Path of Empire: Panama and the California Gold Rush (review)

On April 15, 1856, in Panama City a drunken American refused to pay a Panamanian melon salesman for a slice of watermelon and cursed him. Each brandished a weapon, and a riot ensued, in which Panamanians attacked Americans traveling by the Panama Railway on their way to California. Fifteen, possibly nineteen, passengers died and 50 were wounded, and one Panamanian is said to have lost his life. This “Tajada de Sandía” incident, as it is known in Panamá, or “Melón de Panamá,” in Colombia, provoked a serious conflict between the United States and the national government of Colombia, and in different ways troubled Panamá.

A number of works have been written on the Panama Railway and passage to California. But Aims McGuinness has made a unique contribution in exploring the social, cultural, economic, and political dimensions underlying the upheaval in 1856 and responses to it. On another plane he discusses the Panama Railway as an instrument of empire and as a causal agent in the conflict. The book is a wonderful piece of historical detective work, piecing together disparate information from a number of archives. It deals with many different topics in an inspired piece of analysis and interpretation. It is a diamond cut with many facets, glistens with insights, ironies, and/or ambiguities in practically every paragraph. A review of this brevity cannot begin to capture all its virtues; it can only present the bare bones.

The book has a number of interwoven themes. First, the Gold Rush. Travel across the Isthmus was difficult for Americans bound for California from 1848 into the early 1850s. People and goods were carried overland by a combination of mules and human porters and by water in canoes. Poor Panamanians, knowing their clients were desperate to get to California, exacted their price. Americans with fixed notions of racial status resented the costs, but also, as McGuinness emphasizes, were upset by what they perceived to be a disruption of the (or their) proper social order, and expressed their anger in arrogance and sometimes cruelty.

A complementary theme is the role of the railway. Poor Panamanians who were making good money by moving passengers across the Isthmus were disinclined to work on railway construction, forcing the railway to bring workers from Jamaica, the Colombian mainland, China, and other places. The Panamanian porters and boatmen viewed the railway as a threat, while the railway, like American travelers, was openly contemptuous of their Panamanian competitors. When the railway was completed, suddenly the porters and boatmen had no work and deeply resented the railway.

McGuinness also emphasizes the Panama Railway as an agent of empire; indeed, in a sense it was in itself an empire. In addition to transforming Panamá and impoverishing its economy, the railway’s company town, Colón, called Aspinwall by Americans, was an early example of an American enclave. McGuinness further notes that Americans have tended to see the period of American expansive aggression in the first half of the nineteenth century as something disconnected from the late stage imperialism of the 1890s. The conflict in Panama, like the filibusters in Nicaragua who impinged on Panama, and American aggressions in Asia, show that American aggression did not stop with the Mexican War. McGuinness also stresses Latin American reactions to North American expansion from the Mexican War to the mistreatment of Chileans and Mexicans in California to the filibusters in Nicaragua, all viewed as threatening to South Americans, particularly on the Pacific coast.

The theme of race runs throughout the book—not only American racism but in Colombian elites as well. McGuinness discusses the racial contempt and racial fears of Colombian elites, but he also notes that Colombian Liberals at least had abolished slavery in 1851–1852. Further, their Constitution of 1853 had instituted universal male suffrage, so that at least formally blacks in Colombia had rights...