Robert D. Aguirre, a professor of English at Wayne State University, has written an incisive cultural history of US and British perceptions of nineteenth-century Panama. Drawing principally on close readings of travel writers, poets, and photographers, he examines how Anglo-American assumptions about the isthmus permeated popular discourse. Such assumptions supported US and British neocolonial policies that commodified Panama and reduced it to a conduit through which to reduce travel within each country's empire. Aguirre maintains that these writings defined “pre-canal Panama as a site of traversal, a location between [that] laid the discursive ground for its incorporation into a world transport system whose centers of command lay elsewhere” (5). This frame of reference about Panama would be the foundation on which twentieth-century justifications for the Panama Canal and the US-controlled Canal Zone would rest.

Aguirre describes this discourse in a long but useful contextual introduction. US and British travelers and entrepreneurs first took interest in Panama—then a territory of Colombia—during the California gold rush, when they were looking for faster passage to the US West Coast. It was then, Aguirre argues, that Anglo-Americans began referring to Panama as a potentially advantageous thoroughfare. Indeed, upon completion in 1855, the Panama railroad cut a four-to-eight-month oceanic trip between the US coasts to less than four weeks (2). Here, descriptions of Panama as a place in-between took root. US and British travelers began referring to the isthmus as a way station or a hub to more important and lucrative destinations. On the isthmus, Anglo-Americans held the Panamanians that they encountered in low regard. Aguirre shows that US travel writers such as John Lloyd Stephens, the focus of Chapter 1, often used the discourse of backwardness “to mark the gulf between the mobile, mechanized” modernity” of the United States and Great Britain and the “immobile primitive culture” of Panamanian natives (38). Notions of speed were also embedded in such rhetoric. Locals were often depicted as languid and lazy, too slow for modern sensibilities. Given advances in transportation, especially the railroad, the United States and Great Britain represented civilization and development, implicitly justifying their encroachment on Panamanian territory.

Not all contemporary observers who Aguirre chronicles were uncritical supporters of the Anglo-American presence. The other central figures in this study—British novelist Anthony Trollope, British photographer Eadweard Muybridge, and US poet James Stanley Gilbert—revealed varying degrees of ambivalence. Trollope, for example, criticized the heavy US imprint on local culture and was circumspect about projecting British power. Yet, he also viewed non-white locals as drags on modernity. In assessing images from Muybridge's 1875 trip to the isthmus, Aguirre maintains that these photographs of people, places, and machines subtly questioned the utility of empire and technology in improving local life. Aguirre argues that these photographs, 20 of which are helpfully reproduced, “suggest not only that the railroad's” potential for modernizing Panama was vastly oversold but also that attempts to represent this jagged edge of tropical modernity were far more difficult than imagined” (119). For his part, Gilbert took pride in the growth of US influence and considered the isthmus to be “a crucial” component of the US trans-hemispheric empire” (121), particularly as construction of the Panama Canal began. At the same time, Gilbert, known as the “Kipling of the Isthmus,” suggested that life in Panama was not the paradise that promoters made it out to be, given its tropical climate and the sociopolitical conditions in the Canal Zone.

A scarcity of local voices is one of the few shortcomings of Aguirre's study. Receptions to such depictions could have shed more light on tensions at the grassroots. It is an oversight he acknowledges in light of limited Panamanian archives (19). Nevertheless, Aguirre's objective was to capture Anglo-American perspectives to explain how domineering neocolonial policies drew popular support at home. In this endeavor, Aguirre succeeds.