Making the Empire Work: Labor and United States Imperialism ed. by Daniel Bender, Jana Lipman (review)

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...