Crossing Empires: Taking U.S. History into Transimperial Terrain

In Crossing Empires, Kristin Hoganson and Jay Sexton present an edited collection highlighting recent scholarship on U.S. transimperial history. The emphasis on the “transimperial,” Hoganson and Sexton explain in the introduction, is a corrective to the scholarly tendency to use “transnational” as a catch-all term for people, goods, or ideas that transcend borders. Much of the time, they point out, those borders were imperial, not national. But beyond simply correcting inaccurate terminology, they want this collection to show that recognizing these connections as transimperial can enhance and deepen our understanding of pressing questions in the field about power, connection, and the making of the modern world. The collection is organized in five parts: part 1 follows pursuits of profit (seal trading and bridge-building) across imperial boundaries, part 2 discusses politics (liberal imperialism, the secret ballot, and opium prohibition) that crossed imperial borders, part 3 looks more closely at governance (the U.S. Consular Service, free trade anti-imperialism, and governance in the Islamic Philippines), part 4 focuses on the lives of people who crossed imperial borders or had imperial borders cross them (African American colonists in Canada, Afro-Caribbean laborers on the Panama Canal, and Filipinos under Japanese occupation), and part 5 focuses on transimperial resistance (South Asian activists in the United States fighting against the British Empire and Indigenous activists in Australia, Canada, and the United States fighting against child removal). All of the chapters are accessible, engaging, and succinct, making them ideal for undergraduate courses.