In 1915, as the Great War was consuming Europe and its colonial empires, W.E.B. Du Bois completed The Negro, one of the first comprehensive histories of Africa and its diaspora ever published in the United States. Overshadowed today by his more well-known writings, The Negro meditated on how “the problem of the color line” was nothing if not the result of centuries of global capitalist development dependent upon coerced labor, especially African chattel slavery in the Atlantic world. For Du Bois, peering back in time through the smoking ruins of total war, slavery's postemancipation legacies of political disenfranchisement, landlessness, poverty, and segregation had birthed a global proletariat of color exploited by white Europeans and Americans in an international order divided more and more along imperial lines.

Du Bois's emphasis on racialized unfree labor as the bedrock of modern capitalism and colonialism contrasted sharply with the racial blindness of the great critics of empire in his day. As “metrocentric” theorists, Du Bois's white contemporaries in the years between the Boer War and First World War all explained the age of high imperialism, and the international rivalries it spawned, as a function of social and economic change inside Europe and, to a lesser extent, North America.Footnote ¹ For liberal British economist J.A. Hobson, and the Russian Marxist revolutionary V.I. Lenin, the rise of monopoly forms of industrial capital had forced capitalist societies in western Europe and North America to compete ever more fiercely for the foreign territory, populations, and natural resources necessary for ever-greater profits. Influenced by Max Weber, Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter explained the war instead as the irrational aggression of the landed Prussian autocracy, a class atavism he considered dangerously anachronistic in the modern world economy. None of these Eurocentric theorists acknowledged at the time, as did Du Bois, how racist policies historically had facilitated whites’ expropriation and exploitation of land and labor far from Europe and North America, providing the fuel for industrialization and monopoly capitalism in the first place, and now legitimating white rule in settler societies and administrative colonies worldwide. Of course, Du Bois also believed that Europeans’ scramble for Africa had precipitated the Great War.Footnote ² Yet for him, growing great-power competition, and the political and social position of people of color in this changing imperial world, could be explained fully only from a longue durée perspective that linked contemporary empires and colonies to centuries of racial exploitation.

For all of Du Bois's insight into how not just capitalism, but also race had powered imperialism and, by 1915, together forged a disenfranchised working class of color across the world, his perspective, like that of Hobson, Lenin, and Schumpeter, never extended far beyond societies bordering the Atlantic Ocean. For the most part, histories of unfree labor's contribution to early modern and modern capitalism and colonial empires still focus today on slavery and commodity production in the Atlantic world. Yet an Atlantic-centered history of unfree labor risks overlooking the extra-Atlantic and often global dimensions of the long history of racialized labor in the making of modern capitalism, empire, and colonialism. Although he alluded in 1915 to white American workers’ racism against Asian and Latino/a workers to explain their tacit support for empire, Du Bois that year included in his global proletariat of color neither the working people of Puerto Rico (whose creole population had taken shape through the history of African slavery on that island), nor the Philippines or Hawai'i—three territories which many observers at the time and since regarded as U.S. colonies. Four new labor histories of American empire that range in period from the early American republic and its commercial and territorial expansion to Du Bois's early twentieth-century world push Atlantic-centric narratives into new waters, lands, and cultures. Studying the circulation of capital, commodities, and often unfree migrant labor in the making of American empire, these books show how global, transnational, and international methods help answer questions about historical intersections between capitalist development, race, different kinds of labor, and imperialism. They also map a new histoire croisée for the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, connecting their histories and historiographies by revealing some of the processes, structures, and individuals that linked these two great maritime regions and their islands to North America and each other, and enriching their comparative study.Footnote ³

That European and American merchant capital had by the early nineteenth century already started to integrate the societies and economies of Europe, the Americas, and India with an older Pacific world is manifestly evident in Evan Lampe's Work, Class, and Power in the Borderlands of the Early American Pacific. Perhaps approached at first narrowly as a labor history of the American China trade, Lampe's book exceeds labor history's traditional scope by embedding workers, labor processes, and workplaces in a global history of multiple empires and capitalisms across the Pacific, examining not just Europeans and Americans in these structures, but also Chinese, indigenous Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans. Even as he traffics thematically and conceptually in the common currency of global history—studying commodity chains, cross-cultural trade, the formation of imperial and colonial states, migration, and settlement—Lampe criticizes not only the historiography of the China trade, but also a global-historical practice, which too often loses sight of the significance of workers and class in world histories.

Lampe views the early American Pacific as a region whose integration was predicated on the sweat and blood of a diverse ensemble of workers and the disciplinary regimes required by commodity trade in the age of sail.Footnote ⁴ His greatest inspiration in this regard is the recent social history of Atlantic seafaring labor. Following Marcus Rediker and others, Lampe challenges China trade historians’ preoccupation with the elite merchants and state officials who managed and regulated it. He emphasizes instead the social relations and hierarchies of the merchant ship and, by extension, the societies which these vessels and their crews encountered and connected. In some ways, Lampe fruitfully extends the interpretive architecture of the Atlantic maritime social history, shifting its insights westward into a new ocean, even while noting significant differences between them. Beginning with their first forays to Canton in the 1780s and 1790s, New England merchants and their crews inserted themselves in an emerging trade pioneered by British predecessors, above all the East India Company. The British and then Americans exchanged furs and wood for porcelains, ivory products, fans, and jewelry desired by the rising middling classes of Europe and the United States. For Lampe, these Euro-American sailors—and the usually “self-contained world” of the merchant ship that formed the “bridge that connected the diverse societies of the Pacific and the North Atlantic maritime world” (63)—were the prime movers weaving Pacific societies together and preparing the ocean region for American empire. That a “motley crew” diverse in ethnic and national origins suffered shipmasters’ brutalities and fewer economic rights than landsmen and struggled for personal liberty and dignity through individual and, less often, collective resistance, should not surprise students of the Atlantic social history.

Yet Lampe argues that the Pacific merchant ship as a workplace was starkly different from its Atlantic forerunner. He begins with a critique of Rediker's description of the eighteenth-century trading vessel as a “factory at sea” (16). Not only its violent discipline but shipmasters’ situational inability to easily discharge seamen (and seamen's inability to quit) while at sea during two-year Pacific voyages distinguished the China trade ship as unique. Sailors on Atlantic merchantmen who enjoyed relatively brief transoceanic journeys of four weeks to two months and more frequent access to ports in more familiar cultures, also enjoyed more frequent opportunities for desertion, switching employers, and recreation. By contrast, the China trade and a Pacific ocean less settled by Euro-Americans, with fewer friendly ports, made for a more tightly closed labor market that offered the ordinary seaman precious few and more perilous exits. According to Lampe, China trade sailors also worked harder than Atlantic counterparts. They spent considerable labor and time, often several months, processing sea otter pelts in the Pacific Northwest and sandalwood harvested in the Sandwich Islands before crossing to Canton. Once there they enjoyed less time ashore “at liberty” than in Atlantic ports. Qing rules barred foreign seamen and their captains from entering Canton for business or pleasure, and stuck below Canton at Whampoa, the Pearl River's head of navigation, they had to repair ships before long return journeys. Despite these differences in sailors’ work and agency, Lampe's Pacific shares perhaps the most essential feature of Rediker's Atlantic: The captains’ authority aboard a ship at sea was absolute, in whatever waters the Yankee tar might sail.

The China trade ship for Lampe is never simply a brutal workplace, however. Its significance derived chiefly from its role in forging globe-spanning commodity trade networks that integrated local and regional economies and prepared the region for American empire. Lampe thus raises a fundamental question about scale and social power in capitalism and imperialism, which is implicit in each of the books reviewed here. What relationships developed between, at the microlevel, the exploitation within discrete workspaces that made possible and also transformed the world capitalist economy, and, at the macro-level, the exploitation inherent in unequal foreign and economic relations between different societies and states or, in other words, the international order and political economy? Lampe alludes to the problem as he construes his social history of the China trade in the language of world-systems. The labor of Euro-American sailors, Native American traders, Hawai'ian gatherers, Chinese factory workers, retailers, and prostitutes together created what he calls a “Pacific world system” that would eventually be dominated by Americans, their capital, and the American state.

The American China trade's origins as recounted by Lampe suggest that American merchants in the Pacific world earned their legendary commercial wealth and power through more than mere entrepreneurial zeal. Above all, they transferred the maritime ambitions, capital, workforces, and technologies they had accumulated and developed in Atlantic commerce by the 1780s to a new oceanic field. Furthermore, in what might be viewed as an economic form of imperial transition, they inserted themselves into, altered, and sometimes forcibly exploited preexisting markets in this vast region, including those already forged or penetrated by European merchants. The process arguably resembled the “war capitalism” so crucial to the making of the global cotton industry in the Americas and Asia, though obviously it proceeded on a much smaller scale in a very different part of the world, and with different economic and political effects. As Sven Beckert has shown, armed European merchants throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries aggressively entered and captured preexisting exchange networks and commodity chains in Asia before they appropriated the foreign land, labor, and revenues in settler and administrative colonies in the Americas, Asia, and Africa, which produced the cotton and other goods fueling industrialization.Footnote ⁵

Central to Lampe's book is his argument that the American China trade spurred class formation throughout the Pacific, a claim articulated most persuasively in his final chapter, a social history of early nineteenth-century Canton and its trading system. Lampe examines Canton in its social totality, stressing radical divides of wealth and status exacerbated by highly regulated commerce. He invokes Saskia Sassen and others on the globalized economy as a structure and process defined by inclusion and exclusion, claiming that foreign merchants enjoyed a “gated community” comparable to the urban enclaves of today's cosmopolitan bourgeoisie. Lampe's Pacific proletariat thus includes not only white merchant sailors, but the hundreds of thousands of Chinese making trade goods in the factories, boat people moving goods on the Pearl River between Canton and Whampoa, street vendors, and laundresses and sex workers. In radical contrast to their daily miseries, compounded in the Pearl River delta region by rapid demographic growth and shrinking access to land, Chinese and American and other foreign merchants socialized at elaborate dinners, shared western-trained doctors, conspicuously consumed art and other luxuries, raced together in regatta clubs, collaborated in combatting piracy, and chafed against Qing taxes and graft and restrictions on foreigners’ mobility. Following the interpretive trends of a China-centered historiography, the first Opium War to Lampe looks less like a rupture in Chinese history than a renegotiation of the terms of a highly profitable trade that corrupt Qing bureaucrats, the Cohong, and western merchants all wanted to sustain and expand, at the expense of a laboring multitude whom they kept from its spoils.

Lampe hedges, however, on the social scope of international class formation in the early American Pacific, arguing that only elites in Hawai'i and Canton formed a cohesive social class. Nodding to the concepts and verbiage of the new labor history, he finds in the Pacific's polyglot workers “little evidence of solidarity that matured into a foundation of political action in Marxist lines,” as their communities were “temporary and never created the institutions that could support resistance on a sustained level as developed in industrial cities” (7). Nothing more than the “lived experience” of an emergent transoceanic capitalism apparently united American sailors, Native Americans hunting sea otters, Hawai'ian porters, and Chinese factory workers and boat people. Lampe's insistence that horizontal divisions of class characterized and created the early American Pacific world far more than vertical divisions of national and imperial affiliation or racial, ethnic, and gender identity thus tends to lose its credibility to the extent that he discusses different workers’ cross-cultural encounters through the trade.

Indeed, Lampe provides plentiful evidence that the men and women of the trade's diverse multinational and multicultural workforce seem to have acted, and moreover viewed themselves, first and foremost as fierce competitors in a global marketplace fragmented by empires, nationality, race, ethnicity, and gender—not as “workers” knowingly sharing a common experience of exploitation at the hands of a new “transnational ruling class” (7). Indians and Chinese stole from and cheated Euro-American sailors, who in turn assaulted Indians and haggled with and harassed Chinese vendors and boat people. White sailors also frequented Chinese and Hawai'ian prostitutes, fought with their pimps over prices, and, in the Pacific Northwest, consorted with native women whom Indian and white men alike treated as sexual slaves. Presumably these women did not feel they shared with such men the “lived experience” of toil under global capitalism. Indeed, the scanty evidence he presents for cross-cultural “cooperation” among workers affirms how a multiplicity of differences beyond class structured and facilitated the trade. That Lampe notes the existence of racial and sexual divisions of labor in the Pacific Northwest, Hawai'i, and Canton—even while he does not explore how race and gender may have shaped these workers’ attitudes and how they represented themselves and laboring “others”—increases the reader's skepticism toward his insistence that class was paramount in every instant. Ultimately the members of Lampe's Pacific multitude interacted with each other less as fellow workers than as unequal participants within an emerging global market. They came to that market bearing different forms and degrees of social, political, and economic power determined by their status and identities, exchanging goods and services rather than a common consciousness of exploitation by the merchants and bureaucrats who dominated the trade.

More troubling is how Lampe invokes “empire” without clarifying its analytical meaning or standing in his narrative, as he seems to argue that Americans’ commercial intrusion into the China trade somehow created or represented “American empire” in the Pacific long before the U.S. territorial annexation of Hawai'i and the Philippines after 1898. To his credit, Lampe notes that the ambitious New England merchants who pioneered America's China trade never intended to establish formal or direct colonial rule over foreign land and populations. If they viewed American commercial expansion in imperial terms, certainly they saw it as a maritime “empire” of commerce—not the settler colonialism that fellow Yankees later imposed in Hawai'i, or the administrative form of U.S. colonialism in the Philippines.Footnote ⁶ Not even Thomas Jefferson, who envisioned an expanding and slave-owning territorial republic of white yeoman farmers and democratic government as an “empire of liberty” that would eventually span North America, imagined that the United States would or should possess islands in the Pacific Ocean—even as he praised John Jacob Astor's plans to bring “liberty” to the Pacific coast (75). While Lampe writes that “the goal of power and disciplining of working people was not empire” but the “concrete production” of the “ports, prisons, churches, trading posts, merchant communities, and diplomatic infrastructure” necessary for the capital accumulation that gave rise to “empire” (8), he never defines precisely what this empire was, nor dates its eventual emergence.

Beginning her narrative in the late nineteenth century, Joanna Poblete's book suggests that the U.S. imperial archipelago, which spanned the globe along the Tropic of Cancer after 1898, both forged new relations between the United States as a white settler empire in North America and its adjacent oceans, and transformed transhemispheric connections between the Pacific and Atlantic. This interconnectedness, she shows, makes it difficult for historians to analyze the two oceans as distinct and separable regions. Nevertheless, if Lampe may not prove the existence of American empire in the Pacific earlier in the nineteenth century, its presence is undeniable in Poblete's account. If Hawai'i for both authors serves as an imperial platform for the production and circulation of commodities and migrant labor, the Spanish-American War nevertheless legibly territorialized U.S. foreign power in the formal annexation of Hawai'i in 1898 and the Philippines in 1899.

Poblete attends closely to the ways that American imperial power linked Pacific trade and migration circuits to the nation's newly annexed Caribbean island, Puerto Rico, as Hawai'i's white sugar planters exploited U.S. territorial expansion to recruit Filipino and Puerto Rican labor. Designating these migrants as “U.S. colonials,” Poblete reminds us that the Treaty of Spain, the congressional “Organic Acts,” which granted these islands civil government and U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence, never fully extended the rights of political representation and citizenship to Puerto Ricans and Filipinos, who assumed a liminal legal and political status within this new empire. Yet if the Supreme Court's Insular Cases soon determined that the U.S. Constitution did not always follow the flag—effectively designating Hawai'i as an “incorporated” territory eligible for future statehood, while relegating Puerto Rico and Philippines to the status of “unincorporated” territories potentially forever subject to the direct and arbitrary rule of Congress and its plenary powers—Poblete shows us that tens of thousands of Filipino and Puerto Rican men desperate for work did follow that same flag to Hawai'i.

Although she compares Filipinos and Puerto Ricans to Native Americans, Samoans, or Virgin Islanders as dependent “wards” of the United States, Poblete breaks new ground in historiography by arguing that these islanders’ new geographic mobility within this newly expanded American imperium distinguished them from the many other foreigners and migrant laborers who were halted at the shifting borders of U.S. territorial sovereignty. Never prohibited from entering Hawai'i by the Chinese exclusion and alien contract labor laws, which Congress quickly extended there, nor the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907, which barred Japanese migration to North America and was also applied to Hawai'i, Puerto Rican and Filipino migrant workers acted as “intra-colonials,” in her words. Together with sugar planters eager for their labor, they used their newfound “open colonial mobility” to voluntarily emigrate to Hawai'i (2–6). Her book thus accomplishes more than just adding an imperial dimension to the history of migrants in U.S. history who occupied a peculiar and liminal status in law and politics—such as Asian and Mexican American “alien citizens,” whom while born in the United States after the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of birthright citizenship, nevertheless came to be defined in policy and law as racially unassimilable and thus subject to legal restrictions in the mid-twentieth century.Footnote ⁷ Through a transnational approach, which reveals networks of labor migration crossing and linking two newly imperial American ocean spaces, Poblete satisfies recent calls to write histories of American empire emphasizing power, connection, and comparison.Footnote ⁸ Furthermore, the few available comparative histories of U.S. empire in Puerto Rico and the Philippines tend to be “top-down” studies focused on colonial and American elites and their politics, policies, and political culture.Footnote ⁹ In contrast, Poblete shows it is possible to compare in synchronic time the lived experience of ordinary working people in multiple imperial, colonial, or “national” settings—and the causes, dynamics, and effects of the movement of people, policies, social practices, and ideas and goods between them—through global history methods, which are both comparative and intraimperial.

If Filipinos and Puerto Ricans endured in equal measure Hawai'ian sugar's punishing work regime, Poblete finds their shared histories as migrant labor diverged due to intraimperial communications, timing, and the presence or absence of imperial bureaucracy and institutions. When the wave of more than five thousand Puerto Rican men who traveled to Hawaii in 1900 and 1901 began complaining to family, friends, newspapers, and nationalist politicians at home of squalid and abusive conditions on steamships and plantations, and wages offering little more than subsistence, Puerto Ricans accustomed at home to greater economic autonomy as tenants on estates, renters, and hacienda laborers stopped volunteering for Hawai'i altogether. When planters rejected Puerto Rican migrants’ pleas to pay for transport home, the Hawaii Sugar Planters Association learned its lesson. In 1906, these employers turned more profitably to Filipinos, who signed new labor contracts offering free passage home after three years’ service and, by the 1920s, limited family resettlement benefits. The recruitment reforms sparked translocal chain migration, as members of Filipino migrants’ families and home communities followed them to Hawai'i, lured partly through a public relations campaign organized by planters which encouraged these employees to write home of Hawai'i's abundance. The new “creative and flexible” (49) recruiting processes targeting Filipinos made them the largest and most reliable source of labor for Hawai'ian planters throughout the twentieth century's first half, with roughly 126,000 Filipinos arriving in these years.

Poblete is right to reconstruct the intraimperial nature of contests over the terms of Filipino and Puerto Rican labor migration to Hawai'i within the structure of America's imperial state as a whole, placing these three insular territories in their proper colonial or, in the case of Hawai'i, neocolonial relation to the federal government. She contrasts the successive repudiation of Puerto Rican labor migration by the Hawai'i territorial and Puerto Rican colonial governments with consistent but ineffective support for it among planter-friendly bureaucrats inside the War Department's Bureau of Insular Affairs—as close as the federal government ever came to a European-style colonial office. White BIA officials desired Filipino migration for reasons of race and interimperial competition. Worried about Hawai'i's Asian majority, they hoped Puerto Rican labor migration would increase the percentage of the population there classified as “white” in the federal census. After citizenship had been granted Puerto Ricans in 1917 and two militant Filipino sugar worker strikes in the early 1920s, and as white Americans increasingly feared a rising imperial Japan, they also argued that Puerto Ricans would be more loyal to planters and the U.S. government. Such claims foundered on the opposition to renewed Puerto Rican migration among local officials in Hawai'i and Puerto Rico. In one analytical gesture unfortunately not fully elaborated, Poblete asserts that these disagreements between different insular governments and the federal government are proof of the “discrepancies that can occur within a global colonial system” (27).Footnote ¹⁰

Poblete also determines that the relative presence or absence of local leadership within Hawai'i was ultimately far more powerful than the federal government in shaping migrants’ everyday lives. While BIA officials slowly passed planters’ requests for labor and migrants’ complaints up and down the attenuated bureaucratic chain of telegrams and letters that connected Washington, D.C. to these disparate Pacific and Atlantic islands, a small and shifting coterie of colonial government representatives, labor agents, and ethnic ministers acted as intermediaries who negotiated day-to-day relations between workers, planters, and different state institutions. Most notable here is the fact that Puerto Ricans never had a representative of their colonial government on the island to whom they could appeal; this made them unlike every other group of foreign workers in Hawai'i, including even Filipinos after 1923. According to Poblete, this lack of representation and leadership both hurt and helped Puerto Ricans. On the one hand, their protests and cries for paid transportation home could never be issued directly to authorities in Hawai'i. On the other hand, Poblete's claim that the absence of local government leaders and representatives gave Puerto Ricans “a degree of control and independence over their labor experiences in Hawai'i” (88) is borne out by her findings that four Philippine government representatives sent ostensibly to assist Filipino laborers more often than not helped planters control and discipline them.

Poblete's fascinating discussion of other intermediaries, from evangelical ministers to labor agents who served as translators, advocates, and recruiters, and were often paid or otherwise supported by the HSPA, strengthens a growing literature on the significance of interpreters and other cultural brokers in an imperial early twentieth-century U.S. immigration history.Footnote ¹¹ Yet the degree to which these individuals demonstrated the power that Hawai'i's planter elite and the American imperial state exercised over these workers and their lives stands sharply in contrast to Poblete's claims that open colonial mobility and local leadership granted them agency. It may be true in a narrow legal sense that insular American territorial expansion after 1898 permitted these intracolonials to evade federal laws that denied U.S. entry to so-called Chinese “coolies” and other seemingly unfree migrants. More fundamental is an acknowledgment that white planters in Hawai'i in the mid-nineteenth century never introduced the chattel slavery that typified many other sugar plantation societies beyond the British West Indies at this time. Even while Hawai'i's native rulers coerced a declining indigenous population into plantation labor, haole employers hired and paid them nominally as wage workers.Footnote ¹² Yet beyond the thin protections of labor contracts not always honored by planters, Poblete's intracolonial migrant workers accumulated little more collective political and social power in Hawai'i than Lampe's proletariat had throughout the Pacific. Isolated on separate plantations, on different islands in a remote archipelago thousands of miles from their home islands and the North American mainland, and lacking powerful and durable ethnic institutions, political rights, trade unions, and government leadership, they had more in common with Du Bois's landless and disenfranchised black agricultural workers in the American South, or Chinese workers imported to work in the south's sugar plantations after the Civil War, than white male industrial laborers in North America struggling for liberty of contract as “free” labor.Footnote ¹³ Indeed, though unmentioned by Poblete, Hawai'i's planters in 1901 looked to the U.S. south to resolve the islands’ labor scarcity, importing two hundred black “field hands” from Tennessee during the same year that they started to recruit Puerto Ricans.Footnote ¹⁴

Such comparisons suggest another question about Poblete's book, in which relations between Puerto Rican and Filipino migrants, and these workers’ relations with the many thousands of Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Portuguese and other foreign workers on Hawai'i's islands and plantations are not systematically explored. The reader is left to wonder whether or how these migrants and white planters and luna supervisors might have been racialized through their migration, labor, and everyday cooperation and conflicts. Julie Greene, Jason Colby, and David Roediger and Elizabeth Esch, among others, have detailed how racial categories and discourses, which shaped the management of foreign labor by white Americans in different imperial and colonial and neocolonial contexts such as the Panama Canal, Costa Rica, Guatemala, the Philippines, and South Africa simultaneously, produced racial identities and class formation.Footnote ¹⁵ Ronald Takaki's social history of Hawai'ian sugar plantations suggests that white planters as early as the 1850s were comparatively racially evaluating and managing Chinese and native Hawai'ian labor. Consciously recruiting from various Asian and European labor markets to develop ethnic and racial divisions and hierarchies that increased their control over their workforce in coming decades, it is hard to believe that white sugar planters’ recruitment and supervision of workers segmented by race, ethnicity, and nationality never inflected their perception of Filipinos and Puerto Ricans as laborers.Footnote ¹⁶

In April Merleaux's sophisticated history of sugar and early twentieth-century American empire, however, racial difference is essential, and shapes more than just white employers’ perceptions of labor for the industry. Race for Merleaux determined Americans’ views of sugar as a commodity, and, thus, the cultural politics that configured its use, value, and multiple and conflicting meanings. Much more than just a study of labor and U.S. empire, Sweetness and Civilization is sweeping in ambition and scope. Integrating the cultural, political, and social and economic history of sugar in the making of modern American empire, the book employs global history methods to intervene within and bring together burgeoning fields of commodity history, imperial history, labor history, and the history of consumption. Additionally a work of food history, the book also arguably shares with the new history of capitalism a methodological interest in “reconnecting the mind and body,” in the words of one food historian, and “bringing the mental, discursive worlds of cultural history together with a material, embodied understanding of the past.”Footnote ¹⁷ Indeed, the way Merleaux conceives the commodity as a work of culture pushes past Marxist readings of the commodity as fetish, and affirms the cultural foundations of a new materialist history recognizing that social and economic ideas and structures are inevitably rooted in ideas and symbols and constructed through discourses and representations.Footnote ¹⁸

Naturally, Merleaux's greatest intellectual debt is not Marx but Sidney Mintz, the historical anthropologist, and his landmark book, Sweetness and Power. Like Mintz, she aims for a total transnational history of sugar's role in industrialization, capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism, showing how these developments connected both tropical plantations to temperate-region factories, and the social life of elites and working classes and poor who consumed the substance in ever greater quantities. Yet her scholarship departs from Mintz in at least two ways.Footnote ¹⁹ While he geographically divided his analysis of the sugar economy in the Atlantic's opposite shores, locating production in the West Indies and consumption inside Britain and Europe, Merleaux examines the simultaneous development over time of a cultural politics of sugar within and between several sites of America's post-1898 “sugar empire”—not only Cuba, Hawai'i, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, but also the U.S. mainland's sugar-beet producing regions. She analyzes not only how both American and colonial and neocolonial sugar workers abroad themselves consumed sugar. She also scrutinizes how different people in each of these spaces, from government policymakers and progressive reformers to cane and migrant beet sugar workers, participated in shaping sugar's production and consumption through government policies, business activity, and everyday social and culinary practice.

Second, while Mintz explained sugar's rising vitality to British working-class diets and, thus, industrialization partly as a function of declining sugar prices caused by free trade, Merleaux finds that sugar consumption and its growing stature in American culture surged after 1898 in an era of U.S. protectionism. For Merleaux, the American empire accrued its historical significance not because it facilitated labor's “intra-colonial” geographical mobility. Rather, her American empire emerged from intertwined tariff, immigration, and colonial policies, which together organized sugar production and consumption. In her transoceanic approach, changing relations between the North American mainland and Caribbean and Pacific islands overseas were negotiated through the tensions between exclusion and inclusion generated by America's newly expanded territory and global sugar economy, as policymakers with different backgrounds and interests regulated commodity and labor flows, which traversed shifting national and colonial borders. Merleaux's careful cultural reconstruction of U.S. sugar tariff policy and politics thus makes this one of the best recent histories of the imperial dimensions of modern American trade.Footnote ²⁰

Despite her fascinating and innovative dissection of tariff policy, however, Merleaux never reduces American empire or imperial power to the narrow sphere of diplomacy determined by high politics, as trade so often figured in the scholarship of William Appleman Williams and others who characterized the United States as an informal empire. Her definition of empire—“an arrangement in which political sovereignty is exercised unevenly across space and in which some people and geographies are differentiated as being outside of the law or subject to an alternate set of legal arrangements”—might have served Lampe well, as she acknowledges that nonstate actors, including business leaders and private firms, exercised and limited political sovereignty in the American imperium of sweetness prior to formal or direct U.S. territorial rule, or without it. Much like the United Fruit Company in Guatemala and Costa Rica in these same years, American sugar planters in Hawai'i before U.S. annexation, and sugar planters in a Cuba never formally annexed, still negotiated and gained trade preferences and other protections that nevertheless limited these islands’ effective sovereignty.Footnote ²¹ Thus Merleaux reminds us that not merely workers, consumers, and culture writ large, but also capital in its various merchant, industrial, and financial forms and spatial locations, combined with U.S. foreign territorial rule to craft America's sugar empire.

Despite significant differences of history, political status, and culture between the various sites of this empire, Merleaux finds that white Americans, including policymakers in Washington and private boosters for both North American beet sugar and tropical cane sugar, shared a great deal. They agreed that the sugar industry could fuel economic and political modernity, believed U.S. economic and foreign policies would develop markets for goods, labor, and land in the American West and the islands, and, above all, “privileged white men and white sugar” as they “claimed authority to include and exclude people and places from the law as necessary to promote economic development” (29). Merleaux argues that not only constituent interests and partisanship but racialized ideas of nationhood and civilization scrambled tariff politics’ usual late-nineteenth century configuration. Democrats strong in southern and western states who usually opposed high tariffs benefiting northern industrialists and veterans’ pensions—none more so than Nevada politician Francis Newlands—tended to advocate “populist anti-imperialism” (34). Committed to a racially homogenous republic, they resisted annexation and supported high sugar tariffs to prevent cheap migrant labor, cheap goods, and monopoly in the U.S. West and the tropics from degrading white Americans' living standards and white settler-colonial society inside North America. Republicans, on the other hand, led by seaboard refiners eager for cheaper tropical sugar, tended to support both colonial annexation and lower tariffs.

Merleaux argues that a racial global hierarchy of sugar production and consumption constructed through imperial trade preferences as well as federal immigration and even irrigation policies persisted in the World War One era and 1920s, partly through wartime regulations and the cultural politics of sugar workers’ eating habits. As high tariffs on refined sugar not only shielded North American refiners from possible competition in the tropics, they also “maintained the racial hierarchy encoded through the contrast between civilized and uncivilized, technology and nature, refined and raw, white and brown” (57). With whiteness tied to the refined “pure” product of industrial technologies owned and engineered by white Americans, and consumed by self-restrained middle-class whites in elaborately bourgeois domestic settings, black and brown African-American, Mexican-American, and tropical sugar workers and their families were seen as less civilized and undisciplined, associated with the raw sugar cane, which white observers assumed they ate in the fields whenever possible. Merleaux claims that the molasses, syrups, and other homemade sugars these peoples made satisfied their desires for both sweetness and economic and cultural autonomy, as Mexican beet workers’ consumption of piloncillo inside the United States, for example, allowed them to negotiate its social and racial hierarchy by imaginatively linking them to their homeland. Even the bodies of American soldiers securing U.S. power over tropical territories were “internalizing empire” (68) as they ate more sweets, in racially differentiated rations, which granted more sugar to white American troops allegedly more vulnerable to the climate than Filipino scouts.

Most historians believe Franklin D. Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy, abrogation of the Platt Amendment, and guarantee of Philippine independence in the 1930s signaled the United States’ retreat from three decades of empire and interventionism in the Americas and Pacific. Yet Merleaux claims that the U.S. sugar empire persisted throughout that decade and well into the 1940s, the result of skyrocketing consumption and contradictory New Deal tariff cuts and agricultural programs which, in sugar policy, “appears neither anti-imperialist nor particularly isolationist” (176). By World War Two, the old high-tariffs colonialism that had been meant to protect white civilized sugar from the many dangers of uncivilized raw cane had been reworked into a liberal neocolonial project of fictive economic equality between the United States and its island territories secured through allegedly less imperial marketing quotas and benefit payments. Yet New Deal policies intended to mitigate these islands’ exceptional status in the American sugar economy were undermined ultimately by their continued political subordination to the American metropole.

Although its value for the emerging labor history of American empire is too multifaceted to be fully addressed here, Making the Empire Work, edited by Daniel Bender and Jana Lipman, scholars of labor and the culture of U.S. empire in their own right, offers this growing literature a conceptual and interpretive agenda that matches Merleaux's work in its ambitious scope and sophistication.Footnote ²² Bender and Lipman join Paul Kramer and others who repudiate the “Sisyphean exercise” (3) of forever debating whether the United States is or has been an empire according to some ideal and transhistorical definitive criteria for “empire” or “imperialism.”Footnote ²³ They instead think through the “imperial” as a category of analysis that makes it possible to identify the “imperial labor systems” (5) that have been fundamental to the physical and symbolic projection of American power in the world, in its multiple forms. As with commodities for Merleaux, work and labor in a U.S. imperial context for Bender and Lipman renders artificial the traditional binaries of hard power and soft power, or formal and informal empire which, they claim, “obscures the nature of working-class experience as well as the braided employment of state, military, and corporate power and sovereignty” (4). Emphasizing a taxonomy of industrial, agricultural, service, and military forms of labor whose mobilization and management constituted a “U.S. imperial system” in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the editors argue this system “included formal colonies, corporate capitalism, military bases, and interactions across empires” that “mobilized workers through colonial networks, created mass migrations, and often disenfranchised and removed local, indigenous populations” (5) as well as settler colonialism, which they suggest has its own unexplored labor history. Such a capacious notion of imperial labor systems, they acknowledge, risks accusations that their U.S. empire seems “everywhere and nowhere at the same time.” Yet they caution that this empire “was not all powerful or monolithic,” as imperial labor practices were “deep and systematic” in some regions, while merely “improvisational” in others. Bender and Lipman situate this volume's intervention in approaches to empire in several historiographies, including diplomatic history, which has emphasized trade and political economy without considering the labor beneath them; cultural studies, which tend to neglect work and workers by focusing on “middle-class and elite consumption and representational practice” (6); the new transnational history, which recognizes that migration, organizations, and networks crossing national borders are often embedded in imperial structures; and borderlands history, noting how labor has or has not figured in studies of “internal” or “imported” colonialism in North America's southwest. Lastly, their introduction presses an imperial analytic that disrupts and expands the received category of “labor” itself. In imperial structures and settings, distinctions between “slave” and “free” labor dissolved into a finely gradated spectrum of coercion. Colonial knowledge required intellectual work, toil in tropical fields enabled industrial exploitation, the intimacies of tourism, service, and sex work generated affective labor, and the military exploited the labor of both soldiers and civilians.

Thirteen essays, divided thematically into four parts, flesh out their program. In Part One, on “Solidarity and Resistance,” Moon-Ho Jung returns us to the 1920 joint Japanese-Filipino sugar strike in Hawai'i and its Pan-African internationalist mirror image in Harlem radical Hubert Harrison's simultaneous call for a “colored international,” showing how race and empire infused radical organizing and led a new postwar security state to suppress protests it tied to a rising imperial Japan. Christopher Capozzola deconstructs a collective refusal by Philippine Scouts in 1924 in Manila, organized through an all-Filipino “Secret Soldiers Union,” as a mutiny, labor strike, and form of soldier politics that exposed the U.S. military's dependence on Filipino labor and ongoing contests over American colonial rule. Kevin Coleman unpacks the photographic archive of workers’ protests against the United Fruit Company in Colombia and its repressive government during the 1920s. The second part, on “Intimacies in Colonial Spaces,” contains comparative research by Seungsook Moon on sexual labor and U.S. military occupations and bases in Europe and East Asia, from World War Two to the post-Cold War present, and a history of the lei, by Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, that scrutinizes hospitality as a gendered and sexualized form of cultural labor in territorial Hawai'i. Part Three, on empire and migration, offers chapters by Andrew Urban, on the late nineteenth-century splintering of white settler-colonial visions for domestic servant labor in California along lines of race and gender, amid rising anti-Chinese politics; by Dorothy Fujita-Rony, who uses the murder of a Filipino agricultural worker in 1930 during riots in Watsonville, California, to explore how Filipino migrant laborers negotiated the region as an imperial space in political, military, and social terms; and by Cindy Hahamovitch, who suggests the importance of comparing modern guest worker programs not to slavery, but to the indentured servitude that flourished in the British empire's “coolie trade” after its abolition of the slave trade and slavery. The last group of essays focuses on American imperial labor relations in the tropics. Andrew Zimmerman reviews the Tuskegee Institute's expedition to German colonial Togo in West Africa in 1901 as a transnational or interimperial experiment in coercing black labor in postemancipation societies. Jason Colby examines the changing status of black West Indian migrant workers in the discourse and politics of the United Fruit Company in Central America, influenced as they were by intersecting ideas of race, progress, and tropical nature. Augustine Sedgewick offers a stimulating study of the imperial politics of one Mancunian entrepreneur's efforts to control and expand coffee production in El Salvador in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; and Lauren Hirshberg navigates the Cold War-era U.S. empire of bases through a microhistory of Kwajelin Atoll in the Marshall Islands, from which the U.S. military conducted nuclear tests while recreating an insular Pacific simulacrum of postwar American suburbia.

Zimmerman's argument that Americans following the Civil War modeled for European colonists in Africa the methods by which white elites could still exploit black labor after emancipation returns to W.E.B. Du Bois and his insights into the origins and painful predicament of his global proletariat of color in the World War One era. It also points us to Julie Greene's contribution to the collection, in which she extends explicitly the spirit of Du Bois's arguments and orients in new directions some of the concerns and themes in her path-breaking labor history of the Panama Canal. Inspired by his Black Reconstruction, as well as Edward Thompson and Herbert Gutman, Greene offers a sweeping meditation on how intricate historical interrelationships between capitalism, American expansion, and class formation in the critical decades between these two wars, in her words, “combined the problems of labor and race into one.” Through Du Bois, and his explanation for why white metropolitan industrial workers endorsed imperial practices that oppressed workers of color in North America and beyond, Greene conceives “the wages of empire” as heuristic for organizing a new imperial labor and working-class American history. Not based on psychological-racial compensation alone, this imperial wage invites readers to consider that “empire constituted a force that articulated and shaped class experience and formation as much as did, say, race or gender.” The imperial, she writes in adapting Stuart Hall, “served as a modality through which class was lived, experienced, organized and struggled through” (36). Reviewing the disturbing histories of the Indian wars and of the American West and U.S. colonial wars in the Philippines, and the continuities between them, as she mines a military history and military archives rarely explored by social and cultural historians, Greene relates a particularly uncomfortable truth. Imperial and colonial subjugation required the extraordinary efforts of ordinary Americans, including white and black soldiers and their “foreign” partners, who not only suffered costs but sometimes also derived benefits and even pleasure from war and pacification, building infrastructure, or seeing themselves as civilized compared to the strangers they encountered in faraway lands, oceans, and islands. Historians would do well to remember this when we continually wonder why different kinds of working people whom we presume share so many experiences and interests in common fail to think or act in the ways we might expect, or hope, they would.