Weaving U.S. history into the larger fabric of world history, the contributors to Crossing Empires de-exceptionalize the American empire, placing it in a global transimperial context. They draw attention to the breadth of U.S. entanglements with other empires to illuminate the scope and nature of American global power as it reached from the Bering Sea to Australia and East Africa to the Caribbean. With case studies ranging from the 1830s to the late twentieth century, the contributors address topics including diplomacy, governance, anticolonialism, labor, immigration, medicine, religion, and race. Their transimperial approach—whether exemplified in examinations of U.S. steel corporations partnering with British imperialists to build the Ugandan railway or the U.S. reliance on other empires in its governance of the Philippines—transcends histories of interimperial rivalries and conflicts. In so doing, the contributors illuminate the power dynamics of seemingly transnational histories and the imperial origins of contemporary globality.
Contributors. Ikuko Asaka, Oliver Charbonneau, Genevieve Clutario, Anne L. Foster, Julian Go, Michel Gobat, Julie Greene, Kristin L. Hoganson, Margaret D. Jacobs, Moon-Ho Jung, Marc-William Palen, Nicole M. Phelps, Jay Sexton, John Soluri, Stephen Tuffnell
- Cover
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- Part I. In Pursuit of Profit
- 1. Fur Sealing and Unsettled Sovereignties
- 2. Crossing the Rift: American Steel and Colonial Labor in Britain’s East Africa Protectorate
- Part II. Transimperial Politics
- 3. “Our Indian Empire”: The Transimperial Origins of U.S. Liberal Imperialism
- 4. Empire, Democracy, and Discipline: The Transimperial History of the Secret Ballot
- 5. Medicine to Drug: Opium’s Transimperial Journey
- Part III. Governing Structures
- 6. One Service, Three Systems, Many Empires: The U.S. Consular Service and the Growth of U.S. Global Power, 1789–1924
- 7. Transimperial Roots of American Anti-Imperialism: The Transatlantic Radicalism of Free Trade, 1846–1920
- 8. The Permeable South: Imperial Interactivities in the Islamic Philippines, 1899–1930s
- Part IV. Living Transimperially
- 9. African American Migration and the Climatic Language of Anglophone Settler Colonialism
- 10. Entangled in Empires: British Antillean Migrations in the World of the Panama Canal
- 11. World War II and the Promise of Normalcy: Overlapping Empires and Everyday Lives in the Philippines
- Part V. Resistance Across Empires
- 12. Fighting John Bull and Uncle Sam: South Asian Revolutionaries Confront the Modern State
- 13. Indigenous Child Removal and Transimperial Indigenous Women’s Activism across Settler Colonial Nations in the Late Twentieth Century
- Bibliography
- Contributors
- Index