The Big Ditch: How America Took, Built, Ran, and Ultimately Gave Away the Panama Canal

Notes

n o T e s one introduction to the Ditch 1. Under this definition, empires end in three ways. First, the stronger political community loses interest in using sanctions to impose its preferred policies on the weaker community. Second, the threat of sanctions (or the sanctions themselves) at the disposal of the stronger community lose their ability to compel the weaker. Third, the two political communities merge in some sense that is perceived as legitimate by the vast majority of both populations . Although we will use John Gaddis’s felicitous phrase “empire by invitation” later on in this volume, a voluntary relinquishment of some amount of sovereign authority by one government to another is not truly imperialism by this definition if enforcement by sanctions is off the table. 2. Niall Ferguson and Moritz Schularick, “The Empire Effect: The Determinants of Country Risk in the First Age of Globalization , 1880–1913,” Journal of Economic History 66, no. 2 (June 2006): 283–312; Kris James Mitchener and Marc Weidenmier, “Empire, Public Goods, and the Roosevelt Corollary,” Journal of Economic History 65, no. 3 (September 2005): 658–92; Peter Svedberg, “Colonial Enforcement of Foreign Direct Investment,” Manchester School of Economic and Social Studies 49, no. 1 (March 1981): 21– 38; Michael Edelstein, “Realized Rates of Return on U.K. Home and Overseas Portfolio Investment in the Age of High Imperialism,” Explorations in Economic History 13, no. 3 (July 1976): 283–329; Lance Edwin Davis and Robert A. Huttenback, Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire: The Political Economy of British Imperialism, 1860–1912 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 3. David Landes, “Some Thoughts on the Nature of Economic Imperialism,” Journal of Economic History 21, no. 4 (December 1961): 496–512, 505. 4. Robert H. Bates, Avner Greif, Margaret Levi, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, and Barry R. Weingast, Analytic Narratives (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). 5. Robert William Fogel, Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1964). 6. Stanley Lebergott, “The Returns to U.S. Imperialism, 1890– 1929,” Journal of Economic History 40, no. 2 (1980): 229–52. 7. William K. Hutchinson and Ricardo Ungo, “Social Saving of the Panama Canal” (working paper 04-W23, Vanderbilt University , 2004). 8. Colombia, Libro azul: Documentos diplomáticos sobre el canal y la rebelión del Istmo de Panama (Bogotá [Colombia]: Imprenta nacional, 1904). 9. Adam Clymer, Drawing the Line at the Big Ditch: The Panama Canal Treaties and the Rise of the Right (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008); Julie Greene, The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal (New York: Penguin Press, 2009). Two Before the Ditch 1. Samuel Eliot Morison, The European Discovery of America: The Southern Voyages, A.D. 1492–1616 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 596–616; Hans Kraus, Sir Francis Drake: A Pictorial Biography (Amsterdam: N. Israel, 1970), available at http:// www.loc.gov/rr/rarebook/catalog/drake/drake-5-spanishdef.html. 2. Mary W. Helms, Ancient Panama: Chiefs in Search of Power (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979), 35. 3. Eugenia Ibarra, “Gold in the Everyday Lives of Indigenous Peoples of Sixteenth-Century Southern Central America,” in Gold and Power in Ancient Costa Rica, Panama, and Colombia, ed. 334 | noTes To ChapTer Two Jeffrey Quilter and John W. Hoopes, 383–413 (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2003). 4. Helms, Ancient Panama, 55. 5. Pascual de Andagoya, Narrative of the proceedings of Pedrarias Davila, trans. Clements R. Markham, 23 (London: Hakluyt Society , 1865). Spanish text: “En este Nombre de Dios había cierta gente que se decían los Chuchurs, gente de lengua extraña de los otros: vinieron a poblar allí en canoas, por la mar, de hacia Honduras ; y como la tierra era montuosa y enferma, antes se disminuyeron los que allí vinieron que se multiplicaron, y así había pocos; y destos pocos no quedó ninguno con el tratamiento que se les hizo después de poblado el Nombre de Dios.” Pascual de Andagoya, Relación y documentos, edición de Adrián Blázquez, 97. 6. Izumi Shimada, “Evolution of Andean Diversity: Regional Formations (500 B.C.E.–C.E. 600),” in The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 3, part 1, ed. Frank Salomon and Stuart B. Schwartz, 350–517 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), especially “Meso-American-Northwest South American Connections,” 430–34. 7. Linda A. Ram...