<i>Making the Empire Work: Labor and United States Imperialism</i> ed. by Daniel Bender and Jana Lipman

The United States is a colonial construct. It is a settler state that, like other similar states in North America and elsewhere on the planet, is predicated on the dispossession of a large and diverse population of indigenous people, often through violence and sometimes genocidal policies. In the case of the United States, the nation and its wealth are also predicated on the transportation of human chattel across imperial networks. Establishing sovereignty over indigenous lands, some of which slaves cultivated, is partly what allowed the United States to rise in stature on the international stage by the later nineteenth century, and the acquisition of an overseas empire further enhanced and stood as evidence that the country occupied, or at least aspired to, “great power” status. The overt jingoism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries became unfashionable by the end of the Second World War. The United States has, however, continued to dominate people—and to control economically and diplomatically strategic territories, albeit mostly without formally annexing them or imposing direct rule and mostly while denying that its overseas endeavors are imperialist—until the present day.A variety of talented scholars (i.e., Gabriel Kolko, William Appleman Williams, Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, E. J. Hobsbawm) have provided excellent analyses of motivations and methods of American imperialism in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They have also exposed how the American government has supported repugnant regimes and perpetrated directly and indirectly a host of atrocities in the name of liberty and justice during this period. Yet, as Daniel Bender and Jana Lipman point out in their introduction to Making the Empire Work, very often the focus has been on the diplomats, politicians, heads of corporations, and bourgeois cultural producers who occupy the upper tiers of the American class structure. Bender, Lipman, and the thirteen contributors to this fine collection set out to provide insight into the history of the working class and the American empire.Understanding the labor history of empire is at once important and tricky, requiring us to come to grips with the place and diverse experiences and struggles of workers drawn into a shifting web of relations necessitated by the changing demands of US capitalism. This is a tall order, and the essays in this collection go a long way toward addressing important aspects of this broad history. US economic dynamism hinged partly on expansionism. Expansion within North America and overseas provided raw materials essential to an expanding number of factories of the American industrial heartland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Thus, as Julie Greene makes clear in her essay, the empire was instrumental to production in the United States. It was also essential to the accumulation of wealth afforded thereby and to the development of military expertise, both of which corporate and government leaders (often closely intertwined) did not hesitate to mobilize against restive members of the American working class. At the same time, the increasing power of the ruling class in the United States was also vital to the lives of workers in overseas territories that were rich in raw materials or that were of strategic significance. Thus Kevin Coleman, Andrew Zimmerman, and Jason Colby all provide insight into the oppression and resistance in areas under US control or influence. They also highlight the mutually determining nature of the relationships between developments in the United States and those outside its formal territorial borders. Coleman, for example, shows how power disparities shape memory by structuring silences. The archive, photographic and otherwise, he shows, reflects historical power disparities and in the case of the United Fruit Company works to obliterate memory of oppression and of resistance to domination and exploitation, doing so through a process of selection that is not random even if it is not planned. Zimmerman shows how long-standing developments within the United States and West Africa shaped relations between people in the two regions as representatives of the Tuskegee Institute sought to “improve” some residents of Togo. Colby provides an insightful discussion of how shifting relations between officials, capitalists, and workers in Central America shaped racialized understandings of “tropicality.” Moreover, as Dorothy B. Fujita-Rony, Andrew Urban, and Cindy Hahamovitch make clear, the exchanges between the seat of imperial power and the edges of empire involved more than ideas and goods. Indeed, the imperial system acted as a conduit for people either from US overseas holdings such as the Philippines or from territories under the control of other imperial powers.While relations within industry, whether in the United States or in overseas territories under its influence, were important, the US empire, like those before it, depended heavily on the exercise or threat of violent intervention. This has meant that from the later nineteenth century up to the present day the United States has maintained a series of strategic military outposts, most of which are staffed by working people. Those workers, whether US soldiers or local proxies for US power, have often been the face and teeth of the imperial machine. Lauren Hirshberg and Christopher Capozzola address some of the tensions surrounding thinking about soldiers as labor. Seungsook Moon examines the history of sexual labor central to the operation of military bases, demonstrating how policies and practices at different bases reflected broader understandings of the people under occupation.If there is a weak point in this collection it is in the framing of the essays. No doubt the editors faced the same difficulty in introducing the collection as I do in reviewing it. The essays in this collection offer readers conceptually and empirically rich analyses of a plethora of themes and topics (including but not limited to those mentioned above). The complexity, nuance, and diversity of the essays are a testament to the quality of the research and care that have gone into crafting each part of the collection. It is also difficult to provide a general statement about such a collection of material. Nevertheless, it is clear that the authors of the various essays take the US empire to mean regions under the direct control of the US government or under the influence of US corporations during the era of the “New Imperialism” (approximately 1870s to the interwar years) and during the “post-colonial” period—that is, after 1945. This is worth noting explicitly. For even though the editors and some contributors (particularly Greene) acknowledge that the conquest of peoples within North America is an important part of the history of the American empire, this collection, like much earlier writing, does tend to suggest that the history of US imperialism is centrally about mutually determining relations between the continental United States and territories outside it. This contrasts with the recent work of both the “new” Western historians and historians of US borderlands (for example, Patricia Limerick, Richard White, Pekka Hämäläinen) and historians of other settler states (i.e., Patrick Wolfe, Elizabeth Furniss, Jeremy Beckett, Anthony Moran, Cole Harris, and a great many others). Such scholars have argued that the dispossession of indigenous peoples has long-standing effects on collective imaginings, state policies, and class relations within settler societies. This collection diverges from but does not engage with that position.In any event, taken together, the essays in this volume provide important insights into the scope and operation of the American empire, and in so doing they make important contributions to our understanding of both the history of labor and imperialism. Particularly significant is that, as many of the contributors suggest, analyzing the history of labor through the lens of the empire allows us to better see American capitalism as a system of social reproduction not bounded by national borders. This work deserves a wide readership among labor historians, social and cultural historians, and historians of American politics and diplomacy.

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