Paul A. Kramer

Paul A. Kramer

EMBEDDING CAPITAL: POLITICAL-ECONOMIC

HISTORY , THE UNITED STATES , AND THE WORLD

One of the chief promises of the emerging history of capitalism is its capacity to problem-atize and historicize relationships between economic inequality and capital’s social, po-litical, and ecological domain. At their best, the new works creatively integrate multiplehistoriographic approaches. Scholars are bringing the insights of social and culturalhistory to business history’s traditional actors and topics, providing thick descriptionsof the complex social worlds of firms, investors, and bankers, while resisting rationalist,functionalist, and economistic analyses. They are also proceeding from the assumptionthat capitalism is not reducible to the people that historians have typically designatedas capitalists. As they’ve shown, the fact that slaves, women, sharecroppers, clerks,and industrial laborers were, to different degrees, denied power in the building of Amer-ican capitalism did not mean that they were absent from its web, or that their actions didnot decisively shape its particular contours.1

In broad terms, the work’s enabling concept has been embeddedness. Where both con-ventional business and Marxist historical approaches gave primacy to capitalists’ auton-omous actions in pursuit of their interests, historians have enlisted Karl Polanyi to situatethese figures, their activities, and capitalist power relations generally within conditioningstructures of law, policies and institutions, social norms, practices, and resources.2 Thishas helped give American capitalism a more thoroughly historical politics, against theformidable teleological engines typically activated to account for change. As much asPolanyi, these scholars’ necessary partners have been the new political and legal histori-ans, who, informed by the social sciences, have a supple sense of the ways that institu-tionalized power shapes political contests and outcomes.3 If, for Marx, the bourgeoisstate was capital’s boardroom, these historians have demonstrated that different sectorsof capital demanded varied and often incompatible actions from government, and thatstate institutions, rather than simply conforming to these pressures, had structuringpower of their own. Marx’s boardroom has been rendered more crowded, conflicted,and contingent, exercising a more variable range of powers than imagined.4

Also critical to the field’s interpretive success has been its willingness to address cap-italism’s spectrum of discipline, coercion, and violence. To the extent that capitalism isbeing denaturalized, it raises the question of how its ongoing expansion has been polit-ically achieved. Legitimacy and compliance explain only so much: requiring attention toforce. In turning to these questions, historians have challenged venerable, liberal

Paul A. Kramer, Vanderbilt University; email: [email protected]

The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 15 (2016), 331–362doi:10.1017/S1537781416000189

© Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

mailto:[email protected]

presumptions about the system’s voluntarist character, contractual modes, and techno-rational operations. They have also contested liberal and Marxist understandings of cap-italism’s definitional reliance on “free” labor, allowing them to better chart struggles overthe terms of exploitation and freedom, and to listen in more keenly to historical actors’arguments over these themes.Degrees of unfreedom were, of course, not a new theme to historical scholarship; they

had been a focal point of labor historians’ accounts of workers’ struggles, and founda-tional to the historiography of slavery. But the study of coercion under the “history ofcapitalism” rubric suggested that coercive power was systemic: war, enslavement, dis-possession, eviction, enclosure, incarceration, blacklisting, strikebreaking, and thepolice and military suppression of labor appeared as unexceptional instruments for im-posing, securing, and extending regimes of commodification, both during and beyondmoments of “primitive accumulation.” The centrality of coercion to American capital-ism, and the Atlantic and global labor systems from which it was inseparable, hasbeen most rigorously explored in the burgeoning study of slavery as a mode of capitalistproduction and labor organization. Drawing on insights from colonial and postcolonialintellectuals, this scholarship has dramatically countered prevailing assumptions aboutslavery’s status as “in but not of” capitalist modernity, recasting it as laboratory,engine, and financial bulwark. As a result, the lash has now assumed its proper placealongside the stopwatch in capital’s arsenal.5

Despite the field’s accomplishments and potential, the “new history of capitalism”

faced and faces a number of challenges. First, there was wariness about defining theaxial term “capitalism” itself, an evasion sometimes defended as a virtue.6 Did capitalismdenote a feature of society, or a social totality in which all features were more or less sub-ordinated to the projects of commodification and accumulation? Or was it just a project oractivity, something that capitalists (however you defined them) did? To what extent wasthe study of capitalism coterminous with studies of the “material” or the “economic?”What place (if any) did systems of meaning-making, the defining subject of culturalhistory, play in capitalism’s trajectory? In more directly political terms, was theproblem the scope, character, and power of capital in a particular setting and moment,or its existence as a sociopolitical force at all?7 The issue here was not that historians dis-agreed on their answers to these questions. It was, rather, the extent to which they pro-ceeded from unstated, know-it-when-you-see-it presumptions, or dismisseddefinitional debate itself. In such cases, “capitalism” could appear more of an advertise-ment than a tool for opening historical inquiry.There was the way that prominent historians of capitalism defined their project against

“culture,” often erroneously conflated with the study of race, gender and sexuality. Thismove sometimes came with a revanchist edge: after decades exiled to the wilderness bycultural historians, the materialist motors of historical change—especially state forma-tion and capital accumulation—were retaking history’s commanding heights, and frivo-lous superstructures were being consigned to their proper place. To be sure, some of thescholarship targeted in this way had advanced what might be called a disembedded ap-proach to culture, race, gender and sexuality, conflating power with representation, ab-stracting patterns of meaning from the material forces and institutional structures towhich they were tied, and paying relative inattention to economic inequality. Butsuch historiographic framings, rather than confronting and overthrowing age-old

332 Paul A. Kramer

dichotomies—material/ideational, base/superstructure, class politics/identity politics—doubled down on them. Some historians of capitalism managed to steer their crafts cre-atively through these roiling waters, reconstructing capitalism’s cultures and the intimateentanglements of economic exploitation and racialized, gendered and sexualized powerand difference. But others embraced the satisfactions of a self-vindicated government-in-exile returning to power, dispelling vanquished methods and analytics to the margins.Relatedly, there was the hype. The “new history of capitalism” label proved an effec-

tive brand: while some scholars acknowledged their indebtedness to business, economic,and labor history, the term suggested temporal and interpretive distance from these fields.It managed to insulate itself—perhaps better put, to disembed itself—from explicitly po-litical questions, allowing the “history of capitalism” to gather together undergraduateenrollees, audiences, and scholars that embraced capitalist power relations and soughtmanagerial, how-to answers, as well as those that brought critical perspectives to bear.There was also highly successful marketing, with spokespeople celebrating the field’sbold innovation and unique ability to speak to the present crisis in presentist terms.This amounted, not without irony, to something like historiographic capitalism: thepursuit of resources, prestige, and position through declarations of novelty and obsoles-cence. Next year’s shiny models were already on the showroom floor: did you really wantto be caught driving around last year’s?8 Academic hype comes in many flavors, but itinevitably courts backlash, as self-conscious outsiders (and even some insiders) pushback. When critics target a new field’s exaggerated self-promotion, its genuinely sub-stantive insights can get lost in the melee. The questions raised by the new historiographyof capitalism are simply too important for them to be rendered vulnerable to, or confusedwith, the boosterism that attended its birth.What is at stake in all this, not merely for historians, but for the larger societies in

which they are embedded? By following capital’s imperial trajectories both within andacross national boundaries, historians of U.S. capitalism will enable themselves to dothe necessary work of grounding capital’s history in human agency and political struggle,against the culturally dominant tendency to tell its story in naturalizing, teleological, orinstructional modes. Among the most generative sites of investigation will be social lo-cations where scholars can chart the expansionary forces of capital as they confront thedemos, the commons, and the web of life. It is precisely in such contests, in which theagents of commodification meet their political, social, and ecological antagonists, thatcapitalism’s intricate, disputed operations may emerge most sharply, as its self-justifyingmythologies battle, break down, and steel themselves against the challenges of politicsand history. In other words, the projects of subjecting capitalist forces to critical, histor-ical analysis, and of organizing material and economic life to serve the goals of collectivewell-being, democratic power, and ecological sustainability, are intimately tied.

In the interests of keeping this vital conversation moving forward, I’ll suggest a fewpossible directions. One involves a reframing of these inquiries in methodologicalterms, as political-economic history. Conceiving of the enterprise as a matter of approachrather than topic may have advantages for its richness, dynamism, and longevity. It may,for example, help historians avoid the reification of capitalism itself: it may prove easierfor scholars to productively debate the meanings of the term, and their histories, if theyare not resting the weight of their enterprise on it. To be clear, this is not to suggest yet

Embedding Capital 333

another “turn:” political-economic histories (whether they are called this or not) havelong been central to both U.S. political and economic history, as well as segments of busi-ness and labor history. It is, rather, about reenlisting an older, methodological term tosharpen historians’ inquiries into the co-production of political power and economic re-lations, under capitalism.This reframing may also encourage greater methodological pluralism. That capitalism

may be a historically exceptional mode of organizing political-economic power does notmean that exceptional methods should be used to make sense of it, especially those thatderive from its own technocratic or managerial ideologies. Here we should not underes-timate the formidable intellectual capital presently wielded by the discipline of economics,business schools, and prestigious economic summits, to whose attractions historians—with our less-glamorous microfilm readers—are not immune. Historians, like everyoneelse, must grapple with the fact that our age’s dominant public vocabularies have ontol-ogies of private property, the opposition of market and state, and individualized self-responsibility and rational choice at their core.9 There is serious danger that, in attemptingto historicize capitalism, scholars will adopt either their actors’ power-laden analytical cat-egories or present-dayWall Street talking-points, effectively allowing capitalism to defineand delimit its own interpretive horizons.One strategy for interrupting this kind of cozy cognition involves picking up imple-

ments of economic anthropology, which have long been valuable in making sense of arange of political-economic orders, capitalist and noncapitalist alike. Their use would en-courage historians to ask how the societies they study build, enact, and argue over value;the multiple, overlapping, and competing ways they practice exchange; and the ways that“economic” activity is determined and made legible by its social meanings, among manyother fundamental questions.10 The goal would be to use anthropological approaches tocomplicate notions of both “the political” and “the economic,” so that they might bebraided together with the greatest subtlety. One might think of these types of inquiriesas a toolkit for re-embedding that would, among other benefits, highlight the strangenessof economic systems whose participants understood them to be disembedded from socio-political institutions and meanings.Another approach involves seeing capitalism ecologically, with an awareness of the

ways that commodification transforms life systems, the constraints that nature placeson human beings’ efforts to transform it into capital, and of the ways the nature/society binary is implicated in capitalism itself, and vice versa. That ecological questionshave been excluded, marginalized, or problematically included within conventional ac-counts of capitalism may be one reason they have interpretive traction for scholarsseeking “new histories.” Ideally, they will be able to account for this dismissal as a sig-nificant dimension of capitalist ideology and practice, if one that is proving increasinglydifficult to defend.11 In bringing anthropological and ecological approaches to capital-ism’s political-economic history, historians might think of their task as bringing the ex-ternalities back in.

My main focus here is another set of historiographic externalities: histories of theUnited States in the world. As I’ll suggest, historians of American capitalism benefitfrom broadening their geographic horizons beyond national frames, as many arealready doing, and historians of the United States in the world learn a great deal from

334 Paul A. Kramer

engaging seriously with questions of political economy, a project also well underway.Capitalism has long been a major theme in the historiography of U.S. foreign relations,and is currently being revived in ways that sometimes intersect with the concerns of thenew histories of American capitalism, but often run parallel to them. With the goal ofadvancing both efforts and, especially, their cross-pollination, this essay presents an ex-ploration of specific historiographic terrains in which the histories of capital are emergingin the study of the United States’ transnational histories, sometimes self-consciously,other times not. Precisely because of the expansionist, transnational character ofcapital itself, nation-based historians of American capitalism need to look “outward,”even as historians of the United States in the world need to inquire into the ways the pol-itics of commodification and accumulation have shaped histories of the United States’global presence and power.In what follows, I’ll gather and reframe a handful of ongoing conversations—distinct,

but actually and potentially overlapping—about American capitalism’s transnational his-tories, conversations about commodities, consumption, law, debt, militarization, migra-tion, labor, race, and knowledge regimes. Many of these dialogues do not rely heavily onthe terms “capitalism” or “political-economic history,” so this juxtaposition requiresloosening some of these literatures from their immediate historiographic contexts and re-framing them so that their commensurabilities and through-lines are clearer. Some ofthese domains of scholarship, like those on militarization and capitalism, are morewell-established, while others, like that on law, capital, and empire, are only recently de-veloping. The scope of the reading here is limited to Anglophone scholarship that focuseson the United States, though the phenomenon of American capitalism is also a major em-phasis in non-Anglophone scholarship and plays a substantial role in works not centeredon US histories. One of my main goals is to demonstrate the abundance and diversity oftransnational histories of the United States that deal with questions of political economy,which might provide reference points for the new historians of capitalism. More ambi-tiously, my hope is that registering these connections might inspire new bridge-buildingprojects that join local, subnational, and national histories of American capitalism totransnational histories of the capitalist world economy.That many of my historical and historiographic examples come from the Gilded Age

and Progressive Era is not coincidental. These decades saw the rise of the United States asan industrial and agricultural powerhouse, exporting capital and goods at new intensitiesand scales, building new corporate and state institutions capable of stabilizing, harness-ing, and projecting industrial-capitalist energies, seizing territorial anchors abroad forpurposes of commercial penetration, and opening its doors (where it did not closethem) to immigrant labor power. As Emily Rosenberg has demonstrated, it was alsoduring these years that many of the state-corporate arrangements that would predominatein the American Century came into being: a promotional state oriented toward aidingU.S. corporate expansion into foreign markets, American companies abroad as instru-ments of U.S. foreign policy, and developmentalist ideologies that fused capitalismand social evolution under the banner of American exceptionalism.12

This era is also pivotal in historiographic terms: it was in their effort to make sense ofthese transformations that the Wisconsin School of diplomatic history first identified thesearch for foreign markets as the driving force as the driving force of U.S. foreign policy:out of the crucible of the 1890s, and U.S. exporters’ insistence that trade with China was


the path toward American global power and away from industrial-capitalist upheaval,they read patterns they traced back to the origins of the United States’ continentalempire, and forward to Vietnam War. When it comes to political-economic historiesof the United States in the world, these years continue to be uniquely fruitful to thinkabout, and think with. While later twentieth-century historians, particularly those whowork on the post-1945 period, can (if they choose) take certain system dynamics forgranted, the Gilded Age and Progressive Era makes this more difficult (if not impossible),delivering myriad examples of exigencies, improvisations, learning curves, roads nottaken, and worlds unwittingly being born. The essay’s thematic coverage and, hopefully,its implications for history-writing, stretch further back into the 19th century and forwardinto the 20th and 21st centuries. But in search of denaturalization, contingency and pol-itics, these decades are a good place from which to set out.

Among the most striking if underexplored dimensions of the “history of Americancapitalism” phenomenon is the term “American.” The question of what exactly, if any-thing, was American about American capitalism can only be asked by stretching the an-alytical frame beyond national horizons, allowing historians to think in terms ofcomparisons (and not just nation-to-nation comparisons), and cross-national connectionsand interactions. In other words, historians need transnational perspectives in order tochart the extent to which national states, social structures, and ideologies mattered.One unique hurdle faced here by scholars of the United States is the peculiar way that“American” and “capitalism” were forged together as synonyms, especially from themid-twentieth century forward, a process closely tied to both ColdWar intellectual offen-sives at home and abroad and international observers’ reflections on the United States andits transnational presence from the “outside.” For many of these actors, and the scholarswho followed their lead, the tensions and gaps between the two terms in “American cap-italism,” and the history of their fusion, did not require investigation because the phraseitself was a redundancy.To the extent that modern capitalist formations were always embedded in national in-

stitutions, it can make good sense to speak of nationalized capitalist structures, in theAmerican case and elsewhere. Distinct national policy infrastructures—subsidies, regu-lations, labor codes, welfare systems, and tax and tariff regimes, for example—socialstructures and hierarchies, and political-economic ideologies made and make capitalistpolitical economies dissimilar.13 But to degrees that the new histories have not alwaysacknowledged, capitalist power relations were foundationally transnational and global:they were the historical ground within which nationalized state power grew. Embeddingthe history of capital, then, is not only about studying the ways that state power struc-tured market relations on the “inside,” but about how it mediated relationships betweennational-political “insides” and “outsides.”14 It is for this historical reason—the geo-graphic dimensions and dynamics of capitalism—that historians of capitalism needto work at multiple, layered scales, in which the local, regional, national, and globalare neither mutually exclusive, conceived as nested inside each other, nor the onlyscalar options. Rather, as critical geographers have long argued, capitalism’s multiplescales need to be understood as always if variably present, interpenetrating, and mutu-ally defining.15

336 Paul A. Kramer

In the effort to connect more localized and nationalized histories of American capital-ism “outward,” the new historians may find it productive to collaborate with counterpartsworking under the generatively amorphous “United States in the world” brand; thesescholars, in turn, have much to learn about capitalism’s histories at local, regional, andnational scales. There is a multigenerational historiography connecting national andtransnational histories of American capitalism, a tradition in which an exciting, newchapter is now being written.16 Some of this work is self-consciously in dialogue withthe “new histories,” but much of it is being written in parallel, engaging most withother, dynamic dialogues: about modernization and development, commodity circula-tion, and labor systems, for example. In what follows, I’ll attempt to realign these liter-atures so that they might face each other more directly, for purposes of historicalinterconnection and historiographic exchange. My hope is to deepen this dialogue, tothe extent that it already exists, to convene it to the extent that it doesn’t, and, in eithercase, to render it more fluent through the provision of necessarily limited, cross-fieldtranslation services.In pursuit of tools for framing questions about American power and capitalism, con-

cepts of the empire and the imperial will prove useful. The question is not so muchwhether or not these terms successfully apprehend the United States as an entity (a ques-tion that, sadly, continues to both emit heat and absorb light in scholarly and public dis-course), but the kinds of necessary inquiries they open. When it comes to Americancapitalism, concepts of empire draw historians’ attention to the system’s expansionistcharacter, the interpenetration of corporate and state power, and the asymmetrical hierar-chy of capitalist globalization. Perhaps most importantly, it makes it more difficult—if notimpossible—for scholars to employ the depoliticizing, technocratic, and apologeticidioms of capitalist self-understanding as their own. Thinking about capitalism isgreatly aided and clarified by thinking with empire, whether historians of capitalismuse this terminology or not.17

What, if anything, is unique about the place and power of capital within U.S. imperialhistory? Here we must tread carefully: exceptionalisms of the left and right, eager toblame or celebrate the United States and capitalism for each other, lie in wait tocapture the unsuspecting.18 Most modern empire-building states joined together govern-ment and capital, subsidizing and facilitating export industries, pressing for commercialentry abroad, carving out access to “strategic” resources, building nodes of infrastructuralpower such as bases, canals, and naval stations, and cultivating corporatist relationshipsbetween state institutions and key industries. “Formal” colonial states, built to maximizeexploitation and minimize welfare, were among the places where these dynamics playedout most intensely, but nonetheless represented points along a continuum. In its ownunique way, the United States shared these characteristics with all capitalist empires.But in many settings and moments, U.S. imperial power was distinctly oriented toward

universal commodification and capital accumulation as primary goals. The usual termused to apprehend this fact is “informal empire.”19 Closer to the mark, the UnitedStates was one example of a commodifying empire, one in which the intrusion of capi-tal’s dominion into social life and the biosphere, and the extent to which the world’s re-sources served Americans’ geopolitical interests and economic well-being, served asfundamental metrics of American power, global order, and the advancement of historicaltime itself. Many saw these outcomes as interdependent, or even indistinguishable.


The distinctive fusion of national and global interest—never without deep tensions—was of special importance: if what was good for GMwas good for the United States, whatwas good for the United States was good for the world.20 It should tell historians a greatdeal that the United States’ two most ambitious, self-consciously universalist projects inimperial ideology in the twentieth century, modernization theory and neoliberalism, werepredicated on both aggrandizing the domain of capitalist power and policing the instabil-ities and upheavals that resulted. The term “informal empire,” originally invented tocapture these processes, ultimately introduced as many problems as it solved, disembed-ding commercial power from state-territorial (“formal”) holdings, reinforcing rather thanundercutting American exceptionalism (since the United States and Britain were markedas exceptionally “informal”) and suggesting that capital’s disciplines were separablefrom and looser than governmental ones.21

Territorialized power always played an indispensable role in U.S.-oriented capitalistexpansion, on the North American continent and overseas. Across the 19th centuryand beyond, it materialized as proliferating networks of rail, land offices, military forti-fications, barbed-wire enclosures, border towns, and Indian reservations. Especially afterthe 1890s, the system’s anchors and relay points included military bases, canals, coalingstations, colonial metropoles and port facilities outside the continent: irreducibly ground-ed channels through which distance-aspiring commodities, products, investment, and in-formation had to travel. But it was striking that U.S.-governed spaces overseas wereacquired not for their own sake but, as “stepping stones” to buyers elsewhere. More strik-ing, still, was the fact that much of the physical infrastructure required for U.S. capitalistexpansion was located in spaces run, at least nominally, by other states. The instrumentsof this kind of empire were the military base lease, the status-of-force agreement, and thetrade pact, each imprinted with and legalizing asymmetric power relations betweenstates.22 This approach to world power, which William A. Williams once evocativelytermed “imperial anti-colonialism,” did not (as was long thought) represent a turningaway from empire but a breakthrough in imperial history, one that liberated Americaneconomic power to a significant degree from the troublesome issues of state capacity,legitimacy, and the civic status of conquered subjects raised by running territories asone’s own.23

Projecting power in this way, however, came with still tougher challenges, namely,those involved with securing conditions that would enable profitable investment, ex-traction, and trade in political spaces over which the United States did not exercise“formal” sovereignty. Often mistaken for a minimalist mode of transnational hegemo-ny (particularly against the traditional standard of “formal,” territorial possession) thisdefinition of American power was maximalist, involving a battery of tools intended notonly to hold terrain or shore up the right kinds of elites, but to transform entire politicaleconomies: military and police training, U.S.-based political and economic expertiseand education, technical assistance, foreign loans, and the pressure of international fi-nancial institutions, sought to align foreign states and societies with U.S. geopoliticaland political-economic goals, tolerating and even promoting “sovereignty” whilestrictly policing the outer limits of national politics.24 This mode of transnational dis-cipline can be usefully understood through the concept of international empire, whichalllows scholars to move beyond unproductive, legitimating, resilient dichotomybetween ’nation’ and ‘empire.’25

338 Paul A. Kramer

Commodifying empire was maximalist not only in macro-geographic terms, but in itssocial ambitions. The destructively creative project of harnessing political-economicancien régimes to the imperatives of U.S.-oriented profit maximization requiredmaking unfamiliar social spaces legible, re-engineering production processes and laborrelations, redrawing lines between public and private, sacred and profane, and imposingnew technological and informational formats that locked in patterns of material depen-dence and expert authority, issuing intellectual monopolies on “best practices.”26 Forall these reasons, commodifying empires were necessarily empires over civil society,with their agents pursuing power over and through influential elites, associational life,educational institutions, media landscapes, and public space. Ultimately, in the Americancase, their success could be measured in the degree to which they captured utopia, insin-uating American-associated, capitalist forms, practices, and ideologies—the gospels ofprivate property, market valuation, technocratic productionism, self-maximization, andindividualized responsibility, especially—into normative understandings of the goodlife and the forward arc of time.27

The very sociopolitical reach required to create climates supportive of commodificationgenerally, and U.S. economic access specifically, broadened and sensitized Americans’definitions of what counted as opposition. Land reform, pressure on foreign capital or prop-erty, debt defaults, or too lively a political presence of left labor unions or peasant organi-zations repeatedly met U.S.-supported crackdowns. Even public expressions of hostility—or even ambivalence—toward specific projects in American power, its symbolic expres-sions, or the political-economic conditions it promoted were condemned as wholesale“anti-Americanism,” somewhere between disobedience and treason.28

The politics of capital have never been absent from the writing of the United States’history in the world, even if they were not objects of critical inquiry. Capitalismhovered somewhere near the core of what orthodox diplomatic historians, channelingthe subjects they studied, identified as the “freedom” the United States embodied and ad-vanced in the world, even where it went unmentioned (or, perhaps, especially where itwent unmentioned). Similarly, the defense of capitalism, understood as a “way oflife,” was at the heart of Cold War academic politics; it was at its sharpest in scholarlydomains like U.S. foreign relations history, where interpretations of American powerwere at stake and the lines between historian and practitioner were muddy. Particularlyduring the middle decades of the twentieth century, critical discussion of capitalism as afactor in the United States’ foreign relations was fraught with political danger, especiallywhere it was charged (however inaccurately) with parroting Soviet denunciations of U.S.diplomacy as the statecraft of America’s capitalist class.29

But more challenging accounts also had to be reckoned with. The 1920s and 1930s hadseen the rise of a robust anti-imperialist public sphere that vigorously muckraked what itsaw as corrupt entanglements of capital and U.S. state power, from the munitions indus-try to the seizure of local customs-houses by Marine-backed U.S. banks. HistorianCharles Beard, a key contributor to this milieu, stressed Americans’ search for externalmarkets and investment opportunities, and the protection of their property abroad, in hisaccount of American foreign policy.30

By the late 1950s, this scene had collapsed under ColdWar repression, whichmade theappearance of an interpretive school that placed capitalism—or, at least, the pursuit of


external markets—at the center of U.S. foreign relations all the more surprising. Inaugu-rated by William Appleman Williams’s 1959 The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, aninsurgent “Wisconsin School” took aim at the geopolitical presumptions that underwrotedominant interpretations: rather than a reluctant, defensive, and ambivalent world power,the United States had been an assertive and ambitious one; the opening of foreign marketsfor U.S. products had been at the root of policymakers’ understandings of empire, polit-ical economy, and social stability; despite their self-understanding as an anti-imperialistpeople, Americans had placed “expansion” at the center of their collective existence, ma-terially and ideologically. It was the embedding of recent U.S. foreign relations in thesedeeper histories, especially when it came to the origins of the Cold War, which provedmost explosive: rather than being pulled into the world by fascism and communism,the United States had approached them as challenges to its continuous, globalistpursuit of the “Open Door.”31

There were features of Williams’s critique that partook of Cold War nationalist sensi-bilities, rather than engaging them: its jeremiadic sense that American empire was anavoidable tragedy, its exceptionalism about the market-oriented character of Americanglobal power, its utopianism about small-town democracy. This fact may have givenWilliams’s work its particular bite: it was a self-conscious critique from the inside byan anguished native son.32 None of this insulated Williams or his students fromcharges of subversion. As the politics of empire boiled over in the 1960s and 1970s,the Wisconsin School’s “revisionist” interpretation shaped activist critiques, drawingfire from Cold Warriors and orthodox historians who, in attaching the label “NewLeft” to the school, did not intend it as a compliment. Despite this opposition, the Wis-consin School managed to powerfully foreground questions about the intersections ofU.S. foreign policy and capitalist political economy, while advancing the process (stillongoing) of dislodging the field from its organic relationship to state power and anchor-ing it in an oppositional, anti-imperialist public, a public that it helped bring intoexistence.But the Wisconsin School proved vulnerable in a number of ways and, by the turn of

the twenty-first century, its critical energies had been largely absorbed. To be sure, it hadgained new traction by engaging with dependency theory and world-systems theory, sit-uating the United States’ Open Door imperialism within a larger arc of capitalist worldhegemons and, in the process, countering the school’s inward-looking and exceptionalistfeatures.33 But strong criticisms came from varied quarters. Diplomatic historianscharged it with interpretive rigidity and monocausality—the Open Door as the continu-ous, driving force of U.S. foreign policy—and a “post-revisionist” school incorporatedits account of political economy into a more analytically pluralistic account. TheWiscon-sin School also confronted the same wave of challenges that met diplomatic historians,orthodox and revisionist, alike: the call to study “non-state” actors in domestic and inter-national civil society; to foreground culturalist modes of interpretation; and to bring gen-dered and racialized dimensions of power into the spotlight. It was ironic and, to a certaindegree, tragic, that when these critiques arose, the Wisconsin School was more oftenbracketed and by-passed rather than actively engaged and critiqued from within acommon critical project. Essential conversations—about the complex, co-productionof meaning and state power, about what transnational American capitalism and racializedand gendered power had to do with each—would have to wait.

340 Paul A. Kramer

As elsewhere, the early twenty-first-century’s capitalist crises provoked renewed at-tention to political economy among historians of U.S. foreign relations. But this was notthe Wisconsin School’s capitalism, in many respects. In general, the new scholarshiphad a more nuanced, sophisticated, and dynamic account of the interpenetration ofU.S. state power and private interests and their shifting, internal balances of power; itpaid closer attention to the specific disciplinary grids that made capital’s extensioninto distinct social settings possible. Taken collectively, it had a more holisticaccount of capitalist economics, linking older questions about “open door” access toquestions about foreign direct investment, resource extraction, debt, tariff regimes,labor control, infrastructure, and military mobilization, for example. It was morealive to questions of thinking: the ways that commodified social relations bridgingthe United States and the world had to be imagined and argued for, and the complicated,sometimes unforeseen itineraries that political-economic ideas traveled. It was moretransnational, approaching actors, settings, institutions, and ideologies within andoutside the United States on a more analytically equal footing. It was attuned to thecrucial roles played by intermediating elites “on the ground” with their own interestsand ideas, and explored the affinities between commodifying empire and authoritarianpower.34 Finally, it was alert to capital’s limits: the places where commodification ranup against its own contradictions, intra-elite frictions, popular challenges, logisticalobstacles, or nature’s rebellions.It makes sense to begin with the burgeoning historical literature on transnational pro-

duction and circulation of commodities. As a tool for tracking the idiosyncratic opera-tions of capitalist social relations as they bind together distant locales, commoditieshave understandable historiographic appeal as a kind of traceable dye throughcomplex circulatory systems. The best works in this field provide methodological inspi-ration to both historians of capitalism and historians of the United States in the world intheir integrating of environmental histories, histories of technology, material-culturalstudies, labor history, and economic history, and their interweaving of geographicscales. To the extent that traditional narratives of capitalism have tended toward self-nat-uralization, historians have successfully countered this tendency by reconstructing thehistorically specific challenges of harnessing labor, land, capital, and technologytoward the goal of transforming nature into resource.35

Commodity histories also require scholars to rethink their studies’ geographic scales.If historians sometimes juggle a short, clumsy list of spatial frames—local, regional, na-tional, global—following the goods requires them to think in more granular ways aboutparticular places and how processes of extraction, production, distribution, and consump-tion connected them, and subordinated each to the needs of others. By the advent of in-dustrialization in the United States, there were few commodities whose invention was notimplicated to some degree in political-economic processes unfolding on the other side ofthe globe. In complicated ways, histories of U.S. imperial power can be read in andbetween the migrations of guano, tobacco, sugar, coca, bananas, grapes, pineapples,coffee, cattle, cotton, timber, tin, rubber, uranium, coal, and oil provided by resourcefulscholars in recent years.36 So, too, can maps of the United States’ transnational impact betraced from the odysseys of U.S. industrial exports, from nineteenth-century guns andharvesters to twentieth-century automobiles to twenty-first-century genetically modifiedseeds.37 Of rising historical interest are tourism’s commodification of places, peoples,


and cultures, which both transformed its destinations and provided privileged Americans,compelling, problematic visions of the world.38

Each of these commodification processes was characterized by distinct patterns ofpower and contestation, allying and opposing economic actors in ways that muddledneat, conventional dichotomies of monolithic U.S. imposition and local/national resis-tance. Transnational enterprises operated by Americans were sometimes opposed byU.S.-based competitors, for example, and supported by foreign officials and elites thatstood to profit from them. Each confronted varied forms of friction and resistance: nation-alization, boycotts, property destruction, smuggling, and black marketing and policystructures aimed at preserving local peoples’ sovereignty over resources.39 Of particularinterest to historians of the United States in the world, particularly those who focus onU.S. foreign relations, are the creation of “strategic resources”: commodities whose pro-duction, control, and monopolization were seen as critical to states, particularly, but notexclusively, in military-technological terms. The earliest of these was coal, whichemerged as a major factor in U.S. foreign policy in the nineteenth century, as the devel-opment of coal-fired, ocean-going steam vessels and programs in U.S. navy-buildingmade access to coaling stations and fuel depots more urgent, especially as the necessarymeans to secure the United States’ post-1898 island colonies.40 In the post-1945 period,the Interior Department participated in the Point IV program to facilitate the extraction offoreign minerals by U.S. companies to replenish petroleum, lead, copper, tin, and irondepleted by the postwar economic boom.41 Cold War requirements for uranium in theinterest of American nuclear supremacy allied the United States with extractive, racistregimes in colonial and postcolonial Africa.42 During the same years, the U.S. govern-ment sought to monopolize state and corporate access to South American coca for pur-poses of military and pharmaceutical “readiness” through the repression and stigmatizingof “addiction” and indigenous use.43

At the heart not only of U.S. military-industrial logistics, but the American socialmodel at its core—from suburbia to agribusiness—the United States’ vast demand forpetroleum placed the support of oil-supplying regimes in the Middle East at the centerof U.S. geopolitics. The United States’ military and financial support for these states,both despite their authoritarianism and because of it, predicated the realization of con-sumer freedom in the United States—the foundation of the mid-twentieth-centurysocial-democratic compact—on political repression and violence elsewhere. U.S. re-source dependence subjected the Middle East to a destructive cycle of American inva-sion, war, and occupation: oil traded for blood.44 In some ways, however, the UnitedStates’ most strategic resources were generated from within, from mineral deposits tosubsidized, technologically advanced agriculture. During the Cold War, this mass-pro-duction advantage allowed the United States to leverage foreign aid as a versatile politicalweapon, issuing grain surpluses to compliant states and withholding it from disobedientones; projecting humanitarian talk, while wielding carrots as sticks.45

Closely related to this scholarship is work on the transnational and imperial dimen-sions of capitalist consumption, the everyday life of the Open Door.46 Across the Amer-ican Century, getting cigarettes into the hands of Chinese street vendors and movies intoFrench cinemas was hard work. It meant overcoming logistical hurdles, competing withlocal producers, cultivating ties with intermediaries, batting down obstacles raised bygovernments (especially tariffs), inventing demand (sometimes against the grain of

342 Paul A. Kramer

entrenched social practices), and confronting nativist charges of cultural “invasion” or“Americanization.”47 The hubristic notion that American goods and practices were supe-rior, exceptional, and inevitable ran aground repeatedly, particularly when it came toissues of gender and sexuality, where mass consumption’s destabilizing effects on patri-archy (both actual and imagined), prompted masculinist backlash.48 But the idea that mo-dernity itself had a national brand proved seductive, as more and more of the world’speoples saw corners of their bathrooms, kitchens, and street corners overtaken by prod-ucts they identified (rightly or wrongly) with the United States.49 Particularly after 1945,American mass production and ostensibly democratizing mass consumption moved tothe epicenter of U.S. national-imperial imagery, symbolic of the United States’ excep-tional and exemplary character.50 Historians took up the actor’s category “Americaniza-tion” as the organizing principle of a diverse literature on U.S. industrial and commercial-cultural impacts, especially in Europe. By the turn of the twenty-first century, however,the “Americanization” literature had come under serious challenge by scholars who crit-icized the concept’s nationalizing thrust and emphasized both wide-ranging resistance toAmericanizing efforts and the distinct, non-American forms taken by consumer cultureand political-economic life in societies subjected to them.51

Despite fantasies that, when the world’s consumer desires were unfettered, it automat-ically bought American, the U.S. state played active roles in promoting the transnationalprojection of American consumer goods, from diplomatic pressure against tariff walls, todata collection on the world’s markets, to mandates that its foreign aid be spent on Amer-ican products, to the provisioning of GIs with chewing gum.52 As early as the 1890s, thenotion that transnational commercial expansion alone would steady the United States’turbulent, overproducing industrial economy—while delivering an escape from domesticpressures for redistribution—made the foreign consumption of its goods appear to be amatter of existential significance.53 Consumer goods also flowed into the UnitedStates from elsewhere, underwriting the mass consumption politics at the heart of NewDeal social democracy and implicating American consumers in what were often hierar-chical, exploitative, and violent relations of production. Sometimes products arrivedstamped with their origins—bearing exoticist value, imperial privilege, or racializedmenace—while other goods of foreign origin went unmarked, with Americans quietlyassimilating them, and the worlds that built them, into their daily existence.54

One of the most needed, arriving literatures deals with the understudied role of legalinstitutions, procedures, and discourses in the transnational expansion of U.S. capitalfrom the late nineteenth century forward.55 Inquiries into these relationships have beenobscured in part by divisions of historiographic labor between legal and diplomatic his-torians, but even moreso by century-old ideological oppositions between law, on the onehand, and empire and its conjugates (gunboat diplomacy, great power politics) on theother. This dichotomy served the professionalizing ambitions of both internationallawyers and legal scholars (eager to distinguish themselves from sordid, imperial mach-inations), and “realist” diplomatic historians (who associated the legal realm with fuzzy“idealism” and multilateralism). But scholars working at the intersection of U.S. legalhistory and empire history, drawing inspiration from critical, imperial histories of inter-national law, are fundamentally challenging this dubious distinction even as they histor-icize it. As they have demonstrated, law was an indispensable tool in the hands ofimperial states and internationalizing capital.56 At the global level, the capacity of


states to protect property relations—particularly to secure the property of foreigners—was built into the fundamental criteria for membership in the family of civilized states.States deemed incapable of guaranteeing the safety and property of foreigners (especiallyWestern ones), were subjected to stigmatizing regimes of extraterritorial legal controlthat, in turn, facilitated commercial penetration by investors and merchants.57 Therewere also the seemingly more mundane ways that international legal regimes createdthe institutional environment needed to stabilize property rights and exchange relations,whether through copyright, patent law, adulteration rules, agreements that standardizedmeasurement, or treaties governing the extradition of embezzlers.58

By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American policymakers were ad-vancing a self-consciously legalist approach to American power, in which law mightserve as a vehicle for American hegemony, rather than a barrier to it. Law often under-wrote military intervention, rather than precluding it: the 1901 Platt Amendment, underwhose terms the United States repeatedly landed troops in Cuba, was written into theCuban Constitution at American insistence. The 1918 Webb-Pomerene Act’s exemptingof U.S. corporations from antitrust law when operating abroad aided large-scale capitalistenterprises in their efforts to gain foreign footholds. U.S. foreign investors whose claimswere challenged appealed to the international-legal standard of protection—foreigners’rights to appeal to their home governments in cases of disputes—to secure diplomaticand military pressure from the U.S. government to protect their property against host-country challenges. The imperial politics of law often played out over questions of juris-diction: whether U.S.-based companies involved in transnational property disputes oughtto be able to get their cases heard in U.S. courts, rather than foreign ones. In such cases,appeals to international law were not appeals to neutral, apolitical justice, but plain effortsto defeat nationalist claimants by expanding American legal jurisdiction at the expense oflocal courts.59

Among the most definitive ways that U.S. legal institutions structured transnationalcapitalism was in marking the boundary between the United States and its “outside.”One of the most essential policy domains here was the charged question of the tariff.High tariffs generated state revenues by harnessing the forces of transnational commerceand monopolized the nation’s expansive domestic markets for U.S.-based producers, butalso raised consumer prices and risked retaliatory tariffs feared by U.S. exporters. Therewas also the question of enforcement: whether U.S. customs officials would administertariff codes to Progressive Era standards of disinterested efficiency or collude in smug-gling by extracting bribes or abetting fraud.60 Similar issues confronted the U.S. state’scontrol of migration, itself a lucrative mode of international commerce. Unhappy with thepermeability of state and local enforcement to private interests, and the perceived dangersof state-level immigration control, federal officials took control of immigration at the endof the nineteenth century, and federalized immigration law would soon become a keydeterminant of the legal boundaries of the U.S. labor market. It was around tariff and mi-gration flashpoints that the United States defined its legal relationships to its post-1898colonies, ultimately opting for the ambiguous language of “unincorporation” for its over-seas territories, and “non-alien nationals” for their inhabitants. These legal novelties fa-cilitated the transit of investment capital, colonial products, and laborers with“U.S. national” status both between metropole and colony and between colonies,

344 Paul A. Kramer

while insulating metropolitan U.S. politics from the full membership and agency of ra-cialized others.61

One developing body of scholarship has mapped the complex ways in which transna-tional debt regimes built and structured asymmetrical power relations between the UnitedStates and other parts of the world. Some of this literature has foregrounded the expan-sionary efforts of financial institutions in search of new sources of investment returns incredit-poor societies. At the intersection of banks’ restless profit-seeking and the aspira-tions of local, modernizing elites (for political monopoly, capital accumulation, the liq-uidation of commons, export development, and conspicuous consumption, for example),transnational loans locked non-U.S. political economies into rigid, subordinating rela-tionships to U.S. financial institutions. U.S. state agencies played indispensable rolesin brokering, organizing and enforcing many of these arrangements; U.S. diplomats ne-gotiated the deals and appointed financial “experts,” often drawn from academia, tooversee compliance with debt repayment, and the expansive, disciplinary interventionsbelieved necessary to secure it, from currency reform to administrative overhauls tocustoms receiverships. When workers, peasants, and elite outgroups challenged thesesystems on the grounds of exploitation, autocracy, or corruption, U.S. Marines wereclose by, landing repeatedly in the Caribbean, for example, to violently repress rebellionand to restore outward-facing order and peace.62

While historians traditionally characterized these interventions as expressions of “in-formal empire,” the term’s utility crumbles in the face of the U.S. government’s activerole in building them and the tightening spirals of discipline they brought into being: ex-tractive taxation, the crushing of labor activism, the seizure of smallholdings, and the en-closure of commons, in particular. Particularly in transnational contexts where powergradients tilted in Americans’ favor, finance politics siphoned off both wealth andself-determination. Long after the close of the “dollar diplomacy” era, finance structuredAmerican geopolitics profoundly. U.S.-brokered loans played a key role in ColdWar cli-entage, alongside military and policing training and weapons sales, allowing authoritar-ian kleptocracies to sustain themselves, while burying their societies beneath intractabledebt obligations that survived the regimes themselves. By the late twentieth century,transnational loans became one of the defining modalities of U.S. imperial power, asagencies like the IMF required the opening, privatization, and deregulation of loan-receiving economies, extending neoliberal practices while constructing U.S.-centeredrelations of financial tribute.Scholarship on the intersections of war, militarization, and capitalism dates at least as

far back the interwar, anti-imperialist, scholar-activist moment, with its critical attentionto the entanglements of bankers and gunboats. Their interventions, which represented tiesbetween war and capital as more systemic than anomalous, had to contend with a broadtendency within the era’s Anglo-American liberal thought to sharply distinguish “war”and “commerce.” The dichotomy was compelling because of the many, seeminglynatural distinctions it drew upon: atavism/modernity, state/private, coercion/voluntarism,masculine/feminine, for example. It also shaped, and was shaped by, intellectual divi-sions of labor within the social sciences and humanities, with the study of war-makingand military institutions largely reserved to practitioners concerned with normativeand operational questions, and capitalism the special province of business schools andeconomics departments.


There were critical advances, however, during the era of the Vietnam War, as somepolitical scientists turned their attention to the workings of the “military-industrialcomplex,” Eisenhower’s helpful hyphenate.63 Historians are now catching up and inno-vating, mapping new crossroads of war, capital, and military empire in U.S. history,while providing these intersections much-needed historical arcs. They are looking at sol-diers as workers whose state employers who recast their labor through elaborate rituals ofmartial, patriotic “service,” and the laborers they contracted and coerced: cooks, carriers,road crews, translators, and sex workers among them.64 They are exploring histories ofwhat one scholar calls “economic geopolitics,” the ways that empire-builders conceivedof the relationship between militarized state power, the control of external market andresources, and social stability at “home.”65 They are examining the federal state’swartime roles in marshalling industrial employers and organized labor and brokering re-lationships between them, which had lasting effects on political-economic balances ofpower.66 They are charting the ways that massive federal outlays for military production,research, and infrastructure, particularly since 1940, transformed the United States’ po-litical economy and social geography, shifting population to the South and West, andgiving rise to a contractor state whose corporate arms possessed formidable lobbying ca-pacities.67 They are also studying the economic impacts of U.S. military invasion on theground. Wartime and postwar economies were dense with fire sales, lucrative windfalls,and plaguing uncertainties. U.S. military infrastructure proved to be a vast, format-making machine that wrenched occupied societies towards American industrial stan-dards, expertise and product lines, with transport hubs and corridors that serviced bothmilitary and commercial connections.68

Historians are also examining the impact of military institutions on the politics of laborand social welfare, looking at the transit of militarized discipline into ostensibly civilianlabor contexts and the militarized character of American social citizenship, its compara-tively fragile and penurious socioeconomic rights gathering in proximity to militaryservice.69 Particularly in making sense of the United States’ “all-volunteer” militarysince the 1970s, they are looking at the role of economic dislocation in shaping theU.S. military’s working-class character, registered by African Americans’ and Latinos’disproportionate military presence and recruiters’ promises of occupational and socialmobility.70 The pressure of neoliberal politics against the U.S. military’s welfare state,and in advancing privatized, military contracting (for base construction, service labor,security, and war-fighting), has come under increasing scholarly scrutiny.71 Finally,there are studies of the economic dimensions of U.S. military basing: the labor relationsand conflicts between base authorities and the local workers upon whom they relied; theimpact of American military spending on elite and popular acceptance of compromisedsovereignty; the remolding of local political economies to cater to American soldiers’demands; and the racialized, gendered, and class dynamics of sexual labor in militarizedsettings.72 Taken together, this scholarship illustrates the ways that, especially sinceWorld War II, military resources, institutions, and priorities have shaped U.S. politi-cal-economic orders to such a degree that the search for a distinctly “civilian” Americancapitalism is elusive, if not quixotic.Also rising into view for historians of the United States in the world are relationships

between transnational migration and American capitalism. Migration was, in itself, a vastbusiness enterprise, from the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans; to the railroads and

346 Paul A. Kramer

steamship companies that built themselves transporting “free” migrants; to the bankers,merchants, and compatriot entrepreneurs who loaned themmoney for ticket purchases; tothe smugglers and labor brokers who recruited and deceived them in port cities andborder towns.73 The availability of vulnerable workers out of place in American factories,mills, mines, ranches, and farms was one factor that enabled the meteoric rise of U.S. eco-nomic power. Not for nothing did labor-intensive industries campaign against restriction-ist legislation, and in favor of occupationally-defined admission and state-brokered“guest worker” programs that could block upward pressure on wages and create“perfect workers” characterized by relative rightlessness and deportability.74 To theextent that policymakers responded to these pressures, opening America’s gates to thekinds of workers employers sought, immigration policy delivered state supports for cap-italist enterprise. It was understood as such by many American workers and by organizedlabor, which made America’s gateways as contested as its factory floors, advancing pro-tests that were, to varying degrees, unionist, populist, nativist, and racist.Employer power played a key role in at least three overarching features of the twen-

tieth-century U.S. immigration regime. First was an aggressive capitalist biopoliticswith gendered and racialized coordinates: beginning in the late nineteenth century, immi-grants were barred if deemed “likely to become a public charge,” a term tightly identifiedwith single women and mothers, the disabled, and peoples understood to be congenitallyweak or possessing unruly work habits.75 Second was a durable, evolving anti-radical-ism: from Progressive Era anti-anarchism to Cold War anti-communism, an immigrant’sassociation with anti-capitalist forces provided elastic justifications for exclusion, sur-veillance, and deportation.76 Third were openings and exemptions for those possessingwealth, education, skill, and “civilization:” from exempted Chinese merchants movingbetween San Francisco warehouses and Shanghai shops, to information technologyworkers recruited through the corporate-university nexus, the presence and mobility(if not the citizenship and social membership) of those understood to aid American pro-ductivity and profit were built into the U.S. boundary regime.77

Among the most generative crossings currently developing between histories of cap-italism and transnational U.S. histories are those traversed by histories of labor, capital,and empire. As this multi-sited research is demonstrating, the question of how vulnera-ble, inexpensive labor could be secured has long preoccupied a wide variety of Americanemployers, policymakers, and commentators, from the garlic fields of California, to thesugar plantations of Hawaii, to the world-spanning U.S. merchant marine.78 In theirtransnational cartographies of labor demand, mass migration—brokered or engineeredby employers and state agents to varying degrees—played a fundamental role. So didthe threat and reality of plant relocation. By the late twentieth century, the placementof U.S.-run industrial enterprises was often determined less by proximity to raw materialinputs or consumer markets than by prospective workers’ relative exposure to hunger anddanger. Poverty, political repression, social division, the weakness of independentunions, and absence of labor regulations all had their attractions.79

Transnational labor regimes, both within and outside the United States, were sites inwhich sociopolitical hierarchies were enacted and enforced, as employers often soughtto deepen and formalize already existing social cleavages of language, race, religion,and nationality among workers.80 National-territorial borders proved to be an essentialtool of transnational labor discipline: officially confining workers in the global South


to their regions, while Northern capital and goods ranged freely; stripping trans-bordermigrant workers in the United States of formal avenues of rights, redress, and social-welfare protections. U.S. national boundaries also disciplined American workers,whose discontent, sometimes directed upwards, was also frequently channeled down-ward and outward against “foreigners” who purportedly threatened them with actualor potential competition. But migrant workers also built cultures of resistance acrossborders, bringing organizing and protest strategies with them and developing new, some-times far-flung solidarities animated and organized by popular culture, diasporic imagi-naries, and the expansive geographies of empire itself.81

Workers also played important roles in the shaping of U.S. foreign policy, including itscapitalist dimensions. From the era of World War I through the VietnamWar, the Amer-ican Federation of Labor and AFL-CIO signed on to corporatist relationships with theU.S. government and American industrialists, animated by the understanding that itsworkers had much to gain from the growth of American state power and the geographicexpansion of American capital, andmuch to contribute to their success. Especially duringthe Cold War, in places that were more or less directly under U.S. supervision or control(occupied Japan, South Vietnam) and areas that were not (postwar Italy, Brazil), U.S.labor organizers attempted to spread the gospel of “free trade unionism:” bread-and-butter issues, autonomy from state and party structures, and strident anti-communism.They sponsored political counterparts and subverted and sidelined more radical alterna-tives, ultimately receiving generous federal funds for these purposes, including from theCIA. For much of the American Century, having the right kind of organized labor was anelement of U.S. commodifying empire.Organized labor’s compact with empire cemented its ties with the U.S. state, while also

sparking dissent. The AFL-CIO leadership’s dogged commitment to the war in Vietnam,for example, prompted breakaway union opposition, while undermining labor’s ties toNew Deal coalition partners. The impacts of American labor’s empire-building variedgreatly from place to place: in South Vietnam, it succeeded for a time in sponsoringthe Vietnamese Confederation of Labor’s variant of “free trade unionism,” while inBrazil and Japan, unionists fought back against American-style organizing, suspectingit—not incorrectly—of complicity with the U.S. state and corporate interests. Amongits significant impacts, these efforts deepened fissures between organized labor and theleft in the United States, and helped accommodate white workers to military intervention-ism, neoliberal retrenchment, and Republican rule through a martial-masculinist, raciallycharged, politically exploitable imperial patriotism.82

While the racialized dimensions of American global power have long been researched,studies of the complex intersections of race, capital, and empire are now developing. Asthey do, historians are learning more about the political-economic dimensions of racial-ization and the racializing operations of capitalism both within and across nationalborders.83 American-led production settings abroad, for example, were crucibles of cap-italist racialization, as plantation managers, factory foremen, and social engineers typol-ogized laborers on the basis of their propensities for work and revolt, arraying them alongdivide-and-rule grids of color, nationality and language that did much to carve out thesocial fissures that were then cast as naturally occurring. Until at least the mid-to-latetwentieth century, outposts of US economic, military, and colonial and economicpower around the world—bases, plantations, oil enclaves—were rigidly segregated, a

348 Paul A. Kramer

spatial choice understood to be economically rational by their architects. In the PanamaCanal Zone, for example, race had (or was) currency, in the form of stratified “gold” and“silver” payrolls that divided white American workers from most West Indian andAfrican American workers.84

In myriad contexts, racialized exception and capitalist hyper-exploitation were tightlyfastened; for the racially-dominant, non-white peoples’ descent-based inferiorities ofblood or culture permitted and required modes of extraction, discipline and violencethat differed in degree and kind from those to which white people, even the relativelypoor and powerless, were subjected. Racialized modes of power and differentiationwere often built around specifically capitalist criteria, with gradations of superiorityand inferiority measured in degrees of labor discipline, accumulation, consumption, eco-nomic reason, and financial trustworthiness. During the “dollar diplomacy” era, forexample, US government agencies and US-based banks, working in league with localelites, justified their exceptionalizing regimes of political-economic discipline in the Ca-ribbean and Asia through a relentless calculus that found loan-receiving societies bothwanting in self-control and inviting of outside intervention. Such controls provedmobile across imperial geographies linked and stratified by racialized hierarchy, aswhen German colonialists attempted to transplant subordinating, export-orientedNew South cotton cultivation to colonized Togo.85

Despite their mutually reinforcing character, capitalist and racialized hierarchies couldnot always be made to align. At the global level, there was the challenge of modernizingJapan, which, in defeating Russia in the early 20th century, interrupted hegemonic equiv-alences between Eurocentric origin, industrial-capitalist development, and imperial dom-ination. On smaller scales, there were hosts of subaltern elites—merchants, smallbusinessmen, landowners, compradors, religious leaders, converts to Christianity—that pressed against totalized racialized enclosures, sometimes in the name of broadlydefined liberation, elsewhere in the name of exemptions and privileges that would prop-erly reflect their economic and political standing and their civilizational distinction frombarbaric masses that could be legitimately oppressed. Here it is advantageous to identify aspectrum from absolutizing to civilizing modes of racial distinction: the former resistedpolitical concessions to the wealth, education, and political power, while the latter, bettersuited to post-colonial capitalisms, extended conditional power and membership to thosewho could demonstrate moral, bodily, sexual, and economic self-mastery.86

Among the most compelling developments in recent scholarship on capitalism—botha cause and result of denaturalization—has been a full realization of the importance ofmodes of knowing in extending, consolidating, and defending capitalist social relations.Conceiving of the world as consisting of resources and relationships that were eithercommodities or needing commodification required intellectual work, particularlywhere capitalizing imaginaries ran up against a universe of discrepant political econo-mies: domains of social life partitioned off from market valuation and transactionbehind walls of sacredness, tradition, domesticity, nation, or sentiment. As capitalism’sadvocates sought its advance across these barricades, and languages of self-recognitionthrough which they could identify each other, their ideological inventions drew upon, re-inforced, and transformed their era’s prevailing social vocabularies, whether organic,mechanistic, martial, historical, or religious. By the twentieth century, these ideologieswere being professionalized and scientized as they took root within academia. The


Gilded Age and Progressive era saw scholarly pitched battles over both the normativearrangements of society, state and economy and their conceptualization; the emergenceby the late 20th century of the reifying category of “the economy” as an object of inquiryrepresented a triumph of disembedding.87

Historians of the United States in the world are in a unique position to historicizecapitalism’s many knowledge regimes, studying multiple societies with often divergentpolitical-economic ideas, practices, and institutions. They are avidly charting transfersand convergences, frictions and incommensurabilities, at capitalism’s internal and exter-nal frontiers. Industrial employers, colonial officials, labor experts, and social scientistsscoured the world for techniques of labor control, searches that straddled or ignored con-ventional boundaries between empires, between colonies and metropoles, and betweenmilitary and civilian domains.88 Botanists and biologists traded reports on profitableflora and fauna and the ecologies that sustained them, while mineralogists combed sub-terranean spaces for investment opportunities.89 Rival powers’ naval authorities translat-ed each other’s canonical texts on the importance of fleet strength to the protection oftheir subjects’ overseas investments, the extension of trade, and the building of politicalconsensus.90 Many exchanges involved quarrels over who ought to control the means ofstandardization. Distant agricultural and industrial scientists fastened together by produc-tion processes, for example, argued over the proper means to assess and certify thequality and value of their commodities as they moved across long distances.91 Bankagents seeking to carve out footholds in foreign economies struggled to make unfamiliar,local assessments of creditworthiness align with their own.92 Other interactions involvedthe self-conscious diffusion of particular models of capitalist development: moderniza-tion theories in Cold War classrooms and neoliberal economics on the world’s multiply-ing screens, backed by technocratic state authority and the hard hand of internationallenders.93 Equally noteworthy, however, were the knowledge systems built by capital’scritics and opponents. These included American progressives seeking social-politicalmodels for a less violent and unequal capitalism in reformist Europe and its peripheries,late 20th-century activists in pursuit of an alternative globalization that took labor rightsand environmental protection into account, and international socialists and anarchists,whose practices of knowing society, politics, and economies were crafted to defeat cap-ital’s reign.94

Among themost enduring knowledge regimes born in the context of U.S. capital’s trans-national expansion were intellectual efforts sponsored in the name of international educa-tion, philanthropy, humanitarianism, and law. Late nineteenth- and twentieth-centuryProtestant missionary movements, active not only in conversion, but in medicine, publichealth, and education, sustained themselves not only on Sunday collections, but large do-nations fromAmerican corporate philanthropists.95 Andrew Carnegie’s steel capital under-wrote wide-ranging efforts to promote international law, sublimating the violence ofHomestead into visions of perpetual peace.96 Corporate foundations sponsored internation-al student migrations the goal of which was a convergent, worldly elite whose clubby, fra-ternal familiarities would cement a fractiousworld together from the top.97 So, too, did theysupport self-consciously international organizations—trade organizations, professional as-sociations, the Red Cross—that scholars would gather under the heading of “civil society.”Within these settings and at their crossings, a new kind of imperial, cosmopolitan glob-

alism was born, one that detached peace from justice, mobile elites from the empires that

350 Paul A. Kramer

propelled them, and the objects of their earnest criticisms—extreme nationalist, racialand religious chauvinism, great power machinations and military aggression,especially—from inquiries into their world’s vertical political-economic and racial-colonialordering.98 Given this transnational bourgeois public sphere’s birth in an age of revolu-tionary agitation over the “social question,” it is perhaps not surprising that its partici-pants often attributed intolerance, violence, and militarism to an inherently bellicoseworking class whose disenfranchisement by far-seeing elites was in their own largerinterest, even if this fact was not always clear to them. Here it was not so much that chor-tling capitalists drafted world maps in the image of their financial interests, but that bour-geois internationalism’s structuring habitus—elite membership, college ties, fluency inthe right languages, first-class steamer cabins—quietly nudged certain questions out ofthe frame, if never completely. This geopolitical imaginary, with its emphasis ofglobal openness to capital and trade, civil society, and elite mobility as the touchstonesof world peace and order, was a key component of American liberal internationalism, thedominant political shape of mid-to-late twentieth century U.S. imperial power. Impor-tantly for present purposes, its celebration of a self-aware transnational civil society asa stabilizing, progressive force, analytically severable from its enabling matrix ofcapital and empire, significantly informed the themes, methods and questions of whatcame to be known as “international history.”99

It can be tempting to read the histories and historiographies sketched above as occu-pying a space “out there,” complementary to national histories of U.S. political-economiclife but ultimately separable from them. It may be easier to approach them in this waythan otherwise, running as it does with the grooves of canonical literatures that mostlyend at the national boundary. But to do so would be to miss something fundamentalabout the mercurial, border-crossing character of capital and the complex embeddednessof U.S. national power in transnational contexts. Whatever one invests in the “American”part of “American capitalism,” it has always been a profoundly transnational, imperialand global phenomenon. Much of the asphalt used to pave the United States’ burgeoningearly twentieth-century cities—the engines and symbols of industrial capitalism—wasextracted by an American company from a giant pool of tar pitch in Venezuela.Profits brought in by U.S. companies operating abroad, from Caribbean fruit toPersian Gulf oil, were funneled into American electoral politics, where they had an out-sized impact on “domestic” configurations of power. The AFL’s and AFL-CIO’s insis-tence, from the early twentieth century through the Cold War, that the world’s workersneeded politics no more radical than their own, played a role in undermining Americanworkers’ capacities to successfully resist corporate power and political retrenchment at“home.”Modernization and development projects unfolded simultaneously in SoutheastAsian “strategic hamlets” and U.S. urban cores, and lessons about political-economicbackwardness, uplift, and police power were carried between these settings in waysthat blurred lines between national-imperial outsides and insides. Contestation overAmerican investment in apartheid South Africa sparked the most vibrant anti-imperial,anti-racist movement in the late twentieth-century United States. These transnational dy-namics’ implications for the United States is not their only feature of interest, nor theirmost important one, but they can provide a convincing counter to the still-formidable


tendency to frame American history, including political-economic history, as somethingapart from the world.At the same time, historians of American capitalism clearly have much to teach schol-

ars seeking to transnationalize U.S. history. Specifically, they may be able to assist astransnational historians move past their own, moment of lamentable hype, when the his-torical study of cross-border flows was invested not only with reasonable, unobjection-able, anti-exceptionalist hopes (the United States as a “nation among nations”), butexuberant cosmopolitan fantasies of a mobile, interconnected world of capital, goods, in-formation and (some) people. As this moment and its post-Cold War triumphalism beginto recede, political-economic historians may remind transnationalists that their task wasnot to provide present-day neoliberal globalism a useable past, but among other things, toreconstruct and analyze high-stakes, multi-scale struggles over resources, economicpower, and material survival. Their own attempts to embed histories of capitalistpower in law, state, and society might inspire analogous efforts to embed US foreignpolicy-making in culture, civil society, and transnational contexts.From this critical angle of vision, the late 20th century the United States was not,

simply a “nation among nations”; it was a military-economic power of unprecedentedreach, a commodifying, international empire, one of whose defining fictions wasnation-among-nations parity itself. Even as historians of capitalism continue toprovide increasingly subtle, wide-ranging accounts of the United States’ political-eco-nomic history, they may play a decisive role in moving the historiography of the USin the world towards its next phase, and inquiries into the production and contestationof transnational inequalities called for by an ever-more integrated, divided world.

NOTES

This essay is dedicated to the memory of Patrick Wolfe. My thanks to Megan Black, Dirk Bönker, Ben-jamin Coates, Christopher Dietrich, Walter Licht, Daniel Margolies, Amy Offner, Jeffrey Sklansky, MichaelThompson, Christy Thornton, and especially Noam Maggor, for their comments, assistance, critiques, andencouragement.

1For assessments of the field, see Jeffrey Sklansky, “The Elusive Sovereign: New Intellectual and SocialHistories of Capitalism,” Modern Intellectual History 9:11 (2012): 233–48; Seth Rockman, “What Makes theHistory of Capitalism Newsworthy?,” Journal of the Early Republic 34 (Fall 2014): 439–66; Louis Hyman,“WhyWrite the History of Capitalism?” SymposiumMagazine (July 8, 2013); Sven Beckert, “History of Amer-ican Capitalism” in American History Now, eds. Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr (Philadelphia: Temple UniversityPress, 2011): 314–35; and Sven Beckert et al., “Interchange: The History of Capitalism,” Journal of AmericanHistory 101:2 (2014): 503–36; Michael Zakim and Gary J. Kornblith, eds., Capitalism Takes Command: TheSocial Transformation of Nineteenth Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

2Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston:Beacon Press, 2001 [1944]); Fred Block and Margaret R. Somers, The Power of Market Fundamentalism:Karl Polanyi’s Critique (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).

3See, for example,Meg Jacobs,William J. Novak, and Julian E. Zelizer, eds., The Democratic Experiment:New Directions in American Political History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Karen Orrenand Stephen Skowronek, The Search for American Political Development (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2004); William J. Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Brian Balogh, A Government Out of Sight: TheMystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2009); Brian Balogh, The Associational State: American Governance in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia:University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); James T. Sparrow, William J. Novak, and Stephen W. Sawyer, eds.,Boundaries of the State in U.S. History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); William J. Novak, “The

352 Paul A. Kramer

Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State,” American Historical Review 113:3 (June 2008): 752–72; and responsesby John Fabian Witt, Gary Gerstle, and Julia Adams; Gary Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox ofAmerican Government from the Founding to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).

4For an exemplary account of the contingent and contested politics of capital in the late 19th century UnitedStates, see NoamMaggor, “To ‘Coddle and Caress These Great Capitalists’: Eastern Money and the Politics ofMarket Integration in the American West,” forthcoming, American Historical Review.

5Among the key works in this literature are Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire inthe Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013);Walter Johnson, Soulby Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); SvenBeckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2014); Edward E. Baptist, The Half HasNever Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014); StephanieSmallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 2007); Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Bal-timore (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). For an earlier comparative work that discussescertain slave-based planter societies as “bourgeois,” see Eugene Genovese, The World the SlaveholdersMade: Two Essays in Interpretation (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969). On the capitalism/slavery debate,see John J. Clegg, “Capitalism and Slavery,” Critical Historical Studies 2:2 (Fall 2015): 281–304; WalterJohnson, “The Pedestal and the Veil: Rethinking the Capitalism/Slavery Question,” Journal of the Early Repub-lic 24 (Summer 2004): 299–308; Stephanie Smallwood, “Commodified Freedom: Interrogating the Limits ofAnti-Slavery Ideology in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 24:2 (Summer 2004): 289–98;Seth Rockman, “The Unfree Origins of American Capitalism” in The Economy of Early America: HistoricalPerspectives & New Directions, ed. Cathy Matson (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,2006), 335–61. Foundational works that explore slavery’s relationship to capitalism include W. E. B.DuBois, Black Reconstruction (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1935); C. L. R. James, The Black Jaco-bins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1963 [1938]);Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944).

6Hyman, “Why Write the History of Capitalism?”7For an illuminating account of the emergence of the term “capitalism,” see Michael Merrill, “How Cap-

italism Got Its Name,” Dissent 61:4 (Fall 2014): 87–92.8Things were not helped by overly enthusiastic press coverage: Jennifer Schuessler, “In History Depart-

ments, It’s Up with Capitalism,” New York Times, Apr. 6, 2013.9Daniel Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).10For a useful introduction, see Chris Hann andKeith Hart,Economic Anthropology: History, Ethnography,

Critique (Cambridge: Polity, 2011).11For works along these lines, see, for example, Thomas G. Andrews,Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest

Labor War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Thomas Robertson, The Malthusian Moment:Global Population Growth and the Birth of American Environmentalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Uni-versity Press, May 2012); Christopher F. Jones, Routes to Power: Energy and Modern America (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Ashley Carse, Beyond the Big Ditch: Politics, Ecology, and Infrastruc-ture at the Panama Canal (Boston: MIT Press, 2014); Paul Sabin, Crude Politics: The California Oil Market,1900–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicagoand the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992). On the state of the field of environmental history, seePaul S. Sutter, “The World With Us: The State of American Environmental History,” Journal of AmericanHistory 100:1 (2013): 94–119; For an ambitious integration of ecological and political-economic approachesto capitalism, see Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital(New York: Verso, 2015).

12Emily Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890–1945 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982).

13Peter A. Hall and David Soskice, eds., Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Compar-ative Advantage (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). As in the larger debates about the status of thenation-state in historical writing, transnational history does not, in and of itself, presume that states did not“matter” (a common error, particularly among the opponents of the approach), but rather that they shouldnot be the a priori subject and horizon of historical inquiry.

14Michael Geyer, “Portals of Globalization” in The Plurality of Europe: Identities and Spaces, eds. Win-fried Eberhard, Christian Lübke, and Madlem Benthin (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2010), 509–20.


15See, for example, Neil Brenner, “Beyond State-Centrism? Space, Territoriality, and Geographical Scale inGlobalization Studies,” Theory and Society 28:1 (Feb. 1999): 39–78; Neil Brenner, “The Limits of Scale?Meth-odological Reflections on Scalar Structuration,”Progress in HumanGeography 25:4 (2001): 591–614; AndrewHerod, Scale (New York: Routledge, 2010).

16Bradley Simpson, “Explaining Political Economy” in Explaining the History of American Foreign Rela-tions, 3rd ed., eds.Michael Hogan and Frank Costigliola (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 58–73.

17Paul A. Kramer, “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in theWorld,” AmericanHistorical Review 116:5 (Dec. 2011): 1–44.

18Daniel T. Rodgers, “Exceptionalism” in Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past, eds.Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 21–40.

19For the classic expression of “informal imperialism,” see Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher in “TheImperialism of Free Trade,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., VI:1 (1953): 1–15.

20On the ideological fusion of U.S. national and global interest more broadly, see John Foucek, To Lead theFree World: American Nationalism and the Cultural Roots of the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of NorthCarolina Press, 2003). Importantly, the American presumption of access to world markets was accompanied bythe right to protect the U.S. market from foreign goods. Marc-William Palen, The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade:The Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalization, 1846–1896 (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2016); “The Imperialism of Economic Nationalism, 1890–1913,” Diplomatic History 39:1(2015): 157–85; Mary Speck, “Closed-Door Imperialism: The Politics of Cuban-U.S. Trade, 1902–1933,”His-panic American Historical Review 85:3 (Aug. 2005): 449–84.

21One way to avoid the generalizing, typological sense of “informal empire” involves explaining particularkinds of US state intervention in terms of specific overseas economic interests: see Jeffrey Frieden, “The Eco-nomics of Intervention: American Overseas Investments and Relations with Underdeveloped Areas, 1890–1950,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 31:11 (1989): 55–80.

22On status of forces agreements, for example, see Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism,Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004).

23Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, ch. 1.24On transnational police training, a core dimension of this maximalist approach, see Jeremy Kuzmarov,

Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation-Building in the American Century (Amherst: Universityof Massachusetts Press, 2012); Stuart Schrader, American Streets, Foreign Territory: How CounterinsurgentPolice Waged War on Crime (work in progress).

25For a discussion of various permutations of nation and empire, including nationalizing empires, empire-building nations, empires of nationalities, nation-building colonialisms, and international empires, see Kramer,“Power and Connection,” 1366–73.

26On high-modernist social engineering and legibility, see James C. Scott, Seeking Like a State: HowCertain Schemes to Improve the HumanCondition Have Failed (NewHaven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).

27My description of the maximalism of commodifying empire has a kinship with Victoria De Grazia’saccount of the United States’ “market empire” in twentieth-century Europe: Irresistible Empire: America’sAdvance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,2005).

28Max Paul Friedman, “Anti-Americanism and U.S. Foreign Relations,” Diplomatic History 32:4 (2008):497–514.

29OnWilliam A. Williams’s encounters with the House Un-American Activities Committee, see Buhle andRice-Maximin, William Appleman Williams.

30For a discussion of this earlier generation of anti-imperialist publication, see Emily Rosenberg, “Econom-ic Interest and United States Foreign Policy” in American Foreign Relations Reconsidered, 1890–1993, ed.Gordon Martel (London, New York: Routledge, 1994), 37–51. For the Christian ecumenical dimensions of in-terwar radical anti-imperialism, see Michael G. Thompson, For God and Globe: Christian Internationalism inthe United States between the Great War and the Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015). ForBeard’s perspective, see Charles A. Beard, The Idea of National Interest: An Analytical Study in AmericanForeign Policy (NewYork: TheMacmillan Co., 1934); ClydeW. Barrow,More than a Historian: The Politicaland Economic Thought of Charles A. Beard (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2000), esp. ch. 6.

31Among the central works in the Wisconsin School are William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy ofAmerican Diplomacy (Cleveland: World Pub. Co, 1959); Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretationof American Expansion, 1860–1898 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963); Lloyd Gardner, Economic

354 Paul A. Kramer

Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964); Thomas J. McCormick,China Market: America’s Quest for Informal Empire, 1893–1901 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967);Marilyn Blatt Young, The Rhetoric of Empire: American China Policy, 1895–1901 (Cambridge: Harvard Uni-versity Press, 1968); William ApplemanWilliams, Empire as a Way of Life: An Essay on the Causes and Char-acter of America’s Present Predicament along with a Few Words about an Alternative (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1980). For an anthology dedicated to the work of the Wisconsin School, see LloydGardner, ed., Redefining the Past: Essays in Diplomatic History in Honor of William Appleman Williams (Cor-vallis: Oregon State University Press, 1986). On William A. Williams, founder of the Wisconsin School, seePaul Buhle and Edward Rice-Maximin,William ApplemanWilliams: The Tragedy of Empire (NewYork: Rout-ledge, 1995). OnWilliams’s scholarship and its legacy, see Bradford Perkins, “The Tragedy of American Diplo-macy: Twenty-Five Years After,” Reviews in American History 12:1 (1984): 1–18. For assessments of hisscholarship and politics, see J. A. Thompson, “William Appleman Williams and the American Empire,”Journal of American Studies 7:11 (1973): 91–104; Richard A. Melanson, “The Social and Political Thoughtof William ApplemanWilliams,”Western Political Quarterly 31:3 (1978): 392–409; “William ApplemanWil-liams: A Roundtable,” Diplomatic History 25:2 (2001): 275–316. For a collection of Williams’s writings, seeHenry W. Berger, ed., A William Appleman Williams Reader: Selections from His Major Historical Writings(Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1992). For an overview that distinguishes the Wisconsin School from New Leftthought, see James G. Morgan, Into New Territory: American Historians and the Concept of US Imperialism(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014).

32On Williams from a regional perspective, see David S. Brown, Beyond the Frontier: The MidwesternVoice in American Historical Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), ch. 6.

33Louis A. Pérez, Jr., “Dependency” in Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, 2nd ed., eds.Michael J. Hogan and Thomas G. Paterson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 99–111;Thomas. J. McCormick, “World Systems” in Explaining, 89–98, eds. Hogan and Paterson; ThomasJ. McCormick, “‘Every System Needs a Center Sometimes’: An Essay on Hegemony and American ForeignPolicy, in Redefining the Past, 195–220; Thomas J. McCormick, America’s Half-Century: United StatesForeign Policy in the Cold War and After, 2nd edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).”

34On “modernization” undertaken by authoritarian means, see Bradley R. Simpson, Economists with Guns:Authoritarian Development and U.S.-Indonesian Relations, 1960–1968 (Stanford: Stanford University Press,2008); Thomas C. Field Jr., From Development to Dictatorship: Bolivia and the Alliance for Progress in theKennedy Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014).

35Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1986); Gary Gereffi and Miguel Korzeniewicz, eds.,Commodity Chains and GlobalCapitalism (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994).

36Christina Duffy Burnett, “The Edges of Empire and the Limits of Sovereignty: American Guano Islands,”American Quarterly 57:3 (Sept. 2005): 779–803; Teresita A. Levy, Puerto Ricans in the Empire: TobaccoGrowers and U.S. Colonialism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014); April Merleaux,Sugar and Civilization: American Empire and the Cultural Politics of Sweetness (Chapel Hill: University ofNorth Carolina Press, 2015); César J. Ayala, American Sugar Kingdom: The Plantation Economy of theSpanish Caribbean, 1898–1934 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Steve Striffler andMarkMoberg, eds., BananaWars: Power, Production, and History in the Americas (Durham: Duke UniversityPress, 2003); Gregg Mitman and Paul Erickson, “Latex and Blood: Science, Markets, and American Empire,”Radical History Review 107 (Spring 2010): 45–73; Emily S. Rosenberg, “The Invisible Protectorate: TheUnited States, Liberia, and the Evolution of Neocolonialism, 1909–1940,” Diplomatic History 9:3 (July1985): 191–214; John Soluri,Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Hon-duras and the United States (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006); Heidi Tinsman, Buying into the Regime:Grapes and Consumption in Cold War Chile and the United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014);Gary Okihiro, Pineapple Culture: A History of the Tropical and Temperate Zones (Berkeley: University of Cal-ifornia Press, 2010); Augustine Sedgewick, “What’s Imperial about Coffee?: Rethinking ‘Informal Empire’” inMaking the Empire Work: Labor and United States Imperialism, eds. Daniel E. Bender and Jana Lipman(New York: New York University Press, 2015): 312–34; Richard P. Tucker, Insatiable Appetite: The UnitedStates and the Ecological Degradation of the Tropical World (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield,2007); Kristin Hoganson, “Meat in the Middle: Converging Borderlands in the U.S. Midwest, 1865–1900,”Journal of American History 98:4 (2012): 1025–51.


37Brian DeLay, Shoot the State: Arms, Business, and Freedom in the Americas before Gun Control (work inprogress); Mona Domosh, American Commodities in an Age of Empire (New York: Routledge, 2006); NanEnstad, “To Know Tobacco: Southern Identity in China in the Jim Crow Era,” Southern Cultures 13:4(Winter 2007): 6–23.

38Christine Skwiot, The Purposes of Paradise: U.S. Tourism and Empire in Cuba and Hawaii (Philadel-phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Dennis Merrill, Negotiating Paradise: U.S. Tourism andEmpire in Twentieth-Century Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Christo-pher Endy, Cold War Holidays: American Tourism in France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,2004); Adria L. Imada, Aloha America: Hula Circuits through the U.S. Empire (Durham, London: Duke Uni-versity Press, 2012).

39On smuggling, see Andrew Wender Cohen, Contraband: Smuggling and the Birth of the AmericanCentury (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015).

40Peter A. Schulman, Coal and Empire: The Birth of Energy Security in Industrial America (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015).

41Megan Black, “Interior’s Exterior: The State, Mining Companies, and Resource Ideologies in the PointFour Program,” Diplomatic History 40:1 (Jan. 2016): 81–110.

42Thomas Borstelmann, Apartheid’s Reluctant Uncle: The United States and Southern Africa in the EarlyCold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Javan David Frazier, “Almost Persuaded: The JohnsonAdministration’s Extension of Nuclear Cooperation with South Africa, 1965–1967,” Diplomatic History 32:2(Apr. 2008): 239–58.

43Suzanna Reiss, We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of US Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press,2014).

44David S. Painter, “Oil and the American Century,” Journal of American History, 99:1 (2012): 24–39;Toby Craig Jones, “America, Oil, and War in the Middle East,” Journal of American History 99:1 (2012):208–18; Tyler Priest, “The Dilemmas of Oil Empire,” Journal of American History 99:1 (2012): 236–51;Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London, New York: Verso,2011); David S. Painter, Private Power and Public Policy: Multinational Oil Corporations and UnitedStates Foreign Policy, 1941–1954 (I. B. Tauris, 1987); Michael B. Stoff, Oil, War, and American Security:The Search for a National Policy on Foreign Oil, 1941–1947 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,1980); Aaron David Miller, Search for Security: Saudi Arabian Oil and American Foreign Policy, 1939–1949 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Irvine Anderson, Aramco, the United States,and Saudi Arabia: A Study of the Dynamics of Foreign Oil Policy, 1933–1950 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-versity Press, 1981); Uri Bialer,Oil and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (New York: PalgraveMcMillan, 1998); MaryAnnHeiss, Empire and Nationhood: The United States, Great Britain, and Iranian Oil, 1950–1954 (NewYork:Columbia University Press, 1997); Steve Galpern, Money, Oil, and Empire in the Middle East: Sterling andPostwar Imperialism, 1944–1971 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Chad H. Parker, Makingthe Desert Modern Americans, Arabs, and Oil on the Saudi Frontier, 1933–1973 (Amherst: University of Mas-sachusetts Press, 2015); Robert Vitalis, America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier (Stanford:Stanford University Press, 2006); Nathan Citino, From Arab Nationalism to OPEC: Eisenhower, King Sa’ud,and the Making of US-Saudi Relations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); Nathan J. Citino, “In-ternationalist Oilmen, the Middle East, and the Remaking of American Liberalism, 1945–1953,” BusinessHistory Review 84:2 (Summer 2010): 227–51; Christopher Dietrich, “Oil Power and Economic Theologies:The United States and the Third World in the Wake of the Energy Crisis,” Diplomatic History 40:3 (2016):500–29; Oil Revolution: Anti-Colonial Elites, Sovereign Rights, and the Economic Culture of Decolonization(forthcoming, Cambridge University Press); Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicutt, “The End of the ConcessionaryRegime: Oil and American Power in Iraq, 1958–1972 (Stanford University, PhD thesis, 2011); Victor McFar-land, “The United States, the Arab Gulf, and the Oil Crisis of the 1970s” (Yale University, PhD thesis, 2013).

45Kristin L. Ahlberg, Transplanting the Great Society: Lyndon Johnson and Food for Peace (Columbia:University of Missouri, 2009); Jeffrey Taffet, Foreign Aid as Foreign Policy: The Alliance for Progress inLatin America (New York: Routledge, 2007); Samantha Iyer, The Agricultural Metropolis: The Politics ofFood in the United States, Egypt, and India, 1870s to 1970s (work in progress).

46For transnational histories of consumption, see John Brewer and Frank Trentmann, eds., Consuming Cul-tures, Global Perspectives: Historical Trajectories, Transnational Exchanges (New York: Bloomsbury Pub-lishing, 2006).

356 Paul A. Kramer

47On U.S. firms operating abroad see, for example, Jennifer van Vleck, Empire of the Air: Aviation and theAmerican Ascendancy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Julio Moreno, Yankee Don’t GoHome! American Business Culture and the Shaping of Modern Mexico, 1920–1950 (Chapel Hill: Universityof North Carolina Press, 2003); Ricardo Salvatore, “Yankee Advertising in Buenos Aires: Reflections on Amer-icanization,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 7:2 (July 2005): 216–35; FredV. Carstensen, American Enterprise in Foreign Markets: Singer and International Harvester in ImperialRussia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); Mona Domosh, “Uncovering the Friction ofGlobalization: American Commercial Embeddedness and Landscape in Revolutionary-Era Russia,” Annalsof the Association of American Geographers 100:2 (April 2010): 427–43; Anne L. Foster, Projections ofPower: The United States and Europe in Colonial Southeast Asia, 1919–1941 (Durham: Duke UniversityPress, 2010); Mira Wilkins, The Emergence of Multinational Enterprise: American Business Abroad fromthe Colonial Era to 1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970); Mira Wilkins, The Maturingof Multinational Enterprise: American Business Abroad from 1914 to 1970 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-sity Press, 1974); Annabel Jane Wharton, Building the Cold War: Hilton International Hotels and Modern Ar-chitecture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). For Ford Motor Company’s international operations,see Mira Wilkins and Frank Hill, American Business Abroad: Ford on Six Continents (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2011); Elizabeth Esch, “Whitened and Enlightened: The Ford Motor Company and RacialEngineering in the Brazilian Amazon” in Company Towns in the Americas: Landscape, Power, andWorking-Class Communities, eds. Oliver J. Dinius and Angela Vergara (Athens: University of GeorgiaPress, 2011), 91–110; Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City(New York: Picador, 2010); Thomas Fetzer, “Exporting the American Model? Transatlantic Entanglementsof Industrial Relations at Opel and Ford Germany (1948–1965),” Labor History 51:2 (May 2010): 173–91;Robert Tignor, “In the Grip of Politics: The Ford Motor Company of Egypt, 1945–1960,” Middle EastJournal 44:3 (Summer 1990): 383–98. For an overview of U.S. firms’ relationships to the Nazi state, seeJacques R. Pauwels, “Profits über Alles! American Corporations and Hitler,” Labour/Le Travail 51 (Spring2003): 223–49. On Walmart, see Nelson Lichtenstein, ed.,Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First Century Cap-italism (New York: New Press, 2006); BethanyMoreton, To Serve God and Walmart: The Making of ChristianFree Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

48See, for example, Uta G. Poiger, Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in aDivided Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Emily Rosenberg, “Consuming Women:Images of Americanization in the ‘American Century,” Diplomatic History 23:3 (Summer 1999): 479–97.

49See, especially, Richard F. Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1993); Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cul-tural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Ca-rolina Press, 1994); Rob Kroes, Robert W. Rydell, and Doeko F. J. Bosscher, eds., Cultural Transmissions andReceptions: American Mass Culture in Europe (Amsterdam, 1993); Rob Kroes and Robert W. Rydell, BuffaloBill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1869–1922 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005);Brian A. McKenzie, Remaking France: Americanization, Public Diplomacy, and the Marshall Plan(New York: Berghahn Books, 2005). For a sweeping account of these dynamics through the Americanizationlens, see Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire.

50Charles S. Maier, “The Politics of Productivity: Foundations of American International Economic PolicyafterWorldWar II,” International Organization 31:4 (Autumn 1977): 607–33; Robert H. Haddow, Pavilions ofPlenty: Exhibiting American Culture Abroad in the 1950s (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997);G. Castillo, “Domesticating the ColdWar: Household Consumption as Propaganda inMarshall Plan Germany,”Journal of Contemporary History 40:2 (April 2005): 261–88.

51For criticisms of the Americanization paradigm, see Heide Fehrenbach and Uta G. Poiger, “Americaniza-tion Reconsidered” in Transactions, Transgressions, Transformations: American Culture in Western Europeand Japan (New York, 2000), xiii–xl.; Mary Nolan, “Americanization as a Paradigm of German History” inMark Roseman, Hanna Schissler and Frank Biess, eds., Conflict, Catastrophe, and Continuity: Essays onModern German History (New York, 2007), 200–18; Mary Nolan, The Transatlantic Century: Europe andthe United States, 1890–2010 (Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Rob Kroes, “AmericanEmpire and Cultural Imperialism: A View from the Receiving End” in Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking Amer-ican History in a Global Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 295–313; Stefan Schwarzkopf,“Who Said ‘Americanization’? The Case of Twentieth-Century Advertising andMassMarketing from a BritishPerspective” in Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, Decentering America (New York, 2007), 23–72; Kristin


Hoganson, “Stuff It: Domestic Consumption and the Americanization of the World Paradigm,” DiplomaticHistory 30:4 (2006), 571–94. Works that emphasize the active role of non-U.S. actors in appropriating Amer-ican elements as filtered through their own histories and interests include Mary Nolan, Visions of Modernity:American Business and the Modernization of Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Poiger,Jazz, Rock, and Rebels; Emanuela Scarpellini, “Shopping American-Style: The Arrival of the Supermarketin Postwar Italy,” Enterprise and Society 5:4 (2004), 625–68; Karin Zachmann, Cold War Kitchen: American-ization, Technology, and European Users (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009).

52Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream. On State Department assistance to the U.S. film industry inaccessing European cinemas, see John Trumpbour, Selling Hollywood to the World: U.S. and European Strug-gles for Mastery of the Global Film Industry, 1920–1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

53McCormick, China Market; David M. Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Involvement: American Economic Ex-pansion Across the Pacific, 1784–1900 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001); Daniel Margolies,Henry Watterson and the New South: The Politics of Empire, Free Trade, and Globalization (Lexington: Uni-versity Press of Kentucky, 2006).

54Emily Rosenberg, “U.S. Mass Consumerism in Transnational Perspective” in Michael J. Hogan andFrank Costigliola, eds., America in the World: The Historiography of U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1941(NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 307–37. Augustine Sedgewick, “’The Spice of the DepartmentStore’: The ‘Consumer’s Republic,’ Imported Knock-Offs from Latin America, and the Invention of Interna-tional Development, 1936–1941,” International Labor and Working-Class History 81 (Spring 2012): 49–68;Kristin L. Hoganson, Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865–1920(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). For a more global perspective, see Frank Trentmann,Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First(New York: Harper, 2016).

55For a guide to legal histories of the United States in the world, see Mary Dudziak, “Legal History asForeign Relations History” in Frank Costigliola andMichael J. Hogan, eds.,Explaining the History of AmericanForeign Relations, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 135–50.

56On law, political economy, and global governance in related, contemporary contexts, see David Kennedy,AWorld of Struggle: How Power, Law, and Expertise Shape Global Political Economy (Princeton, NU: Prince-ton University Press, 2016).

57On the United States and extraterritoriality, see Teemu Ruskola, Legal Orientalism: China, the UnitedStates, and Modern Law (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013); Eileen P. Scully, Bargaining withthe State from Afar: American Citizenship in Treaty Port China, 1844–1942 (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 2001).

58On extradition, see Daniel S. Margolies, Spaces of Law in American Foreign Relations: Extradition andExtraterritoriality in the Borderlands and Beyond, 1877–1898 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011);Katherine Unterman, Uncle Sam’s Policemen: The Pursuit of Fugitives across Borders (Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 2015).

59On the United States’ legalist empire of the early twentieth century, and the imperial uses of internationallaw, see Benjamin Allen Coates, Legalist Empire: International Law and American Foreign Relations in theEarly 20th Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Benjamin Coates, “Securing Hegemonythrough Law: Venezuela, the U.S. Asphalt Trust, and the Uses of International Law, 1904–1909,” Journalof American History 102:2 (2015): 380–05.

60On tariff enforcement, custom houses, and smuggling, see Cohen, Contraband; Gautham Rao, NationalDuties: Custom Houses and the Making of the American State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

61The literature on the legal status of the post-1898 colonies is extensive. See, especially, Christina DuffyBurnett and Burke Marshall, eds., Foreign in a Domestic Sense: Puerto Rico, American Expansion, and theConstitution (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001); Sam Erman, “Meanings of Citizenship in the U.S.Empire: Puerto Rico, Isabel Gonzalez, and the Supreme Court, 1898 to 1905,” Journal of American EthnicHistory 27:4 (2008): 5–33.

62Emily S. Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy,1900–1930 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999); Cyrus Veeser, AWorld Safe for Capitalism: Dollar Diplo-macy and America’s Rise to Global Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); Ellen D. Tillman,Dollar Diplomacy by Force: Nation-Building and Resistance in the Dominican Republic (Chapel Hill: Univer-sity of North Carolina Press, 2016); Peter James Hudson, “The National City Bank of New York and Haiti,1909–1922,” Radical History Review, No. 115 (2013): 91–114. On the United States in the nineteenth

358 Paul A. Kramer

century as a debtor nation whose dependence upon European finance impacted its domestic and internationalpolitics, see Jay Sexton, Debtor Diplomacy, Finance and American Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era1837–1873 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

63James Ledbetter, Unwarranted Influence: Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Military-Industrial Complex(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).

64Christopher Capozzola, “The Secret Soldiers’ Union: Labor and Soldier Politics in the Philippine ScoutMutiny of 1924” in Bender and Lipman, eds.,Making the Empire Work, 85–103; HopeMcGrath, “’AnArmy ofWorking-Men’: Military Labor and the Construction of American Empire, 1865–1915” (University of Pennsyl-vania, PhD thesis, in progress); Justin Jackson, “TheWork of Empire: The U.S. Army and theMaking of Amer-ican Colonialisms in Cuba and the Philippines, 1898–1913,” (Columbia University, PhD thesis, 2014); JustinJackson, “’A Military Necessity Which Must be Pressed’: The U.S. Army and Forced Road Labor in EarlyAmerican Colonial Philippines” in On Coerced Labor: Work and Compulsion after Chattel Slavery, eds.Marcel van der Linden and Magaly Rodriguez Garcia (Leiden: Brill, 2016). On the Vietnam War as shapedbyU.S. soldiers’working-class origins, see ChristianG. Appy,Working-ClassWar: American Combat Soldiersand Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).

65Dirk Bönker, Militarism in a Global Age: Naval Ambitions in Germany and the United States beforeWorld War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012).

66See, especially, Paul A. C. Koistinen’s five-part history of the political economy of American warfare:Beating Plowshares into Swords: The Political Economy of AmericanWarfare, 1606–1865 (Lawrence: Univer-sity Press of Kansas, 1996);Mobilizing for Modern War: The Political Economy of American Warfare, 1865–1919 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997); Planning War, Pursuing Peace: The Political Economy ofAmerican Warfare, 1920–1939 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998); Arsenal of World War II: ThePolitical Economy of American Warfare, 1940–1945 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004); State ofWar: The Political Economy of American Warfare, 1945–2011 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas,2012). For torpedo development as a formative moment in these relationships, see Katherine C. Epstein,Torpedo: Inventing the Military-Industrial Complex in the United States and Great Britain (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).

67See, for example, Roger W. Lotchin, Fortress California, 1910–1961: From Warfare to Welfare(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); AnnMarkusen, ed., The Rise of the Gunbelt: The Military Remap-ping of Industrial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

68Louis A. Pérez Jr., describes the influx of American capital into Cuba the wake of the Spanish-Cuban-American War, for example, in On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture (Chapel Hill,London: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). On the Philippine-American War, see AllanE. S. Lumba, “Imperial Standards: Colonial Currencies, Racial Capacities, and Economic KnowledgeDuring the Philippine-American War,” Diplomatic History 39:44 (2015): 603–28. On the militarization ofSouth Korea and corporate globalization, see Patrick Chung, “Building Global Capitalism: Militarization,Standardization, and U.S.-South Korean Relations Since the Korean War” (Brown University, PhD thesis,work in progress).

69Joshua B. Freeman, “Militarism, Empire, and Labor Relations: The Case of Brice P. Disque,” Internation-al Labor and Working-Class History 80:1 (Sept. 2011): 103–20; Laura McEnaney, “Veterans’Welfare, the GIBill, and American Demobilization,” Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 39:1 (Spring 2011): 41–47.

70Beth Bailey, America’s Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, 2009); Kimberly L. Phillips, War! What Is it Good For?: Black Freedom Struggles and theU.S. Military from World War II to Iraq (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).

71Jennifer Mittelstadt, The Rise of the Military Welfare State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,2015); P. W. Singer, Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry (Ithaca, NY: CornellUniversity Press, 2003).

72On the labor politics of U.S. military basing, see Jana K. Lipman,Guantánamo: A Working-Class HistoryBetween Empire and Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); on the politics of sexual labor,see Katharine H. S. Moon, Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S. Korea Relations (New York: Co-lumbia University Press, 1997); Saundra Pollock Sturdevant and Brenda Stoltzfus, Let the Good Times Roll:Prostitution and the U.S. Military in Asia (New York: The New Press, 1992); Paul A. Kramer, “Colonial Cross-ings: Prostitution, Disease and the Boundaries of Empire during the Philippine-American War” in Body andNation: The Global Realm of U.S. Body Politics in the 20th Century, eds. Emily Rosenberg and Shanon Fitzpa-trick (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 17–41. For a collection of essays on the global history of U.S.


military bases, with special attention to the politics of gender, race and sex, see Maria Höhn and SeungsookMoon, eds., Over There: Living with the U.S. Military Empire from World War II to the Present (Durham:Duke University Press, 2010).

73See, for example, Gunther Peck, Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant Workers in the NorthAmerican West, 1880–1930 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Kornel Chang, Pacific Connec-tions: The Making of the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); RobertEric Barde, Immigration at the Golden Gate: Passenger Ships, Exclusion, and Angel Island (Westport, CT:Praeger, 2008); Ethan Blue, “Finding Margins on Borders: Shipping Firms and Immigration Control AcrossSettler Space,” Occasion: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities 5 (Mar. 1, 2013): 1–20.

74Cindy Hahamovitch, No Man’s Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History ofDeportable Labor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Deborah Cohen, Braceros: Migrant Citi-zens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico (Chapel Hill: University of North Ca-rolina Press, 2011); Gabrielle E. Clark, “From the Panama Canal to Post-Fordism: Producing Temporary LaborMigrants Within and Beyond Agriculture in the United States (1904–2013)” forthcoming 2016, Antipode: ARadical Journal of Geography. For a global survey of the “guest worker” phenomenon, see Cindy Hahamovich,“Creating Perfect Workers: Guest Workers in Historical Perspective,” Labor History 44:1 (2003): 69–94.

75Martha Gardner, TheQualities of a Citizen:Women, Immigration and Citizenship, 1870–1965 (Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Jeanne D. Petit, The Men and Women We Want: Gender, Race, and theProgressive Era Literacy Test Debate (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2010); George Peffer, If TheyDon’t Bring Their Women Here: Chinese Female Immigration before Exclusion (Urbana: University of IllinoisPress, 1999); Douglas C. Baynton, “Defectives in the Land: Disability and American Immigration Policy,1882–1924,” Journal of American Ethnic History 24:3 (Summer 2005): 31–44.

76On anti-radicalism in U.S. immigration restriction politics, see John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Pat-terns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (NewBrunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002);Mary S. Barton,“The Global War on Anarchism: The United States and International Anarchist Terrorism, 1898–1904,”Diplomatic History 39:2 (Apr. 2015): 303–30; Moon-ho Jung, “Seditious Subjects: Race, State Violence,and the U.S. Empire,” Journal of Asian American Studies 14 (June 2011): 221–47.

77Paul A. Kramer, “Imperial Openings: Civilization, Exemption, and the Geopolitics of Mobility in theHistory of Chinese Exclusion, 1868–1910,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 14 (2015): 317–47; Paul A. Kramer, “Is the World Our Campus? International Students and U.S. Global Power in the LongTwentieth Century,” Diplomatic History 33:5 (Nov. 2009): 775–806.

78Bender and Lipman, eds.,Making the Empire Work; Leon Fink, Sweatshops at Sea: Merchant Seamen inthe World’s First Globalized Industry, from 1812 to the Present (Chapel Hill: University of North CarolinaPress, 2011).

79Jefferson Cowie, Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni-versity Press, 1999).

80David Roediger and Elizabeth Esch, The Production of Difference: Race and theManagement of Labor inU.S. History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

81For transnational histories of labor and migrant politics see, for example, Leon Fink, ed.,Workers acrossthe Americas: The Transnational Turn in Labor History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); LaraPutnam, Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age (Chapel Hill: Universityof North Carolina Press, 2013); Davide Turcato, “Italian Anarchism as a Transnational Movement, 1885–1915,” International Review of Social History 52:3 (Dec. 2007): 407–44.Mae M. Ngai, “Chinese Gold Miners and the ‘Chinese Question’ in Nineteenth-Century California and Victo-ria,” Journal of American History 101:4 (2015):1082–1105.

82On nineteenth-century American maritime workers as “working-class diplomats,” see Brian Rouleau,With Sails Whitening Every Sea: Marines and the Making of an American Maritime Empire (Ithaca, NY:Cornell University Press, 2014). On organized labor and U.S. foreign policy, see Horace B. Davis, “AmericanLabor and Imperialism Prior to World War I,” Science and Society 27:1 (Jan. 1963): 70–76; David Montgom-ery, “Workers’ Movements in the United States Confront Imperialism: The Progressive Era Experience,” TheJournal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 7:1 (2008): 7–42; Gregg Andrews, Shoulder to Shoulder? TheAmerican Federation of Labor, the United States, and the Mexican Revolution, 1910–1924 (Berkeley: Univer-sity of California Press, 1991); Elizabeth McKillen, “Integrating Labor in the Narrative of Wilsonian Interna-tionalism: A Literature Review,” Diplomatic History 34:4 (2010): 643–62; Elizabeth McKillen, Making theWorld Safe for Workers: Labor, the Left, and Wilsonian Internationalism (Urbana: University of Illinois

360 Paul A. Kramer

Press, 2013); Elizabeth McKillen, Chicago Labor and the Quest for a Democratic Diplomacy, 1914–1924(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); Geert Van Goethem, “Labor’s Second Front: The ForeignPolicy of the American and British Trade Union Movements during the Second World War,” DiplomaticHistory 34:4 (2010): 663–80; Jon V. Kofas, “U.S. Foreign Policy and the World Federation of TradeUnions, 1944–1948,” Diplomatic History 26:1 (2002): 21–60; Anthony Carew, “The American Labor Move-ment in Fizzland: The Free Trade Union Committee and the CIA,” Labor History 39:1 (1998): 25–42; PeterWeiler, “The United States, International Labor, and the Cold War: The Breakup of the World Federation ofTrade Unions,” Diplomatic History 5:1 (1981): 1–22; Carolyn Eisenberg, “Working-Class Politics and theCold War: American Intervention in the German Labor Movement, 1945–49,” Diplomatic History 7:4(1983): 283–306; Federico Romero, The United States and the European Trade Union Movement, 1944–1951 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Ronald L. Filippelli, American Labor andPostwar Italy, 1943–1953: A Study of Cold War Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989);Howard Schonberger, “American Labor’s Cold War in Occupied Japan,” Diplomatic History 3:3 (1979):249–72; Christopher Gerteis, “Labor’s Cold Warriors: The American Federation of Labor and ‘Free TradeUnionism’ in Cold War Japan,” Journal of American-East Asian Relations 12:3 (2003): 207–24; Seth Wigder-son, “TheWages of Anticommunism: U.S. Labor and the KoreanWar” in Labor’s Cold War: Local Politics ina Global Context, ed. Shelton Stromquist (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 226–57; Rose T. Yu,“Foreign Labor Aid and the Philippine Experience,” Philippine Social Sciences and Humanities Review47:1–4 (1983): 193–217; Cliff Welch, “Labor Internationalism: U.S. Involvement in Brazilian Unions,1945–65,” Latin American Research Review 30:2 (1995): 61–89; Robert Waters and Gordon Daniels, “TheWorld’s Longest General Strike: The AFL-CIO, the CIA, and British Guiana,” Diplomatic History 29:2(2005): 279–307; Gigi Peterson, “’A Dangerous Demagogue’: Containing the Influence of the MexicanLabor-Left and its United States Allies” in American Labor and the Cold War: Grassroots Politics andPostwar Political Culture, eds. Robert Cherny et al. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004),245–76; Edmund F. Wehrle, Between a River and a Mountain: The AFL-CIO and the Vietnam War (AnnArbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005); Frank F. Koscielski, Divided Loyalties: American Unions andthe Vietnam War (Wayne State University, PhD thesis, 1997); Andrew Battista, “Unions and Cold WarForeign Policy in the 1980s: The National Labor Committee, the AFL-CIO, and Central America,” DiplomaticHistory 26:3 (2006): 419–51; John Bennett Sears, “Peace Work: The Antiwar Tradition in American Laborfrom the Cold War to the Iraq War,” Diplomatic History 34:4 (2010): 699–720; Geert Van Goethem andRobert Anthony Waters Jr., eds., American Labor’s Global Ambassadors: The International History of theAFL-CIO during the Cold War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

83For a compelling, comparative account of radicalization grounded in political-economic analysis, seePatrick J. Wolfe, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (London, New York: Verso Press, 2016).

84On racially-stratified labor systems in U.S. imperial enclaves, see Julie Greene, The Canal Builders:Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal (New York: Penguin, 2009); Jason M. Colby, The Businessof Empire: United Fruit, Race, and U.S. Expansion in Central America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UniversityPress, 2011); Vitalis, America’s Kingdom.

85Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the GlobalSouth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

86Paul A. Kramer, “Shades of Sovereignty: Racialized Power, the United States and the World” in Explain-ing the History of American Foreign Relations, 3rd ed., eds. Frank Costigliola andMichael Hogan (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2016), 245–70.

87Timothy Mitchell, “Fixing the Economy,” Cultural Studies 12:1 (1998): 82–101; Timothy Mitchell, Ruleof Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

88Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa.89Ian Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods: Californian-Australian Environmental Reform, 1860–1930

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Ian Tyrrell, Crisis of the Wasteful Nation: Empire and Con-servation in Theodore Roosevelt’s America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Black, “Interior’sExterior”; Stephen Tuffnell, “Engineering Inter-Imperialism: American Miners and the Transformation ofGlobal Mining, 1871–1910,” Journal of Global History 10 (2015):53–76; Mark Hendrickson, From the(Under)Ground Up: Mining Engineers, Geologists, Foreign Direct Investment, and American Economic De-velopment, 1880–1930 (work in progress).

90Bönker, Militarism in a Global Age.


91David Singerman, “’A Doubt is At Best an Unsafe Standard: Measuring Sugar in the Early Bureau ofStandards,” Journal of Research of NIST 112:1 (Jan. 2007): 53–66. See also Singerman’s contribution tothis volume, “Science, Commodities, and Corruption in the Gilded Age.”

92Mary Bridges, “Constructing Credit, Expanding Commerce: U.S. BranchBanking in Latin America in theEarly Twentieth Century” (Vanderbilt University, PhD thesis, work in progress).

93On modernization and development, see David C. Engerman and Corinna R. Unger, “Towards a GlobalHistory of Modernization,” Diplomatic History 33:3 (2009): 375–85; Nick Cullather, “Development? It’sHistory,” Diplomatic History 24:4 (2000): 641–53. David C. Engerman, Nils Gilman, Mark H. Haefele, andMichael E. Latham, eds., Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War (Amherst:University of Massachusetts Press, 2003); Dennis Merrill, Bread and the Ballot: The United States andIndia’s Economic Development, 1947–1963 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990);Simpson, Economists with Guns; Nick Cullather, The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle AgainstPoverty in Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); David Ekbladh, The Great AmericanMission: Modernization and the Construction of an AmericanWorld Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UniversityPress, 2010); Michael E. Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development and U.S. ForeignPolicy from the Cold War to the Present (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); Field Jr., From Develop-ment to Dictatorship;Daniel Immerwahr, Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Devel-opment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). On neoliberalism, see David Harvey,A Brief Historyof Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinvent-ing Free Markets since the Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Daniel StedmanJones,Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2012); Aaron Major, Architects of Austerity: International Finance and the Politics of Growth(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014). For striking accounts of the relationship between the “outsides” and“insides” of American economic thought and practice, see Sheyda Jahanbani, “One Global War on Poverty: TheJohnson Administration Fights Poverty at Home and Abroad, 1964–1968” in Beyond the Cold War: LyndonJohnson and the New Global Challenges of the 1960s, eds. Francis J. Gavin and Mark Atwood Lawrence(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 97–117; Amy Offner, “Anti-Poverty Programs, Social Conflict, andEconomic Thought in Colombia and the United States, 1948–1980,” (PhD thesis, Columbia University, 2012).

94Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1998); Paul Adler “Planetary Citizens: U.S. NGOs and the Politics of International Develop-ment in the Late 20th Century,” (PhD thesis, Georgetown University, 2014); Turcato, “Italian Anarchism.”

95Henry Gorman, “Words from Across the Sea: Americans, Syrians, Movement and Translation in an Ageof Empire” (Vanderbilt University, PhD thesis, work in progress).

96Coates, Legalist Empire.97Kramer, “Is the World our Campus?”98On foundations and international relations, see Inderjeet Parmar, Foundations of the American Century:

The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations and the Rise of American Power (New York: Columbia Uni-versity Press, 2015). For a powerful, political-economic history of the Fulbright program, the most prestigiousexpression of postwar educational internationalism, see Sam Lebovic, “From War Junk to Educational Ex-change: The World War II Origins of the Fulbright Program and the Foundations of American Cultural Glob-alism, 1945–1950,” Diplomatic History vol. 37, no. 2 (2013): 280–312. On Rotary, an exemplary institution ofcosmopolitan, capitalist internationalism, see Brendan Goff, “The Heartland Abroad: The Rotary Club’s Mis-sions of Civic Internationalism” (PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 2008).

99Akira Iriye, Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contem-porary World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

362 Paul A. Kramer

How Did the World Become Global?: Transnational History, Beyond Connection

Paul A. Kramer

Reviews in American History, Volume 49, Number 1, March 2021, pp. 119-141(Review)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article

[ Access provided at 17 Mar 2021 02:09 GMT from Vanderbilt University Library ]

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/785082

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/785082

HOW DID THE WORLD BECOME GLOBAL?: TRANSNATIONAL HISTORY, BEYOND CONNECTION

Paul A. Kramer

Isaac A. Kamola, Making the World Global: U. S. Universities and the Production of the Global Imaginary. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. xviii + 282 pp. Notes, references, and index. $27.95.

It was at some point in the late 1980s and early 1990s that policymakers, jour-nalists, and academics in the United States and elsewhere decided—roughly 490 years after the advent of the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans, and 425 years since the opening of the Manila galleon trade that linked Chinese and European trade circuits—that the world was suddenly, finally, becoming “global.” For many of these commentators, signs of an epochal shift were soon apparent everywhere: streamlined, seemingly instant, financial transactions; accelerating barrages of email; growing fleets of container ships, stacked with Day-Glo metal crates of minerals, cars, and plastic toys, plying the world’s oceans.1 Observers at the time might have invoked the “annihilation of time and space” to capture this bold new world, had the phrase, coined in the 1840s in captivated response to the telegraph, not exhausted itself over the century that followed, chasing steamboats, the railroad, the underwater cable, then the airplane.2

There were very good reasons that observers found themselves searching for, embracing and inventing new cartographies and timelines. New technolo-gies were indeed speeding and cheapening long-distance communications, for example, even if they did so incrementally, rather than abruptly, and in patchwork fashion: “networks” were stretching and thickening, even as they were cut through with vast, equally defining (if never as talked-about) gaps and fissures. Perhaps most significantly, for over four decades, the idea of a rigidly divided world organized by a Manichean opposition of “free” capital-ist and “unfree” communist domains—with problematic fence-sitters—had been foundational to the worldviews of many U.S. policymakers, experts and ordinary citizens, and a key structuring principle of American politics, society and culture more broadly. This imaginary had been anchored by material and metaphorical walls and barricades at the militarized frontiers between “West” and “East”; where these fell, permitting the mobility of capital, goods,

Reviews in American History 49 (2021) 119–141 © 2021 by Johns Hopkins University Press

REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / MARCH 2021120

policies, ideas, and migrants (or some of them), it seemed to call for a radical rethinking of historical processes and the spaces within which they unfolded.

It was in this crucible that what might have been plausibly taken to be discrete, potentially contradictory phenomena with their own distinct histories were melted into the mega-narrative of “globalization.” Out of a dangerous, dichotomized world, it was said, a new, unified, promising, “global” world was being born. Deeper, broader and faster transits of capital, goods, and information, unprecedented in scope, were eroding and supplanting the regulatory power of territorially bounded national polities. Rising in power were supranational formations like the European Union, global trade regimes like the World Trade Organization and, at least aspirationally, human rights norms and institutions. The result was a progressively homogenized global consciousness, webbed together by transnational civil society organizations, diffusing consumer habits and mass-mediated reference points which, de-pending on your angle of vision, heralded the end of potentially conflictual and destructive difference, or a tragic collapse of human diversity, or both. It was not always clear to those who invoked a newly global present how far things had proceeded. Was globalization complete, or a work in progress? Was globalization a condition, a process, or something else? But this did not mean they saw it as reversible or escapable.3

Within the university-based social sciences and humanities, “globalization” (and “transnationalism,” the non-identical term with which it was often used interchangeably) launched a thousand agendas that varied in their understand-ing of what “global” analysis could do and why it was important or necessary. They diverged on the question of why the previous interpretive regime, with its taken-for-granted framing of social analysis within nationalized units—”methodological nationalism”—was a problem. And they differed implicitly or explicitly in their normative approaches to the question of how national and global spaces ought to interrelate.

But works that found inspiration or analytic potential in the “global” or “transnational” often shared key features. In search of a rough, broad descrip-tor, one might encapsulate their approaches as “connectionist.” Connectionist works foregrounded questions about global linkage: the ways actors, processes, and institutions bridged across or even “transcended” long distances and na-tionalized borders. They posed, as antagonists, national borders and mobile “flows” of goods, cultures and people that moved around and across them. They often tended—with key variations and exceptions—to approach global dynamics through lenses of culture and identity, focusing on globalization’s ramifications for belonging, loyalty, religious practice, and social differentia-tion, often advancing narratives of homogenization and revanchist backlash. They defined human freedom and flourishing in terms of physical mobility, and valorized “connection” as expressive of, or the means towards, a cosmo-

121KRAMER / How did the World Become Global?

politan world of cultural coexistence. And they narrated their interpretive innovations as reflexive responses to an unequivocal, actually existing, novel, “global” condition, one that required entirely new forms of social knowledge to make sense of it and, to the degree that it was possible, to steer and manage it. These new forms of social inquiry had, in other words, been summoned into existence—and were justified for budgetary and other institutional pur-poses—by the character of world-historical events themselves.

Embarking from the idea that the world was becoming—or had recently become—”globalized,” connectionist scholarship set out to inquire into, chart, and understand connections, their dynamics and implications, in the past and present. In such work, connection and the terms used to register and describe it (flows, linkages, interactions and exchanges, especially) tended to play three interlocking roles. They were the means of scholarship: the subjects being reconstructed, described, and interpreted. They were also the ends of scholar-ship, the main reasons questions were being posed. (What was connected, and to what degree? When and how were things first connected? How and why did connections change? Were things connected as thoroughly as presumed?) And, in many works, connection played a powerful if backgrounded norma-tive role, implicitly or explicitly affirming a cosmopolitan world of mobility and complex, plural identities that either subverted or transcended hard, exclusionist, socio-political boundaries.

If connectionist scholarship could be recognized by critiques of method-ological nationalism and topical attention to cross-border phenomena, it was often—if never uniformly—characterized by a certain mode of feeling, what might be called a transnational affect. It was far from alone as a scholarly approach that accrued and came to be defined and identifiable by certain af-fective traits or feeling rules. In the case of much connectionist scholarship, this affect conveyed unconstraint through the exercise of agency, exploration, and self-remaking in both the authors and their subjects. Scholars’ subjects, it was often said, had broken free of territorial strictures and gone “beyond borders.” So, too, it could seem, had the scholars who tracked them down, interpreted them, and published work about them.

This particular affective mode, with its exuberant, even dizzy, sense of freedom from limits, echoed globalization discourse’s dominant structures of feeling. These, in turn, had much to do with Western and particularly U.S. representations of the collapse of the Soviet regime. Talk of a new, “global” reality was forged amid and profoundly colored by the surrounding ex-hilaration and self-vindication of geopolitical victory, defined especially in terms of freedom: unleashed capital mobility, political freedom, emancipa-tion from history and its burdens, mingling jubilantly. The consequences of this transnational affect—what might be called transnationalism’s informal feeling rules—were far from trivial. Especially early on, scholars could tend


to transnationalize the study of actors they liked or identified with, the bet-ter to enjoy their transnationalism. They could also figure the world beyond national borders as an open space of promise and opportunity rather than a complex domain of power with its own distinctive hierarchies and constraints. It was possible that such affective, rhetorical, and interpretive tendencies ran strongest in settler-colonial polities with deep histories of equating freedom with outward movement in violation of unrecognized borders. But at least in the case of the U.S. academy, these framings—whatever their particular and provincial origins—had far-reaching effects.

While connectionist scholarship shared much, the meanings assigned to connection differed. In university contexts, the “global” was introduced into disciplinary trajectories of inquiry that varied widely, and its meanings inevi-tably took on the imprint of these conversations and the questions, debates, and methods that structured them, for better and worse. While the “global” condition was often depicted as an objective reality that academic disciplines merely responded to and reflected on, the “global” and “transnational” were, to the contrary, sculpted as they were taken up and enlisted by academic partisans in their ongoing battles with opponents over institutional power, funding, hiring, and prestige. Sometimes these concepts sparked genuinely novel conversations, and sometimes they merely retreaded or rescaled old ones. This made the “global” scholarship ubiquitous across the social and human sciences, and in many cases incommensurable.

Among migration scholars, for example, the global and transnational arrived in the wake of debates about the degrees to which migrants “assimilated” to national cultures; the facts of long-distance connection aided those who claimed migrants retained their cultures, coming to connote loyalty to kin and home-land, the will to fight assimilation, and a resilient sense of collective selfhood. By contrast, for some historians interested in “transfer,” connection signified not historical actors’ determination to hold onto their cultures across distance and geography, but a willingness to borrow and adapt “outside” influences and, at least in part, to qualify or abandon nationalist pretenses and hostilities towards the “foreign.” In yet another field, U.S. foreign relations historians employed the term the “transnational” in the context of debates over the degree to which “non-state” actors played significant roles in the making of U.S. foreign policy, and over the appropriateness of cultural-historical methods; “transnational” came to denote a loose amalgam of “non-traditional” approaches, including a focus on non-policymakers and culturalist approaches.4

In nearly every context, connection meant agency, and vice versa. Especially where informed by poststructuralist emphases on plural, fractured, and inde-terminate meanings and identities, it connoted self-activity, resourcefulness, adaptability, and dynamic self-making. For some scholars, connecting one’s subjects to what might seem surprising locations, across startling distances,


especially through their use of their eras’ innovative technologies, demonstrated their “modernity” (which was not always well-defined). Where historical sub-jects had been stigmatized as backward or parochial by virtue of presumed geographic stasis and isolation—in effect, denied the status of co-evals of their own historical moment—establishing their “modernity,” through, for example, mobility, intercultural contact, and individual or collective self-reinvention vindicated them, incidentally and by design.

Perhaps predictably, historians chose, as one of their unique contributions to an interdisciplinary inquiry, to debunk the conventional (and facile) idea of globalization’s conventional late 20th century origins, and to show instead how world regions had become significantly entangled far earlier.5 The skeptical claim that there was “nothing new” in globalization was soon commonplace. Some historians inquiring about connection focused less on just how far back in time it stretched than on connection’s limits, valuably demonstrating how gapped, friction-filled, and impossible past efforts at long-distance connec-tion had often been, and challenging and complicating pasts that too-neatly mirrored, anticipated or led teleologically to many scholars’ presumptively linked-up present.6 Others pointed out the ways that connective processes often understood to be uniformizing and universalizing were enlisted and remade by entrenched, resilient local and national forces, giving rise not to homogeneous social formations, but newly plural ones.7

The idea that “global” or “transnational” scholarship and the university structures built to support it had, in effect, been called to life by a bold, new, ex-tant “global” condition evidently served versatile academic-political purposes. But what if, in fact, causal arrows between “globalization” and the academic world pointed the other way, too? What if, instead of universities tailoring themselves to the emerging lineaments of real-world globalization, the very invention of globalization as a concept had been a creation of university-based and university-adjacent knowledge production, especially in the United States? And what if the particular character of its global imaginaries—visions which permeate contemporary civil society and deeply shape policy outcomes—re-flected the peculiar and shifting academic-institutional structures within which they had been built, perhaps even more than the globalizing world that they purported to chart and render legible?

This is the thesis of political scientist Isaac Kamola’s generative recent book Making the World Global: U.S. Universities and the Production of the Global Imaginary. Bringing together a rich secondary scholarship into a new frame alongside close readings of canonical and noncanonical primary texts, the book persuasively argues for the importance of tracking the emergence of the “global” as a keyword and semantic field within U.S. intellectual life; for the late 20th century as a critical inflection point in this history; and for university


settings in the United States as a key origin-point of a self-consciously “global” knowledge, the implications of which would spill over campus walls and U.S. borders. Overall, Kamola makes a case that the very terms, language, and concepts used to make sense of the contemporary world were structured by particular sets of interests which invented a “global” world at least partly in their image. These authors of “globalization,” to the extent that they succeeded in naturalizing their invention, obscured their extensive investments in it and the self-interested projects it served. Kamola seeks to denaturalize this given, unquestioned globalism by reconstructing key moments in its intellectual con-struction. “What was the massive expansion of global-speak a symptom of?” he asks (p. xv). In posing this question, Kamola hopes to reopen conceptual space for different global imaginaries and, in turn, the possibility of worlds structured and organized differently.

The book’s immediate intellectual setting consists of historical and his-torically minded works by political scientists and international relations (IR) scholars that seek to provide alternative (and more accurate) genealogies of IR scholarship and, simultaneously, critical, deconstructive accounts of the field’s own self-serving myths as to its origins. Such counter-histories have revealed international relations’ inseparability—in institutional and intellectual terms—from both the politics of racialized empire and racially segregated university systems and state institutions. They have also demonstrated that these increas-ingly inconvenient entanglements were hidden away in the discipline’s official histories and evolving canons. Importantly, this scholarship also registers the existence of rich, alternative, anti-imperial and anti-racist ways of knowing the world, especially among scholars on the left and scholars of color, and explores the ways they were institutionally marginalized by the field’s power centers.8 The decision not to grant African American universities Title VI area studies funding for the building of African studies centers is illustrative in a context where these institutions had the U.S.’s best-developed African studies capacities before World War II.

Kamola begins with a detailed account of the largely national and regional (rather than “global”) framings of post-World War II U.S. social-scientific research, organized under the rubric of “area studies.” But a critical turn towards the “global” began in the 1980s. In a highly influential 1983 article, “The Globalization of Markets,” Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt—often if incorrectly hailed as the coiner of the term “globalization”—called upon business executives to shift their imagination of the world from one of discrete national markets that needed to be studied, adapted to, and produced for, to a single, unified, “global” market within which relatively homogenized goods could be successfully sold with sufficiently energized marketing. To minimize the risks of this hoped-for worldwide commerce, Levitt flattened cultural differences and emphasized the universal psychological traits


all consumers shared. “In suggesting that firms imagine the world as global—and therefore act as if it were global,” Kamola writes, “Levitt helped produce the possibilities for making it so” (p. 85). (Interestingly, in making this case, Levitt made clear that such a world did not yet exist, but that demand for it had to be generated in advance by marketing it in classrooms and academic journals to rising cohorts of executives.)

Kamola’s identifies a second main source for this intellectual turn to the “global” in the World Bank’s Alden Clausen. Clausen’s vision had initially been shaped by his career at Bank of America, which he had managed to reorient internationally, buying up foreign financial institutions and gaining greater access to markets abroad. Once at the World Bank, he turned the in-stitution from an earlier emphasis on lending for national development to the streamlining and protection of an ever-more-integrated world-wide financial market that crossed previously formidable geographic distances and political boundaries; Clausen described it as “a whole complicated ganglion of inter-dependent relationships and a very dynamic environment in which they are all interacting” (pp. 123–24).

This new, “global” economy was understood to possess complex, techni-cal, virtually unknowable realities which only a narrow group of financial experts could fully apprehend and master, and fixed, unchanging rules, to which development-oriented, borrowing states needed to rigidly conform. Hallmarks of this new vision included the diffusion and institutionalization of ideologies of “human capital,” the application of “rate-of-return” calculations on social spending, and the subordination and sacrifice of domestic social priorities to international debt service under the neutralizing, technocratic label of “structural adjustment.”

Here, then, is the crux of Kamola’s argument: that while theorists and advocates of “globalization” declared it an objective, world-historic fact—no one’s social construction—the concept arrived firmly imprinted with concep-tions derived from the worlds of business, marketing, and finance, some of them associated then and later with “neoliberalism.” Out of these projects, particular concepts of the “global”—forged in pecuniary mission and the technocratic pursuit of profit across wider geographic scales—came to inform and structure a host of intellectual agendas across fields, at the expense of oth-ers. But importantly, there was nothing foreordained about the emergence of these new imaginaries for Kamola, who rightly emphasizes the ways global approaches had to contend with other, entrenched modes of world-making, especially earlier ones structured by nation and region.

Among the book’s themes—if one that could have been highlighted in a more sustained way—is how deeply taken-for-granted the nation was as unit of analysis within U.S. social-scientific imaginaries across most of the 20th century. From the birth of the social sciences, the modern societies that


economists, political scientists, sociologists, and historians studied were pre-sumed national. As scholars framed these national objects of inquiry, they also participated in naturalizing and legitimating them, an outcome that was, in many cases, also an explicit and unapologetic objective.9 The roots of what scholars would later dub “methodological nationalism” were complex, tied to the rise of statist systems of data collection and statistical management, nation-alized welfare regimes, systems of border control, the militarized knowledge requirements of states at war or preparing for war and—especially in the field of history—the mass production of national identification and loyalty among potentially or actually refractory populations.10 At the mid-20th-century mark, the idea of the world as a jigsaw of nations was also tied both to the member-ship rules and operating parameters of new multilateral organizations, and to “liberal internationalist” ideologies that rationalized U.S. global dominance in a world-in-the-making ostensibly built of old and new nation-states. Sup-porting and informing these dynamics were conceptualizations of academic knowledge-production, and public and private university worlds, as state-serving enterprises that did or ought to function in the state’s interests, even if there remained space—sometimes considerable space—between what officials wanted and what scholars produced.11

While foundations and nonprofits play key roles in Kamola’s story, universi-ties figure most prominently in his account of U.S. intellectual world-making. Although they might have been parsed more explicitly for readers, there are at least four distinguishable roles that universities play in his account. First, a handful of prestigious, private universities in the Northeast appear as labora-tories and launchpads where influential, macro-level theories of development were founded and projected. They accomplished this through new sources of funding from the U.S. government and private philanthropies. The most prominent of these theories, of course, was modernization, pioneered and developed by Walt Rostow at MIT, which had much to commend it when it came to the search for an epistemologically confident, U.S.-entered imperial globalism. Among its appealing components were universality in scope; dif-fusionist mechanisms, with special applicability to the decolonizing world; the embrace of technocratic-managerial modes of authority; a familiar, stage-by-stage, evolutionary sequence capable of closing any threatening teleology gap with Soviet counterparts; a self-affirming, normative centering on the powerful states of the Global North, and especially the United States; and the non-requirement of deep, textured social, cultural, political or historical knowledge of non-U.S. spaces.12

Similarly, Kamola argues for the importance of Harvard Business School (HBS) in particular as a hub from which visions of a global market radiated outward. Here Levitt’s influential thesis on the globalization of markets, he claims, would not have gained traction had it not been for a growing business


school infrastructure with its own theories, methods, and approaches to train-ing and expertise—including a gathering cult of management and marketing “gurus”—from which a rising number of corporate executives gained their credentials and took their cues. In particular, HBS’s widely adopted system of case studies, which were diffused across other schools and business, required students to imagine themselves solving large-scale problems as the heads of multinational corporations even before many such entities existed.

Second, American universities figure prominently as the institutional homes for what Kamola calls a “standing reserve” of area and regional expertise available for policy consultation across the broadening, increasingly world-wide landscapes of post-1945 U.S. interventionism, particularly with respect to the colonized and formerly colonized world. National-security-oriented government funding poured in, resulting in a new, massive complex of areas studies and international relations centers, programs, journals, and profes-sional organizations. These new institutions channeled U.S. social-scientific attention further out into the world than ever before, but pulled it into a world pre-packaged into discrete nations and regions empirically knowable through their distinct societies, politics, cultures, and economies.

In theory and practice, area studies experts would be well-suited to advise U.S. policymakers on other societies’ complex, otherwise illegible political situations, and their cultural contexts and historical arcs. Such knowledge, it was hoped, would allow the U.S. to expand its influence, tailor its “hearts and minds” appeals, deflect Soviet advances, and counter anti-colonial insurgencies. Area studies would provide the empirical evidence, legible through modern-ization theory, which might help policymakers make sense of the tensions and turmoil of decolonizing societies, pressing them onto the progressive paths that awaited them. But Kamola points out, as have others, that the invention of “area studies” also brought unintended consequences, including the cul-tivation of culturally fluent, authoritative, sometimes first-hand witnesses to the destructive results of U.S. imperial involvement, figures who were often inclined to become vocal critics.13

Third, universities appear in Kamola’s account as key instruments of post-colonial development. Anti-colonial and post-colonial leaders had myriad reasons to develop their nations’ systems of higher education: they would train and employ local experts, contribute to locally and regionally oriented economic development, cultivate and credential potential leaders, and initiate and carry out research programs in support of self-determined social agendas that might strengthen new states’ international positions. They would also break the former colonies’ educational, material and symbolic dependence on imperial metropoles’ academic systems. As Kamola relates, this agenda over-lapped, up to a point, with World Bank priorities under Robert McNamara in the late 1970s. Heavily informed by modernization theory, Bank policy during


these years emphasized the financing of university systems in the decoloniz-ing world as part of broader investments in infrastructure, education, public health, and birth control which might, at least prospectively, enhance what was understood to be stabilizing economic growth.

In the African context—Kamola’s regional specialty—as in other parts of the developing world, the result was the rapid growth of higher education, as expanding universities fostered intellectual ferment, and academics moved dynamically between scholarly, journalistic, activist, and policy domains and careers. African universities in particular became laboratories for heterodox approaches to economic development that critically thematized structural global inequalities with their roots in colonial and neo-colonial capitalism. They remapped the world as already profoundly integrated and unequal precisely due to the character of its integration; and sought to chart new, forward-looking paths towards more autonomous, self-directed national and regional development in which universities and their broader, critical intel-lectual milieus were understood to play a key role.

Finally, Kamola describes universities as subject to the pressures of privatiza-tion and commodification, processes tied closely to the forces the term “global-ization” was meant to capture and naturalize. As academic institutions found themselves more and more subject to profit-oriented mandates, they absorbed the ideologies that underwrote capitalist integration; produced academic and social-scientific knowledge derived from or resonant with these ideologies; became important hubs for the training, credentialing and networking of a newly self-aware global elite; and were enlisted as metonymic symbols of what a genuinely “global” cosmopolis looked like in institutionalized form.

To tell this part of his story, Kamola emphasizes major, late-20th-century turning points. Some affected U.S. universities most: the end of the Cold War and with it, the implosion of geopolitical rationales for robust area studies funding; fiscal retrenchment from private foundations; and deepening uni-versity reliance on tuition-paying international students for revenue. Some factors pertained to university systems in the developing world: in the context of the Third-World debt crisis, institutions like the World Bank increasingly conceived of higher education in the formerly colonized world not as instru-ments of national-welfarist development and societal modernization, but as engines for producing individualized “human capital” and, to the extent that they failed to do so by governing metrics, costly luxuries that must be pared back or eliminated in the interests of fiscal responsibility and a disciplined debt-repayment regime. As Kamola recounts, the imposition of these new priorities took a heavy toll on African universities.

It is from this concatenation of political-institutional developments that Ka-mola sees the birth of the “global” as a full-blown, university-based knowledge project. “Global” studies provided an intellectualized rationale for cutbacks


to expensive, in-depth training and research in particular places, especially in the formerly colonized world. And it allowed universities to market the expertise they were selling as universally—“globally”—applicable, especially to business-oriented students and an increasingly transnational student-clientele. Part and parcel of this withdrawal from on-the-ground, culturally specific knowledge was a shift in power towards social-scientific theorists interested in the developing world merely as a proving ground for Western and espe-cially U.S.-based theories of social change. Hypotheses forged largely within the United States to answer U.S.-centered questions would be tested for their “universality” inexpensively, over short periods of research, in select, non-U.S. locations. Area studies, he writes, became “conceptualized as the receiver of social scientific knowledge” (p. 155). As Kenneth Prewitt of the SSRC put it, while area studies had made “valid and valuable contributions” by supplying “basic data from a rich variety of cultural contexts,” efforts must be made “to transcend the limits of particular cultures and to formulate and synthesize these expanded and enriched data in cross-cultural and comparative terms”

(p. 157). This shift intensified long-standing imperial divisions of intellec-tual labor that reserved theory, conceptualization, and agenda-formation as metropolitan prerogatives, while peripheries were restricted to supplying “empirical” raw materials destined for ostensibly higher-order interpretive processing elsewhere.

Even as powerful political-economic forces shaping universities were con-ditioning the rise of the “global” as concept and organizational frame within academia, its advocates emphasized that this radically new way to structure social inquiry was, to the contrary, a more or less automatic, natural response to the radically new way that human beings everywhere were experiencing their lives. “Area studies traditionally had a fairly clear grasp of what was meant by ‘here’ and what was meant by ‘there,’” Prewitt wrote in 1996. “But when areas, from remote villages to entire continents are caught up in processes which link them to events that, though geographically distant, are culturally, economically, politically, strategically, and ecologically quite near, the distinc-tion between ‘here’ and ‘there’ breaks down.” What he called the “global-local notion was not a “methodological metaphor invented by social theorists.” It was “the lived experience of billions of people in ways unanticipated even a decade ago” (p. 158)

Using the case of New York University at the turn of the 21st century, Kamola closes with an account of international university branch campuses as instantiating a kind of university-shaped capitalist globalism: setting up shop in rapidly-growing regions possessing youthful elites eager for “global” knowledge bearing a U.S. imprimatur; structuring the transnational mobil-ity and networking of students, alumni and faculty; and legitimated by self-representations of a utopian cosmopolis inherited from Enlightenment


dreams, but injected with an up-to-date, post-nationalist, multicultural ethos. Such campuses, Kamola rightly emphasizes—similar to many campuses in the U.S.—were and are sustained in many cases by an equally globalized if far less heralded proletariat of intensely vulnerable migrant workers whose lack of civic status, rights, and protections proved to be a structural feature of “global university” operations. It was too easy and all too common to resolve these relationships into contradictions, paradoxes, or ironies—globalization’s separable “upsides” and “downsides”—instead of mutually implicated forms of domination and hierarchy.

Making the World Global merits high praise for accomplishing something that only some intellectual histories of the U.S. in the world succeed at: tying ideas, their makers, and their institutional homes to their lived consequences for the world’s peoples. When Kamola writes about the global vision of the architects of structural adjustment, for example, the implications for the aspi-rations of formerly colonized societies—particularly, in this case, for robust, autonomous higher education—are neither abstract nor bounded by the walls of U.S. academia. Rather, U.S. policymakers and academics’ thinking about the operations of finance capitalism, about the centrality of rigid debt repay-ment regimes to legitimate statehood, and about the relevance or irrelevance of histories of slavery, colonialism, exploitation, and post-colonial domination have profound—if never unmediated—impacts on the very practical question of whether African universities will be able to pay their staffs, maintain their infrastructure, and remain open.

Also valuable is the book’s emphasis on the significant yet often unremarked effects of academic-institutional arrangements on knowledge production, particularly as a corrective to accounts of postwar intellectual life that over-stress individual academics’ autonomy and agency. But Kamola’s reliance (especially in his introduction and conclusion) on a strong sense of structural determinism, indebted in part to Louis Althusser, fits awkwardly with the book’s own, more supple and varied method, which combines synoptic insti-tutional histories, intellectual biographies of prominent individuals, and close readings of their most representative or influential texts. Less tethered to an overarching structuralist frame, the book would have been well-positioned to explore when precisely in late-20th-century U.S. history specific thinkers or modes of thinking represented primary, decisive factors in world-making with respect to broader intellectual, institutional, and geopolitical forces. When did the history here pivot on well-positioned actors, or institutional nodes, or clusters of ideas, or specific keywords? To what extent did academics set or shape larger agendas, and where did they provide rationales, legitimacy or rhetorical gloss for agendas over which they had very little say, their illusions of power and influence notwithstanding?


The book provides a nuanced account of key instances of global thought, but one place where it could have used much finer-grained analysis is in its articulation of the national and global. Making the World Global draws a sharp contrast between national and global imaginaries, in part through a loosely periodized but unmistakable before/after sequence. As Kamola tells it, national imaginaries embedded in and structuring of modernization theory and area studies in the postwar decades gave way to global imaginaries that displaced their precursors. But the relationships between national and global imaginaries were always more complex, contrapuntal, interdependent, and mutually con-stitutive. While anchored to nationalized understandings of economy, society, and culture, for example, modernization theory and the practical enterprises it helped organize always assumed a wider world: “modern” societies that diffused their advanced ways to “backward” ones; foreign aid and loans and technical expertise as levers of progressive uplift; export development as a defining metric of economic progress; possibilities for cross-border political destabilization that growth would forestall; and technocratic, long-distance, counterinsurgent violence that would crush whatever discontents growth had not extinguished. Modernization theory’s defining pretensions of universal-ism presumed and required a global space over which the theory must apply.

Similarly, national imaginaries were never absent from global ones. Some-what abstract accounts of nation-states played a critical role as globalization’s foil. They were right there, after all, in narratives of a “decline of the nation-state”; if it was not always clear what globalization was, it was clear enough what it came after. (Somewhat ironically, Kamola’s description of a decline of national imaginaries mirrors the narratives of a decline of the nation-state that he seeks to problematize.) And globalization narratives often relied on nationalized cartographies, particularly when it came to accounts of cultural collision. While there were heated debates on the matter, for example, the “globalization” of world culture was for many onlookers synonymous with its “Americanization,” a concept that nationalized culture in the very act of describing and analyzing transnational and global processes. The question may be less how the national was replaced by the global than the ways that particular actors in particular settings joined one with the other, with what political intents, tensions, and consequences.

The book usefully introduces new actors into the story of U.S. world-making, particularly from the domains of business and marketing. But the principles guiding its coverage are not always clear, and some of the Kamola’s choices can seem arbitrary or reproduce conventional, and problematic, timelines. The decision to emphasize the post-World War II period, for example, with selec-tive flashbacks to prior eras is especially striking given what scholars have revealed when it comes to the deeper genealogies of hegemonic U.S. global thinking within and proximate to the U.S. academy, dating back at least as far


as the late 19th century: the rise of an imperial geopolitical expertise among U.S. naval officers and scholars; the invention of colonizing sciences tasked with making “native” societies and resources legible in newly conquered ter-ritories; transits of public health knowledge, ideology, and practice between far-flung “tropics” under U.S. sovereignty; the birth of international relations as an applied science oriented towards the maintenance and management of Euro-American colonialism and white racial domination; the birth of U.S. inter-national law as a means of extending and legitimating the power of U.S.-based corporations; transatlantic exchanges over the racial structuring of capitalist labor regimes; and the early-to-mid-20th-century origins of “development” practices that included technocratic governance, statist planning, infrastructure building, and industrial, agrarian, and environmental reform; and World War II-era strategic thinking about the prospects of Anglo-American military and commercial hegemony over a “Grand Area” including, at the least, the Western Hemisphere, Western Europe, and European colonies and in Asia, Africa and the Middle East.14 The 1940s were without doubt a watershed, in other words, in a deeper, ongoing story. That much of the post-World War II thinking the book foregrounds has roots that trace back to these prewar sources, roots that internationalist social scientists sometimes worked diligently to scrub in the years after 1945 in promoting their modernity, rationality, objectivity, and dedication to “freedom,” makes their relative absence here more notable.15

There are also many significant approaches to thinking about the world as global, including but not limited to the academy, that unfolded at the same late-20th-century moment the book covers, but which go curiously unexplored. There was the “revolution in military affairs,” with its emphasis on sophisti-cated technologies of targeting, surveillance, navigation and communications; smaller, more mobile units capable of rapid deployment; and remapping of the world as single, integrated battle space.16 There were domains of human rights law and scholarship, with its ambitions to establish globally extensive norms, jurisprudence and legal institutions.17 Relatedly, there were older discourses of “humanitarianism,” with their hierarchical, long-distance, anti-political politics of sympathetic affect and material relief. In the late 20th century, these were updated, globalized and sometimes militarized, with interventions carried out in the name of stopping or punishing regimes abusive of civilians, protecting the vulnerable, or preventing or ending “genocide”; these proved lethally versatile when it came to the making of a “war on terror.”18

The second half of the 1990s also saw a surge of interest in “cosmopolitan-ism” within the academic humanities and social sciences, and debates about “tolerance” and “coexistence” across cultural difference and the prospects for “global community.”19 Some scholars embraced forms of imperial, capitalist cosmopolitanism that represented the United States’ own “multiculturalism” as an instrument for extending and legitimating U.S. power and profiting U.S.


corporations in an irreducibly “diverse” world; the nation’s “diversity,” and what was narrated as its actual or imminent transcendence of a racist past in the wake of the civil rights era, was understood to be a source of its greatness and geopolitical dominance. At roughly the same time, academic political science and popular journalistic discourse witnessed a resurgence of demo-cratic peace theory. Some of these thinkers conflated markets and democracy in symptomatic ways, as in Thomas Friedman’s glib, catchy “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention,” the assertion that no two countries possessing McDonald’s franchises would go to war.20

If Kamola’s late-20th-century hegemonic globalizers represent only some among many, the book also pays comparatively little attention to dissenting, anti-imperial globalisms. Kamola is forthright that his book’s overall subject is the making and transformation of hegemonic global ideologies and modes of social-scientific inquiry, with occasional treatments of egalitarian, anti-imperial approaches; at one point, he imagines a parallel book that would explore in depth such counter-traditions of the global.21 This is fair; as it stands, the book covers a great deal effectively. But its focus does make it difficult to ask the crucial question of how exactly emerging forms of imperial, capitalist global-ism related to their alternatives. Did they arrive on the scene first, prompting critical rejoinders? Or did visions of a more equal world come first, leading to top-down efforts to contain, absorb, and displace them? If the latter is the case, it potentially recasts late-20th-century “global” talk (against its self-mythologies as a sui generis response to events “themselves”) as a counter-revolutionary discourse seeking to defeat, neutralize and incorporate challenging elements of past and present-day egalitarian globalisms seeking to imagine the world differently. More fully registering the presence and pressure of these dissenting alternatives more—even while still focusing on hegemonic projects—would have allowed the book to better track and interpret striking shifts in the politi-cal valences of “global” discourse, from the strong early-to-mid-20th-century association of “internationalism” with a host of progressive and left move-ments to globalization’s late-20th-century and early-21st-century associations with technocratic capitalist politics.

Along these lines, it is worth exploring one line of inquiry that Kamola does not consider. The question of whether long-distance connectivity actually reached epochally new intensities in the late 20th century has been heavily contested, but by convincing metrics, the bulk of the world’s economic activ-ity during these years (admittedly, only one possible measure of a “global” condition) remained national or regional, with important variations. To the extent that this was the case, it gives Kamola’s central question—what was global-speak a symptom of?—additional bite, because this way of speaking did not accurately reflect what was actually happening in the material world. Why, then, has globalization had such conceptual traction and staying power down to our own time?


One possibility is that “globalization” discourse resonated with and pro-pelled efforts to wrench apart the domains of “economics” and “politics,” and to enhance the relative power of capital within states structured by social-democratic politics.22 Narratives of the “decline of the nation-state” across the world could be brought to bear against any particular national-welfarist regime with great force. If, in this brave new world, cross-border flows of goods and capital could somehow no longer be captured and harnessed by putatively weakening states, it said something powerful about whether capital could or should be regulated at all, within nations or between them. Indeed, one way to read globalization discourse is as a kind of allegorical drama in which “poli-tics” (played by national states, understood territorially) was both separable from “economics” (played by cross-border flows), and no longer capable of governing it. That this allegory played out across the globe, named a process said to envelop humanity as a whole, and defined both a present epoch and unbounded future greatly enhanced its capacity to erode or liquidate the domain of “politics” within national polities, as well as between them, and to render this withering of the space of collective decision-making inherent to the inexorable drive of history itself.

Needless to say, global-speak was far from the only political-cultural idiom in which this particular politics, associated with the term neoliberalism, was being advanced in the late 20th century.23 And globalization discourse was not, strictly speaking, cooked up to achieve “neoliberal” goals, nor can this discourse’s effects be reduced to these goals. (Among other things, global concepts proved useful and compelling to many who had serious criticisms of neoliberalism.) It was more that a set of bad, easy-to-think mappings, partly created in other contexts and for other purposes (state equals territory equals politics; capital equals deterritorialization equals economic law) were avail-able to reinforce one another, creating opportunities to legitimate new, hotly contested global orders and disorders.24

Among the subtle and unintended but consequential effects were scholars’ foregrounding of questions about “connection” and the appropriate scales of social analysis as interpretive end in and of themselves. How new exactly was “globalization”? How much connectivity did it involve? What were the limitations of nation-based scholarship? What were the proper frames of scholarly inquiry? Scholars who posed these key questions could have used them to open broader critical inquiries with implications for the politics of the global condition itself. Some did, to be sure. But in many other instances, connectionist questions became ultimate ends, rather than stepping stones. Other pressing questions about the global past and present, the criteria used to discern better worlds from worse ones, and roles that global scholarship should play in the wider world, went largely undiscussed.


In this respect, Kamola’s book should be applauded for inviting scholars to think more critically about the politics and values that undergird their un-derstandings of the “global” and “transnational” as terms used to map space, scale, and social action in present and past, and as the organizing concepts used to categorize modes of social knowledge-production. By taking up the challenging work of historicizing, contextualizing, and problematizing ways of knowing that are of relatively recent origin and that remain dominant in many circles—if never unchallenged—he implicitly calls attention to the way that scholars’ reconstructions of the social, whether or not they self-consciously unfold on global or transnational scales or recognize their salience, are none-theless involved in the making of worlds. Whatever its intended scale, any social representation’s chosen centers and margins, inclusions and exclusions, spotlights and backdrops, presume, evoke and convey—for better and worse—a larger world they participate in building.

While the stakes of Kamola’s book are clear enough for historians of U.S. higher education and intellectual historians of the United States’ role in the wider world, what if anything does it mean for the globalizing of U.S. history? The stakes here, while subtle, are substantial. When influential U.S. historians in the late 1990s and early 2000s announced the need to bring the history of the United States “into” the world, they had any of a number of intellectual traditions available to them, including those forged in the previous half-century’s anti-racist, feminist, socialist, anti-militarist, anti-imperialist, and environmental globalisms. Among other advantages, laying the foundations here (at least prospectively) would have rendered a globalized U.S. history at the outset, clearly and compellingly, as a mode of critical history seeking to denaturalize, historicize, and problematize illegitimate past and present-day power relations, including those with transnational, imperial, and global reach. It would have also aligned the field well with prevailing analytical categories of race, gender, and class, and well-established interpretive and critical practices in many national and sub-national histories.

But for reasons that Kamola’s book helps illuminate, this was not the dominant path taken. Instead, the field’s foundational concepts and agendas were adapted from connectionist globalism, with its borders, flows and cos-mopolitan ambitions. The borders in question were the bounds of national history, which needed to be transcended. The flows were mobile, border-crossing cultures, goods, and people that enmeshed national histories in one another. Core research questions would center on the ways that historical actors had navigated between national and transnational identities in the interconnected worlds they had inhabited. Past societies would be shown to be more entangled and mutually implicated than latter-day nationalists and exceptionalists allowed, a discovery that was especially prized when it came


to social domains previously understood to be disconnected and sui generis (domestic spheres and “internal” regions, for example).25 Such histories could, intentionally or not, provide borderless capitalist globalization something ap-proximating a usable past.26

In seeking to provide alternatives to the United States’ late-Cold War nationalist triumphalism and the exceptionalist arrogance of its “unipolar” moment, globalizing history’s anti-exceptionalist impulses and goals were substantial and important, and continue to animate and inform vibrant, diverse research agendas down to the present. They played an indispensable role in defamiliarizing elements of U.S. history, previously anchored to national and exceptionalist frames, by revealing their transnational entanglements. And they have emerged as newly valuable in the face of some historians’ recent calls for an ostensibly “progressive” nationalist U.S. historiography that might be capable of battling effectively with the proliferating historical myths being manufactured in the service of a U.S. authoritarian nationalism.27 But if this anti-exceptionalist project has been necessary, it has also been insufficient. Its limits are clearest in framings of a globalized U.S. history that identify its goal as a more cosmopolitan U.S. national identity, rescued from arrogant exceptionalism. Here the point of a writing histories “beyond the nation” was ultimately a better U.S. national history, a prioritization of nation and globe with its own distinct history, a history that was not separable from that of American exceptionalism itself.

Such framings, both in the context of a globalized U.S. history and the broader field of global history, did not go unchallenged. Nor were they totally hegemonic in shaping the landscape of monographs that followed them, which drew from varied conceptual, interpretive, and historiographic traditions; among these were critical empire histories that foregrounded questions of unequal power as well as transnational connection. But connectionist fram-ings were influential enough that, as reservations about global history have recently surfaced, they have often tellingly conflated the act of writing history at scales larger than nations with the act of celebrating mobility, flows, and a borderless world. Has backlash nationalism proven that global history went too far? some scholars asked. Haven’t global historians, somewhat like cos-mopolitan capital, abandoned those “left behind,” who merited more “local” attention? Might not worldly global historians even share some of the blame for revanchist nationalism?28

Whatever the merits of these questions, they would only make sense if global history and connectionist history were the same thing. But, fortunately, global history and connectionist history are not and have never been the same thing, even if the indispensable distinction between them has often gone un-marked. There has always been scholarship that, even as it carefully tracks and reconstructs connections, sees this task as the means to larger critical


ends, ends that are not reducible to hopes for a more inclusionary national identity among the citizens of the world’s most powerful states. Among these goals is the critique of political and methodological nationalisms not merely as exclusionary or exceptionalist, but as enclosing social analysis and political ethics in ways that mask and legitimate structures of unequal power between nations and across global space, structures of power that merit—indeed, re-quire—critical, historical scrutiny.

From this point of view, the work of global history can be reimagined to involve, alongside the challenging of national exceptionalisms, the related but deeper matter of providing critical genealogies and contingent histories of an unequal world rendered legitimate and natural by national and global structures and ideologies—including the nation-bounded scholarship—and as well as by past and present global ideologies. It is not that connection and linkage will cease to be among scholars’ defining research subjects and orga-nizing themes in such a reimagined global history, but that excavating and reconstructing them as early traces of a “global” world in the making will no longer be these histories’ primary goal. Recovering and mapping connection might be productively recast as one means for carrying out global scholar-ship, but not its end.

Such work is, thankfully, far from hypothetical. Historical scholarship that uses reconstructed connections to critically thematize transnational and global inequalities has long existed in specific sectors of both global historiography and national historiographies “in the world.” This impulse can be observed, for example, in many works that employ political-economic analyses inspired by dependency theory and world-systems theory to account for the historical development of the capitalist world economy’s uneven, hierarchical, segmented structures and divisions of labor. Similarly, there are histories that track the politics of racialized and gendered difference across national boundaries, examining the ways that such hierarchies shaped and were shaped by rela-tions of geopolitical domination. And there are works that critically historicize war-making and societal militarization—capacity-building for state violence organized by friend/enemy distinctions—and these processes’ relationships to the building of national power and an unequal world. Much of this scholar-ship has relied upon concepts of empire. While empire analytics have varied widely in the purposes to which they have been put, and in their definitions of empire—including overly-narrowed definitions that confine the term to “formal” colonialism—at their best, they have oriented historians towards inquiries that problematize and historicize transnational and global inequali-ties, even as they fundamentally challenge conventional boundaries between the “insides” and “outsides” of national history itself.29

Reconstructing, as Kamola’s book does, American universities’ significant roles in incubating and carrying forward a particular set of global imaginar-


ies—and marginalizing others—helps historians make sense of the reasons why, by the late 20th and early 21st centuries, connectionist globalisms tied to U.S. unipolarity, military dominance, and the marketization of society on a global scale prevailed within the university-based social sciences and humanities in the United States including, ultimately, in many of the founding charters of a globalized U.S. history itself.

Raising awareness of this intellectual history also helps open the necessary space for other global histories, animated both by well-established and emer-gent critical traditions and ones that remain to be imagined. Many of these nascent agendas, including ones that distinguish connection as means and end, will not have been conceivable within the matrix of institutional imperatives and dominant global cartographies so effectively charted in Kamola’s work. But unlike the inexorable, unchosen, end-of-history globalizations dreamed of and brought partway into being by this book’s protagonists, global history’s own story is far from over.

Paul A. Kramer is associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University, and the author of The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines, and numerous articles on the history and historiography of the U.S. in the world. He is currently completing a book on the transnationalizing of modern U. S. history. His work can be found at paulkrameronline.com.

1. For influential examples of this discourse, see Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism are Reshaping the World (1996); Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (2000).

2. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (2003).3. For successive waves of reflection on globalization as process and category (including

some highly critical assessments), see Roland Robertson, “Mapping the Global Condition: Globalization as the Central Concept,” Theory, Culture and Society, Vol. 7, No. 2 (1990), pp. 15–30; Roland Robertson and Habib H. Khondker, “Discourses of Globalization: Prelimi-nary Considerations,” International Sociology, Vol. 13, No. 1 (1998), pp. 25–40; Jens Bartelson, “Three Concepts of Globalization,” International Sociology, Vol. 15, No 2 (2000), pp. 180–19; Justin Rosenberg, The Follies of Globalization: Polemical Essays (New York: Verso, 2000); Peer C. Fiss and Paul M. Hirsch, “The Discourse of Globalization: Framing and Sensemaking of an Emerging Concept,” American Sociological Review, Vol. 70, No. 1 (2005), pp. 29–52; Justin Rosenberg, “Globalization Theory: A Post-Mortem,” International Politics, Vol. 42 (2005), pp. 2–74; Manfred B. Steger, “Ideologies of Globalization,” Journal of Political Ideologies, Vol. 10, No. 1 (February 2005), pp. 11–30; Paul James and Manfred B. Steger, “A Genealogy of ‘Globalization’: The Career of a Concept,” Globalizations, Vol. 11, No. 4 (2014), pp. 417–34; Stephen Stetter, “Globalization” in Felix Sebastian Berenskoetter, ed., Concepts in World Politics (2016), pp. 304–20.

4. For transnational approaches to immigration historiography see, especially, Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton, “Transnationalism: A New Analytic Framework for Understanding Migration,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 645, No. 1 (July 1992), pp. 1–24; Donna R. Gabaccia, “Is Everywhere Nowhere? Nomads, Nations, and the Immigrant Paradigm of United States History,” Journal of American His-


tory, Vol. 86, No. 3 (Dec. 1999), pp. 1115–34. On transfer history see, for example, Gabriele Lingelbach, “Intercultural Transfer and Comparative History: The Benefits and Limits of Two Approaches,” Traversea, Vol. 1 (2011), pp. 46–59.

5. For example of efforts to date back and periodize globalization, see A. G. Hopkins, “Introduction: Globalization—An Agenda for Historians,” and “The History of Globaliza-tion—and the Globalization of History,” in Hopkins, ed., Globalization in World History (2002), pp. 1–10, 11–46; Adam McKeown, “Periodizing Globalization,” History Workshop Journal, No. 63 (Spring 2007), pp. 218–30.

6. For forceful critiques of the over-emphasis on connectivity in globalization discourse and histories that flow from it, and an emphasis on connectivity’s limits, see Frederick Cooper, “What is the Concept of Globalization Good For? An African Historian’s Perspec-tive,” African Affairs, Vol. 100, No. 399 (April 2001), pp. 189–213; Nancy Green, The Limits of Transnationalism (2019).

7. For a compelling account of the global politics of time along these lines, for example, see Vanessa Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time, 1870–1950 (2015)

8. See, for example, David Long and Brian C. Schmidt, eds., Imperialism and Internationalism in the Discipline of International Relations (2005); Inderjeet Parmar, Foundations of the American Century: The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power (2012); Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations (2015).

9. On the epistemological centrality of the nation-state for the emergence of immigration scholarship, for example, see Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller, “Methodological Nationalism and Beyond: Nation-State Building, Migration and the Social Sciences,” Global Networks, Vol. 2, No. 4 (2002), pp. 301–334.

10. In these ways and others, modern social-scientific knowledge production was closely tied to the building of national territoriality, in Charles Maier’s sense of the term: see his Once Within Borders: Territories of Power, Wealth and Belonging since 1500 (2016).

11. The scholarship on state-university relations with respect to the social and human sciences is extensive, and varies in its account of power balances between scholars and government. Christopher Simpson, ed., Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences during the Cold War (1998); Noam Chomsky, et. al., The Cold War and the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years (1998); Ron Robin, The Making of the Cold War Enemy: Culture and Politics in the Military-Intellectual Complex (2001); David C. Engerman, Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts (2009); Mark Solovey and Hamilton Cravens, eds., Cold War Social Science: Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy, and Human Nature (2012); Mark Solovey, Shaky Foundations: The Politics-Patronage-Social Science Nexus in Cold War America (2013); Christopher Simpson, Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945–1960 (2015); Jamie Cohen-Cole, The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature (2016); David H. Price, Cold War Anthropology: The CIA, The Pentagon, and the Growth of Dual Use Anthropology (2016); Joy Rohde, Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research during the Cold War (2018); Audra J. Wolfe, Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science (2018). For thoughtful overviews that call for skepticism about the Cold War as the primary or exclusive context for mid-20th-century U.S. social science, and about policymaker influence and academic conformity, see Joel Isaac, “The Human Sciences in Cold War America,” Historical Journal, Vol. 50, No. 3 (Sept. 2007), pp. 725–46; David C. Engerman, “Social Science in the Cold War,” ISIS: Journal of the History of Science in Society, Vol. 101, No. 2 (June 2010), pp. 393–400.

12. The historiography of modernization theory is wide-ranging. For a historiographic review and key collection, see David C. Engerman and Corinna R. Unger, “Toward a Global History of Modernization,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 33, No. 3 (June 2009), 375–85; David C. Engerman, Nils Gilman, Mark H. Haefele, and Michael E. Latham, eds., Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War (2003).

13. On area studies, see David L. Szanton, ed., The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines (2004); Vicente Rafael, “The Cultures of Area Studies in the United States,” Social Text, Vol. 41 (1994), pp. 91–111; Bruce Cumings, “Boundary Displacement: Area Stud-ies and International Studies During and After the Cold War,” Bulletin for Concerned Asian


Scholars, Vol. 29, No. 1 (January-March 1997), pp. 6–26; Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Unin-tended Consequences of Area Studies Research,” in Chomsky, et. al., The Cold War and the University, pp. 195–231.

14. Dirk Bönker, Militarism in a Global Age: Naval Ambitions in Germany and the United States (2012); Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines (2006); Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics; Benjamin A. Coates, Legalist Empire: International Law and American Foreign Relations in the Early 20th Century (2016); Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (2010); Nick Cullather, The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle against Poverty in Asia (2010); Stephen Wertheim, Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy (2020); David C. Engerman, Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development (2004); Susan Schulten, The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880–1950 (2001); Ricardo D. Salvatore, Disciplinary Conquest: U.S. Scholars in South America, 1900–1945 (2016); Zachary Lockman, Field Notes: The Making of Middle East Studies in the United States (2016).

15. For a compelling survey of the reasons “Cold War social science” requires longer gene-alogies, with special emphasis on continuities in public health and development projects, see Jessica Wang, “Colonial Crossings: Social Science, Social Knowledge, and American Power from the Nineteenth Century to the Cold War,” in Jeroen van Dongen, ed., Cold War Science and the Transatlantic Circulation of Knowledge (2015), pp. 184–213.

16. On the expansive use of U.S. military power in the 1990s, see Andrew Bacevich, American Empire (2002). On GPS and global mapping, see William Rankin, After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century (2016). On the “revolu-tion in military affairs,” see Simon Dalby, “Geopolitics, the Revolution in Military Affairs and the Bush Doctrine,” International Politics, Vol. 46 (2009), pp. 234–52.

17. Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2010); Mark Philip Bradley, A World Reimagined: Americans and Human Rights in the 20th Century (2016).

18. The literature on “humanitarian intervention” is extensive. Stephen Wertheim, “The Solu-tion from Hell: The United States and the Rise of Humanitarian Interventionism, 1991–2003,” Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 12, No. 3–4 (Sept.-Dec. 2010), pp. 149–72.

19. For an overview, see David A. Hollinger, “Not Universalists, Not Pluralists: The New Cosmopolitans Find Their Way,” Constellations, Vol. 8, No. 2 (2001), pp. 236–48.

20. See for example, essays in Michael W. Doyle, Liberal Peace: Selected Essays (New York: Routledge, 2011); Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, pp. 248–275. For an insightful overview of global discourse in the U.S. in the late 20th century, including many of the above developments, see Howard Brick, “The U.S. and Globalization,” in Martin Halliwell and Catherine Morley, eds., American Thought and Culture in the 21st Century (2008), pp. 145–159.

21. For a powerful, parallel account, see Adom Getachew’s account of egalitarian global thinking by Black diasporic intellectuals in the mid-20th century, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (2019).

22. On this separation of politics and economics in globalization discourse, see Michael Lang, “Globalization and Its History,” The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 78 (Dec. 2006), pp. 899–931.

23. The literature on neoliberalism is extensive and growing. For accounts of neoliberalism’s politics and history see, especially, Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (2015); David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2007); Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (2018). For a critique of the term’s expansionary uses, see Daniel Rodgers, “The Uses and Abuses of ‘Neoliberalism,’” Dissent (Winter 2018), pp. 78–87.

24. Geographer John Agnew usefully names this conflation of power, state and territory the “territorial trap.” See John Agnew, “The Territorial Trap: The Geographical Assumptions of International Relations Theory,” Review of International Political Economy, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring 1994), pp. 53–80; John Agnew, “Revisiting the Territorial Trap,” Nordia Geographical Publications Yearbook, Vol. 44, No. 4 (2015), pp. 43–48.

25. Among the most influential of these calls were Ian Tyrrell, “American Exceptional-ism in an Age of International History,” American Historical Review, Vol. 96, No. 4 (1991),


pp. 1031–55; David Thelen, “Of Audiences, Borderlands and Comparisons: Toward the Internationalization of American History,” Journal of American History, Vol. 79, No. 2 (1992), pp. 432–62; David Thelen, “The Nation and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on United States History,” Journal of American History, Vol. 86, No. 3 (1999), pp. 965–75; Thomas Bender, “Historians, the Nation, and the Plenitude of Narratives,” in Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (2002), pp. 1–22. Framings of transnational history as the study of connections, linkages and mobilities also feature prominently in many of the contributions to this exchange: C. A. Bayly, Sven Beckert, Matthew Connelly, Isabel Hofmeyr, Wendy Ko-zol, and Patricia Seed, “AHR Conversation: On Transnational History,” American Historical Review, Vol. 111, No. 5 (Dec. 2006), pp. 1441–64.

26. For a parallel critique along these lines, see Louis A. Pérez, “We are the World: Inter-nationalizing the National, Nationalizing the International,” Journal of American History, Vol. 89, No. 2 (Sept. 2002), pp. 558–66.

27. Jill Lepore, “A New Americanism: Why a Nation Needs a National Story,” Foreign Affairs,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2019.

28. Jeremy Adelman, “What is Global History Now?” Aeon, March 2, 2017. For an exchange about global history’s prospects, see Richard Drayton, David Motadel, Jeremy Adelman, and David Bell, “Discussion: The Futures of Global History,” Journal of Global History, Vol. 13, No. 1 (2018), pp. 1–21.

29. The literatures here are extensive and varied. For relevant citations, and a discussion of the value of empire as a generative analytic category in histories of the U.S. in the world, see Paul A. Kramer, “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World,” American Historical Review, Vol. 116, No. 5 (December 2011), pp. 1348–1391.

Paul A. Kramer

Documents