Embedded Files
Keystone View Company, "Have You a Pass? Scene on the firing line, PI" California Museum of Photography, Riverside, CA.
As I point out in the book project, reconcentration not only extended US power over the rural landscape, but local relationships to the land also transformed the policy. The war and forced containment nearly decimated carabao populations (Philippine water buffalo, shown here) by spreading infectious rinderpest. The centrality of carabao to local subsistence, and the crisis fueled by the US army's destruction of these populations, drew the US government deeper into efforts at managing the Philippine environment, hinting at the ways in which local political ecologies shaped US empire. The shipment of water buffalo from Hong Kong, and the experiments with transplanting Texas cattle in southern Luzon, also suggests the global scale of this ecological change.
Commercial stereographs like these repackaged the war for US audiences. A common motif was the reinforcing the US imperial project by drawing attentiont to the spectacle of tropical nature.
First Book Project | The American Roots of War: A Global History of US Empire Building, 1894-1914
This project, building upon my dissertation, offers a new interpretation of US empire building between the Wars of 1898 and First World War. In case studes that draw together five continents, I trace the ways that culturally constructed and transnationally contested ideas about tropical nature linked anticolonial insurgencies, US imperialist ambitions, and global imperial rivalry.
US political leaders, diplomats, and other non-state agents of empire appropriated what I call anticolonial ecologies, or the political ecologies of revolution which rejected the exploitation, alienation, and commodification of the land, as a tool of their own empire-building project. Appealing to republican solidarity, I show how overlooked appeals to ideas about climate, land use, resource development, subsistence, and sovereignty structured the projection of US global power.
Historians of US empire have long recognized the transnational and transimperial connections linking the United States to a global imperial system. This research brings together interdisciplinary frameworks of environmental, cultural, diplomatic, and transimperial histories, as well as political ecology, environmental geography, and visual culture to critically reexamine those historical connections. By focusing on the co-construction of ecological imaginaries, this project suggests a pathway for building upon the work of diplomatic history and the environmental humanities that goes beyond declensionist narratives of extraction and US exceptionalist narratives about "isolationism" before the Great War.
Article Manuscripts
"The Disputed El Dorado: The Venezuela Question, the Scramble for America, and the Birth of Anticolonial Ecologies" Manuscript in preparation.
I am also preparing a gallery/media article analyzing the Keystone View Company's collection of wartime/imperial stereographs (see left).
Reviews
Taína Caragol and Kate Clarke Lemay, 1898: Visual Culture and US Imperialism in the Caribbean and the Pacific (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023), H-War [forthcoming].
Dean A. Nowowiejski, The American Army in Germany, 1918-1923: Success Against the Odds (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2021), H-War. (link)
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