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  • Frontiers in the Gilded Age: Adventure, Capitalism, and Dispossession from Southern Africa to the U.S–Mexican Borderlands, 1880–1917 by Andrew Offenburger
  • Alicia M. Dewey
Frontiers in the Gilded Age: Adventure, Capitalism, and Dispossession from Southern Africa to the U.S–Mexican Borderlands, 1880–1917. By Andrew Offenburger. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2019. Pp. 299. Photographs, appendix, notes, bibliography, index.)

In Frontiers in the Gilded Age, Andrew Offenburger has placed the concept of borderlands into a global framework by exploring the connections among the American West, the Mexican North, and South Africa. He argues that the three regions “shared a unique kind of frontier history,” which was informed by Social Darwinism and involved “economic aggression and resource extraction” (2). His subjects move among the United States, South Africa, and Mexico because “frontier ideology based on capitalist development and a masculine sense of the American West made these far-flung regions interchangeable to those who sought them” (47). Indigenous people, whose lives were upended by capitalist development, resisted, accommodated, and adapted in various ways. Tellingly, the Yaquis of Sonora successfully resisted incorporation by cross-border enterprises, bringing the “Gilded Age frontier” to an end in northern Mexico by 1917 (149).

Offenburger brings together economic, social, and cultural history, as well as some diplomatic history, using a sophisticated methodology. He explains that every chapter relies in part on a “home lands” framework, developed by Virginia Scharff and Carolyn Brucken, which accentuates “the importance of family in the colonial and capitalist encounter” (10). A strength of the work is his emphasis on the experiences and contributions of women. Also, he ably incorporates Indigenous perspectives through the extensive oral histories he conducted among the Yaquis in Sonora. Additionally, he interviewed descendants of investors, missionaries, and other groups. Finally, he conducted in-depth research at several archives in the United States, Mexico, and South Africa, thereby avoiding nationalist bias.

The book is organized regionally in a way that helps the reader envision the travels of its various key individuals. It begins with an 1888 journey by Francis Hopkinson Smith in a catamaran across Lake Pátzcuaro to a church where he sees a beautiful, yet hidden, painting he calls “The Entombment of Christ.” Smith’s journey embodies the elements of a [End Page 93] Victorian narrative that shaped his worldview and that of Offenburger’s other travelers—rumors of a lost and hidden treasure, Indigenous people who did not understand its value, a “courageous adventurer who braves the wilds to recover the riches,” and “a sacred chamber” where the adventurer discovers the treasure (17–18). Readers also follow Frederick Russell Burnham, a Minnesotan who moved to South Africa in the 1890s to work for the British military and to profit from their mines, and the Eaton family, Protestant missionaries in Chihuahua between 1882 and 1910, who epitomized cultural imperialism and viewed Catholic Mexicans as superstitious and ignorant. The Eatons befriended members of a community of Protestant Boer small farmers displaced by British imperialism in South Africa, who arrived in 1903 to start an agricultural colony.

Rising nationalism and Indigenous resistance ended the Gilded Age’s global networks. Mexican nationals took over the churches the Eatons established. The Boer colony failed in 1905 and moved to the Mesilla Valley of New Mexico. Frederick Burnham, having since moved to northern Mexico, unsuccessfully sought to protect his properties from Mexican revolutionaries, and the Boer General Ben Viljoen, who had joined Madero’s movement, attempted but failed to subdue Yaqui depredations. Both Burnham and Viljoen settled in Southern California and wrote about their lives in romantic terms.

Frontiers in the Gilded Age is an important book because it reveals surprising connections among unexpected borderlanders, causing us to rethink transnational encounters in neighboring countries in order to ask questions about the entire globe.

Alicia M. Dewey
Biola University
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