
of U.S. Empire. In this account, baptism, a Catholic ceremony and a signifier of
Spanish colonial rule, came together with an American-influenced menu. Over
lapping empires manifested in a celebration for a newborn d aughter who faced
an uncertain future under a new imperial regime.
In w omen’s accounts of the war, holidays and festivities w ere portrayed as
a break from the new normal of both tedium and violence.51 Montinola re
called celebrating her m other and father’s silver wedding anniversary in No
vember 1944 and how she “opened a can of treasured Wesson oil to make real
mayonnaise” to put in a chicken salad.52 The routines of holidays u nder U.S.
Empire became a means to enact a sense of normalcy. For Montinola and her
family, creating that desired normalcy meant conjuring the minutiae of every
day life prior to World War II. W hether or not she was conscious of the prod
uct’s and r ecipe’s U.S. colonial roots, Montinola’s use of t hese food items never
theless provided a reprieve from the stress of war. The strong sense of nostalgia
for the seemingly banal objects of the U.S. colonial period presents a certain
irony. Montinola couches her desire for freedom from Japanese tyranny as a
desire for the materials of another colonial past. The items that evoked hap
pier times and a past normal life w ere in fact vestiges of an American colonial
regime. That these items continued to exist and produce such powerful feel
ings illustrates the ways in which U.S. colonial power lingered even during the
Japanese occupation.
While nostalgia for American food products pervaded practices in everyday
urban life, Filipinos in rural provinces confronted different challenges to ev
eryday food practices. As some migrated from urban areas to provincial towns,
they improvised food practices utilizing local resources and networks. Staying
in Palompon, a small coastal Visayan town, the Gimenezes had access to local
seafood, such as small fish and krill. Gim Gimenez earned a living by selling
guinamus, salted and fermented krill, made with local food preservation tech
niques that long predated canned meats.
While Flora Gimenez praised her husband for his entrepreneurial spirit,
she also relied on her own resourcefulness and connections with other w omen
to generate income during the war. From the sale of guinamus Gimenez could
purchase more expensive products, like rice and pork, which she used to
make and sell delicacies derived from the Spanish colonial period. She de
pended on her mother-in-law’s labor-intensive recipe for chorizos that she
sold door-to-door.53 Gimenez innovated Spanish- influenced recipes with

local food sources in order to assemble a new food economy and increase her
household income.
The Gimenezes w ere able to hire two helpers to assist them in both business
and h ousehold work. With the extra help, Gimenez expanded her business. She
targeted local wealthy w omen, who played mahjong to pass the time during the
malaise of the war, as potential patrons, after noticing that they lacked variety
during their daily merienda (afternoon snacks). Hoping to capitalize on the de
sire for food variety during a time of scarcity, Gimenez began making and selling
empanadas. Much in the same way that Japan could not completely eliminate
traces of U.S. colonialism, almost fifty years of U.S. control had not eradicated
Spanish colonial influences. The layering of empires appeared in Filipinas’ ad
aptations of food practices and tastes. The comfort offered by Spanish-inflected
empanadas and chorizos enhanced the comfort offered by social networks—
revealed by family recipes and friendships among women—to help civilians
cope with the duress of war.
Across the archipelago, war made the production and consumption of food
increasingly difficult. Levels of starvation and famine varied across the Philip
pines. For example, in Luzon and the Visayan region, restrictions on U.S. imports
like wheat flour necessitated the use of a locally sourced substitute, cassava flour.
Cassava, a root vegetable that the Spanish Empire imported from Mexico to the
Philippines via the Manila Galleon, once again became a food staple throughout
the archipelago. Like kamote (sweet potato), also indigenous to Mexico, cassava
could be planted and easily foraged.54 While food practices during the American
colonial period created a food economy that rendered cassava and kamote less
valuable and desirable than American imported vegetables, the reality of scarcity
spurred Filipino civilians to return to older colonial products.55
Japanese administrators also promoted the revitalization of local agriculture,
with indigenous crops as well as t hose crop varieties introduced by the Spanish
and Americans prior to World War II. Food shortages and the conditions of war
prompted colonial authorities to demand Filipino farmers in Luzon and the
Visayas to resume work on the land. The Ministry of Agriculture’s food cam
paigns in agricultural rural areas encouraged the growing of food crops, namely
cassava, kamote, soy, corn, and rice.56 However, the damage caused by the war
and continued battles between guerrilla forces and the Japanese Imperial Army
made it difficult for farmers to comply with new policies.57
As food shortages persisted, Japanese officials homed in on domestic life,
targeting Filipino w omen. They emphasized the importance of utilizing locally
produced food. Although Japanese-controlled newspapers denied widespread

food shortages and starvation, they strongly encouraged the use of cassava.58
Articles directed t oward women readers provided new r ecipes with cassava as
the main ingredient, such as cassava cake and cassava pudding.59 Cassava des
serts and the use of canned fruits in Filipino treats embodied the layering of
Japanese, U.S., and Spanish cultural and economic forces. The shifts in food
economies left an indelible mark on Filipino cuisine and tastes and show the far
reaches of colonial conflicts in Filipino lives.60 Today in the Philippines and the
Filipino diaspora, for example, cassava is a coveted ingredient used in celebra
tory delicacies like cassava cakes.61
Conclusion
Although histories of war and competing empires have focused on spectacular
events, attempts to establish control and power in the Philippines relied heavily
on controlling perceived norms and normalcy. Understanding the power of the
fantasy of “normalcy” in the day-to-day, Japanese colonial authorities in the
war-torn Philippines promised a return to life as usual, if not a life better than
before. Even as they strove for a clean and decisive break from U.S. power,
capital, commodities, and culture, Japanese military authorities went to g reat
lengths to frame war as the introduction of a new and greater normal. The im
ages they produced of accessible and abundant food and healthy, clean, and
smiling Filipinos attempted to secure Filipinos’ trust in a new colonial regime.
Yet the distance between Japanese propaganda and lived experience as articu
lated by middle-class Filipino women was profound. Writing the history of the
everyday through personal archives reframes triumphalist narratives of war,
policy changes, and the imperial state as a history of precarity, fear, and uncer
tainty. These difficult conditions were felt acutely by women. Japan’s failure to
actually create a new and better normal for Filipinos forced ordinary women to
pursue a range of survival strategies.
Tracing middle-class Filipinas’ efforts to achieve normalcy reveals the
extent to which they navigated imperial overlaps. Instead of experiencing a
clean break, they w ere surrounded by residue from previous imperial regimes,
whether in housing, clothing, or food. The layering of imperial power in the
context of war structured norms and normalization. Having introduced new
forms of precarity, the Japanese military government inadvertently enhanced
attachments to prior colonial regimes. Even Filipinos who ardently wanted na
tional independence came to see elements of past occupations as far preferable
to the Japanese colonial present and promised future. Firsthand knowledge of

multiple imperial regimes enabled Filipinos to assess one in relation to o thers,
to the detriment of Japanese efforts to win hearts and minds.
As Filipina civilians’ pursuit of normalcy in a time of war suggests, the Phil
ippines provides a critical case to think about the application of the concept of
transimperialism in one geographic location. Their pursuit of normalcy pro
vides insights into how empires overlap in particular places and how imperial
legacies s haped daily lives long a fter the formal cession of imperial power. Just
as transimperialism can help us grasp the history of changing imperial policies,
institutions, and bureaucracies across different imperial spatial regimes, it can
also help us understand the consequences and lived experiences that followed
from imperial overlaps and transitions in a particular place. For Filipinos dur
ing World War II, that meant living with the decisions of the Japanese military
administration and the long legacies of the United States and the Spanish who
came before.
notes
1. Denise Cruz and Rey Ileto’s work underscores that World War II was in fact the
third modern war in the Philippines: first was the Philippine Revolution, then the
Philippine-American War, and then World War II. See Denise Cruz, introduction to Yay
Panlilio, The Crucible: An Autobiography by Colonel Yay, Filipina American Guerrilla (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009), ix–xxviii; Reynaldo Clemena Ileto,
“Philippine Wars and the Politics of Memory,” positions: east asia cultures critique 13, no. 1
(2005): 215–35.
2. For more on a general history of World War II and the Philippines, see Teo
doro A. Agoncillo, The Fateful Years: Japan’s Adventure in the Philippines, 1941–45, vols. 1–2
(Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 2001); John W. Dower, War without
Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993).
3. Pacita Pestaño-Jacinto, Living with the Enemy (Pasig City, Philippines: Anvil, 1999), 2.
4. Motoe Terami-Wada, “The Japanese Propaganda Corps in the Philippines,” Philip-
pine Studies 38, no. 3 (third quarter 1990): 279–300.
5. For an intellectual history of Japanese ideologies of pan-Asianism, see Sven Mat
thiessen, Japanese Pan-Asianism and the Philippines from the Late Nineteenth Century to the
End of World War II: Going to the Philippines Is Like Coming Home? (Boston: Brill, 2015);
Vicente L. Rafael, “Anticipating Nationhood: Collaboration and Rumor in the Japanese
Occupation of Manila,” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 1, no. 1 (1991): 67–82.
6. Helen Mendoza, Memories of the War Years: A Teenage Girl’s Life in the Philippines
u nder Japanese Rule (Quezon City, Philippines: Pantas, 2016).
7. Pestaño-Jacinto, Living with the Enemy, 2.
8. Lydia C. Gutierrez, “Liberation Diary: The Longest Wait,” Sunday Times Magazine,
April 23, 1967, Philippine Diary Project, http://philippinediaryproject.com/category/diary
-of-lydia-c-gutierrez/.

9. Eiichiro Azuma, Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japa
nese Americ a (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Historians Rey Ileto and Resil
Mojares are critical of dominant nationalist histories that frame World War II in the
Philippines as a story of allied Filipino-American forces battling against the tyranny
of Japanese imperialism. The joint struggle thus rallied together Filipinos in patriotic
fervor for the shared goal of Philippine national independence. The narrative of Filipino-
American alliance framed the period of Japanese occupation as an aberration from the
linear progression of modernization and nation-making. In other words, World War II was
a time of the abnormal, an extreme deviation of normal conditions. A return to normal
could be achieved only through the joint efforts of Filipinos and Americans to defeat and
expel Japanese forces. Ileto, “Philippine Wars and the Politics of Memory”; Resil B. Mojares,
“The Formation of Filipino Nationality under US Colonial Rule,” Philippine Quarterly of
Culture and Society 34, no. 1 (2006): 11–32.
10. Veena Das discusses the “mutual absorption of the violent and the ordinary” and
argues that in recognizing that there is violence in the everyday we also come to an un
derstanding that the “event” is “always attached to the ordinary.” This is a useful frame
work to explain civilian experiences of war as encompassing both spectacular “events” of
warfare and what becomes the everyday of war. Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and
the Descent into the Ordinary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 7.
11. Michael Warner addresses the normal and normality as a “regime of normal” in The
Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: F
ree Press, 1999).
See also Canguilhem Georges, The Normal and the Pathological (New York: Zone Books,
1991); Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives
(New York: New York University Press, 2005); Rosemarie Garland Thomson, ed., Freakery:
Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York: New York University Press, 1996).
12. Antoinette Burton makes a compelling case for centering w omen’s writing and
writings about women in studies of empire. Antoinette M. Burton, Dwelling in the
Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India (Oxford: Oxford
13. For more on the American colonial period and the impact of English education on
the making of Filipino w omen writers and an English canon, see Denise Cruz, Transpacific
Femininities: The Making of the Modern Filipina (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).
14. On imperial residues, see Ann Laura Stoler, “Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins
and Ruination.” Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 2 (2008): 191–219.
15. Here I borrow from cultural critics such as Ju Yon Kim and Henri Lefebvre who
argue for analyzing the depths of the mundane as repetitive behaviors, everyday enact
ments, and everyday life. Ju Yon Kim, The Racial Mundane: Asian American Performance
and the Embodied Everyday (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 8–9; Henri
Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life (London: Verso, 1991), 2:196.
16. Maceda, Bride of War, 33.
17. “Dressing for Evacuation,” Graphic, July 10, 1941, n.p.
18. Helen Mendoza recounts meticulously curating what was necessary for evacuation
and the amount she could carry herself. She packed three sets of clothes, two pairs of
socks, a pair of slippers, and an extra pair of rubber shoes (Memories of the War Years, 29).

20. Mendoza, Memories of the War Years, 31.
22. Kiyoko Yamaguchi, “The New ‘American’ Houses in the Colonial Philippines and
the Rise of the Urban Filipino Elite,” Philippine Studies 54, no. 3 (2006): 418.
23. Frances B. Cogan, Captured: The Japanese Internment of American Civilians in the
Philippines, 1941–1945 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012).
26. Pestaño-Jacinto, Living with the Enemy, 2–4.
27. Daniel F. Doeppers, Feeding Manila in Peace and War, 1850–1945 (Madison: Univer
sity of Wisconsin Press, 2016), 308–9; Pestaño-Jacinto, Living with the Enemy, 11.
28. Agoncillo, The Fateful Years, 2:518; Pestaño-Jacinto, Living with the Enemy, 7.
30. The Philippines was part of what Japan deemed “Area A,” along with British Ma
laya, Dutch East Indies, and Borneo. For more on the Japanese imperial expansion in the
Philippines and across Southeast Asia, see Theodore Friend, The Blue-Eyed Enemy: Japan
against the West in Java and Luzon, 1942–1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2014); Benito Justo Legarda, Occupation: The Later Years (Quezon City, Philippines: De
La Salle University–Manila, 2007); Setsuho Ikehata and Ricardo Trota Jose, eds., The
Philippines under Japan: Occupation Policy and Reaction (Quezon City, Philippines: Ateneo
de Manila University Press, 1999); Terami-Wada, “The Japanese Propaganda Corps in the
Philippines.”
31. Agoncillo, The Fateful Years, 2:517.
32. Gutierrez, “Liberation Diary,” February 3, 1945; Lourdes R. Montinola, Breaking
the Silence: A War Memoir (Diliman, Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press,
1996), 47.
33. Ricardo T. José, “War and Violence, History and Memory: The Philippine Experi
ence of the Second World War,” Asian Journal of Social Science 29, no. 3 (2001): 457–70.
34. Ian Brown, “The Philippine Economy during the World Depression of the 1930s,”
Philippine Studies 40, no. 3 (third quarter, 1992): 385.
35. For more on economic conditions of the 1930s, growing l abor unrest, and persis
tent communist movements that resisted both the U.S. and Japanese regimes, see Bene
dict J. Kerkvliet, The Huk Rebellion: A Study of Peasant Revolt in the Philippines (Lanham,
MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002); Vina A. Lanzona, Amazons of the Huk Rebellion:
Gender, Sex, and Revolution in the Philippines (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
2009).
36. Doeppers, Feeding Manila in Peace and War, 308.
37. Terami-Wada, “The Japanese Propaganda Corps in the Philippines,” 281.
38. Lanzona, Amazons of the Huk Rebellion.
39. Japanese colonial occupation strategies also took up this idea of the gift of freedom
throughout its campaign in colonized Southeast Asia. In the Philippines they promised
freedom from the tyranny of the West and solidarity in a pan-Asian movement.
40. Shin Seiki: Bagong Araw, A New Era (Manila, Philippines, 1942–43).

41. Doeppers, Feeding Manila, 333.
42. For more on food politics, colonial hygiene, and hydrogenated oils, see Dawn
Bohulano Mabalon, “As American as Jackrabbit Adobo: Cooking, Eating, and Becoming
Filipina/o American before World War II,” in Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader
(New York: New York University Press, 2013), 147–76.
44. Montinola, Breaking the Silence, 37. Additionally, the depletion of rice from local
markets pushed the military administration to regulate rice, and other products like soap
and medicine. For more on the rice shortage in Manila, see Doeppers, Feeding Manila,
307–32.
46. Megan Elias, “The Palate of Power: Americans, Food and the Philippines a fter the
Spanish-American War,” Material Culture Vol. 46, No. 1, Special Issue (2014): 44–57.
47. For more on food politics during the U.S. colonial period, see Doreen G. Fer
nandez, “Culture Ingested: Notes on the Indigenization of Philippine Food,” Philippine
Studies 36, no. 2 (1988): 219–32; René Alexander Orquiza Jr., “Lechon with Heinz, Lea
& Perrins with Adobo: The American Relationship with Filipino Food, 1898–1946,”
in Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader, edited by Robert Ji-Song Ku, Martin F.
Manalansan IV, and Anita Mannur (New York: New York University Press, 2013),
177–85; Felice Prudente Santa Maria, The Governor-General’s Kitchen: Philippine Culi-
nary Vignettes and Period Recipes: 1521–1935 (Pasig City, Philippines: Anvil, 2006).
48. Raquel A.G. Reyes, “Modernizing the Manileña: Technologies of Conspicuous
Consumption for the Well-to-do Woman, circa 1880s–1930s,” Modern Asian Studies 46,
no. 1 (2012): 193–220.
50. Pestaño-Jacinto, Living with the Enemy, 71–72. Montinola’s memoir expressed simi
lar rituals around food from the American colonial era (Breaking the Silence, 49).
51. Mendoza, Memories of the War Years, 64; Pestaño-Jacinto, Living with the Enemy, 25.
52. Montinola, Breaking the Silence, 49.
54. Even prior to the war, the Commonwealth government encouraged civilians to
plant kamote in preparation for the war. Doeppers, Feeding Manila in Peace and War,
321–23.
55. Mendoza, Memories of the War Years, 32; Agoncillo, The Fateful Years, 2:556.
56. In addition to planting root crops, the Ministry of Agriculture also planned to pro
duce and harvest grains in the provinces surrounding Manila, such as Isabella, Cagayan,
Nueva Ecija, Bulucan, and Cavite. Francis K. Danquah, “Japan’s Food Farming Policies
in Wartime Southeast Asia: The Philippine Example, 1942–1944,” Agricultural History 64,
no. 3 (1990): 64.
57. Danquah, “Japan’s Food Farming Policies in Wartime Southeast Asia.”
58. The problem of inflation was further exacerbated by an already deficient food sup
ply, brought on by natural disasters between 1938 and 1941.
59. “Re-discovering the Cassava, Camote’s Forgotten Cousin,” Tribune, March 22,
1942, 5.

60. For more on colonial and wartime legacies affecting Filipino cuisine and food
cultures, see Gilda Cordero-Fernando, ed., Culinary Culture of the Philippines (Manila:
Bancom Audiovision, 1976); Doreen Fernandez, Palayok: Philippine Food through Time, on
Site, in the Pot (Manila: Bookmark, 2006); Doreen Fernandez, Tikim: Essays on Philippine
Food and Culture (Manila: Anvil, 1994), 62, 223; Doreen Fernandez, Kinilaw: A Philippine
Cuisine of Freshness (Manila: Bookmark, 1991).
61. Fernandez, Tikim.

part v. res ist ance across empires
12. fighting john bull and u
ncle sam: south asian
revolutionaries confront the modern state
Moon-Ho Jung
Born in 1884 to a literary caste (Kayastha) and a f ather in the colonial bureau
cracy, Har Dayal’s intellectual gifts placed him on a fast track to a career in civil
service, but his anticolonial radicalism made him instead a target of the Brit
ish imperial security state. A fter earning his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in
India, he left in 1905 to study at Oxford University on a scholarship sponsored
by the colonial government of India. Although his academic achievements mo
mentarily eclipsed his political activities, the British government’s Investiga
tion Department had grown concerned enough to file a report in 1904 stating
that “a sense of revolt had taken deep root in his mind and had even permeated
strongly a select circle of his friends.” Dayal engaged in formal historical stud
ies at Oxford and informal political studies with fellow colonized subjects in
England. His outrage against the British Empire compelled him, as he put it,
to “resign” his scholarship in 1907, a year before he was expected to graduate
with high honors. The British colonial educational system, he would write
the following year back in India, was “one huge octopus which is sucking out
the moral life-blood of the nation.” Hounded by British undercover agents and
repressive laws, Dayal left India in less than a year, returning to E ngland and
then finding a home briefly in the radical world of Paris. He edited a revolution
ary newspaper there, Bande Mataram, for South Asians everywhere, especially
back home in India.1
Dayal soon sought refuge across the Atlantic, to recover from ill health and
to regenerate his political philosophy and revolutionary organizing. Having
grown tired of the socialist orthodoxy pervading the exiled left in Paris, he em
barked in 1910 for Martinique, a French colony in the Caribbean. Dayal led an
ascetic life on the tropical island, evidently determined to bequeath a new reli
gion to the world modeled on Buddha’s life. His mission took him to the librar
ies of Harvard University by way of the Danish Virgin Islands, the U.S. colony
of Puerto Rico, and New York City. A couple months in Cambridge were appar
ently long enough. Hearing that there were thousands of South Asian laborers
on the Pacific Coast who might be organized in the struggle for the liberation
of the Indian subcontinent, Dayal made his trek westward in the spring of 1911.
The United States, he wrote then, was an “ethical sanitarium, where eternal
sunshine prevails, and the wrecks of other climes are wrought into beautiful
specimens of restored humanity.” His love affair with America would be short-
lived, but he was ready to make the Bay Area home, at least for a while. A fter a
short trip to Hawai‘i, where he read Karl Marx and became friends with Japa
nese residents, he received a temporary appointment as a lecturer of Indian
philosophy at Stanford University. In California, Dayal began writing and lec
turing again on the British Empire and revolutionary politics. He was ready to
move back into the spotlight.2
Both the U.S. program of intelligence and surveillance, which had emerged
from the campaign to consolidate colonial rule in the Philippines, and the Brit
ish system, which had originated in the colonial administration of India, took
notice. By January 1913 William C. Hopkinson, in charge of monitoring South
Asians for the Canadian government since 1909, had established a transimpe
rial network of state officials and paid informants to keep track of “seditious”
activities in the Bay Area. The British consul general, whose government had
urged Canadian authorities to dispatch Hopkinson, provided him with names
of South Asian college students willing to provide information on Dayal. Hop
kinson also made contact with U.S. officials at the immigration station on
Angel Island and in the Department of Justice, all of whom promised coopera
tion and support in his investigation of “Hindu agitators.” He attended Dayal’s
public lectures, which were featured regularly in local radical circles, trying to
gather criminal evidence to pass on to his American colleagues. Like Stanford
administrators who pressured Dayal to resign his academic post, Hopkinson
was dismayed by Dayal’s unflinching radicalism and adoring leftist audiences.
“Of all the Indian agitators who have visited the States and of all those whom I
have a knowledge,” he reported, “I am led to believe that Har Dayal is the most
dangerous.”3
Dayal’s intrepid rhetoric and anticolonial politics—and false reports of his
close association with Emma Goldman, the most prominent anarchist in the
262 moon-ho jung

United States—drove U.S. and British officials to intensify their surveillance
of Dayal and his comrades. In January 1914 Samuel W. Backus, the head of the
immigration station on Angel Island, requested from Commissioner G eneral of
Immigration Anthony W. Caminetti an arrest warrant. Time was of the essence.
“The reason this subject is presented at this time is that from information re
ceived,” Backus explained, “he has been in the United States nearly three years;
and if the Bureau s hall be of the opinion that he comes within the excluded
classes, he may be arrested before the statute of limitation operates and then his
case can be considered at leisure.” Caminetti complied immediately, securing a
warrant for Dayal’s arrest on February 10, 1914. “That the said alien is a member
of the excluded classes in that he was an anarchist or person who believed in or
advocated the overthrow by force or violence of the Government of the United
States, or of all government, or of all forms of law,” the warrant read, “or the
assassination of public officials, at the time of his entry into the United States.”4
The U.S. bureaucrats’ plan to deport Dayal backfired. Their failure to locate
the exact date of Dayal’s landing in New York—February 9, 1911—led them to
miss the statutory three-year window by a single day, a fateful m istake that
they tried to cover up by investigating whether Dayal had subsequently left and
reentered the United States. Not only did Dayal pounce on that error, but he
fought back, loudly. News of his arrest, which took place at the conclusion of a
socialist meeting in San Francisco’s Bohemian Hall on March 25, 1914, stunned
local South Asians, two hundred of whom accompanied Dayal as he was taken
away to Angel Island for questioning the following morning. In his interview
with an immigrant inspector, Dayal refused to renounce or apologize for his po
litical beliefs and anticolonial activities. “As a general rule I believe that tyranni
cal government[s] should be over-thrown by mass uprisings,” he replied at one
point, “but this does not mean that I must condemn the assassination of public
officials in all lands, in all ages, and under all circumstances, as a principle.” He
presented himself as an intellectual, denying that he was an anarchist three
years earlier but admitting his later espousal of what could be called “philo
sophical anarchism.” “I will never enter a country by denying my convictions,”
Dayal shot back. After posting a $1,000 bond, he returned to San Francisco
and proceeded directly to the Industrial Workers of the World Hall to deliver a
lecture titled “The Problem of Unemployment.”5
Dayal’s confrontation with U.S. immigration authorities revealed the deep
and vast colonial roots of modern state power. Propelled by global demands
for migrant labor and a repressive colonial security state at home, South Asian
workers and activists moved to all corners of the world, including the Pacific
Coast of North America, where they forged an anticolonial movement in the
Fighting John Bull and Uncle Sam 263

opening decades of the twentieth century that reverberated across oceans and
continents. But, as Dayal discovered, the U.S. state was becoming intimately
wedded to the British Empire, literally fighting on the same side during World
War I, in a wider project to erect and protect imperial borders and racial hier
archies and to silence and criminalize revolutionary ideas and revolutionary
peoples. As waves of “foreigners” appeared to threaten the “domestic” order of
things, the U.S. state increasingly recognized and mobilized against revolution
ary movements that critiqued and transgressed t hose borders and hierarchies.
The outbreak of World War I, in turn, unleashed transpacific visions of antico
lonial revolution, visions that appeared to solidify and magnify racial and radi
cal alliances emerging out of the U.S.-occupied Philippines and all across colo
nized Asia. The U.S. state’s repression of South Asians mobilizing against the
British Empire ultimately exposed and created the racial and colonial edifice of
the modern state, which became indispensable to preserving white supremacy
and empire and to extending U.S. claims to power across the Pacific.
Mobilizing against British and U.S. Empires

Virtually blocked from entering Canada and the United States by 1910 through
immigration statutes and their expansive enforcement, South Asian migrants
came face to face with British and U.S. government officials driven to control
their movements. On November 4, 1910, nineteen South Asians left Manila
for Seattle, where immigration authorities summarily rejected them for being
“likely to become a public charge” and, in the case of four individuals, believ
ers “in the practice of polygamy.” Herbert W. Meyers, an attorney representing
the migrants, appealed the decisions, arguing that his clients were able-bodied
workers and that they had been admitted legally into the United States in the
Philippines. “This country of ours has been heralded as the hope of the down-
trodden,” he pleaded, “but if we go out of our way to exclude men who have once
been rightfully admitted in the country and who, under the law, should really not
be rejected, we will soon find we have made a serious m istake.” Meyers added
that Taraknath Das, “a college graduate and a writer of some repute,” vowed
to post bond that “these men w ill not become public charges” and to employ
fifteen of them immediately. As they strove to gain entry into Seattle, t hese mi
grants exploited the contradictions of empire. The U.S. government could not
claim jurisdiction over the Philippines and, as Meyers put it, over his clients’
“journey from one section of our country to another.”6
U.S. immigration authorities, in effect, concluded that they could do both.
Ellis DeBruler, the commissioner of immigration in Seattle, affirmed the de
264 moon-ho jung

cisions, stressing the dangers of allowing “an open gateway to the mainland
of the United States,” thereby flooding the market for “common labor.” White
workers, he continued, would not stand by idly, “and one of the ways in which
these men would all finally become public charges would be the fact that the
American laborers would drive them from the fields and the camps and then
they would be for us to feed and not only to feed, but to protect from vio
lence which would ultimately ensue.” Commissioner General of Immigration
Daniel J. Keefe sustained DeBruler’s views, ruling that the migrants were not
being denied entry but being deported from the United States. “While or
dinarily it is doubtless assumed that aliens admitted to so distant a part of
the ‘United States’ as the Philippines intend to remain there, where climatic
and economic conditions are very different from on the mainland . . . ,” he
stated, “the m atter takes on another aspect when viewed retrospectively in
determining whether aliens who have not remained in the islands, but have
attempted to move into a part of the country where conditions are dissimilar,
are subject to deportation.” Keefe allowed two migrants who had resided in
the Philippines for longer than three years to land in Seattle, but all of the
others were to be deported to Hong Kong, “where they embarked originally
for the Philippines.”7
These particular migrants would find a reprieve from the deportation
orders, but their legal appeals unwittingly reinforced U.S. imperial ambitions
in the Philippines. In March 1911 Secretary of Commerce and L abor Charles
Nagel overruled the judgment of immigration officials. “No doubt deportation
could be ordered and could be made effective,” he reasoned, “but I can not bring
myself to believe that such a course would be a fair enforcement of the law.”
Motivated less by a sense of fairness than by the conviction that entry decisions
rendered by War Department officials in the Philippines should stand, at least
in the absence of legislation authorizing his department to conduct another
round of independent inspections, Nagel sided with the migrants. By asserting
the legality of his colleagues’ decisions in the Philippines, Nagel’s conclusion
sanctified the U.S. state’s claims to sovereignty in the Philippines at a moment
of heightened imperial insecurities. Rumors of another Philippine revolution,
in alliance with Japan, swirled in the Philippines, driving the U.S. security state
to monitor an ever growing number of potential revolutionaries. In June 1911
a Philippine Constabulary agent submitted a report on an Indian peddler in
Manila, “an intelligent man” who was leaving soon for Japan and China before
returning to India. He concluded that the man was “an Indian political agita
tor.” “He is a slick individual anyhow and I believe he could stand some close
watching,” the agent suggested. In 1911 the state authority to monitor an “agitator”

in Manila and to admit South Asian migrants from Manila into Seattle helped
to make the Philippines a part of the “United States.”8
The state surveillance of anticolonial revolutionaries expanded apace in
North America. By the time Har Dayal set off on his speaking tour of the Pacific
Coast in 1913, Hopkinson’s surveillance network extended to every stop along
the way. On June 9, 1913, Hopkinson rushed a telegram to a U.S. immigration
commissioner in Canada to ask for assistance. “Har Dayal, notorious Hindu
revolutionist and anarchist, delivering course of lectures in Oregon and Wash
ington; was in Astoria third instant,” he wrote. “Would it be possible for any of
ficers of your service to attend his lectures and take notes?” The commissioner
requested that his boss, the commissioner general in Washington, DC, send
agents “to attend the lectures given by this man, with a view to determining
whether he comes within any of the excluded classes.” Commissioner General
Anthony Caminetti responded instantly. Through an informant Hopkinson also
learned that Guru Dutt Kumar—who had been active in organizing and pub
licizing revolutionary work against the British Empire in Victoria, Vancouver,
and Seattle—had recently left for Manila, where he hoped to establish a base to
“supervise the work near China, Hong-Kong, Shanghai” and “to export to South
America, Mexico, Chili [sic], Peru and Brazil.” “Information I have received is
to the effect that Kumar was g oing to the P.I. with a view to encourage Hindu
immigration into the United States,” Hopkinson wrote.9
Hopkinson’s reports reinforced U.S. immigration officials’ resolve to curb
South Asian migrations from the unincorporated Philippines to the incorpo
rated United States. Since 1912 Hopkinson had framed the Philippines as the
weak link in the regulation of U.S. borders, an opening through which revolu
tionary ideas and revolutionary peoples could enter. In June 1913, three months
into Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, his appointees formalized a new approach.
Commissioner General of Immigration Caminetti and Secretary of Labor Wil
liam B. Wilson authorized immigration officers “to reject aliens coming from
insular possessions u nless it should appear that at the time of entry they w ere
not members of the excluded classes or persons ‘likely to become a public
charge.’ ” In contrast to his predecessor, Secretary Wilson was willing to appro
priate the authority to reconsider decisions made by U.S. officials in the Philip
pines. As much as the U.S. state had an investment in claiming the Philippines
as a part of the “United States,” it had a deeper commitment to demarcating a
clear boundary between the metropole (or the U.S. nation) and its colonies (or
the U.S. Empire). The decision to amend U.S. immigration regulations followed
the reasoning of Supreme Court Justice Edward Douglass White, who in 1901
argued, “Whilst in an international sense Porto Rico was not a foreign country,
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since it was subject to the sovereignty of and was owned by the United States, it
was foreign to the United States in a domestic sense, because the island had not
been incorporated into the United States, but was merely appurtenant thereto
as a possession.”10
South Asians from the unincorporated U.S. possession of the Philippines
would be “deported,” not denied entry, but that legal distinction did nothing
but underscore their subjection to the British and U.S. empires. In Septem
ber 1913, when more than seventy of two hundred South Asians arriving from
Manila received deportation o rders in Seattle for “likely to become a public
charge” and then appealed t hose orders in court, the local federal judge refused
to grant them writs of habeas corpus. Immigration and deportation m atters,
he argued, rested with the executive branch, beyond the reach of judicial re
view. The deportation o rders infuriated South Asians across North America. At
a mass meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia, Rajah Singh articulated that
collective rage by calling for vengeance. “All Hindustani, Mohomedans [sic],
Sikhs should speak up for your rights, and I have to say this, that when these
Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders do not allow us to enter into their
country, why should we not drive them from India?” he exclaimed. “We should
take those steps and we could start a struggle and exclude those people from
our India, and I have great hope with our friends and our people that this work
can be done.” T here was no question that “their country” now included the
United States. “Hindustani Brothers, for what reason are we being deported?”
asked another speaker, who had tried in vain to enter the United States with
his family. He proposed to raise money to assist the deportees in Seattle and
“to force the Indian Government to recognize our status.” Attendees pledged
$24,000.11
When Dayal began publishing Ghadar (“revolt” in Urdu) in November 1913,
his unrelenting rebuke of empire and unremitting calls for collective action
articulated and resonated with South Asian migrants’ frustrations and aspi
rations. “It is fifty-six years since the Rebellion of 1857,” he wrote, “now it is
urgently necessary to have another.” Dayal presented extensive reports on the
many crimes committed by the British in India and the British criminalization
of political activities, a combination of which, he argued, demanded concerted
and direct action. In December 1913 Ghadar commemorated the attempted as
sassination of Lord Hardinge, the viceroy of India, one year earlier. “The echoes
of that bomb have spread all over the world,” Dayal argued, “for the newspapers
in far distant countries published articles (about the incident) and asked what
is wrong with the government of India that such a terroristic group has ap
peared.” And he spelled out the future course of history. “Similarly, all events

clearly indicate that the rain storm of ‘revolt’ is about to burst on India soon,”
he predicted, “which sweeping away the debris of (the ruins of) centuries will
establish a republic.” For an audience trying to make sense of their migrations
and persecutions, Dayal’s words provided direction and resolution. “It becomes
immediately the duty of e very patriot who reads this paper to become a soldier
of the Rebellion,” he implored, “to join the regiment of the Rebellion; to pre
pare for the Rebellion; to see visions of the Rebellion; to wait impatiently for
the day of the Rebellion.” Copies of Ghadar soon circulated in North America,
India, East and Southeast Asia, Africa, and everywhere South Asians resided.12
Immigration Laws and the U.S. Security State

By January 1914 U.S. immigration authorities w ere on high alert for South
Asian migrants’ revolutionary activities. Commissioner Backus, head of the
San Francisco office, provided a comprehensive report on “Hindu colonies”
in the United States, highlighting the locations where Dayal and many other
individuals engaged in anticolonial politics. He expressed particular concern
over college students, or those claiming to be students to gain admission into
the United States, “whose primary purposes are to foment and foster a revolu
tionary movement in India, to prepare and distribute circulars and pamphlets
inciting their countrymen to such a revolution, to prepare and train leaders
for the uprising, and to collect funds for the promotion of their plans.” Those
congregated at the University of California, Berkeley, Backus noted, went so far
as to conduct “rifle and revolver practice” nearby. They also supported Ghadar,
which he described as “highly revolutionary in character” and “suppressed by
the British Government in India.” In addition to editing the newspaper, Backus
reported, Dayal was delivering “periodical addresses at various points on the
Pacific Coast under the same auspices wherefrom such agitators as Emma
Goldman secure their support.” He hoped soon to gather evidence of Dayal’s
“apparently anarchistic advocacies” to initiate deportation proceedings. Backus
vowed to commit his office “to scrutinize with the greatest care all Hindu ap
plications for admission in order that we may bring the fullest strength of the
immigration laws against those who may be coming to join in the movement
referred to.”13
Dayal and his supporters struck back because they realized the intimate links
between British and U.S. governments. In January 1914 Dayal wrote a letter to
Charles H. Reily, a U.S. immigrant inspector stationed in Astoria, Oregon, to
convey that he was, in Reily’s paraphrasing, “aware of the plot of the British
government and the United States Immigration Service to ‘kidnap him’ because
268 moon-ho jung

of his activities in behalf of the Hindu Nationalist party.” Unless Reily replied
personally to suspend the plot, Dayal threatened to divulge it to a San Francisco
newspaper and to report to Reily’s superiors that he had received improper sub
sidies from the British government. Although Reily dismissed Dayal’s letter, he
could not so easily disregard a long series of threats from local residents. “At
various times since June, 1913, at which time inquiry concerning these Hindus
was first directed, I have been approached by Hindus who have warned me if
any effort was made to find either Har Dayal or R[am] Chandra [another Gha
dar leader] they would personally see that I was ‘blown up,’ or ‘pushed off the
dock at night,’ or my f amily molested,” Reily reported. “It was explained to me
that the work of Har Dayal, and the interests of the Hindu Nationalist party
were of such importance that rather than permit any interferance [sic] with
their plans they would cheerfully dispose of me in some manner.” “As evidence
of their proficiency in the art of ‘blowing people up,’ ” he added, “I was assured
that most of the members of the Hindu nationalist party w ere also ‘i.w.w.’s.’ ”14
As the revolutionary movement against the British Empire mobilized in
creasingly against the U.S. state, U.S. immigration officials redoubled their ef
forts to secure the United States from South Asian revolutionaries. At the end
of January 1914 Commissioner Backus decided that it was time to arrest Dayal
since he “ha[d] been connected with alleged revolutionary movements in this
vicinity for some time” and “may be considered anarchistic.” “This office has no
definite information as to the exact period of his arrival,” he admitted, “but it is
believed that evidence can be obtained showing his presence in London, Paris
and Martinique within three years, from which his movements can be traced
to the United States.” As Backus’s request moved up the chain of command,
Dayal arrived in Washington, DC, to appear before the congressional Commit
tee on Immigration and Naturalization. He wished to voice his opposition to an
immigration bill prohibiting Asian laborers. Commissioner General Caminetti
secretly informed Representative John L. Burnett, chair of the committee, of
Dayal’s impending arrest warrant so that “it may be possible to illicit [sic] some
testimony from him which otherwise would not come to light.” Dayal did not
testify before the committee, but he evidently stopped by Caminetti’s office to
protest that Asians were categorized “with all idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded
persons, and so forth” in the bill. In his testimony before the committee, Cami
netti conveyed Dayal’s objection, identifying Dayal only as “a cultured man and
a graduate of Oxford University,” and suggested revising the bill’s language to
deflect criticisms from “some people of that race.”15
Besides recounting his conversation with Dayal, who might have said a lot
more in person, Caminetti lobbied fervently for a more stringent immigration

law and a more forceful administrative state. Discretionary and emergency
measures, such as the examination of aliens arriving from the Philippines, he
insisted, w ere not enough. “We have not been able to exclude, under the pre
sent conditions of the law,” he stated, “more than 50 per cent.” Like Chinese im
migration before it, “Hindu immigration” had grown “stealthily” over the years,
to number twenty thousand to thirty thousand, according to Caminetti, far in
excess of the official figure on l egal entrants (6,656). “The question is, s hall we
allow this experience we have had on the Pacific coast to be repeated with
the Hindu before we take action,” he asked, “or s hall we profit by the experience
of the past and meet the question now?” In addition to a new immigration law,
Caminetti appealed for greater resources from Congress to build “patrolling
facilities on both borders and on the extensive coasts, east, south, west, and on
the Great Lakes,” and to improve “water patrol particularly in the Northwest,”
all in an effort “to protect ourselves from people who desire to come in surrep
titiously.” In his letter to Congress, Secretary of Labor Wilson transmitted the
same message, arguing that indirect “expedients and makeshifts . . . to prevent
a large and ever-increasing influx of laborers of that race, who to all intents
and purposes are ‘coolies’ in the same sense that Chinese w ere regarded,” now
required explicit legislation and “direct methods.”16
As one of the most outspoken and visible anticolonial activists in the United
States, Dayal came to represent the growing rift between the U.S. state and
South Asian communities. With an arrest warrant dated February 10, 1914,
based on the premise that he had arrived in “an unknown port, subsequent to
the 26th day of February 1911,” U.S. immigration authorities arrested Dayal in
March 1914 after his return to California. “For many months I have been spied
upon by British secret service operatives,” he informed local newspapers, “but
have gone about my affairs openly and have not tuned my statements or modu
lated my declarations because of their presence.” He condemned the Wilson
administration for “licking the boots of England” and for demonstrating its
“despicable pro-British subservience” by arresting him. “This is a political ques
tion and not an ordinary immigration case,” he asserted. His case revealed the
emerging alliance between Britain and the United States around race and em
pire. “It is simply ridiculous to think that I am being prosecuted in the United
States and in the twentieth c entury because of my ideas,” Dayal said. “I have
broken no laws, and I have not advocated breaking of any laws. The only overt
act I have committed is advocating the overthrow of the British in India by an
armed revolt.” He exuded confidence. “I am not afraid of any Government,” he
wrote in Ghadar. “If I am turned out of this country I can make preparations for
the Ghadr in any other country.”17
270 moon-ho jung

Dayal mounted a challenge that placed U.S. officials on the defensive. “The
Government of Great Britain has had no part in the matter nor has it either
directly or indirectly requested e ither the arrest or the deportation of the
alien,” Caminetti announced in a statement to deny Dayal’s accusations. Dayal’s
attorney, in the meantime, stressed in his brief that his client’s articles and
speeches w ere “incorrectly and most unfavorably translated . . . to give vio
lent and anarchistic significance.” “Mr. Dayal has never advocated terrorism,”
he explained, “but only a national rebellion.” At bottom, what Dayal might or
might not have stated did not m atter legally, his attorney argued, since he
“had actually and continuously been a resident of the United States of Amer
ica” for longer than three years. Dayal conveyed the same message directly
to Caminetti. Within two days of Dayal’s arrest, the acting commissioner of
immigration at Ellis Island certified that Dayal had indeed arrived in New
York from San Juan, Puerto Rico, on February 9, 1911, three years plus one
day before the arrest warrant was issued. That he had sailed from an unin
corporated U.S. possession might have served as a bone of contention if the
date of arrival had been even a day l ater—Dayal’s attorney could have argued
that he had landed in the United States when he set foot on Puerto Rico on
February 3, 1911—but, as it was, U.S. officials knew they had missed the l egal
window of opportunity by one day.18
Even with his legal argument in hand, Dayal could not ignore the power of
the modern state to legitimize and consolidate race and empire. At the same
time that Dayal was arrested in San Francisco in March 1914, Gurdit Singh
chartered the Komagata Maru in Hong Kong to transport nearly four hundred
South Asians to Canada, in defiance of Canadian immigration restrictions. At
stopovers in Shanghai, Moji, and Yokohama, those affiliated with the Ghadar
movement delivered fiery speeches against the British Empire and circulated
copies of Ghadar to passengers. The arrival of the Komagata Maru in British Co
lumbia in May precipitated a standoff between South Asian migrants and Cana
dian officials that reverberated around the world. Refused entry and receiving
deportation o rders, the passengers lived nearly two months aboard the vessel
in Vancouver’s harbor, with their once hopeful outlooks and daily living condi
tions deteriorating week by week. The fate of the Komagata Maru consumed the
attention of Canadian, British, and U.S. authorities and South Asian communi
ties, as it came to symbolize the legitimacy of the state to restrict immigration
and to suppress revolutionary movements. “The Hindusthanees, subjected to
eternal hunger and maltreatment of every sort in their native land,” Taraknath
Das wrote, “want to be recognized as h uman beings and have equal rights to
come to Canada or any other place in the World just as o thers have the right to

come to India.” The impasse concluded in July with a Canadian naval cruiser
forcibly escorting the Komagata Maru west toward the Pacific.19
In contrast to the drama unfolding in Vancouver’s harbor, Dayal’s stay in
the United States ended on an anticlimactic note. In early April 1914 he sent
a telegram to the Department of State to offer a concession. “Considering all
circumstances we have decided to discontinue publication in this country of
Hindu Nationalist anti-British paper and other similar propaganda here,” he re
lated. “No necessity now of persecuting educated political refugees.” Commis
sioner Backus, in the meantime, was investigating rumors that Dayal had trav
eled outside of the United States a fter his initial entry. Dayal probably sensed
that the U.S. government was not going to allow the facts of his case to impede
his deportation. At the end of April, Backus demanded that Dayal appear before
him for further examination, but no one knew his whereabouts. A short time
later Backus learned from “an authentic source” that Dayal had left for Swit
zerland, a turn of events that drove him to seek revenge. Backus wanted to col
lect the $1,000 bond. His superiors disagreed. “At the time the bond was taken
it had not been shown, nor has it since been established,” the commissioner
general stated, “that the three-year period had not expired—indeed, it seemed
quite clear that it had at the time the proceedings were instituted.” The Depart
ment of L abor canceled the bond. But the Bureau of Immigration refused to
withdraw the arrest warrant in case of Dayal’s return b ecause “some advantage
might result from not having absolutely closed the previous proceedings.”20
Even as Dayal evaded U.S. authorities, his departure pointed to the growing
authority of the modern state to secure nation and empire from racialized and
radicalized subjects. Amid his confrontation with the Bureau of Immigration,
eleven individuals in Delhi faced charges that they had conspired with one an
other and with others, including Dayal, to murder public officials. During their
trial in May 1914, the prosecuting attorney reportedly “read an effusion of Har
dyal’s [sic] which was a mixture of religion and anarchy.” He also read passages
from Ghadar “to show the revolutionary trend of the publication.” The U.S. con
sul in Bombay, in turn, requested from British officials information on Dayal’s
“alleged anarchistic activities” and on all “suspected or known to be anarchists”
leaving India for the United States. The prosecution and deportation of itiner
ant anarchists, presumed to signify and include anticolonial revolutionaries,
seemingly demanded transimperial and interstate collaboration. In July 1914,
in Geneva, Dayal explained why he had decided to leave the United States. “I
understood that my presence in the country was undesirable, as I was carrying
on an active anti-British propaganda among the Hindus on the Pacific Coast,
and certain unfounded charges have been preferred by the English Government
272 moon-ho jung

against me with reference to incidents in India,” he informed U.S. officials. “I
hope that the U.S. government w ill not needlessly molest my poor and ignorant
compatriots who live in the United States and cherish dreams of the freedom
of their country.” As Dayal knew from his own experience, that wish would not
be granted.21
John Bull, Uncle Sam, and Bhagwan Singh

Bhagwan Singh, a fellow Ghadar leader, learned firsthand the global reach of
the Anglo-American alliance that would haunt and stifle revolutionary politics
in the opening decades of the twentieth century. According to British police
and intelligence reports, Singh left India around 1909 for the British Federated
Malay States “on account of having got into trouble through taking away a mar
ried woman.” A religious leader (granthi) by training, Singh worked at a gurd-
wara (a Sikh place of worship) u ntil he came into a quarrel with local Sikhs for
“preaching sedition.” He moved to Hong Kong in 1910 and secured a post at
another gurdwara. His tenure in that British colony proved even more scandal
ous. “Bhagwan Singh had got himself into bad odour by consorting with loose
Chinese w omen, which is a serious religious offence from the Sikh point of
view,” a British police officer reported, “and his preaching, although it could not
at that time be proved to be actually seditious, was certainly directed against
the British Government, and encouraged a considerable amount of loose talk.”
In May 1913 Singh departed for British Columbia, where he “openly preached
sedition.” He was deported in November 1913 for having given false statements
when entering Canada. He sailed back across the Pacific to Japan and, in the
spring of 1914, greeted the Komagata Maru as it stopped over on its way to Van
couver. The British embassy in Tokyo related that Singh “sold a pistol to the
leader of the expedition, Gurdit Singh . . . and made speeches of extreme vio
lence to those on board.”22
Singh’s transpacific movements and connections unnerved British and U.S.
officials. In Japan he lived with Muhammed Barakatullah, who had been a pro
fessor of Hindi-Urdu languages at the University of Tokyo and editor of Islamic
Fraternity, a pan-Islamic newspaper banned in India. By the time Singh arrived
in Japan, Barakatullah’s anti-British politics had already led to the loss of his
teaching position and the Japanese government’s suppression of his newspaper.
Barakatullah and Singh decided to devote their energies to the Ghadar Party
in the United States, taking over leadership positions in San Francisco just as
Dayal fled to Switzerland. When war broke out between Britain and Germany,
Barakatullah and Singh toured with Ram Chandra up and down the Pacific

Coast to urge Ghadarites to incite a revolution in India. Singh himself left San
Francisco in October 1914, traveling u nder a false name, and landed in Manila
the following month on a journey that he hoped would lead back to India. In
an interview published in the Manila Daily Bulletin in March 1915, Singh ex
plained how state repression—rather than disputes with fellow Sikhs or his
sexual escapades—had forced him to move repeatedly:
For three years I officiated as a priest among my p eople in Hongkong. . . .

I mingled among the Indian soldiers garrisoned t here and preached revo
lution to them. They were all opposed to British oppression and gave me
their assurance that they were ready to fight for their country when the
time came. . . . The British authorities finally became suspicious. They
were afraid of my influence. A false charge was brought against me and I
was place[d] under arrest. Their case against me, however, was so flimsy
that they were obliged to order my release. Then I went to Canada and
British Columbia. I began there as a teacher among the Indians in that
country and when the British learned of my mission, I was ordered de
ported to Hongkong. I knew what would happen to me if I was taken back
there, so I succeeded in escaping from the steamer in Japan. I was in Yo
kohama when the Yamagata [sic] Maru s topped there with the Indian[s]
bound for Canada, who were afterwards deported to India, and I went
aboard and delivered a lecture to them. Finally a secret service man who
was sent to watch me told me that the British authorities were after me
and advised me to go away. I then went to the United States and was
working among my people there when the war broke out.
Reproduced, shared, and filed by U.S. agents in Manila, Singh’s interview il
lustrated both the apparent necessity and the perpetual futility of state sur
veillance. British authorities could never quite contain his movements or his
ideas.23
To U.S. authorities grappling with anticolonial revolutionaries of their own
in the Philippines, Singh’s arrival in Manila generated anxiety and insecurity.
In January 1915, unable to find a non-British ship to India, Singh left Manila to
try to reach the Dutch East Indies by way of the southern islands of the Philip
pines. Suspecting that Singh was up to no good, an Englishman working as a
U.S. customs inspector in the Sulu archipelago arrested him for attempting to
incite an insurrection among the Moros. Singh was eventually transferred to
Zamboanga, on the island of Mindanao, where U.S. authorities interrogated
him. A fter a short time, an agent of the Philippine Constabulary and the cus
toms office in Zamboanga reported, “I found out that he had not been talking,
274 moon-ho jung

or had he in any way or manner had any connection with the moros [sic].” In his
statement, though, Singh embraced revolution. “My business is to get all of my
countrymen to assist in the general uprising which is about to take place (prob
ably next month) in India against the English Government,” he said. “It was for
this purpose that I have visited the United States, Canada, and Mexico and am
now here in the Philippines.” Claiming that German agents had promised him
at least a million rifles, Singh avowed that, once back in Punjab, he would com
mand “an army of three or four hundred thousand men.” He was not alone, he
said, for there were anticolonial organizers like him “in all parts of the world
wherever any of our people live.”24
Released after being deemed “not a serious menace to public order though
perhaps somewhat unbalanced mentally,” Singh decided to test the bounds of
political freedom in the Philippines. When he returned to Manila, he frankly
informed the governor general, “I am working for the revolution in India.” He
also recounted his personal story to the Manila Daily Bulletin and declared,
“The revolution has already begun.” British authorities had heard enough. In
May 1915 the U.S. consul in Hong Kong related to the governor general’s office
in Manila that British colonial authorities had approached him several times
about Singh. The consul recommended strongly that Singh “be deported to
Hongkong or Singapore and the authorities notified at the time of his deporta
tion and the vessel by which he will arrive at either place.” The Philippine Con
stabulary investigated the m atter and concluded that there were “no grounds
upon which to base legal proceedings against this Indian.” When British of
ficials demanded again a few months later that “Indian agitators in Manila”
be deported to Hong Kong, U.S. authorities refused politely. But they also had
Manila’s secret agents warn the “agitators” that the government “could not per
mit any activity on the part of the Indians residing in these Islands looking to
the creation of disturbances in a neighboring colony, and that further activity
on their part would result in immediate steps being taken to rid the Islands of
them.” The U.S. colonial government, with agents at “every meeting of the Indi
ans in Manila,” pledged to monitor revolutionary activities in the Philippines.25
Singh, for his part, continued to evade British and U.S. authorities to ad
vance his work against the British Empire. In June 1915 he left Manila for Japan
and reportedly established communications with German agents in Shanghai.
Four months later he and a compatriot traveled to Tientsin (Tianjin), “where
they w ere nearly captured by the British.” By June 1916, according to infor
mation gathered by British officials and shared with U.S. officials, Singh was
back in San Francisco, having “concealed his traces so skil[l]fully that it ha[d]
not been possible to ascertain by what vessel he arrived.” He quickly sailed to

Panama, traveling u nder the alias B. Pritam, and thence to Cuba, from which he
was forced to leave because of a physical ailment (trachoma). Singh returned to
Panama, staying at “a h otel and restaurant of more or less bad repute and which
used to be a resort for Germans.” “Pritam while in Panama formed secret meet
ings with the East Indians and collected funds for the purpose of starting a revo
lution to free India from British rules [sic],” the U.S. minister reported. Nearly
all four hundred East Indians in Panama “promised to support the movement.”
The British minister to Panama, the U.S. minister noted, actively sought to have
Singh deported, accusing him of being a Turk and pressuring the government
of Panama to apply its immigration laws against “members of the Turkish race
and certain other races.” Given fourteen days “to prove he was not a Turk or
leave Panama,” Singh headed back to San Francisco.26
Singh’s movements—and the Ghadar movement—led to the expansion of
the U.S. security state across the Americas. In the wake of Singh’s forced de
parture and local protests against it, U.S. authorities in Panama maintained a
“practically complete list of East Indians resident on the Isthmus of Panama
in the vicinity of the Canal Zone,” prioritizing “all members of the Ghadr (or
Gadar) Party” and keeping the “leaders of these men” under “observation, and
any information received . . . transmitted to the American Minister to Pan
ama.” Claiming authority over the Panama Canal Zone translated into moni
toring South Asian revolutionaries. The U.S. government’s surveillance of the
Ghadar movement also intensified in San Francisco. As Singh assumed control
of Ghadar headquarters in the opening months of 1917, after an acrimonious
struggle with Ram Chandra, U.S. officials decided that the moment to strike
had arrived. The United States was about to enter World War I, in alliance with
the British Empire, an act that the attorney general feared might drive Gha
dar leaders to seek refuge elsewhere. In April 1917 he instructed U.S. Attorney
John W. Preston of San Francisco to carry out immediate arrests in the “Hindoo
revolution m atter.” “Advise arrest in advance declaration War since fear escape
Ram Chandra,” he explained in a telegram. Feeling besieged, Singh decided to
flee to Mexico before it was too late. Contesting the British Empire meant con
tending with the U.S. Empire and its security apparatus.27
Once the United States entered World War I, various agents and agencies of
the U.S. state bolstered and coordinated their efforts to suppress revolutionary
movements. On April 18, 1917, U.S. immigration authorities in Naco, Arizona,
detained Singh for appearing “very suspicious.” At first he reportedly claimed
that “he was an English Jew by the name of William James” on his way to visit
his white “sweetheart.” Assuming Singh to be connected with the “Indian Revo
lution movement,” the immigrant inspector immediately contacted the Bureau
276 moon-ho jung

of Investigation, the forerunner to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. When
examined by a Bureau agent and the immigrant inspector the next day, Singh
explained that he was planning to “preach” to “my people” in Mexico about
“their duties as Hindus, about nationalism.” Pressed by the agent if that meant
“to teach your countrymen to raise up in arms against the English Government
in India,” Singh replied: “We are not allowed to speak anything in India; so we
are getting new ideas in this country and so we are teaching them to our people
so that they will not be behind.” Not satisfied, the agent asked repeatedly if
Singh was, in fact, “a revolutionist against the British Government in India.”
“If the English are going to oppress my people in India I am against them. . .
I want to see India enjoy freedom and happiness like other countries,” Singh
responded. “If this is a crime, then let me be a criminal.”28
The U.S. state indeed deemed Singh a criminal, issuing a warrant for his ar
rest, a turn of events that expanded and sharpened Singh’s critique of empire.
In July 1917, as he and dozens of fellow South Asian revolutionaries awaited
trial for violating U.S. neutrality laws, Singh wrote a piercing column on U.S.
claims to be fighting for “the protection of democracy.” “If America has entered
[World War I] with the purpose of emancipating small nations then what need
is there for a revolution, for she will liberate all,” he posed. “The question is,
but will she fulfill her purpose?” Long before the Paris Peace Conference, Singh
knew the answer. Having “never dreamt of endeavouring to secure the eman
cipation of smaller nations,” he argued, the United States offered no hope, for
“the cause of the evil existing in India to-day is the friendship of America and
England.” The contradiction between empire and democracy was too stark to
ignore. “When a nation . . . keeps in subjection the Philippines and Porto Rico,”
he observed, “then her claim appears a m atter of astonishment to the w hole
world.” As Singh penned t hose words, U.S. Attorney Preston was busy compiling
his writings to prosecute him. That was the state of affairs South Asian revolu
tionaries faced in the United States and around the world. By daring to confront
the colonial roots and colonial objectives of the modern states flying the Union
Jack and the Stars and Stripes, they bore the brunt of state repression.29
notes
1. Emily C. Brown, Har Dayal: Hindu Revolutionary and Rationalist (Tucson: University
of Arizona Press, 1975), 9–81, quotes from 18 and 57.
2. Brown, Har Dayal, 81–126, quote from 86; P. A. Baker to Commissioner-General of
Immigration, April 3, 1914; W. A. Clark, Academic Secretary, Stanford University, to A.
Caminetti, April 21, 1914; File 53572/92–92a, Records of the Immigration and Natural

ization Service (ins), Record Group (rg) 85, National Archives and Records Administra
tion, Washington, DC (hereafter nara).
3. Alfred W. McCoy, Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and
the Rise of the Surveillance State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009); Brown,
Har Dayal, 111–12, 131–33, Hopkinson quote on 133; Joan M. Jensen, Passage from India:
Asian Indian Immigrants in North America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988),
163–64.
4. A. Caminetti to Immigration Service, Seattle and Portland, June 12, 1913 (tele
gram); Wm. C. Hopkinson to John L. Zurbrick, August 2, 1913; Samuel W. Backus to
Commissioner-General of Immigration, January 30, 1914; J. B. Densmore, Acting Secretary
of L
abor, to Samuel W. Backus, February 10, 1914; File 53572/92–92a, ins, rg 85, nara.
5. Har Dayal to A. Caminetti, March 29, 1914 (telegram); Charles Sferlazzo, Attorney
for Har Dayal, “Defendant’s Brief, In the Matter of the arrest of Har Dayal, alleged anar
chist arrested under the authority of Departmental Warrant dated February 10th, 1914,”
n.d.; Samuel Backus to Commissioner-General of Immigration, April 24, 1914; Hearing
on Har Dayal by F. H. Ainsworth on Angel Island, March 26, 1914; File 53572/92–92a,
ins, rg 85, nara; San Francisco Chronicle, March 27, 1914.
6. Ellis DeBruler to Commissioner-General of Immigration, January 11, 1911; Her
bert W. Meyers, “Aliens’ Brief,” in the Matter of the Arrest of Arjan Singh et al., Febru
ary 28, 1911; File 53154/2–2a, ins, rg 85, nara.
7. Ellis DeBruler to Commissioner-General of Immigration, January 11, 1911; Daniel J.
Keefe, “Memorandum for the Acting Secretary,” January 27, 1911; File 53154/2–2a, ins,
rg 85, nara.
8. Charles Nagel, “Memorandum,” March 7, 1911, File 53154/2–2a, ins, rg 85, nara;
Agent 30 to Colonel, June 27, 1911, Harry H. Bandholtz Papers, Bentley Historical Li
brary, University of Michigan.
9. Seema Sohi, Echoes of Mutiny: Race, Surveillance, and Indian Anticolonialism in
North Americ a (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 84–91, 126; John H. Clark
to Commissioner-General of Immigration, June 10, 1913 [including Hopkinson’s tele
gram]; A. Caminetti to Immigration Service, Seattle and Portland, June 12, 1913; Wm.
C. Hopkinson to John H. Clark, September 9, 1913; G. D. Kumar to “My dear Dass,”
July 8, 1913 (copy); Tarak[nath Das] to “My dear Harnam,” August 13, 1913 (copy); File
53572/92–92a, ins, rg 85, nara.
10. Sohi, Echoes of Mutiny, 124–26; Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making
of U.S. Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 2; Downes v. Bidwell,
182 U.S. 244.
11. Sohi, Echoes of Mutiny, 124–25; “Report of Proceedings at Meeting of Hindus, Held
in O’Brien Hall, Vancouver, B.C., on September 29, 1913. With Reference to 73 Hindus,
held by United States Immigration Authorities at Seattle, Wash.,” File 52903/110-c, ins,
rg 85, nara. Seven of the two hundred were rejected ostensibly for medical reasons
(hookworm), while seventy-three were ordered deported for “likely to become a public
charge.”
12. Translations of Ghadar by Har Dayal in his immigration file, File 53572/92–92a,
ins, rg 85, nara; F. C. Isemonger and J. Slattery, An Account of the Ghadr Conspiracy
278 moon-ho jung

(1913–1915) (1919; Berkeley: Folklore Institute, 1998), 20. The issues, not all of which
were dated, are from March 3, 1914, December 9 and 23, 1913.
13. Samuel W. Backus to Commissioner-General of Immigration, January 23, 1914, File
52903/110-d, ins, rg 85, nara.
14. Charles H. Reily to Acting Inspector in Charge, Portland, Oregon, January 14,
1914, File 53572/92–92a, ins, rg 85, nara.
15. Samuel W. Backus to Commissioner-General of Immigration, January 30, 1914;
Washington Post, February 10, 1914; A. Caminetti to John L. Burnett, February 7, 1914;
File 53572/92–92a, ins, rg 85, nara; Brown, Har Dayal, 154; 63rd Congress, 2nd Session,
Hearings before the Committee on Immigration . . . Relative to Restriction of Immigration of
Hindu Laborers, Part 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1914), 85–86.
16. 63rd Congress, 2nd Session, Hearings before the Committee on Immigration . . . Rela-
tive to Restriction of Immigration of Hindu Laborers, Part 1 (Washington, DC: Government
Printing Office, 1914), 45–46, 48, 50; 63rd Congress, 2nd Session, Hearings before the
Committee on Immigration . . . Relative to Restriction of Immigration of Hindu Laborers, Part
4 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1914), 141.
17. J. B. Densmore, Acting Secretary of Labor, to Samuel W. Backus, February 10, 1914;
San Francisco Chronicle, March 29, 1914; San Francisco Bulletin, March 27, 1914; San Fran-
cisco Examiner, March 28, 1914; File 53572/92–92a, ins, rg 85, nara; “Har Dayal on His
Arrest,” Ghadar, March 31, 1914, translated copy in Box 1, Neutrality Case Files, Records
of the U.S. District Attorney, rg 118, National Archives, San Bruno, California (hereafter
nasb).
18. A. Caminetti, Memorandum, April 4, 1914; Charles Sferlazzo, Attorney for Har
Dayal, “Defendant’s Brief, In the Matter of the arrest of Har Dayal, alleged anarchist
arrested under the authority of Departmental Warrant dated February 10th, 1914,” n.d.;
Har Dayal to A. Caminetti, March 29, 1914 (telegram); Acting Commissioner, Ellis
Island, to Commissioner of Immigration, Angel Island Station, Certificate of Admission
of Alien, March 27, 1914; Acting Commissioner P. A. Baker to Commissioner-General of
Immigration, April 3, 1914; File 53572/92–92a, ins, rg 85, nara.
19. Sohi, Echoes of Mutiny, 134–44; Tapan K. Mukherjee, Taraknath Das: Life and
Letters of a Revolutionary in Exile (Calcutta: National Council of Education, Jadavpur
University, 1998), 57. For a fuller account, see Hugh Johnston, The Voyage of the Komagata
Maru: The Sikh Challenge to Canada’s Colour Bar (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1979);
Renisa Mawani, Across Oceans of Law: The Komagata Maru and Jurisdiction in the Time of
Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).
20. Robert Lansing, Counselor, Department of State, to Secretary of L abor, April 7,
1914 (quoting Dayal’s telegram dated April 4, 1914); Backus to Immigration Bureau,
Washington, DC, April 1, 1914 (telegram); Samuel W. Backus to United States Fidel
ity and Guaranty Co., April 28, May 6, 1914; Charles Sferlazzo to Samuel W. Backus,
May 2, 1914; Borland and Johns to Samuel W. Backus, May 4, 1914; Samuel W. Backus to
Commissioner-General of Immigration, May 11, June 20, 1914; W. J. P., Department of
Labor, “Memo. For Mr. Larned,” May 26, 1914; Acting Secretary to Commissioner of Im
migration, Angel Island Station, June 13, 1914; Commissioner-General to Commissioner
of Immigration, San Francisco, June 29, 1914; File 53572/92–92a, ins, rg 85, nara.

21. Times of India, May 27, 1914; Henry D. Baker to Secretary of State, May 27, 1914;
Har Dayal to “Sir,” July 13, 1914; File 53572/92–92a, ins, rg 85, nara; Sedition Committee
Report 1918 (1918; Calcutta: New Age Publishers Private Limited, 1973), 143–46.
22. C. McI. Messer, Captain, Superintendent of Police, May 17, 1915; British Embassy,
Tokyo, “Bhagwan Singh’s Antecedents” (confidential), June 11, 1915; Box 10, Neutrality
Case Files, rg 118, nasb.
23. Sohi, Echoes of Mutiny, 50; “Bhagwan Singh” [no author and no date, but most
likely written by British agents for Preston]; John W. Green, Chief, Secret Service
Bureau, Department of Police, City of Manila, to F. N. Berry, Acting Secretary to the
Governor-General, May 4, 1917; Box 10, Neutrality Case Files, rg 118, nasb.
24. John W. Green to F. N. Berry, May 4, 1917, Box 10; Mr. Blanford, “Documents from
Manila,” August 2, 1917 (including full copies of Singh’s statement, as reported by the
Customs Secret Service Agent, Zamboanga, February 13, 1915, and the agent’s report,
March 1, 1915), Box 7; J. S. Robertson, Custom Secret Service Agent and Philippine
Constabulary Agent, Zamboanga, to Chief Custom Secret Service, “Narrative Report, for
February 1915,” March 1, 1915, Box 2; Perry L. Machlan, Customs Secret Service Agent,
Jolo, to Chief, Customs Secret Service, February 13, 1915, Box 2; Neutrality Case Files, rg
118, nasb.
25. F. W. Carpenter, Governor of Mindanao and Sulu, to Executive Secretary,
March 25, 1915; John W. Green to F. N. Berry, May 4, 1917; George E. Anderson to
Executive Secretary, May 24, 1915; S. Ferguson, Acting Executive Secretary, to George E.
Anderson, August 9, 1915; Herman Hall, Chief of Constabulary, to Executive Secretary,
June 3, 1915; Box 10, Neutrality Case Files, rg 118, nasb.
26. Notes on defendants, n.d., 30–33, Box 4; Wm. Jennings Price, American Minister,
to Secretary of State (confidential), October 30, 1917, Box 1 (and Box 12); American Le
gation, Panama, “Confidential Memorandum No. 124,” to Colonel Commanding, Panama
Canal Department, November 12, 1917, Box 12; Neutrality Case Files, rg 118, nasb.
27. Captain, C.A.C., Intelligence Officer, Panama Canal Department, to Chief,
Military Intelligence Branch, Washington, DC, March 19, 1918; Gregory to US Attorney,
San Francisco, April 6, 1917; Box 2, Neutrality Case Files, rg 118, nasb; Sohi, Echoes of
Mutiny, 171.
28. A. A. Hopkins, “In Re: Bhagwan Singh (Hindu) Fugitive,” Warren, Arizona,
April 22, 1917, Box 7, Neutrality Case Files, rg 118, nasb.
29. “Extract from Yugantar of Bhagwan Singh,” July 1917, Box 4, Neutrality Case Files,
rg 118, nasb.
280 moon-ho jung

13. indigenous child removal and transimperial
indigenous w omen’s activism across settler
colonial nations in the late twentieth c entury
Margaret D. Jacobs
In the 1970s Mollie Dyer, an Australian Indigenous community organizer, was

working for the Aboriginal Legal Service in Fitzroy, an inner-city neighbor
hood of Melbourne.1 She provided representation for Indigenous defendants in
court, offered general welfare advice, and assisted with the r unning of a hostel
for Indigenous people recently released from jail and for the temporarily home
less. Mollie was deeply dismayed to become acquainted with hundreds of Indig
enous children who had been removed from their families and then put in child
welfare institutions or fostered or adopted out to non-Aboriginal families.2
At nearly the same time, eight thousand miles across the Pacific Ocean,
Maxine Robbins, a member of the Yakama Indian Nation, was serving as a so
cial worker with the Washington State Department of Social and Health Ser
vices. As she carried out her work, Maxine became deeply pained to learn that
every year the state removed about thirty-five Yakama children from their fami
lies, took them off the reservation, and placed them with non-Indian foster or
adoptive families.3 Maxine and Mollie each agonized over why so many of their
communities’ children were living apart from their families. Over the ensuing
decades each w oman helped bring attention to and address an Indigenous child
welfare crisis within their communities and their nations.
In the late 1970s Mollie and Maxine’s lives became intertwined. On an
overseas study tour, Mollie ended up staying with Maxine. The two women be
came fast friends, and they learned from one another that the Indigenous child
welfare crises they had witnessed firsthand reflected not just a local problem
within their own communities but a phenomenon that extended across settler
colonial nations. The United States, Canada, and Australia had been removing
Indigenous children from their families and communities for nearly a hundred
years as a strategy of empire, of dispossessing Indigenous p eoples and laying
claim to their lands. By the 1960s Indigenous c hildren were dramatically over
represented in the child welfare systems of these three former British colonies.
This was not a mere coincidence. All three settler colonial nations had studied
one another’s management of Indigenous peoples.4
But transimperial networks across settler colonial nations did not just pro
duce similar ways of managing and controlling Indigenous peoples; they also
grew from and fostered Indigenous activism. Maxine and Mollie developed
their own transimperial network; they gathered knowledge and strength from
one another as they confronted policies and practices that threatened to de
stroy Indigenous families and extinguish Indigenous communities altogether.
This network grew out of Indigenous women’s grassroots community work to
reclaim the care of Indigenous children by Indigenous families and communi
ties. This essay follows the transimperial jetstreams of Mollie and Maxine in the
1970s as they discovered the ubiquity of Indigenous child removal, befriended
one another, and worked in concert to reverse the flow of Indigenous c hildren
out of their communities. By tracking their movements across settler colonial
empires, I demonstrate how transimperial sensibilities shaped Indigenous
women’s movements for self-determination in the late twentieth century.
Settler Colonial Nations as Empires

Both North America and Australia had been colonized by the British Empire.
In contrast to British colonies such as India, these colonies were characterized
by large-scale settlement. The incoming population displaced the local Indig
enous inhabitants from their land and replaced them with families subject to
the British Crown. As the United States gained independence and Canada and
Australia federated, they continued to interact with Indigenous p eoples as set
tler colonial powers, operating under what the historian Patrick Wolfe has la
beled “the logic of elimination.” Whereas other types of colonial systems sought
to harness the local population for labor, settler colonial authorities prized the
acquisition of land and thus sought to dispossess Indigenous people, forcibly
moving or even eliminating them.5
Indigenous child removal constituted a key means by which settler colo
nial powers undermined Indigenous communities. From the late nineteenth
century to World War II, Australian, Canadian, and American officials all en
282 margaret d. jacobs

gaged in the practice of separating Indigenous c hildren from their families and
communities, often forcibly, and shipping them to segregated institutions far
from their homes, where authorities ostensibly sought to assimilate them into
the mainstream. Institutions did not prepare their Indigenous wards to be fully
equal citizens, however, but to be “useful” landless laborers who would fill low-
wage, mostly unskilled occupations on the margins of settler colonial econo
mies. In short, child removal constituted an aggressive attempt to eliminate
Indigenous peoples through assimilation.6
Indigenous Family Survival under the Logic of Elimination

Mollie and Maxine came of age in the mid-twentieth century at a time when
Indigenous families were reeling from generations of child removal. Mollie was
born in 1927, when Australian state policies of “protection” w ere in full force.
Her family, in fact, experienced child removal firsthand. Police had summarily
removed Mollie’s mother, Margaret Tucker, and her aunt May from Cumeroo
gunga, the Aboriginal mission on the Murray River that separated New South
Wales from Victoria, despite the vehement resistance of Tucker’s m other. Of
ficials placed Margaret and May, ages thirteen and eleven, at the Cootamundra
Girls Home in New South Wales to be trained as domestic servants and placed
in white households, their Aboriginality destined for obliteration.7
Margaret Tucker resisted this plan, however, and became an activist. In the
1930s she served as a vice president of the newly formed Australian Aborigines’
League of Victoria, which sponsored a Day of Mourning on Australia Day 1938,
the sesquicentenary of Australia’s founding.8 After World War II Tucker served
on the executive board of a new multiracial national organization called the
Council for Aboriginal Rights and was later active in the Federal Council for
Aboriginal Advancement, which led a successful campaign for a 1967 national
referendum that eliminated a racially discriminatory clause from the Constitu
tion and for the first time provided for the counting of Aboriginal p eople in the
nation’s census.9 In 1979 Tucker published her autobiography, If Everyone Cared,
which highlighted her removal from her family and helped to launch a move
ment to investigate the Stolen Generations in the 1990s.
Mollie Dyer inherited her mother’s activist bent. She came of age among a
new generation of Indigenous activists who increasingly sought greater self-
determination in the 1960s and 1970s.10 They influenced the federal govern
ment to fund a number of new agencies, including the Aboriginal Health Service
and Aboriginal Legal Service, where Mollie worked for five years.11 Like her
mother, Mollie dedicated her activism to stopping child removal. She told a
Indigenous Child Removal and Women’s Activism 283

reporter in 1979 that “all her life she remember[ed] seeing Aboriginal m others
fretting for children who had been removed from their care.”12 She also learned
and practiced Aboriginal women’s ways of caring for extended kin and other
children in need. She began fostering Aboriginal c hildren alongside her own six
children beginning in 1959, eventually taking in twenty-five foster children.13
Jenny Munro, an Aboriginal activist in Victoria, called this the “grandmother
law coming out in Mollie without her even realising.” Munro explained, “Every
child that presented, they w ere hers. It d idn’t matter whose child they w
ere.
She looked after them. . . . Didn’t even know it then, but we were articulating
it—the old law, the old way, the old system. The extended family. The way we
looked after our own family was the way that we would survive.”14
Maxine was about the same age as Mollie. Maxine’s father had been a tribal
policeman who had built a home in 1910 on the Yakama reservation. He was
reportedly the first Yakama man to marry a white woman; the couple report
edly experienced rejection from both of their families.15 Although her father
and grandparents would have experienced great pressure to assimilate, Max
ine came of age at a time when the United States began to question and re
treat, temporarily, from its aggressive assimilation policy and forcible removal
of Indigenous children to boarding schools. Indigenous activists and their al
lies protested the federal government’s heavy-handed policies in the 1920s,
leading to the appointment of one such white ally, John Collier, as commis
sioner of Indian Affairs under Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration. In
the 1930s Collier promoted greater Indian self-government, shuttered many
of the boarding schools, and emphasized day-school education with a more
Indian-centered curriculum. Still, Indian communities were so hard hit by the
Great Depression that many Indian families sent their c hildren voluntarily to
boarding schools, to ensure that the children would have adequate food, cloth
ing, and shelter.16 As in Australia, extended family was a key feature of Indig
enous survival. Maxine, in fact, was raised by her great-grandmother during at
least part of her childhood.17
As a young adult, Maxine experienced changes wrought by World War II
and a federal Indian policy shift toward “termination” and “relocation” in the
1950s. During the war, many Indigenous Americans served in the armed forces;
others relocated to urban areas. A fter the war Congress rejected Collier’s ten
tative steps toward Indigenous self-determination and instead sought to ter
minate the federal government’s unique trust relationship with tribal nations.
Congress also promoted the urban relocation of Indians in a renewed attempt
to assimilate Indian p eople and to eradicate Indigeneity. As part of this urban
migration, Maxine and her brother had moved away from Yakama. Her brother

became a research engineer with Boeing Aircraft Company, while Maxine at
tained a master’s degree in social work at the University of Washington. Before
returning to Yakama, Maxine had served as director of the National Social
Workers Associate Program for the Indian Health Service, training social work
ers to work in Indigenous communities in Arizona, New Mexico, South Dakota,
and Alaska. She also sought to increase the numbers of Indigenous social work
ers through the Association of American Indian Social Workers.18 In recogni
tion of her work on behalf of Indian families and communities, the National
Association of Social Workers named Maxine the Social Worker of the Year in
1980.19
Indigenous Women Reclaiming the Care of Children

in the Era of Self-Determination
Both Maxine and Mollie found themselves on the front lines of an Indigenous
child welfare crisis in their communities. A fter her stint with the Indian Health
Service, Maxine had worked in the Yakima County office of the state Depart
ment of Social and Health Services in Washington from 1964 to 1974. There
she witnessed with alarm the removal of many children from her tribe and
their placement in non-Indian foster homes and adoptive families. The Wash
ington Public Health Service assigned Maxine to work with the Yakama tribe
from 1974 to 1980. She applied for and received a grant of nearly $170,000
from a program of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare for a
three-year demonstration project, Project Ku-nak-we-sha, or “the caring place,”
a reception center for children housed in the home her father had built in 1910
and which she purchased with her own funds.20 The program aimed to return
children to their homes by providing counseling and services to their parents.
“The home works to maintain and strengthen the Indian f amily,” Mollie would
later observe. “According to an Indian Health Service worker, the home works
in a quiet way to advocate the return of jurisdiction over c hildren to the tribe.”21
Authorities removed no Yakama c hildren from the reservation in 1975, when
Maxine’s program had been in operation only one year, whereas prior to that
they had removed about thirty-five children a year.22
What Maxine experienced and addressed at Yakama was part of a national
trend in the post–World War II era to promote the adoption of Indian c hildren
by non-Indian families. Authorities had grown disenchanted with the boarding
schools, now seeing them as an economic crutch that sustained Indian depen
dency and fostered a distinctive Indian identity. At the same time, Congress
sought to turn responsibility for Indian child welfare over to the states, as part

of the termination sensibility of the era. Social workers from the state and Bu
reau of Indian Affairs (bia) continued to engage in child removal. Now, how
ever, they promoted the placement of removed c hildren within white families
rather than in institutions. From 1958 to 1967 the bia contracted with the Child
Welfare League of America to run the Indian Adoption Project (iap), which
developed “a permanent inter-state plan for the placement of Indian children
requiring adoption” and stipulated that these children were “to be placed pri
marily in non-Indian adoptive homes . . . in the eastern area.” The Adoption
Resource Exchange of North America, a program of the Child Welfare League,
absorbed the iap in 1968 and ran it until 1978. The combined iap and Adop
tion Resource Exchange avidly promoted the increased removal and adoption
of Indian c hildren, both through their own program and through state social
service agencies.23
American promoters of adoption characterized it as win-win for all involved:
as a means to save Indian c hildren and to provide c hildren to couples who
wanted to adopt. Social workers routinely portrayed Indigenous communities
and families as hopelessly dysfunctional; they called Indian children “forgotten
children” who faced a “dead end” if they remained in their families and com
munities but had a “chance” if they w ere adopted.24 Promoters even portrayed
Indigenous adoption as a means to heal racial divisions and inequalities. During
a 1977 set of congressional hearings on Indian child welfare, one white w oman
submitted a statement in support of continued adoptions, concluding, “We
cannot point with pride to the results of government policies during the past
150 years; in fact we should be ashamed of the way Indians have been treated.
It seems to me that this present-day trend t owards person-to-person assistance
should be encouraged, not frustrated.”25
Indigenous people, by contrast, saw the adoptive placement of their c hildren
as an all-out assault on their families and communities. During congressional
hearings in the 1970s, Indigenous women testified to the intense pressures they
experienced to put their infants up for adoption. They also related how social
workers routinely removed their children because they were in the care of ex
tended family members or were living in poverty, not because of true neglect
or abuse. The Association on American Indian Affairs (aaia) provided evidence
of legal abuses of Indian families, and tribal social service workers detailed the
unequal funding for tribal versus state foster care programs.26
As the testimony before Congress on Indian child welfare suggests, Maxine
was part of a larger movement among Indigenous peoples to develop programs
within their own communities to reclaim the care of children. The aaia had
become involved, accidentally, in Indian child welfare in 1968. While working

with the Devils Lake (now Spirit Lake) Sioux on Fort Totten, North Dakota, on
other issues, the aaia learned that a number of Indian families were battling
North Dakota state authorities who sought to remove their c hildren. The aaia
arranged for a delegation of five outspoken Indian m others, accompanied by
the tribal chair, to travel to New York for a press conference and to Washington,
DC, for lobbying efforts. The aaia condemned the state actions as “child snatch
ing” and charged that the “forcible removal of Indian youngsters without due
process of law . . . has reached epidemic proportions.” The aaia distributed a
fact sheet noting that out of 1,100 Devils Lake Sioux Indians u nder twenty-one
years of age living on the Fort Totten reservation, 275, or 25 percent, had been
separated from their families.27 In response, President Lyndon Johnson ordered
an inquiry into the allegations, and North Dakota temporarily suspended its
harsh policies and practices.28 Subsequently the aaia collected data on Indian
children from bia regional offices and hundreds of state and private agencies,
finding that an average of 25 to 35 percent of Indian children had been removed
from their families and tribal communities and that Indian c hildren were vastly
overrepresented in the child welfare system.29 The aaia started an Indian
Family Defense legal program and devoted an attorney on staff to helping these
families reclaim their children.30
The aaia held a one-day Indian Child Welfare and Family Services Confer
ence at the ritzy Biltmore H otel in New York City in 1974 to strategize about
the Indian child welfare crisis. About twenty people attended the conference,
including aaia staff members, national Indian leaders, local Indian activists,
child psychiatrists, legal experts, and journalists. There were only two women
in attendance, Maxine and Judge Justine Wise Polier, a white woman who was
there as a substitute for a young attorney named Hillary Rodham specializing in
child advocacy.31 The aaia invited Maxine because her “caring place” program
had gained a national reputation, coming to serve as a model for many other
Indian tribes and urban Indian groups.32
Attendees despaired that an Indian child welfare crisis imperiled Indian
communities. If Indian families and communities lost generations of children
who never learned their tribal practices and customs, over time Indian commu
nities would cease to exist. Building on her personal and professional experi
ence, Maxine ruminated on the breakdown of traditional caring. She asserted,
“These are the things that we have lost, the tradition of families—extended
families . . . being the agent that socializes the children and raises them. This
has broken down.” She and other conference attendees linked the removal of
Indian children in their time to the federal government’s earlier programs of
boarding school education for Indian c hildren. Many c hildren who attended

the schools suffered abuse and trauma and never learned from their parents,
extended family, or community how to take care of c hildren. Conference at
tendees agreed that the ongoing removal of Indian children in the postwar era
represented both a consequence of earlier removals and its latest manifesta
tion.
Maxine and o thers at the conference sought solutions to this Indian child
welfare crisis. Maxine promoted the reclamation or adaptation of extended
family traditions: “Certainly the most critical issue is: How can we at the res
ervation level begin to provide for some kind of tribal institutions that will do
the work that the generations did in the past? I’m not at all certain, of course,
that we can go back and recreate what was. I’m not sure that it is desirable if we
could. T
here have been too many changes. Certainly, the concept is still t here,
and I think we should attempt to support it at the tribal level.”33
Maxine and other attendees also came to the conclusion that comprehensive
federal legislation was needed to help keep Indian c hildren within Indian com
munities. The aaia soon approached the chairman of the Senate Select Com
mittee on Indian Affairs, James Abourezk of South Dakota, who committed to
holding hearings on the issue later that year.34 Following the 1974 hearings, the
aaia embarked on the task of writing the Indian Child Welfare Act.35 At the
same time the aaia began to publish Indian Family Defense, a small newsletter
that championed the association’s legislative work and publicized its legal de
fense cases of Indian families who w ere working to get their c hildren back. This
small publication reached well beyond U.S. borders and served as the catalyst
that brought Mollie and Maxine together.
In Melbourne, Mollie got a copy of Indian Family Defense. The striking par
allels with the situation of Aboriginal c hildren in Australia prompted her to
write an impassioned letter to the editor, Steven Unger, who published it in
the July 1976 issue. “In Australia a similar situation exists,” she wrote. “It has
generally been assumed that the Aboriginal parents are not capable of caring
adequately for their little ones so the children have been fostered out to white
families, and in some cases even adopted without the consent of their mothers.”
In many cases these children “ ‘have become ‘lost’ to us,” Mollie lamented.36
As Maxine was developing Project Ku-Nak-We-Sha in Washington State,
Mollie was working with the Aboriginal L egal Service in Melbourne. She be
came deeply concerned with the number of Aboriginal juvenile offenders she
encountered who had been in the child welfare system. She demanded a for
mal state inquiry into the rates of Indigenous child removal in her home state
of Victoria. Researchers discovered that Aboriginal c hildren in Victoria were
placed in foster care or adoptive homes at twenty-six times the rate of non-

Aboriginal children.37 Activists and scholars uncovered similar high levels of
removal in other Australian states.
The scope of the problem alarmed Mollie. She and other activists sought to
understand why state authorities w ere removing so many Aboriginal c hildren.
In some cases, police officers w ere apprehending c hildren based on some well-
defined conditions of neglect: the child was found begging, wandering, aban
doned, or sleeping in a public place, for example. In other cases, however, the
widespread removal of Aboriginal children seemed to be based on vague and
value-laden standards: “not sufficiently provided for”; “is under unfit guard
ianship”; “is likely to lapse into violence or crime”; and “is exposed to moral
danger.”38 In many cases, Mollie charged, child welfare officials were remov
ing children without true evidence of neglect or abuse (just as in the United
States), simply because they deemed Aboriginal families to be too permissive
or too impoverished or because they disapproved of the longtime practice of
Indigenous communities having extended family members care for children.39
Mollie and many other activists learned that authorities now saw adoption
as the most effective means of assimilating Indigenous children. The Native
Affairs commissioner for Western Australia, S. G. Middleton, declared in 1955,
for example, “[Adoption] is the shortest cut to complete assimilation I know.
What speedier way can t here be?”40 With this aim in mind, social workers put
intense pressure on Indigenous m others to give up their children for adoption
at birth or shortly thereafter, as they did in the United States. One nineteen-
year-old Aboriginal mother, Jennifer Thomas, alleged that while she was ill and
recuperating in the hospital in 1978, she had handed over her one-year-old son
Richard to two women for temporary care. The women did not return him. A
year later Thomas still had not heard from the w omen or regained Richard.
Mollie got involved in the case and made allegations of baby stealing, which
led to a police investigation. Police traced Richard to Brisbane and eventually
returned him to his mother.41
Mollie and other activists also documented the widespread informal re
moval of Aboriginal children by “well meaning people” and their informal
placement with foster families. Some non-Aboriginal people simply took
children “for a holiday” and never returned them. “When parents request[ed]
the return of their children, some [could not] be traced,” Mollie noted. She
added, “Some of t hese children have even been taken Interstate and may never
again be seen by their families.”42
Mollie’s charge was not the hyperbole of an activist with a political agenda.
From 1962 to 1974 the Harold Blair Aboriginal C hildren’s Project brought
seventy to eighty Indigenous children each year from the North, primarily

Queensland, to spend their holidays with white urban families in Victoria.
All told the Blair Project placed over two thousand c hildren with white urban
families.43 This led directly to the adoption of Aboriginal c hildren—sometimes
formally but often informally. The Frith f amily of Victoria, for example, hosted
Charity Carbine, an Aboriginal girl for a holiday in 1964. “ ‘We very quickly grew
to love her and before the holiday was over we wanted to adopt her,’ ” Mrs. Frith
told a reporter. The Friths claimed that Charity was an orphan, a common and
usually false justification for removal and adoption that ignored the importance
of extended family relationships. Authorities flew Charity from Woorabinda in
Central Queensland, where she had lived the first nine years of her life, to live
with the Friths.44
Just as in the United States, the adoption of Indigenous c hildren by white
families became popular in the 1960s. Mrs. Pettit, cofounder of the Harold
Blair Project, noted, “The publicity given to the problems of aboriginals t oday
and the people—the academics and intellectuals—who are fighting for them,
have made adoptions of aboriginal c hildren—not only babies—the ‘in’ thing.”45
This interest, in both Australia and the United States, may have been intensi
fied by the decreasing numbers of white babies who w ere available for adop
tion.46 Officials told the Miller family of Bondi in New South Wales that they
would have to wait years to adopt a baby in Australia. However, when they w ere
in Queensland, they “approached the Native Affairs Department and within
two months the department had found [a twenty-one-month-old Aboriginal
girl] and turned the adoption papers over to the State C hildren’s Department.”47
This desire to adopt Aboriginal c hildren rested too on configurations of Indig
enous communities and families as hopelessly dysfunctional and their children
as unwanted, abandoned, and neglected, just as in the United States. “No one in
the world needs more help now than these little aboriginal children,” Mrs. Frith
said in the process of adopting Charity.48 Another adoptive c ouple declared,
“We thought we should do something to help children no one else wanted.”49
News stories on adoption, with titles such as “From Lean-to to Luxury” and
“The Aboriginal Cinderella,” focused on the material aspects of what adoptive
families could offer. A Queensland couple became foster parents to a five-year-
old Aboriginal girl in order to “give her a loving home background, a wardrobe
of pretty clothes—and an education to fit her to compete for a worthwhile job
in later life.”50
White Australians heralded adoption as ushering in a new age of racial rec
onciliation and progress, just as Americans did. When dozens of white families
responded positively to an advertisement for 150 Aboriginal c hildren in the
1950s in New South Wales, a reporter concluded, “The warm-hearted response

to the plight of t hese children seems to illustrate that point that the color bar
does not exist in Australia. It seems that in helping our aboriginals we have
helped ourselves.”51 Such pronouncements fit with the new liberal era that pre
vailed in the postwar era.
To Mollie and other Indigenous activists, however, adoption represented just
the latest manifestation of a longtime policy of destroying Indigenous families.
“If one makes a cross study of a section of Aboriginal families,” Mollie asserted,
“it would soon become apparent that ‘decimation’ is the only appropriately de
scriptive word which sums up the results of one hundred years of European pol
icy on Aboriginal families.” Further, she added, “the lack of a sensitized policy
on the part of housing, health, education and welfare authorities has resulted in
nothing short of a total break-up, social dislocation and alienation of Aboriginal
people.”52 She traced what was happening in the 1970s back a century to the
policies that her family had experienced firsthand. Now, however, authorities
focused on placing removed Aboriginal c hildren in foster care or for adoption
with non-Aboriginal families instead of institutionalizing them.
Transimperial Indigenous Women’s Activism

Mollie’s letter to the editor of Indian F amily Defense launched a transimperial
activist network. A fter ardently but unsuccessfully seeking financial support
from the Victorian state government for her work, she sought out alliances
with North American activists. In 1976 she won an Aboriginal Overseas Study
Award from the Australian government in order to study responses to the In
digenous child welfare crises in North America.53 She had learned that Indige
nous c hildren in Canada also experienced unprecedented rates of removal and
that many Canadian provinces w ere promoting adoption, as in Saskatchewan’s
Adopt Indian Metis, or aim, program. Canadian provincial governments w ere
even placing Canadian Indigenous c hildren in white families across the border
in the United States. Transimperial networks of bureaucratic authorities who
managed Indigenous c hildren had in fact become much more robust since
World War II.54
Mollie began her transpacific tour by visiting child welfare organizations and
tribal groups in Ontario. Then she flew to Saskatchewan, where she attended a
three-week course “designed by Indians for Indians” on Indigenous child wel
fare at the new Saskatchewan Indian Federated College in Prince Albert. At
first other participants in the course w ere suspicious of Mollie and asked her
to speak about her background and her purpose. A fter she explained herself, a
man in the audience “came to the platform and suggested that the students give

a s ister they never knew they had a warm Indian welcome.”55 Each day during
lunch, Mollie recalled, “we would discuss and compare what was happening in
our communities.”56 Through her travels, Indigenous activists w ere becoming
aware that what they considered to be a problem limited to their settler colonial
nations actually transcended borders.
From Saskachewan, Mollie flew to Washington, DC, and then journeyed to
New York City, where she met with various non-Indian authorities who offered
her the official position on Indian child welfare.57 Then she met Steven Unger
and his colleague, the attorney Bert Hirsch from the aaia. They discussed In
dian perspectives on the child welfare crisis with her while taking her on a
whirlwind tour of the city.
Unger had arranged for the rest of Mollie’s trip to “visit reservations where
the programs were largely managed and controlled by Indian people.”58 From
New York City she traveled to Mississippi, Arizona, Michigan, Ohio, and Il
linois, visiting various agencies concerned with either Indian or black children
in care.59 Finally she flew to Washington State, where she stayed with Maxine
Robbins. “After my long journey, it was h ere, at the end of it, that I would find
the program that I had been searching for,” wrote Mollie. “I felt comfortable
with [Maxine] right from the start. She was about my age. . . . She was like
our own elders who, with patience and perseverance, constantly chipped away
at problems and made consistent gains until they achieved the final result.”60
This friendship would prove crucial to building a border-crossing network that
would bolster each woman’s efforts to reclaim the care of Indigenous children.
Mollie was inspired by her trip to North America, particularly her time with
Maxine. Soon a fter she returned home to Melbourne she convened a group of
Aboriginal child care workers to tell them about her experiences and to push
for their newly established organization to model itself on Maxine’s Ku-Nak-
We-Sha. Mollie’s group began by changing its name from the Aboriginal Child
Placement Agency to the Aboriginal Child Care Agency (acca). This name
change signified a shift away from accepting Indigenous child removal and
placement outside their families as the norm. Mollie told a group of workers in
the Department of Aboriginal Affairs that “the Government wanted her to set
up a child placement agency.” A child care agency, by contrast, “emphasizes the
retention of the Aboriginal child within his f amily.”61 And then, using her notes
from Maxine, Mollie and a colleague drew up a “sophisticated submission” to
the Victorian government for funds, which, to Mollie’s great anger, rejected her,
for the second time.62
Soon Mollie sought to activate the new border-crossing Indigenous network to
accelerate change in Australia. She arranged for Maxine to attend a conference for

Australia’s celebration of Children’s Week in October 1978, at which Indigenous
child welfare was a major topic. While t here Maxine questioned Australian gov
ernment authorities as to why there were no provisions made for Aboriginal
people to attend or speak at the conference. They told her the conference was
to educate whites, but she “countered this by saying that this education should
come from Australian Aborigines rather than a Native American Indian.” As a
result, conference organizers welcomed Aboriginal people to attend their meet
ing in Morwell, a small city in eastern Victoria, where they “turned up in force.”
At the meeting, according to Mollie, “Maxine’s skill r ose like cream to the top.
She had Aborigines join in their own afternoon workshops. She put everyone in
a circle . . . [and] would draw out the quiet folk to have their say. . . . She asked
each Aborigine to talk about the struggles they had experienced in a commu
nity dominated by white culture.”63 Maxine helped Mollie get the attention and
respect of government administrators.
Maxine stayed on for two weeks a fter the conference to strategize with the
staff of acca and meet with government officials. A fter she met with the federal
government’s coordinator of Aboriginal L egal Services, she and Mollie received
an invitation from the minister for Aboriginal affairs in Canberra, during which
Maxine “described the opposition of Indians to adoption as the same as Aborigi
nes.” She “stressed the importance that funding for acca not be placed under
any [state] government agency.” Through Maxine’s visit, Mollie gained increas
ing access to and support from government agencies; in fact the Office of Child
Care for the state of Victoria made its first substantial grant to acca shortly
after Maxine returned home.64
During the same time, Indigenous activists and their allies in the United
States were making their final push for the Indian Child Welfare Act (icwa) of
1978.65 This act enabled tribal courts to take unprecedented jurisdiction over
most child welfare matters involving Indian children, even children who lived
off the reservation. The act also required the highest possible level of proof of
neglect or abuse before an Indian child could be removed. It created a hierarchy
of placement for a removed Indian child. Ideally a child would be placed first
with a member of his or her extended family, or, second, with other members
of the child’s tribe, or, third, with another Indian family. The act contained a
number of provisions for services to Indian families—through Indian tribes and
organizations—that would prevent Indian children from being removed. And it
called for a study of the remaining Indian boarding schools, with the objective
of finally closing them or turning over their control to Indian tribes.66
Mollie and other Australian activists took inspiration from the passage of
icwa. Building on the success of her 1978 conference as well as the act’s passage,

in April 1979 Mollie organized a seminar that she named after the title of her
mother’s autobiography, If Everyone Cared, and built in funds to bring back Max
ine as well as Steve Unger from the aaia.67 At the close of the seminar, the
Aboriginal delegates passed a resolution calling for “all states to enact Aborigi
nal child welfare legislation (similar to the Indian Child Welfare Act USA).”68
Eventually, although they did not succeed in enacting a national law, Austra
lian Aboriginal activists negotiated with states to recognize an Aboriginal Child
Placement Principle, modeled on parts of icwa.69 The collaboration of two re
sourceful and committed Indigenous women across the borders of two settler
colonial states had helped Indigenous people reclaim the care of their children.
Mollie and Maxine’s serendipitous meeting, transpacific friendship, and ac
tivist network provide several key insights into our understandings of trans
imperial histories of settler colonial nations in the postwar era. First, their cri
tiques of Indigenous child removal, their activism to stop it, and their framing
of the issue as a transimperial phenomenon represent significant interventions
into common rhetoric in both the United States and Australia that framed child
removal as a benevolent policy. Without recognizing Indigenous child removal
as a transimperial phenomenon, settler colonial national discourse has often
framed the separation of Indigenous c hildren from their families and their
placement in white adoptive homes as a gesture of humanitarianism, as based
solely on “the best interests of the child.” By showing local, regional, and na
tional practices to be part of a larger settler colonial politics, Indigenous activ
ists challenged this insidious liberal narrative.
Second, Maxine and Mollie’s friendship and activism recenters Indigenous
women working at the grassroots in late twentieth-century Indigenous move
ments for self-determination across different imperial formations. Recent
scholarship on Indigenous activism has often overlooked the crucial roles that
Indigenous w omen played in t hese movements. Maxine and Mollie’s intertwined
lives demonstrate the significance of Indigenous grassroots w omen activists
who, as Mollie put it in reference to Maxine, “with patience and perseverance,
constantly chipped away at problems and made consistent gains until they
achieved the final result.”70
Third, Maxine and Mollie’s story helps us to reposition Indigenous women
within w omen’s social movements in the late twentieth c entury. Mollie and
Maxine were just two of hundreds, if not thousands, of Indigenous women ac
tivists who articulated their own brand of feminism. In Redfern, a neighborhood
in Sydney that was home to many urban Indigenous p eople, a dynamic group of
Indigenous women “decided that their c hildren and t hose of other poor families
should have breakfast in their stomachs to give them a fair chance of getting

through the day when they went to school. Then they saw the pressing need
to keep the little children off the streets, help the working m others, give them
a place to meet and learn about their Aboriginal culture and heritage.” They
established a preschool for Aboriginal c hildren and by 1979 had obtained funds
to buy a building for their preschool and a hostel for Aboriginal women.71 Many
Indigenous w omen in the United States engaged in similar forms of community
activism aimed at empowering women and children.72
Mollie and Maxine’s efforts demonstrate the unique style of Indigenous
women’s activism. They were both engaged in the work of caring for future gen
erations, what feminist scholars have deemed social reproduction or carework.
To white feminists in the 1970s, caring for c hildren and looking after family
consigned women to a shrunken domain, but to Indigenous women it was
critical to their efforts to survive, reclaim their cultures, define their destinies,
and assert Indigenous sovereignty. Mollie and Maxine acted on an Indigenous
feminist ideal centered around Indigenous w omen’s esteemed caring roles that
implicitly critiqued white feminism. Indeed the very title of Mollie’s autobi
ography, Room for One More, offers an Indigenous alternative to the Virginia
Woolf book and concept of a room of one’s own that became so prized by white
feminists in the 1970s and 1980s. For Mollie and Maxine, emancipation was
never an individual matter, and it did not require the abnegation of caring. No
wonder, then, that Mollie titled her seminar a fter her mother’s book, If Every
one Cared. This evocative title called upon non-Indigenous people to learn and
care about the shameful histories of child removal that Indigenous p eoples had
experienced and honored the significant care work that Indigenous women
had long carried out in their communities. Through their cross-border connec
tions, Maxine and Mollie developed a wider Indigenous feminism; they shared
more with one another as Indigenous women struggling against forms of colo
nial power than they did with white women within their own borders.
Finally, Maxine and Mollie’s collaborations shed light on how perhaps the
most marginalized victims of transimperial settler colonial projects of Indig
enous child removal could also seize upon the transimperial nature of Indig
enous experience in the late twentieth c entury to forge a powerful network to
challenge child removal within their own communities as well as at the state
and national levels. The exchange of transimperial strategies of rule among
officials— especially involving intervention in Indigenous families— could
be devastating to Indigenous peoples in settler colonial nations. Conversely,
however, the circulation of strategies of family reclamation among Indigenous
women across the borders of settler colonial states also offered a means to
counteract transimperial tyrannies. Mollie and Maxine’s friendship exposed

and challenged the late twentieth-century forms of eliminationist logic. The
crises they identified and worked assiduously to reverse, however, are still
going strong in settler colonial nations.73 The recovery of their history is there
fore all the more pressing.
notes
1. There is no universally agreed-upon term for the descendants of the original
inhabitants of Australia and North America. One overarching term that I use in this
essay is Indigenous. Where possible I will use the tribal or group designation preferred by
Indigenous people.
2. While it is standard to use surnames to refer to individuals in academic essays, I
intentionally use Mollie Dyer’s and Maxine Robbins’s first names. This is not meant as
a sign of disrespect but as a means of bringing readers into close association with the
two women and into the world of their intimate friendship. Brenda Nicholls, “Award
for Services to Aborigines,” Courier, Ballarat, Victoria, June 23, 1979, news clipping, Box
67, Folder 1, Association on American Indian Affairs Records, 1851–2010, Public Policy
Papers, Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts, Princeton University Library,
Princeton, New Jersey (hereafter aaia papers).
3. Jerry Bergsman, “Indian Family Program Wins Honor for Founder,” Seattle Times,
March 22, 1980, Box 67, Folder 1, aaia papers. The Yakama tribe began to spell their
name “Yakama” in the mid-1990s to more closely approximate its correct pronunciation.
Place-names in Washington have retained the earlier spelling, “Yakima.” See Yakama Na
tion History, Yakama Nation, http://www.yakamanation-nsn.gov/history3.php, accessed
September 1, 2017.
4. In the pre–World War II era, there is just a little evidence of direct communication
about child removal as a strategy of empire. For example, Canada sent an emissary to the
United States in 1879 to look into its industrial schools as a model for Indian residential
schools. See Andrew Woolford, This Benevolent Experiment: Indigenous Boarding Schools,
Genocide, and Redress in Canada and the United States (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 2015), 68. More often, however, it was international transimperial networks among
missionaries, reformers, and academics that contributed to similar strategies of rule. For
example, white women in the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union participated in a
worldwide movement, where they exchanged ideas about the “protection” of “dependent
peoples” of the world. See Ian Tyrrell, Woman’s World, Woman’s Empire: The Woman’s
Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1991). For the transimperial circulation of other racial ideas, see
Tony Ballantyne, “Race and the Webs of Empire: Aryanism from India to the Pacific,” Jour-
nal of Colonialism and Colonial History 2, no. 3 (2001), online; Henry Reynolds and Marilyn
Lake, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge
of Racial Equality (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
5. Patrick Wolfe, “Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race,”
American Historical Review 106, no. 3 (June 2001): 866–905; Daiva Stasiulis and Nira

Yuval-Davis, eds., Unsettling Settler Societies: Articulations of Gender, Race, Ethnicity and
Class (London: Sage, 1995); Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview
(London: Palgrave, 2010).
6. David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Board-
ing School Experience, 1875–1928 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995); John S.
Milloy, A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System,
1879 to 1986 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1999); J. R. Miller, Shingwauk’s
Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1996); Woolford, This Benevolent Experiment; Anna Haebich, Broken Circles: Fragment-
ing Indigenous Families, 1800–2000 (Fremantle, WA: Fremantle Arts Centre Press,
2000).
7. Margaret Tucker, If Everyone Cared (Melbourne: Grosvenor Books, 1977), 88–96.
8. Mollie Dyer, Room for One More (East Melbourne, Victoria: Aboriginal Affairs,
Victoria, 2003), 9–21; Bain Attwood, Rights for Aborigines (Crows Nest, NSW, Australia:
Allen and Unwin, 2003), 31–35, 54–78.
9. Dyer, Room for One More, 40–41, 54, 65; Attwood, Rights for Aborigines, 131–60.
10. Dyer, Room for One More, 65–68; Attwood, Rights for Aborigines, 307–49.
11. Letter from Dyer to Unger, May 20, 1977, Box 66, Folder 7, aaia papers.
12. Nicholls, “Award for Services to Aborigines.”
13. Letter from Mollie Dyer to American Indian Law Center at unm, October 29,
1975; letter from B. V. Brown, Office of Australian Consulate-General, to Steven Unger,
July 22, 1976, both in Box 66, Folder 7, aaia papers.
14. Quoted in Linda Briskman, The Black Grapevine: Aboriginal Activism and the Stolen
Generations (Leichhardt, NSW, Australia: Federation Press, 2003), 27–28.
15. Dyer, Room for One More, 117.
16. Lawrence C. Kelley, The Assault on Assimilation: John Collier and the Origins of Indian
Policy Reform (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1983); Kenneth R. Philp,
John Collier’s Crusade for Indian Reform, 1920–1954 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press,
1977).
17. Proceedings, Indian Child Welfare and Family Services Conference, aaia, Janu
ary 20 [26], 1974, p. 6, Biltmore Hotel, New York, 207, Box 365, Folder 4, aaia papers
[hereafter Biltmore Conference Proceedings].
18. Dyer, Room for One More, 117; Mollie Dyer, “Yakima” section, 3, “Programs and
Places Visited during My Recent Aboriginal Overseas Study Grant Tour through Canada
and United States, 20 June 1976 to 17 November 1976,” Report, Australian Institute of
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, Canberra, Australia (hereafter “Yakima,
Overseas Study Grant Tour Report”).
19. Bergsman, “Indian Family Program Wins Honor for Founder.”
20. Dyer, Room for One More, 117–18; Dyer, “Yakima, Overseas Study Grant Tour
Report,” 5.
21. Dyer, “Yakima, Overseas Study Grant Tour Report,” 6.
22. Dyer, Room for One More, 117–18; Bergsman, “Indian Family Program Wins Honor
for Founder”; “From the Office of Child Development,” Yakima Nation Review 4, no. 7
(August 11, 1975): 1.

23. Arnold Lyslo, “The Indian Adoption Project, 1958–1967,” Report, April 1, 1968, Box
17, Folder 4, Child Welfare League of America papers, University of Minnesota Library
Special Collections, Minneapolis.
24. Arnold Lyslo, “The Indian Adoption Project: An Appeal to Catholic Agencies to
Participate,” Catholic Charities Review 48, no. 5 (May 1964): 13.
25. Letter from Mrs. Winifred Kromholtz to Senator Warren Magnuson, Indian
Child Welfare Act of 1977, Hearing before the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Indian
Affairs, 95th Congress, First Session on S. 1214, August 4, 1977 (Washington, DC:
Government Printing Office, 1977) (hereafter icwa Congressional Hearings, 1977), 493.
26. Congress held three sets of hearings on Indian child welfare. The first, in 1974,
provides the most extensive testimony from Indigenous people. See U.S. Senate, Hearings
before the Subcommittee on Indian Affairs of the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs,
93rd Congress, 2nd Session, on “Problems that American Indian Families Face in Rais
ing their Children and How these Problems are Affected by Federal Action of Inaction,”
April 8 and 9, 1974 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1975) (hereafter,
Indian Child Welfare Congressional Hearings, 1974). See also icwa Congressional Hearings,
1977; U.S. House of Representatives, Hearings before the Subcommittee on Indian Affairs
and Public Lands of the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, 95th Congress, 2nd Ses
sion, S. 1214, February 9 and March 9, 1978 (Washington, DC: Government Printing
Office, 1981) (hereafter icwa Congressional Hearings, 1978).
27. List of Devil’s Lake Delegation at aaia press conference, July 16, 1968; telegram
from William Byler to 100 media representatives, July 11, 1968; aaia press release and
fact sheet, July 12, 1968, all in Box 77, Folder 7, aaia papers.
28. Video of Bertram Hirsch presentation on icwa to Alaska Native group on Kodiak
Island, July 18, 1989, in possession of the author. For the bia response, see Report from
Claire Jerdone, October 21, 1968, and related correspondence, Box 2, Folder: General
Program Admin., January–December 1968, Miscellaneous Subject Files, 1929–68,
Division of Social Services, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Record Group 75,
National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC.
29. Video of Bertram Hirsch and letter from Hirsch [to state agencies], n.d. [1968],
seeking information on numbers of Indian children in foster care or placed for adop
tion, Box 77, Folder 7, aaia papers. In the mid-1970s, under contract from the American
Indian Policy Review Commission, established by Congress, the aaia conducted a com
prehensive survey of Indian child placements in nineteen states. These statistics were
included in Appendix G, “Indian Child Welfare Statistical Survey,” July 1976, in icwa
Congressional Hearing, 1977.
30. “American Indian Family Defense Project: A Three Year Program,” n.d. (c. 1972);
“Report on Great Plains Family Defense Project,” May 1, 1972–January 2, 1973; “Indian
Family Defense Legal Services Program,” Proposal to the Lilly Endowment, n.d. (ca.
1975), “Indian Child Welfare Reform First Report,” March 1976–June 1976, all in Box
365, Folder 1, aaia papers.
31. Biltmore conference participants (partial list), Biltmore Conference Proceedings,
1974.

32. Pat Bellanger, an activist in Minneapolis, mentioned in the 1978 Congressional
Hearings that she had visited Ku-Nak-We-Sha and was impressed with how it worked.
See icwa Congressional Hearings, 1978, 132.
33. Biltmore Conference Proceedings, 1974, 6.
34. Interview with Bert Hirsch by Margaret D. Jacobs, September 23 30, 2011; Video of
Bertram Hirsch.
35. Steven Unger, “The Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978: A Case Study,” PhD diss.,
University of Southern California, 2004, 215. Indian Family Defense is available in the
aaia papers.
36. Letter to the Editor from Mollie Dyer, Indian Family Defense, no. 5 (July 1976): 7–8.
37. Gabrielle Schneeman, “A Pilot Study Exploring and Where Possible Describing the
Position of a Sample of Aboriginal Wards of the State of Victoria Known to Be in Resi
dential Care at the Time of the Study, in regard to Their Background, Present Situation
and Expected Future,” November 28, 1978, 7, Box 66, Folder 8, aaia papers.
38. Research Study by Christine Watson, Department of Aboriginal Affairs, Canberra,
“Aboriginal Children and the Care of the State in Victoria,” November 1976, 7, included
in Box 66, Folder 7, aaia papers.
39. Dyer quoted in Schneeman, “A Pilot Study,” 23.
40. Quoted in “Opportunity Opening Up for Native Children,” Daily News (Perth,
Australia), March 5, 1955, Scrapbook: “Aboriginal Children, 1965, 1966, 1967, Box 21/2
Scrapbooks, Vols. 19–21, Council for Aboriginal Rights papers, ms 12913, State Library of
Victoria, Melbourne, Australia (hereafter car papers).
41. Tonie Blackie, “Missing Richard Returns Home,” Age, September 5, 1978, 1. In
another article, Thomas is identified as Jeannette, not Jennifer. See Lindsay Murdoch,
“Countdown for a Happy Reunion,” Age, September 6, 1978, 3.
42. “Aboriginal Child Care Agency History and First Six Months’ Operation,” Novem
ber 15, 1978, 15, 16; “Aboriginal Child Care Agency History and First Twelve Months’
Operation,” November 15, 1978, Appendix F, both in Box 66, Folder 7, aaia papers.
43. “Harold Blair Talks on Assimilation of Aborigines,” April 13, 1966, Leader Bud
get, Northcote, Victoria, Scrapbook: “Aboriginal Children, 1965, 1966, 1967,” Box 21/2
Scrapbooks, Vols. 19–21, car papers; Anna Haebich, Spinning the Dream: Assimilation in
Australia, 1950–1970 (Fremantle, Western Australia: Fremantle Press, 2008), 368–69.
44. “The New Arrival,” The Sun, Melbourne, April 1, 1966, Scrapbook: “Aboriginal
Children, 1965, 1966, 1967,” Box 21/2 Scrapbooks, Vols. 19–21, CAR papers.
45. Claudia Wright, “ ’My Son Is No Symbol,’ ” Herald (Melbourne), April 22, 1967;
Scrapbook: “Aboriginal Children, 1965, 1966, 1967,” Box 21/2 Scrapbooks, Vols. 19–21,
car papers.
46. Ellen Herman, Kinship by Design: A History of Adoption in the Modern United States
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 197; H. Philip Hepworth, Foster Care and
Adoption in Canada (Ottawa, Ontario: Canadian Council on Social Development, 1980), 1,
19–28; Marian Quartly, Shurlee Swain, and Denise Cuthbert, The Market in Babies: Stories
of Australian Adoption (Clayton, Victoria, Australia: Monash University Press, 2013), 3.
47. “They Adopt Their Family ‘At Home,’ ” Daily Telegraph (Sydney), July 29, 1963; Box
16/3 Press Cuttings, Children, car papers.

48. “The New Arrival.”
49. “Family Adopts Aborigines,” Advertiser (Adelaide), September 20, 1962, Box 14/8
Children, 1960–62, Press Cuttings, car papers.
50. Isabel Carter, “The Aboriginal Cinderella,” W oman’s Day (Sydney), September 8,
1958 and “Joyce Wakes to a Glittering World: From Lean-to to Luxury,” no publication,
August 16, 1958, Box 13/5, Press Cuttings, Children 1952–58; Erica Parker, “Rosy Life
for Young Aboriginal,” Telegraph (Brisbane), September 4, 1962, Box 14/8 Children,
1960–62, Press Cuttings, car papers.
51. Fay Patience, “It’s Not the Color That Counts,” W oman’s Weekly (Melbourne),
April 2, 1956, Box 13/5, Press Cuttings, Children 1952–58, car papers.
52. “Aboriginal Child Care Agency History and First Six Months’ Operation,” Novem
ber 15, 1978, 3, Box 66, Folder 7, aaia papers.
54. Hepworth, Foster Care and Adoption in Canada; Department of Welfare, Province
of Saskatchewan, “Adopt Indian-Metis Project,” Report 1967–69, 4, 5, File 8.6.23, Folder
1, Department of Social Services, r-1655, Saskatchewan Archives Board, Regina; Marga
ret D. Jacobs, A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous C hildren in
the Postwar World (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 169–210.
55. Dyer, Room for One More, 97–99, quotes from 98, 99.
57. “Indian Adoption Project,” April 1960, a seven-page document describing the
project, probably written by Arnold Lyslo, 2, 1, Box 17, Folder 3, Child Welfare League of
America papers.
58. Dyer, Room for One More, 100–101, quotes from 101.
59. Dyer, Room for One More, 101–3, 113–17.
61. Sue Ingram, “Children’s Services for Indigenous Peoples,” description of meeting
of Robbins and Dyer with Department of Aboriginal Affairs, 16, November 1977, Austra
lian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.
62. Dyer, Room for One More, 119–21.
63. Dyer, Room for One More, 121–22.
64. Dyer, Room for One More, 121–22; “Aboriginal Child Care Agency History and
First Six Months’ Operation,” November 15, 1978, inside cover, Box 66, Folder 7, aaia
papers.
65. Unger, “The Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978,” 303–34; interview with Bert
Hirsch by Margaret D. Jacobs, September 23, 2011.
66. Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978, U.S. Code, vol. 25 (1978), http://www.tribal
-institute.org/lists/chapter21_icwa.htm, accessed September 1, 2017.
67. Dyer, Room for One More, 131; letter from Dyer to Unger, February 12, 1979, and
Unger to Dyer, February 23, 1979, Box 67, Folder 1, aaia papers.
68. Steven Unger to William Byler, April 30, 1979, Box 67, Folder 1, aaia papers.
69. Briskman, Black Grapevine, 84, 110; Andrew Armitage, Comparing the Policy of
Aboriginal Assimilation—Australia, Canada, and New Zealand (Vancouver: University of
British Columbia Press, 1995), 54–55, 65–67.

70. Dyer, Room for One More, 118. For recent scholarship on Indigenous movements,
see Bradley Shreve, Red Power Rising: The National Indian Youth Council and the Origins
of Native Activism (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011); Daniel Cobb, Native
Activism in Cold War America: The Struggle for Sovereignty (Lawrence: University Press
of Kansas, 2008); Ravi de Costa, A Higher Authority: Indigenous Transnationalism and
Australia (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2006); Charles Wilkinson,
Blood Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian Nations (New York: Norton, 2005); Paul Chaat
Smith and Robert Allen Warrior, Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to
Wounded Knee (New York: New Press, 1996).
71. Barbara Rowlands, “Caring for Kids Ended in Triumph,” Aboriginal News 3, no. 7
(1979): 6–8; quote 6.
72. Julie Davis, Survival Schools: The American Indian Movement and Community Educa-
tion in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Brenda Child,
Holding Our World Together: Ojibwe Women and the Survival of Community (New York:
Penguin, 2012); Jacobs, A Generation Removed, 97–124.
73. In the United States, American Indian children make up just 0.9 percent of the
population of American children but 2.7 percent of those in foster care. See Alicia
Summers, Disproportionality Rates for Children of Color in Foster Care (fy 2014) Techni
cal Assistance Bulletin (Reno, NV: National Council of Juvenile and F amily Court
Judges, August 2016), 3, http://www.ncjfcj.org/sites/default/files/NCJFCJ%202014%20
Disproportionality%20TAB%20Final.pdf. In Canada Indigenous children make up only
7 percent of the population but represent 48 percent of all children in foster care. See
Pam Palmater, “From Foster Care to Missing or Murdered: Canada’s Other Tragic Pipe
line,” Macleans, April 12, 2017, available at http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/from
-foster-care-to-missing-or-murdered-canadas-other-tragic-pipeline/.

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Contributors
ikuko asaka is an associate professor of history at the University of Illinois. She

researches imperial aspects of women, gender, and sexuality in the nineteenth century.
She is the author of Tropical Freedom: Climate, Settler Colonialism, and Black Exclusion in
the Age of Emancipation (2017).
oliver charbonneau is lecturer in American history at the University of Glasgow.

His book, Civilizational Imperatives: Americans, Moros, and the Colonial World (2020), ex
plores four decades of U.S. imperial rule in the Islamic Philippines. Essays from this project
have appeared in Diplomatic History and the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.
genevieve clutario is the Andrew W. Mellon assistant professor of American Stud

ies at Wellesley College. She is currently finishing her first book, on beauty regimes and
the gendered labor of appearance in the Philippines (Duke University Press, forthcom
ing), and is the author of “Pageant Politics: Tensions of Power, Empire, and Nationalism in
Manila Carnival Queen Contests,” published in Gendering the Transpacific World: Diaspora,
Empire and Race (2017).
anne l. foster is an associate professor of history at Indiana State University and

coeditor of Diplomatic History. She is the author of Projections of Power: The United States
and Europe in Colonial Southeast Asia, 1919–1941 (Duke University Press, 2010). She also
coedited and contributed to The American Colonial State in the Philippines: Global Perspec-
tives (Duke University Press, 2003).
julian go is a professor of sociology at Boston University. His books include American Em-
pire and the Politics of Meaning: Elite Political Cultures in the Philippines and Puerto Rico during
U.S. Colonialism (Duke University Press, 2008), Patterns of Empire: The British and American
Empires, 1688 to the Present (2011) and Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory (2016).
michel gobat is a professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author

of Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua under U.S. Imperial Rule (Duke University
Press, 2005) and Empire by Invitation: William Walker and Manifest Destiny in Central Amer
ica (2018).
julie greene is a professor of history and the director of the Center for Global Migra
tion Studies at the University of Maryland at College Park. She is the author of The Canal
Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal (2009) and coeditor, with Leon
Fink, of a special issue of the journal Labor: Studies in Working-Class History devoted to
labor and empire (December 2016).
kristin l. hoganson is the Stanley S. Stroup Professor of U.S. History at the Uni

versity of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her publications include Fighting for American
Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American
Wars (1998), Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865–
1920 (2007), American Empire at the Turn of the Twentieth C
entury: A Brief History with Docu-
ments (2016), and The Heartland: An American History (2019).
margaret d. jacobs is the Chancellor’s Professor of History at the University of

Nebraska–Lincoln (unl), where she has been based since 2004. She received an Andrew
Carnegie Fellowship for 2018–20 for her project “Does the United States Need a Truth
and Reconciliation Commission?” She is also the codirector of the Genoa Indian School
Digital Reconciliation Project at unl. From 2015 to 2016 she served as the Pitt Professor
of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University. She has published thirty-
five articles and three books, including White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism,
Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous C hildren in the American West and Australia,
1880–1940 (2009), which won the 2010 Bancroft Prize from Columbia University.
moon-ho jung is the Dio Richardson Professor of History at the University of Wash
ington. He is the author of Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emanci-
pation (2006) and the editor of The Rising Tide of Color: Race, State Violence, and Radical
Movements across the Pacific (2014).
marc-w illiam palen is senior lecturer in history at the University of Exeter. He is

the author of The “Conspiracy” of F ree Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and
Economic Globalisation, 1846–1896 (2016).
nicole m. phelps is an associate professor of history at the University of Vermont.

She is the author of U.S.-Habsburg Relations from 1815 to the Paris Peace Conference: Sover-
eignty Transformed (2013). The dissertation on which the book is based received the Aus
trian Cultural Forum Dissertation Prize and an honorable mention for the Betty Unter
berger Dissertation Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.
jay sexton is the Kinder Institute Chair of Constitutional Democracy at the Univer
sity of Missouri. He writes about nineteenth-century international history. His publica
tions include Debtor Diplomacy: Finance and American Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era,
336 Contributors
1837–1873 (2005), The Monroe Doctrine: Nation and Empire in Nineteenth-Century America
(2011), and, most recently, A Nation Forged by Crisis: A New American History (2018).
john soluri is an associate professor and the director of Global Studies in the His
tory Department at Carnegie Mellon University. He recently edited, with Claudia Leal
and José Augusto Pádua, A Living Past: Environmental Histories of Modern Latin America
(2018). His book Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in
Honduras and the United States (2006) won the George Perkins Marsh Award for best book
in environmental history.
stephen tuffnell is an associate professor of modern U.S. history at the University

of Oxford. He is the coeditor of A Global History of Gold Rushes (2018) with Benjamin
Mountford. He is currently completing a manuscript titled “Emigrant Foreign Relations:
Independence and Interdependence in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic.”
Contributors 337
Index
Note: Page numbers in italics indicate figures and tables.
Abad, Luis V. de, 170 American Anti-Imperialist League (ail),

Aboriginal Child Care Agency (acca), 159–61, 168–75
292–93 American Bridge Company (abc), 49–60
Aboriginal Child Placement Principle, 294 American Colonization Society (acs), 205–6,
Aboriginal Health Service, 283 209–13, 216–17
Aboriginal Legal Service, 281, 283, 288, 293 American Commercial Reciprocity League, 165
Aborigines. See indigenous peoples American Free Trade League (aftl), 163–64
Aborigines Protection Society, 214 American Invaders, The (McKenzie), 59
Abourezk, James, 288 American Peace Society, 173
Addams, Jane, 169–70 Anchorena, Tómas Manuel, 26
adoption. See under indigenous peoples Anderson, R., 53
Advocate of Peace, The (journal), 173 Anglo-Saxonism, 166, 187
Africa: East, 46–60; Liberia and, 205–18; U.S. Annita (ship), 36
imperialism and, 167. See also Burma; South Anti-Corn Law League (acll), 162
Africa; Uganda anti-imperialism: American Anti-Imperialist
African Americans: antiracism and, 10; climatic League (ail) and, 159–61, 168–75; Har Dayal
essentialism and, 205–18; colonization and, 261–73; economic cosmopolitanism and,
and, 87; Freedom Journal and, 209; Saluda 162–68; Georgism and, 171–75; Bhagwan
incident and, 217; secret ballot system and, Singh and, 273–77; Wisconsin School and,
100–101; Wilberforce colony and, 205–17. 160. See also imperialism
See also racism; slavery Anti-Opium League (China), 121
African Repository (journal), 209–10 Argentine Confederation, 26–27
Afro-Caribbeans: agricultural labor and, 224; Association on American Indian Affairs (aaia),
British patriotism and, 229–30, 236–37; 286–88, 292, 294
emancipation and, 230; Panama Canal and, Atbara Bridge, 47
222–23, 231–36 Atlantic Telegraph Company, 2
Alaska, 28–33, 40 Austin, Harrigan, 228, 231
Alaska Commercial Company (acc), 31 Australia: removal of indigenous children and,
Allen, James, 98 281, 288–91, 293–94; secret ballot system
Allen, Philip L., 101 and, 93–99
Australian Aborigines’ League of Victoria, 283 alization and, 47–48; opium and, 118–22;
Australian ballot. See secret ballot system revolutionary movement against, 261–62,
Australian Ballot System, The (Wigmore), 99 264, 266–67, 269, 275–76; secret ballot sys
Azuma, Eiichiro, 21n55 tem and, 96–99; security state of, 261–62,
264, 267, 273, 276; settler colonialism and,
Backus, Samuel W., 263, 268–69, 272 207, 213–14; single tax movement and,
Baldwin Locomotive Works, 54, 60 174–75; transimperial historiography, 6–7;
Ballantyne, Tony, 7, 185 Uganda Railway and, 49–58, 52, 54, 56–57;
ballot. See secret ballot system U.S. engineering firms and, 46–47, 59–60;
Barakatullah, Muhammed, 273 William Walker and, 71. See also Canada
Baranera, Francisco X., 186–87 British North Borneo, 194
Barbados, 225–27 British South Africa Company (bsac), 47
Barbary States, 141–42 Brooke, James, 194
Barth, Volker, 6 Buddington, James, 34
Bates, John, 186, 194 Buena, Luís Piedra, 33
Bates Treaty, 193 Bülow, Alexander von, 74
Bayard, Thomas, 167 Bunker, Paul, 25–27
Bayly, Chris, 16n10 Bureau of Indian Affairs (bia), 286–87
Beckles, Hilary, 225 Bürkli, Karl, 83
beer, 151, 158n34 Burma: Burma Railway Company and, 47;
Bell, J. Franklin, 190 Gokteik viaduct and, 47, 55–56; Indian
Bender, Thomas, 17n22 migrants and, 55; opium and, 120
Bentham, Jeremy, 96 Burma Railway Company, 47
Berkeley, F. H., 97 Burnett, John L., 269
Berlin Colonization Society for Central Burton, Antoinette, 7, 185
America, 74 Busch, Briton Cooper, 30
Berlin Treaty, 167 Butler, Leslie, 160
Beschor, George, 84
Bewick, Moering & Co., 47 California gold rush, 8, 73
biological essentialism, 215. See also climatic Caminetti, Anthony W., 263, 266, 269–71
essentialism Canada: antiblack resolutions and, 205, 208;
black Loyalists, 210. See also climatic essentialism Cobdenism and, 164–65; consular system
Blaine, James G., 167 and, 138; fur sealing in, 32, 38; Komagata
Bliss, Tasker, 187, 189, 193 Maru incident and, 271–72; Rebellion of
Bowker, R. R., 165–66 1837 and, 209; settlers’ discontent with the
Brent, Charles, 188, 190, 195–96 government of, 208–9; tourism and, 150;
bridges. See engineering U.S. border with, 150; U.S.-Canadian trade
Bridges, Thomas, 35–36 relationship, 149, 152, 164–65; Wilberforce
British African Colonization Society, 213, colony and, 205–17
216 Canada Company, 208–9, 217
British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 218 Cape Explosive Works, 47
British East India Company, 79 Cape Mount, 213, 218
British Empire: Argentina and, 11, 27; Borneo capitalism, 2, 10, 46, 58–60, 70
and, 194; consular system and, 138–39, Carbine, Charity, 290
144–45; Corn Laws and, 162; Falkland Caribbean, the: annexation of Santo Domingo,
Islands and, 27; free trade and, 160–61, 165–66; Barbados, 225–27; emancipated
164–66; fur sealing and, 38; imperial power people and, 213; free trade and, 168–69;
and, 60; indentured labor and, 82; industri Jamaica, 224–26, 228; racism and, 229–30
340 Index
Central America: consular system and, 138; Lin size of consular services by country, 138, 153;
coln’s colonization scheme and, 87; slavery training for, 142–43; transimperialism and,
and, 70, 73; Walker and, 70; war of, 87. See 135; U.S.-Canada trade relationship and 149;
also Costa Rica; Nicaragua; Panama Canal; World War I and, 154. See also U.S. Consular
Walker, William Service (uscs)
Chandra, Ram, 276 Convention between the United States and
Chapman, Henry Samuel, 96–97 Other Powers Providing for the Preservation
Charles Shearer (ship), 35 and Protection of Fur Seals (1911), 28
child removal: Australia and, 281, 288–91, Cook, E. L., 195
293–94; empire and, 282; settler colonialism Coppinger, Richard, 36
and, 282–83, 294–95; United States and, Co-Prosperity propaganda, 248–49
281, 284–86. See also Dyer, Mollie; Robbins, corruption, 96–100, 137, 141, 143
Maxine Costa Rica, 74–77
Child Welfare League of America, 286 Couloote, Mary, 228–29
Chile, 33–39 Council for Aboriginal Rights, 283
Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), 150 Courtwright, David, 114–15
Cincinnati, 205, 208 Cox, Jacob D., 165
Clay, Henry, 210 Cresson, Elliott, 216
Cleveland, Grover, 166–67, 172 Cromwell, Jesse, 6
climatic essentialism, 205–18 Crook, Malcolm, 108
Closed Door Empire, 161 Cuba, 103, 170
Cobden, Jane, 172–73 Cullinane, Michael, 160
Cobden, Richard, 161–63 Curtis Lampson Company, 31
Cobdenism, 161–75 Curzon, Mary Leiter, 9
Colbourne, John, 208 Custis, George Washington Parke, 211
Collier, John, 284 Cvetkovski, Roland, 6
Collins, William, 116
colonialism: elections and, 94, 107; fur sealing Dana, Richard Henry, III, 100
and, 31; Philippines and, 103; U.S. engi Darwin, John, 4
neering firms and, 46–47. See also settler Das, Taraknath, 264
colonialism Davidson, Gilbert, 26
Colonial Office Records (United Kingdom), 223 Davis, Dwight F., 191
Colored American (newspaper), 217 Davis, George, 188
Comer, George, 34 Dayal, Har: attempted deportation of, 263,
commodification, 31 269–71; calls for action against the British
Compendio de la Historia de Filipinas (Baranera), Empire, 267–68, 270; departure to Switzer
186–87 land, 272–73; discontinuation of Ghadar and,
Cóndor (Chilean naval ship), 38 272; early life of, 261–62; kidnapping plot
consular system: animals and, 149; Canada against, 268–69; surveillance of, 262–63,
and, 138, 145; capitulation system and, 137, 266, 268. See also Singh, Bhagwan
142; cities with the most consular officials, De Beers Consolidated Mines, 47
136; corruption and, 137, 141, 143; extrater DeBruler, Ellis, 264–65
ritoriality and, 137, 142–43; informal empire democracy: and empire, contradictions be
and, 137–38; major port-based, 135, 140–41, tween, 277; transimperial origins of, 107–8;
145, 148; nationality of officials and, 141, U.S. liberal imperialism and, 69; William
143; port-based vs diplomatic, 135; role of, Walker and, 70, 72, 74–75, 77, 83–85. See also
135, 137; salaries and, 137, 141–42; services secret ballot system
with the most “Informal Empire” posts, 139; “Democracy and Efficiency” (Wilson), 105
Index 341
Dennison, Louis, 235–36 evangelicalism, 81
Dennys, Nicholas Belfield, 194 exceptionalism, 6, 26, 71, 106, 185
Department of Social and Health Services extraterritoriality, 137, 142–43
(Washington state), 285
diplomats, 135, 137, 153–54 Falkland Islands, 38–39
disease: fur sealing and, 35–36; Panama Canal farming, 47
and, 231; Southeast Asia and, 112, 114–16; Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement,
vaccines and, 114. See also opium 283
doctors, 115, 121–22, 126 Fels, Joseph, 174–75
Drayton, Richard, 5–6 Fels, Mary, 174–75
DuBose, Hampden Coit, 122 feminism. See women
Duncan, Joseph, 193 Field, Cyrus, 2
Duncan, Silas, 26–27 Fifteenth Amendment, 101
Dutch colonialism, 188–89 filibusters, 70, 73, 80. See also Nicaragua;
Dyer, Mollie, 281–85, 288–96 Walker, William
Finley, John, 190
Early, John C., 194–95 Florence (ship), 37
E. B. Marvin (ship), 38 Forbes, W. Cameron, 188
economic cosmopolitanism, 161–69, 171, 173, Ford Peace Expedition, 174
175. See also free trade freebooters, 70
economic nationalism, 161, 163, 166, 170. free trade: American Anti-Imperialist League
See also free trade and, 168–71; American Free Trade League
Edmonds, Penelope, 6 and, 163–65; Civil War and, 163; Cobdenism
Edward Roy (ship), 38 and, 161–75; Cuba and, 170; Downes v. Bidwell
Egypt, 50 and, 169; Henry George and, 161, 164–65,
elections, 94, 107. See also secret ballot system 171–74; Georgism and, 171–75; imperial
empire/empires: American engineers and, 48, ism and, 159; Manchester Colonial Theory
51, 58; American industrial capitalism and, and, 164–65; Philippines and, 170–71, 174;
58–60; anti-Asian immigration policies and, single tax ideology and, 171–75; U.S. anti-
9; definition of, 4–5; elections and, 94, 107; imperialism and, 159–75; war and, 162
imperial formations and, 5–6; knowledge Fröbel, Julius, 86
collection/sharing between, 49, 51; making fur sealing: Chilean restrictions on, 36–39;
of the modern world and, 4; normalcy conservation and, 28–31, 36–39; disregard
and, 242–44, 247–51, 253, 255n10; oceans for territorial boundaries and, 26–27,
and, 28; opium and, 114, 126; partnerships 39–40; hunting methods for, 29; impact on
between, 5–7; race and, 270–71; removal indigenous peoples, 30–32, 35–36, 39, 41;
of indigenous c hildren and, 282; José Rizal industrialization and, 40; open-sea (pelagic)
and, 183; secret ballot system and, 107–8; hunting, 32–33, 38–39; overhunting,
southern slave empire, 10; traffic between, 28–31, 40; in Patagonia, 26; processing of
185; transnational terminology and, 11; pelts, 31, 34; regulations for, 31; in Russia,
United States as an, 5, 8; U.S. collaboration 30; in Tierra del Fuego, 33–36; violence
and the Philippines, 185–91. See also con and, 35
sular system; Panama Canal; Philippines fur seals, 28–31, 34, 36–39
engineering: British empire and, 47–48; engi
neers’ lockout and, 59; great merger move Gaillard, D. D., 232
ment and, 58–59; industrial expansion and, Gammage, Robert George, 97
46; Philippines and, 189; steel technology Gazette (Arkansas), 101
and, 59; of Ugandan railway, 50–58 Gemberling, Charles N., 52
342 Index
gender: Filipino women and normalcy during Hirsch, Bert, 292
World War II, 241–54, 255n10; U.S. Consular hms Challenger, 27
Service and, 156n5; women as indigenous Hobson, J. A., 5, 10–11, 173–74
activists and, 281–96 Hodgkin, Thomas, 206–7, 213–18
geopolitical borders, 26 Hopkinson, William C., 262, 266
George, Henry, 99–100 Hunt, Leigh, 47
Georgism, 171–75 Huzzey, Richard, 160
German East Africa Company, 50
Germany, 50, 74, 85 If Everyone Cared (Tucker), 283
germ theory, 114 immigration, 150
Gerrard, P. N., 115–16 imperial ballot system. See secret ballot system
Ghadar (newspaper), 267–68, 270–72, 276 Imperial British East Africa Company, 50
Ghadar Movement. See Dayal, Har; Ghadar; imperialism: British Empire and, 46, 60; col
Singh, Bhagwan lapse of, 113; dilemma of late, 113; economic
Gimenez, Flora, 242, 244–45, 251–52 cosmopolitan critique of, 162–68; foreign
globalization, 13–14 market expansion and, 166; imperial transi
Go, Julian, 6 tions, 241–54; industrial, 47; informal, 166,
Goethals, George Washington, 233 170; knowledge control and, 49; political
Gokteik viaduct, 47 economies and, 10; public health projects
gold mining. See mining and, 116; resource extraction and, 3; tran
Goldthree, Reena, 236 simperial processes and, 7; United States
Gómez, Juan Gualberto, 170 and, 13–14, 49, 58, 183; U.S. liberal, 69–87;
Graphic (magazine), 244 Victorian, 3. See also anti-imperialism;
great merger movement, 58 interimperialism; settler colonialism;
Great Rebellion of 1857 (India), 3 transimperialism
Green, David, 25–27 Imperialism: A Study (Hobson),
Greene, Julie, 58 173
Groeneveldt, Willem Pieter, 117–18 India, 49–50, 54–56. See also Dayal, Har; Singh,
Guevera, Pedro, 171 Bhagwan
Gunton, George, 101 Indian Adoption Project (iap), 286
Gutierrez, Lydia, 242, 247 Indian Child Welfare Act, 288
gutta percha, 3 Indian Family Defense (newsletter),
288, 291
Haak, J., 118 Indian Health Service, 284
Hailes, Nathaniel, 98 Indian Rebellion, 3, 87
Haiti, 170 indigenous peoples: child removal and, 281–96;
Hamid, Abdul, II, 189 of East Africa, 55; fur sealing and, 28, 39;
Hardie, J. Keir, 235 protection of, 206, 214
Harold Blair Aboriginal Children’s Project, indirect rule, 5
289–90 industrialization: fur sealing and, 40; U.S.
Harriet (ship), 26 engineering and, 46, 53–54, 58–60
Hawaii, 167–68 Innes, A. Mitchell, 235
Hawksley, E. J., 97 interimperialism, 5–6, 21n55
Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty of 1890, 50 invasion, 59–60
Henningsen, Charles Frederick, 80 Iriye, Akira, 2
Hesse, Eugene, 85 Islam, 188, 190–91, 196
Hidalgo, Don Luis, 171 Isthmian Historical Society, 223
Hiramura, Santukno, 9 Ivins, Charles, 192
Index 343
Jackson, Andrew, 27 Mallet, Claude, 234–35
Jamaica, 224–26, 228 Manchester Colonial Theory, 164
Jamaican National Archives, 223 Manchester School. See Cobdenism
Japan, 241–54 Manifest Destiny, 69–74, 78, 85–87, 92n93
Jarrett, N. P., 52 Manila Daily Bulletin, 274–75
Johnson, Lyndon, 287 Manila Times, 105
Johnson, Michele, 230 Martineau, E. W., 229
Johnston, Sir Harry, 54 Maryland Steel Company, 47
Jones, Dorothy, 30 masked condominia, 5
Joos, Wilhelm, 80 Massachusetts State Colonization Society, 211–12
Juno (ship), 25 McCombie, Thomas, 99
jute yarn, 3 McCoy, Frank, 188
McDougal, Ian, 192
Kalaw, Maximo, 106–7 McKenzie, William, 59
Karner, William J., 236 McKinley Tariff, 165
Keefe, Daniel J., 265 McLaurin, John, 122
Keith, W. J., 120 Mead, Edwin D., 173
Kidd, Benjamin, 60 Mead, Lucia, 173
al-Kilani, Sayyid Wajih, 190, 200n36 medicine. See opium: as medicine
Kiram, Jamalul, II, 186, 194 Mendoza, Helen, 242, 245, 255n18
Komagata Maru (ship), 271–73 Meyers, Herbert W., 264
Kramer, Paul, 6 Middleton, S. G., 289
Kumar, Guru Dutt, 266 migrants: consular services and, 152; gold min
ing and, 8; Indian, 54–55; labor, 9; Panama
labor: fur sealing and, 30–32, 35, 39; Gokteik Canal and, 222, 228–29, 231, 234, 236–37;
viaduct and, 55–56; indentured, 82; Panama South Asian, 264–68, 271; U.S.-Canadian
Canal and, 222–23, 226–28; plantation border and, 149–50
economy and, 224–26; shared colonial labor Mill, James, 96
management, 58; Ugandan Railway and, 55, Mills, Roger Q., 167
57–58; Victorian capitalism and, 10 Mindanao-Sulu: colonial transitions and, 184;
Labouchere, Henry, 50 map of, 184; U.S. acquisition of, 183–87; U.S.
Laidlaw, Zoë, 206–7, 214 collaborators in, 191–95; U.S. governance
Lampson Company auctions, 34 of, 187–91, 195–97. See also Moro Province;
Lasch, Christopher, 159 Philippines
League of Nations, 113 mining: California gold rush, 8, 73; Klondike
Levine, Robert, 216–17 gold strike and, 151; South Africa and, 47
liberal imperialism. See Nicaragua; Walker, monogenesis, 215. See also climatic essentialism
William Montinola, Lourdes, 241, 250
Liberia, 205–18 Montt, Jorge, 38
Liberian Herald, 209 Moore, Brian, 230
Lincoln, Abraham, 87 Morgan, J. P., 58
de Lisser, Herbert G., 228 Moroland, 189
Little, R. M., 195 Moro Province, 183–84, 187–88, 190–91, 193,
Lodge, Henry Cabot, 168 196. See also Mindanao-Sulu; Philippines
Lueder, Archibald Byron, 53, 55–58 Moros, 187–97, 274–75. See also Philippines
Mugwumps, 172
MacLachlan, A. F., 119 Munro, Jenny, 284
Malcolm, George, 103–4 Muslims, 183–84, 189, 191
344 Index
Nagel, Charles, 265 Panama Canal: Afro-Carribbean labor and,
nationalism: conservation and, 36; economic, 222–24, 226, 237; British representatives,
161, 163, 166, 170; imperialism and, 1; Puerto labor oversight by, 233–35; Canal Zone
Rican anticolonialism and, 6 operation, 230–31; distrust of Jamaicans
Natzmer, Bruno von, 74 and, 233; failed French effort and, 226; labor
Neptune (ship), 25–26 recruiting for, 226–28; management of
Netherlands Indies, 117 workers, 231–32; size of labor force, 227–28;
New York Evening Post, 168 surveillance of South Asian revolutionar
New York Herald, 70–71, 79 ies and, 276; worker resistance to, 232–33,
New York State Colonization Society, 210 236–37; working conditions, 231–32, 234–35
New York World (newspaper), 168 Patterson, David, 166
Nicaragua: annexation of, 79; canal project and, Paul, Nathaniel, 216, 218
167; colonization projects and, 74; geopo Paul I (Tsar), 30
litical importance of, 72; Liberal Party of, Pellet, Sarah, 75
73, 76; El Nicaraguense and, 75, 77–79, 82; Pencoyd Iron Works, 47, 52
surveying of, 76, 85; William Walker and, Pennsylvania Steel Company, 47, 51, 55–56
69–70, 73, 75–77. See also Central America; Perris, George H., 173
Walker, William Pershing, John, 187, 190
El Nicaraguense (newspaper), 75, 77–79, 82 Pestaño-Jacinto, Pacita, 242, 246–47
Nicholson, John, 196 Peters, Albert, 223–24
Nogueira, José, 33 Philippines: Chinese residents of, 193; civilian
normalcy, 242–44, 247–51, 253, 255n10 deaths during World War II in, 241; free
North American Review (magazine), 101 trade and, 170–71, 174; impacts of World War
North Pacific Fur Seal Convention, 38–39 II on, 247–53, 257n44; independence from
Nova Scotia, 210–11 U.S. rule, 241, 244, 253, 255n9; Japanese
economic restructuring of, 247; Japanese oc
O’Connell, J. L., 119 cupation during World War II and, 241–47;
Ohio, 205, 207–9 as a legal point of entry to the United States,
On the Hygienic Management of Labour in the 264–67, 270; Moro Province, 183–84, 187–88,
Tropics (Gerrard), 115–16 190–91, 193, 196; normalcy during World
Open Door Empire, 161 War II in, 242–44, 247–51, 253, 255n10;
opium: anti-opium activists and, 114, 117–18, opium and, 122–25, 127; political education
121–23, 126, 129n23; British Empire and, of, 103; secret ballot voting and, 93–94,
118–22; forms of, 115; as medicine, 112, 102–7; smuggling of people and, 194–95; so
114–20, 123–25; Netherlands Indies and, cial structure of, 104–5; threat of World War
117–18, 129n23; Philippines and, 122–25, 127; II and, 244–45; U.S. rule of, 183–97; violence
profitability of, 114; regulation of, 112–14; and, 189, 195; Zamboanga, 192, 194. See also
Shanghai Opium Commission, 125–26; Mindanao-Sulu; U.S. imperialism
smoking of, 114, 119–20, 123, 125; tattooers Phoenix Bridge Company, 46–47, 51
and, 120, 124; types of users of, 114–15; United Piang, Datu, 193–94
States and, 122–25, 127; w omen and, 115, 124 Pierce, Franklin, 82
Otis, Elwell S., 186 Placé, Luis V., 170
Ottoman Empire, 137, 142, 185, 189–92, policing, 113, 195. See also surveillance
196 Polier, Justine Wise, 287
political sovereignty, 32, 40
Pacific Navigation Company, 33 Portuguese Empire, 144, 156n15
Pala (Sulu outlaw), 195 postcolonialism, 6, 12–13, 28
Palmer, John McAuley, 188 powering up, 11, 28, 41
Index 345
Preston, John W., 276–77 Russian American Company (rac), 30
Preuss, Oscar, 189 Russwurm, John, 209–10
Pribilof Islands, 30–33
Pribylov, Gavriil, 30 Sadler, Sir James Hayes, 55
Prichard, James Cowles, 215 Saluda incident, 217
Progress and Poverty (George), 171–72 Samoa, 167–68
Project Ku-nak-we-shaw, 285, 288, 292. See also Sampaio, Francisco, 36
Robbins, Maxine Saunier, Pierre-Yves, 185
protectionism, 161–72, 174–75 Schuck family, 192–93
Protection or Free Trade (George), 165, 174 Schurman, Jacob Gould, 195
Public (Georgist publication), 172, 174 Schurz, Carl, 167
Puerto Rico, 103, 169 Schwartz, Adolph, 84–85
Punta Arenas. See Chile Scott, Hugh, 195
secret ballot system: in Australia, 97–99; class
Quinan, William Russell, 47 and, 97; innovation of, 95–97; modern
quinine, 116, 129n20, 231 democracy and, 107–8; Philippines and,
93–94, 102–7; spread of, 94, 96; support for,
racism: adoption and, 290–91; Australian 96–97; United States and, 99–102; voter
Constitution and, 283; in the Carribbean, disenfranchisement and, 100–102; voter
229–30; climatic essentialism and, 205–18; turnout and, 100, 102. See also democracy
European radicals and, 86; filibusters and, settler colonialism: American Colonization So
83; Indian labor and, 56–58; Panama Canal ciety and, 205–6, 209–13, 216–17; American
and, 235–36; registration laws and, 208; contractors and, 46; British humanitarian
secret ballot system and, 101–2; whites-only attitudes toward, 207, 213; climatic essential
settler societies and, 210. See also African ism and, 205–18; empires and, 4–5, 282–83;
Americans; slavery indigenous child removal and, 282–83, 294;
railways: in Burma, 47; Ugandan, 50–58, 52, 54, in Liberia, 206–7; logic of elimination and,
56–57, 60; U.S. engineering firms and, 46 282; William Walker and, 70, 72–74, 80–81,
Raousset-Boulbon, Gaston de, 73 83–85; whites-only settler societies and,
Reily, Charles H., 269–70 210–11. See also colonialism
Rendel, Alexander M., 51 Sexton, Jay, 159
Researches into the Physical History of Mankind Shanghai Opium Commission (1909), 125–26
(Prichard), 215 Shin Seiki (magazine), 249
Rethinking American History in a Global Age Shuster, W. Morgan, 189
(Bender), 2 Sierra Leone, 207, 210–11
Rhodes, Cecil, 47 Singh, Bhagwan, 273–77. See also Dayal, Har
Ricardo, David, 162 Singh, Rajah, 267
Richards, John Altyman, 229 single tax ideology, 171–75
Richardson, Bonham, 227 Slacum, George, 26
Rizal, José, 9, 183 slavery: American Cobdenites and, 162–63;
Robbins, Maxine, 281–88, 292–96 annexation of Nicaragua and, 79; black con
Rodgers Act (1924), 153, 155 vention movement and, 205; British Empire
Room for One More (Dyer), 295 and, 82; British Foreign Anti-Slavery society,
Roosevelt, Theodore, 122, 168, 234 50; in Central America, 73; Civil War and,
Root, Elihu, 122 163; Liberian colonization and, 213; Portugal
Rosenberg, Emily, 189 and, 144, 156n15; William Walker and, 70,
Russia: Alaska, sale of, 30–31, 40; fur sealing 72, 75, 81–82. See also African Americans;
and, 30–31; manifest destiny and, 78 racism; Wilberforce colony
346 Index
Smith, Cecil Clementi, 126 transimperialism: black freedom and, 206–7;
Smith, Goldwin, 164–65 colonialism and, 9–10; consular system and,
Smith, Henry, 27 135, 139, 145; definition and historiographi
Society for the Suppression of the Opium cal roots of, 6–12; democracy and, 95–96,
Trade, 118 107–8; environmental histories and, 28; free
La Solidaridad (newspaper), 183 trade and, 159–75; fur sealing and, 33–34, 36,
Sonnenstern, Maximilian von, 85 39; indigenous women’s activism and, 282,
South Africa, 47 291–96; labor migrants and, 222, 228, 234,
South American Missionary Society, 36 237; Latin America and, 11; management of
South Asian migrants, 264–68, 271–72. See also indigenous peoples and, 282, 291, 294–95,
Dayal, Har; Singh, Bhagwan 296n4; opium and, 112–14, 117–18, 123,
sovereignty: consular system and, 135, 139, 143; 126–27; scholarship on, 6–8; transimperial
indigenous groups and, 30, 32, 39, 41, 295; connectivity, 46–49, 60, 183, 185, 189; tran
Philippines and, 183, 186, 241, 265, 267; ter simperial surveillance and oppression, 262,
ritorial, 26–27, 34, 37–41 272; World War II and, 242–44, 254
Spanish-American War, 168, 185, 187, 194 translocal, 3
Spanish Empire, 26–27, 160, 168, 183–87, transnationalism: definition of, 2–3; global con
192–93, 196 nectivity and, 48; scholarship, 6–12; transna
Speck, Mary, 170 tional frameworks, limits of, 28, 34, 41
steam technology, 2 Treaty of Wangxia (1844), 142
steel technology, 59 Treaty of Washington (1871), 149
St. Louis National Personnel Records Center, 223 Tucker, Margaret, 283
Stole, John, 36 Turk, John C., 56
Straus, Oscar, 189 Tweed, William M. “Boss,” 99
Ströbel, Max, 85 Tyrrell, Ian, 159
Sublime Porte. See Ottoman Empire
Sudan, 47, 50 Uganda: railway, 49–59, 52, 54, 56–57, 60;
Sudan Plantations Syndicate, 47 settlement of, 54–55; Ugandan Protector
Suffolk Insurance Company, 27 ate, 50
sugar production, 224–26 Unangans, 30–32
Sumner, Charles, 165 Unger, Steve, 288, 292, 294
surveillance, 113, 195, 232–33, 262–63, 266, United League for the Taxation of Land Values,
274, 276 174
United Nations, 108
Taft, William Howard, 103–5, 122 United States: Africa and, 167; anti-imperialism
tariffs, 162, 165, 169–71, 173–74 and, 159–75; Argentina and, 27; Civil War
Taylor, Edward, 52 and, 4, 143–44; empire denial and, 5; engi
Taylor, Nikki, 207–8 neering diaspora and, 46–61; filibusterism
telegraph technology, 2 and, 70; globalization and, 13–14; great
territorial annexation, 5 merger movement and, 58–59; Hawaii and,
territoriality, 31 167–68; immigration laws and, 268–73;
territorial sovereignty, 26–27, 39–41 Indian Child Welfare Act (icwa) and, 293;
Thomas, Jennifer, 289 integration into imperial structures and, 8;
Thomas Hunt (ship), 34 liberal imperialism and, 69–87; Manifest
Tierra del Fuego, 33–36 Destiny and, 69–76, 78, 85–87, 92n93;
Townsend, Eben, 26 Neutrality Acts and, 70; opium and, 122–25,
trade. See consular system; free trade; tariffs 127; Philippines and, 94, 183–97, 241–54;
transatlantic cables, 1–4 promotion of adoption of Indian children
Index 347
United States (cont.) U.S. Steel Corporation, 58–59
by non-Indian families, 285–86; purchase U.S. Supreme Court: Downes v. Bidwell case,
of Alaska, 30–31, 40; removal of indigenous 169; immigration law and, 266–67; im
children and, 281, 284, 286; Republican pounding of fur sealing ships and, 27
Party, 161–68, 170, 172; Samoa and, 167–68;
secret ballot system and, 99–102; shift in vaccines, 114
federal Indian policy, 284; Spanish-American Valle, José María, 75, 77, 83
War and, 168; surveillance/intelligence Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 73, 79–80
program of, 262–63, 265–66, 268, 274–76; Vernet, Louis, 26–27
telegraph technology and, 3–4; U.S. Foreign viaducts. See engineering
Service, 135; World War II, role in, 244–46. Victoria Sealing Company, 38
See also Dayal, Har; Panama Canal; Singh, violence: filibusterism and, 70; fur sealing and,
Bhagwan; U.S. imperialism 36; Panama Canal and, 235–36; Philippines
Upper Canada. See Canada and, 189, 195; settler colonial, 213–14;
U.S. Civil War, 4, 151, 163 William Walker and, 77
U.S. Consular Service (uscs): 1789 to 1856, voting. See secret ballot system
140–43; 1856 to 1906, 143–45; 1872 to
1906, 145–52; 1906 to 1924, 152–55; British Walker, William: annexation of Nicaragua and,
Empire and, 138–39, 144–45; British subjects 79; democracy and, 83–84; El Nicaraguense
serving in, 157n18; Canada, location of U.S. and, 75, 77–79, 82; European colonization
Consular posts in, 146–47; Civil War and, projects and, 74; European Forty-Eighters
143–44; civil war veteran pensions and, 151; and, 83–86; evangelicalism and, 81; filibus
consuls general at large (cgals), 153–54; ter army and, 80; inspiration and, 71, 73,
corruption and, 143; day-to-day activities 82; liberal imperialism and, 69–70, 72–74;
of, 145, 148; extraterritorial system and, 137, public health and, 80–81; regime of, 75–77;
142–43; gender and, 156n5; immigration settler colonialism and, 80; slavery and, 70,
and, 150, 154; informal empire and, 137–38, 75, 81–82; support for, 73, 75, 87; U.S. gov
145; language deficiencies and, 142–43; ernment support and, 82. See also Nicaragua
length of service in, 156n14; Portuguese Wallace, Arthur, 99–100
Empire and, 144; reform of, 139, 152–55; Wallace, John, 228
reporting by, 151; Rodgers Act (1924), 153, Walrond, Eric, 232, 236
155; role of, 135, 137, 139; salaries within, Wealth of Nations, The (Smith), 162
141–43, 156n11; size of, 138; trade promotion Wells, David Ames, 164–65
activities of, 151–52; U.S.-Canadian trade Wernher, Beit & Co., 47
relationship, 149, 152; World War I and, 154. White, Edward Douglass, 266
See also consular system Whitehouse, Sir George, 53, 57
U.S. Department of Agriculture, 151 Wilberforce, William, 208
U.S. Foreign Service, 153, 155 Wilberforce colony, 205–17
U.S. imperialism: British empire and, 49; col Wilkeson, Samuel, 217
laboration in the Philippines and, 185–91, Williams, William Appleman, 160
195–96; f ree trade and, 160–61, 169–70; Wilson, William B., 266
immigration and, 265; obscuring of, 5, Wilson, Woodrow, 105, 170, 266
183; Panama Canal and, 167; preexisting Winslow, Erving, 169
networks in the Philippines and, 191–95; Wolfe, Patrick, 282
rule of the Philippines and, 183–85, 195–97, Woman’s Peace Party, 169–70
241–54; scholarship on, 6–7, 13–14; William women: Caribbean labor migration and, 227;
Walker and, 86–87. See also United States colonial intimacies and, 193; Filipino women
uss Lexington, 26 and World War II, 241–54; imperial patrio
348 Index
tism and, 237; indigenous activism and, World War I, 154, 264, 276
281–96; opium use and, 115, 124 World War II, 244–54
Wood, Leonard, 188, 191, 195–96 Wright, Hamilton, 126
Wood, R. E., 227
World Anti-Slavery Convention, 216–18 Yakama Nation. See indigenous peoples
Index 349

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crossing empires

american encounters / global interactions

Duke University Press Durham and London 2020

Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca on acid-­free paper ∞.

Designed by Courtney Leigh Baker

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cover art: Fracked World. © Rebecca Riley. Courtesy of the

part i. in pursuit of profit

2. Crossing the Rift: American Steel and Colonial ­Labor

part ii. transimperial politics

4. Empire, Democracy, and Discipline:

5. Medicine to Drug: Opium’s Transimperial Journey ​112

7. Transimperial Roots of American Anti-­Imperialism:

8. The Permeable South: Imperial Interactivities

part iv. living transimperially

10. Entangled in Empires: British Antillean

11. World War II and the Promise of Normalcy:

part v. re­s is­t ance across empires

13. Indigenous Child Removal and Transimperial Indigenous

This book began as a conference held at Oxford’s Rothermere American In­

2 kristin l. hoganson and jay sexton

4 kristin l. hoganson and jay sexton

this volume seeks to bring sharper definition and meaning to an emerg­

6 kristin l. hoganson and jay sexton

8 kristin l. hoganson and jay sexton

10 kristin l. hoganson and jay sexton

12 kristin l. hoganson and jay sexton

14 kristin l. hoganson and jay sexton

16 kristin l. hoganson and jay sexton

18 kristin l. hoganson and jay sexton

20 kristin l. hoganson and jay sexton

22 kristin l. hoganson and jay sexton

This tale of Yankee exceptionalism, related in the journal of Eben Townsend,

26 john soluri

Fur Sealing and Unsettled Sovereignties 27

28 john soluri

Taking Seals: Alaska

Fur Sealing and Unsettled Sovereignties 29

30 john soluri

Fur Sealing and Unsettled Sovereignties 31

32 john soluri

Pursuing Seals: Tierra del Fuego

Fur Sealing and Unsettled Sovereignties 33

34 john soluri

Fur Sealing and Unsettled Sovereignties 35

Conserving Fur Seals, Claiming Sovereignty

36 john soluri

Fur Sealing and Unsettled Sovereignties 37

38 john soluri

Transgressive Environmental Histories

Fur Sealing and Unsettled Sovereignties 39

40 john soluri

Fur Sealing and Unsettled Sovereignties 41

42 john soluri

Fur Sealing and Unsettled Sovereignties 43

44 john soluri

Fur Sealing and Unsettled Sovereignties 45

Crossing the Rift 47

48 stephen tuffnell

Crossing the Rift 49

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞.

2. Crossing the Rift: American Steel and Colonial Labor

5. Medicine to Drug: Opium’s Transimperial Journey 112

7. Transimperial Roots of American Anti-Imperialism:

part v. res ist ance across empires

This book began as a conference held at Oxford’s Rothermere American In

this volume seeks to bring sharper definition and meaning to an emerg

used to floor the bridges.50 Thirty-six locomotives from Baldwin’s Philadelphia

coolie had a way of organizing himself as an individual striker and refusing to

This essay explores the transimperial origins of U.S. liberal imperialism—

This antebellum valorization of imperial cooperation at a global scale chal

Encountering European Liberal Imperialism