Builders of Empire: Rewriting the Labor and Working-Class History of Anglo-American Global Power

Who built the US empire? A labor history of North American and US empire- building focuses our attention on the interconnections between capitalist and state expansionism, migratory routes, systems of labor mobilization, segregation, and discipline, and the contested rights of citizens and colonial subjects. By taking us into the world of working people across North and South America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific, the essays in this double issue of Labor also illuminate the challenges that faced government and corporate leaders as they sought to create a well-oiled expansionist machine. Their dreams could not be realized without the labor of millions of workers who moved through the reworked geography of empire and, in various ways, either accommodated themselves to the new imperial power structures or struggled to resist them. The authors who have contributed to this issue transport us in time and place to consider, among others, the fears of seventeenth-century conscripted soldiers, the demands of Puerto Ricans to share in the social welfare policies of the New Deal, the lofty hopes of liberated factory workers in Korea, the vulnerabilities of migrant Filipinos in Guam, the frustrations of segregated and monitored Marshallese domestic workers and landscapers, and the desires of West Indian canal workers wanting a chance to defend the British Empire in the Great War. In doing so, they also challenge us to reinterpret the history of labor and the working class as well as the history of empire building.

Building on Labor’s prior collaborative projects—notably Workers across the Americas: The Transnational Turn in Labor History (2011) and Workers in Hard Times: A Long View of Economic Crises (2014)—this issue is part of a broader movement to explore the interconnections between the United States and the world, one that has itself been produced by a historical moment more keenly attuned to global processes. Whether one credits renewed attention to global capitalism and neoliberalism, heightened anxieties around national security in the post-9/11 world, or US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the fact is that the world around us is shaping historical discourse in myriad ways. Indeed, the intellectual shift toward a more global emphasis, which has become so manifest in historical writing, predates the twenty-first century. Diplomatic historians, of course, had long contributed terrific research and writing on the theme of US expansionism and global power. But in 1993 Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease edited an influential anthology, Cultures of United States Imperialism, which forcefully took the issue of US empire out of the diplomatic historian’s toolbox and made it a prime concern for cultural and social historians as well.¹ An explosion of scholarship that approached the making of US power in new and creative ways soon followed: among many others in this trend, one thinks of Mary Renda’s Taking Haiti and Paul A. Kramer’s The Blood of Government. To be sure, there was sometimes a notable neglect of labor history in this scholarship. Yet together these approaches registered a problematizing of the nation-state–centered historical gaze and inspired more global methodologies.

The “new imperial” scholarship was also linked closely to the transnational turn in historical scholarship. Transnational methodologies are based on the premise that the history of a nation-state can never be contained successfully by static territorial boundaries. Since the early 1990s, scholars have increasingly focused on the ways that translocal and transregional forces generate nation-states themselves as well as these nation-states’ territorial borders. Since nation-states in the modern era have been connected to powerful expansionist forces such as imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism, it is not surprising that the historical discipline has become reoriented to examine in more sophisticated ways the connections between nations and the wider world. The case of the United States exemplifies these notions, created as it was by the imperialism of European powers as well as anticolonialist rebellion against them. By the late nineteenth century the United States, as a postcolonial society birthed by Europeans’ colonialist ambitions, had itself expanded across the North American continent and...