Making the empire work: labor and United States imperialism

Table of Content:

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Through the Looking Glass: U.S. Empire
through the Lens of Labor History

Part I. Solidarities and Resistance
1. The Wages of Empire: Capitalism, Expansionism, and Working-Class Formation
2. Revolutionary Currents: Interracial Solidarities, Imperial Japan, and the U.S. Empire
3. The Secret Soldiers’ Union: Labor and Soldier Politics in the Philippine Scout Mutiny of 1924
4. The Photos That We Don’t Get to See: Sovereignties, Archives, and the 1928 Massacre of Banana Workers in Colombia

Part II. Intimacies in Colonial Spaces
5. Sexual Labor and the U.S. Military Empire: Comparative Analysis of Europe and East Asia
6. Making Aloha: Lei and the Cultural Labor of Hospitality

Part III. Migration and Mobilizing Labor for the Empire
7. The Advantages of Empire: Chinese Servants and Conflicts over Settler Domesticity in the “White Pacific,” 1870–1900
8. Empire and the Moving Body: Fermin Tobera, Military California, and Rural Space.
9. Slavery’s Stale Soil: Indentured Labor, Guestworkers, and the End of Empire

Part IV. Imperial Labor and Control in the Tropics
10. The Colonization of Antislavery and the Americanization of Empires: The Labor of Autonomy and the Labor of
Subordination in Togo and the United States
11. Progressive Empire: Race and Tropicality in United Fruit’s Central America
12. What Is Imperial about Coffee? Rethinking “Informal Empire”
13. Home Land (In)security: The Labor of U.S. Cold War Military Empire in the Marshall Islands
About the Contributors 357
Index 361

Millions of laborers, from the Philippines to the Caribbean, performed the work of the United States empire. Forging a global economy connecting the tropics to the industrial center, workers harvested sugar, cleaned hotel rooms, provided sexual favors, and filled military ranks. Placing working men and women at the center of the long history of the U.S. empire, these essays offer new stories of empire that intersect with the “grand narratives” of diplomatic affairs at the national and international levels. Missile defense, Cold War showdowns, development politics, military combat, tourism, and banana economics share something in common—they all have labor histories. This collection challenges historians to consider the labor that formed, worked, confronted, and rendered the U.S. empire visible. The U.S. empire is a project of global labor mobilization, coercive management, military presence, and forced cultural encounter. Together, the essays in this volume recognize the United States as a global imperial player whose systems of labor mobilization and migration stretched from Central America to West Africa to the United States itself. Workers are also the key actors in this volume. Their stories are multi-vocal, as workers sometimes defied the U.S. empire’s rhetoric of civilization, peace, and stability and at other times navigated its networks or benefited from its profits. Their experiences reveal the gulf between the American ‘denial of empire’ and the lived practice of management, resource exploitation, and military exigency. When historians place labor and working people at the center, empire appears as a central dynamic of U.S. history.


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