At the end of the U.S. Civil War, Los Angeles was a modest pueblo of under 6,000 people. At the beginning of the twentieth century, it was a budding city of over 100,000. And on the eve of World War II, it was an exploding metropolis of more than 1.5 million—the largest on the American West Coast. This rapid growth was intimately linked to the city’s position as the nucleus of a transnational business empire that extended deep into Mexico. In Imperial Metropolis, Jessica Kim examines the rise, decline, and adaptation of this empire between 1865 and 1941, showing how Anglo LA capitalists exploited labor and resources south of the international border to enrich themselves and fuel their city’s expansion. For these economic elites, city building and empire formation went hand in hand.

While much of the historical literature on Los Angeles highlights the city’s explosive growth since the 1920s, Kim locates the roots of this “imperial metropolis” in the later decades of the nineteenth century. Chapter 1 shows that when Anglo-American enterprisers began arriving en masse after the Civil War, they already understood the former Spanish colonial town to be a “portal to empire” in Mexico (23). Yet theirs would not be an empire in any traditional sense. What these profit seekers desired was to intervene economically in the neighboring country without establishing traditional colonial relationships that would bring more Mexican people into the U.S. population. Pioneering capitalist William Rosecrans—a former Union Army general and U.S. ambassador to Mexico—forged financial and diplomatic relations with Mexico City that helped establish the southern country as an LA hinterland, opening opportunities for other investors in this city.

The racialized labor system these businessmen created at home in California served as a blueprint for their investments abroad. As Chapter 2 shows, Anglo enterprisers established Los Angeles as an open-shop town, securing state protection to ensure their “industrial freedom” while denying their mostly non-White workforce the right to organize. In this environment, the city’s powerful citrus growers “emerged as agricultural and labor ‘fascists,’” combining state power with a “racialized disdain” for the very workers “who made their comfortable lifestyles and economic and political power possible” (62). Through an alliance with President Porfirio Díaz—who ruled Mexico from 1876 until his overthrow in 1911—LA investors managed to export this racial hierarchy across the border. Los Angeles Times publisher Harrison Gray Otis built a massive agricultural business with Mexican labor just south of the international line in the Mexicali Valley, while oil tycoon Edward Doheny gained extraordinary wealth in petroleum production on the backs of his Mexican workers. These Anglo-American men believed their operations to be modernizing forces, uplifting a “nation of peons” (133).

It therefore shocked them when Mexican campesinos rose up against the Díaz regime in 1910 and soon overthrew the political order upon which this modernizing force rested. The Mexican Revolution, the focus of Chapters 3 and 4, forms the center of the book’s narrative arc. Kim traces the origins of this bloody conflict not to the discontented Mexican communities that first took up arms but rather to the transnational business ventures of Anglo enterprisers in Los Angeles. When Mexican insurgents revolted against Díaz, she argues, they were in essence rejecting the “economic structure that moved wealth from a colonial edge to a municipal core” (79). To protect their Mexico investments in the absence of state protection, LA capitalists called for U.S. military intervention—as had been done in the Dominican Republic and the Philippines. To their disappointment, President Wilson’s preoccupation with the Great War and his policy of national self-determination prevented any such measure.

Although LA capitalists account for most of the book’s primary actors—perhaps a testament to archival abundances and absences—Kim also highlights ways in which ordinary people in the Mexican hinterland shaped history. As Chapter 5 shows, militant peasant organizers pressured President Cárdenas’s administration to seize American properties throughout Mexico in the 1930s. In the Mexicali Valley, peasant activism ended the long-running land monopoly of Otis’s son-in-law and heir, Harry Chandler. Considering these losses “an affront to their civic and imperial powers,” LA investors once again called for U.S. government intervention. But President Roosevelt’s administration, pursuing a Good Neighbor Policy with Latin America, opted instead to negotiate partial reparations from the Mexican government. That the United States yielded to “the demands of Mexican peasants” was, to these LA men, “a blow to capitalism, a setback to American diplomatic power, and an undercutting of American status on an international stage” (170).

The book’s sixth and final chapter brings into focus one of Kim’s essential historiographical contributions: that the U.S.–Mexico borderlands “did not just stretch east to west along the international boundary, but also along the alternative geography of Los Angeles and the Pacific coast” (204). Road construction was crucial to postrevolutionary Mexican state formation, and LA city builders seized the opportunity to propose an International Pacific Highway, connecting the imperial metropolis to Mexico City. Begun in 1929, the project reshaped the traditional city–hinterland relationship, shifting the emphasis from resource extraction to improved trade and tourism. This did not mean the end of LA imperialism in Mexico but rather marked a shift from the “hard power” of military interventionism to the “soft power” of cooperation and economic expansionism (179). The change reflected the Mexican Revolution’s sobering lesson for LA investors that “a robust economic nationalism in Mexico . . . could successfully challenge American influence in the region” (179).

While city building is essential to this story, Imperial Metropolis is not a history of LA’s built environment or cultural landscapes. Nor is it an account of the evolving U.S.–Mexico border itself. Rather, the book’s valuable contributions concern the histories of the American empire, U.S.–Mexico relations, and the Mexican Revolution. It offers a timely historical perspective at a moment when the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement and enhanced border enforcement are reconfiguring transborder relations.