Paper Abstracts (in alphabetical order)

“The French Empire: Colonialism and its Aftermath”

France ruled the world’s second largest overseas empire, which was one of the geographically most dispersed and chronologically longest-lived. This paper explores some of the repercussions of ‘Greater France’ in the metropole: the colonies as a laboratory for political and social experimentation, as a vector for the transformation of France itself, as a battleground for domestic quarrels (between competing regions and interest groups, between clericals and anti-clericals), as a component in national identity. It also examines the colonial heritage in post-colonial France, the ways in which current debates echo with issues from the era of imperialism.

“First Impressions: Diarists, Scientists, Imperialists and the Management of the Environment in the American Pacific, 1899-1902”

They say first impressions always matter. Americans acquired an empire of tropical islands in 1899 about which they knew little and cared even less. Yet they set to almost immediately to understand and harness these new environments to their own purposes. This paper looks at the processes of incorporation and subordination of these strange new worlds in the Philippines and Guam into a comprehensible imperial framework through the diaries of two environmental managers, Gifford Pinchot and William Safford. These men were at either ends of the imperial spectrum: the first was a political giant, working on a grand scale, who only fleetingly visited the Philippines and whose primary interests were definitely fixed on home; the other, a relative unknown, a junior naval officer on Guam who developed a passionate concern with the nature of this island and went on to become one of its leading spokespersons. Both men were also diarists and wrote about their first encounters with the exotic, recording its strange flora and fauna, noting its seismic convulsions and climatic extremes, and trying to manage it by making sense of what they saw, heard, smelt and touched about them. As diarists, scientists and, above all, imperialists, they give us rare insight into the initial attitudes of the men who managed these new imperial landscapes and through their experiences what practices they carried back with them to the USA.

“The U.S. Experience in the Caribbean and the Nationalization of Public Health in the United States”

The U.S. experience in its empire of islands led to a major shift in the administration of public health within the United States. Previously, public health had been viewed as a quintessentially local matter and, as such, was the domain of the states rather than the federal government. Two stunning successes in disease control achieved by U.S. colonial authorities in the Caribbean–over yellow fever in Cuba and hookworm in Puerto Rico–undercut arguments that public health is determined by local conditions alone and greatly increased the legitimacy of federal control.

“The Spanish Empire’s colonial peculiarity: a long-term consideration”

Since the publication of the excellent contributions by Paul Kramer and Michael Salman, we know that “race” and ethnic cleavages were a functional underpinning of the American Empire in XXth Century Philippines. It is not too imprudent to suggest that those ethnic and racial practices and ideas that codified them were imbedded in the racial cultures of its time. Taking all of this into account, my aim is to explore the previous period, the one that can be termed as the twilight of the Spanish Empire in the Caribbean and Pacific possessions. I would like to focus on which sense the Spanish colonial policies were inflected by different or similar intellectual trends all along the Nineteenth Century. Also, I would like to show how those political and cultural practices were prepared and disclosed in the long run as a part of the history of the Spanish Greater Empire. In this respect, I would like to dig into this tradition of imperial administrators and institutions of dealing with different social groups both in the Caribbean islands and the Philippine Archipelago.

“Alliance Imperialism: Formalizing America’s ‘Informal’ Empire”

This paper takes a concept developed in recent scholarship on the behavior of transnational business firms (“alliance capitalism”) as a means for understanding America’s impact on the geopolitical order after 1898. America’s rise to global power in the 20th century has puzzled historians and political scientists who have attempted to unravel the paradoxical character of an anti-imperial empire or an imperial republic. While many compelling interpretations have been offered to explain the curious resiliency of America’s particular brand of imperialism, ranging from self-serving claims of an “American exceptionalism” to economic, racial, and cultural underpinnings, virtually all have focused on the United States as the proper unit of analysis.
Yet as recent business scholarship has shown, the obvious unit of analysis can lead to important oversights in our understanding of the actual workings of transnational organizations such as business corporations and imperial political systems. Much as transnational business firms do today, rival imperial nation states of the turn of the century such as Germany, France, Russia, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States maintained a compelling veneer of invidious competition, yet all sought grounds for formalizing cooperation to safeguard shared interests, and, most importantly, to avoid conflict between rival imperial powers.
In this paper I will argue that an effort to bring into existence the formal structures of a stable international world order was spearheaded by an informal alliance between the United States and England. I will focus on three main areas of cooperation to make the case that the course followed by the United States toward global hegemony was not entirely a product of domestic causation but was to a significant degree influenced by an informal transatlantic alliance. The three scenes I will examine are John Hay’s “open door” policy on the eve of American expansion into Asia, Elihu Root’s “reinterpretation” of the Monroe Doctrine, and Andrew Carnegie’s patronage of the emerging institutions of international law that began at Lake Mohonk in the 1890s and culminated with the World Court at The Hague.

“Roman Fever: Imperial Melancholy in America”

“The Ruins of Time” examines current comparisons of America to the Roman Empire in journalism, popular culture, and scholarship. I argue that this search for a model–or warning–from the past expresses anxiety about the future. Exemplifying this trend in Are We Rome?: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America, Cullen Murphy draws comparisons between the two empires in order to insist that America can avoid the future decline that Rome’s past foretells. I also discuss historical precedents in the popularity of the novel, Ben Hur at the turn of the last century. The paper raises the question of how the specter of loss threatens and animates representations of empire, as J. M. Coetze puts it more eloquently in Waiting for the Barbarians, “One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era.”

"Transits of Race: Empire and Difference in Philippine-American Colonial History"

This paper will explore processes of race-making under Philippine-American colonialism, as part of a larger critique of two methodologies that historians have traditionally used to approach colonialism and difference. The first of these accounts for colonial racial formations in any one setting as merely the local expression of a generic "colonial discourse," with a more or less organic and functionalist relationship to broader processes of violence and dispossession. This approach, in turn, has allowed historians who employ it to establish "connections" between distinct colonial settings on the basis of perceived homology and structural "similarity," often in the absence of any historical evidence of inter-colonial interaction.

A second method is in many ways the analytic inverse of the first: here colonial formations, including racial ones, are explained as expressions of the unmediated "export" or "projection" outward of metropolitan forms and institutions. Colonial spaces, otherwise evacuated of agents and histories, are construed as blank "screens" upon which metropolitan histories unfolded. If the first, "colonial discourse" approach collapses colony into colony, the second makes any one imperial history simply the story of a single, powerful nation-state writ larger. Neither can fully account for the richness and complexity of the imperial past as an indeterminate collision of histories, in which actors contended and interacted simultaneously within metropoles, between metropoles and colonies, and between empires, leading to particular outcomes that were derivative neither of generic colonial mandates or metropolitan histories.

Turning from this critique, the paper will examine four specific forces that shaped the racial politics of Philippine-American colonialism, with an emphasis on the interaction and mutual construction of American and Filipino actors. These dynamics include pre-1898 histories (the ilustrado critique of Spanish racism and colonialism and white U. S. settler-colonialism in North America, in particular); the intersections of race-making and war-making in the Islands' military conquest by the United States; the transformation of race in a context of Filipino-American collaboration and colonial state-building; and the politics of colonial migration from the Philippines to the United States. As Philippine-American colonialism emerged, these dynamics formed an evolving "filter" that determined when and how elements of the Philippine and U. S. pasts would make themselves felt in their hierarchically connected present. As this history of the peculiarities of race-making and empire-building suggests, it would often be colonial logics, mandates and patterns–not existent in any other U. S. colony, in either pre-contact society, or in any other imperial system–that shaped the transit of histories between the United States and the Philippines in the early 20th century.

“Australia’s Desire for a Pacific Empire”

The leaders of the new Commonwealth of Australia badly wanted a Pacific empire: this was deemed their right and responsibility as white men. Their ambition was inspired by the example of ‘the great republic’ across the ocean and leaders such as future Prime Minister Alfred Deakin invoked the idea of ‘Australia’s Monroe Doctrine’ to justify the enterprise. The first federal parliament in 1901 resolved to allocate a sum of 20,000 pounds towards assuming full control of British New Guinea: this was the start of ‘a great policy with regard to the Pacific’. The Solomons, New Hebrides and Cook Islands were all regarded as part of Australia’s domain: ‘It should not end until the whole of the islands are under our control’. The first parliament resolved that the government should ask the Colonial Office for a map of the Pacific showing the islands claimed by different Powers. The British officials, fearing future trouble with France, Germany and the United States, responded: ‘Tell them there is no map’. One opponent of Australia’s imperial designs warned that ‘this new departure in our Australia national life’ was ‘fraught with consequences which it was hard to conceive’. Others worried about the consequences for native populations: ‘If we civilize them they will die’. A history of Australia’s desire for an empire needs to address the subjective identifications of the imperial/republican figure of the turn-of-the-century ‘white man.’

“Policing the Imperial Periphery: Philippine Pacification and the Rise of the US National Security State”

From the first hours of the US occupation in August 1898, the Philippines served as the site of a protracted social experiment in the use of police as an instrument of state power. Indeed, America’s ad hoc innovation with colonial policing was mutually transformative, central in both the formation of the Philippine polity and the transformation of an American national security state. At this periphery of empire, freed from the constraints of courts, constitution, and civil society, the US colonial regime fused new information technologies, the product of America’s first information revolution, to create a modern police apparatus and fashion what was arguably the world’s first full “surveillance state.” Significantly, the colony’s police, called Philippines Constabulary, became the first US Federal agency with a fully developed covert operational capacity. Under US rule, colonial police, particularly the Philippines Constabulary, shaped the country’s political development by destroying radical nationalist movement and advancing political moderates. Colonialism, moreover, made police a central facet of the modern Philippine state, both in actual administration and in popular perception that equated good governance with effective policing. A decade later, these illiberal lessons percolated homeward through the invisible capillaries of empire to foster domestic surveillance in America itself during the social crisis surrounding World War I. Advances in policing at this periphery of empire thus served as both blueprint and bellwether for a later metropolitan transformation–as bellwether for surveillance of American citizens and blueprint for the formation of the US Army’s Military Police and Military Intelligence.

"The Trans-Atlantic Instance within the Imperial Global Carceral Structures of the Late-1800s and the Turn-of-the-Century"

The late 19th- and early 20th centuries mark, in the Spanish Atlantic (metropole and overseas colonies), the rise of Social Darwinist, state-oriented institutions involved in the fashioning, identification, surveillance, and punishment of wayward subjects within the larger-scale context of the contested decline of British world hegemony. This paper examines the extent to which Anglo-American penal models and influences contributed or not towards delineating and contrasting highly racialized social-disciplinary processes across the 19th-century Atlantic world: within very different colonial peripheries and peripheral-colonized populations (mainly in Puerto Rico and the U.S. South, but to a lesser extent French Guyana and Jamaica) and within very different core-poles and core-colonizer populations across the Atlantic (mainly in Spain and the U.S. North, but to a lesser extent Great Britain and France) as an integral aspect of the shifts taking place within global structures of social regulation and domination.
Referencing comparative regional polarizations across the French and British Atlantic, the paper specifically investigates the asymmetrical inter-dependence between colonial-punitive realities–in the U.S. South and in the Caribbean–and penal patterns in the respective imperial metropoles. The immediate goal of the paper is to ascertain to what extent peripheral regions and the actions of colonized populations precipitated, as well as limited, some of the changes in penal discipline and criminological theory during the last quarter of the 19th century within and across these different empires. I argue that, in the case of Puerto Rico and even before the U.S. occupation of this island, these peripheral structures were characteristic of the differences between the criminalization of subject populations within each empire on both sides of the Atlantic, no less so than they did within the regions of the North American empire (i.e., between the U.S. South and the North).
My working hypothesis is that an examination of the harsher forms of social regulation (e.g., custodial-punitive institutions) could contribute to a better understanding of the nature and patterns (local differences versus global structures) of imperial rule and on-going state formation among the world powers across the Atlantic. But given the global reach of all these Western empires by this time–and of the long-term, systemic-capitalist architecture they embodied–, such an examination could likewise contribute to laying the groundwork for future research concerning how to locate these Atlantic carceral forms–and the imperial states they were an essential part of–with respect to social-regulatory structures encompassing the South Asian and/or Pacific zones of each of these empires/states during watershed moments in global Western hegemony such as that turn-of-the-century.

"Censuses in the Transition to Modern Colonialism: Spain and the United States in Puerto Rico"

In assessing the transition from the Spanish to the American empire, in the Caribbean most particularly, it is worth considering how "grids" which long predated the onset of U.S. rule bridged the exercise of power by the two metropoles. I argue in this essay that those grids were most critical in a colony like Puerto Rico, where the Spanish state was deeply grafted onto the social body via multiple applications of power–many of which included coercion and some of which involved local consent. As in its bigger sister, Cuba, by the time the American troops invaded there was in Puerto Rico a tradition of census-taking made more necessary in the late 1700s and early 1800s by military-strategic considerations and the revival of African slavery. The island's incorporation into metropolitan statistical initiatives made it the subject of several flawed but nonetheless modern censuses of population, agriculture, and industry, all of them infused with the same liberal, modernizing purpose which inspired similar exercises in the Peninsula. U.S. officials used these statistics repeatedly to understand the island and its people and to gauge the potential for profit by American capitalists. They adopted the Spaniards’ racial "grids" but tried to fit them into American preconceptions of race and class.

“Empire in American History”

This paper deals with representations of empire in United States history on three levels. It begins with an exploration of how of early physical memorialisations shaped the memory and reflected the forgetting of American colonialism; examines the historiographical equivalent of these representations in an attenuated tradition of confronting the complex history of American
empire; and highlights new work on the relationship between commonly accepted ideas about American empire and the new transnational history.

"Making Empire Visible or Making Colonialism Visible?: The Struggle for the British Imperial Past"

British Empire history has been dramatically reinvigorated in recent years by new approaches, such as postcolonial and feminist theories, yet historians of Britain and its empire hold competing visions. Much of the new scholarship insists on the British Isles as a site of the empire, and the metropole's implication in aspects of imperial history from slavery, to Orientalist and racial thinking, to colonial hierarchies. Other historians reject contentions that the empire was constitutive of British metropolitan history, seeing instead a separation between 'home' and 'away', and insisting on positive legacies of the empire–an insistence that has provoked charges of nostalgia. This historiographical debate, labeled by Catherine Hall Britain's own version of the 'history wars', has been played out in monographs, book reviews, journal articles, and museum exhibitions. One way to view these different interpretations is to consider broad differences in approach between The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History and the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History. This paper
will assess this historiographical debate, and consider the differing implications of making empire visible versus making colonialism visible.