Making the Empire Work : : Labor and United States Imperialism / / ed. by Daniel E. Bender, Jana K. Lipman.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter New York University Press Complete eBook-Package 2014-2015
• MitwirkendeR: Bender, Daniel E.,; Capozzola, Christopher,; Colby, Jason M.,; Coleman, Kevin,; Fujita-Rony, Dorothy B.,; Gonzalez, Vernadette Vicuña,; Greene, Julie,; Hahamovitch, Cindy,; Hirshberg, Lauren,; Jung, Moon-Ho,; Lipman, Jana K.,; Moon, Seungsook,; Sedgewick, Augustine,; Urban, Andrew T.,; Zimmerman, Andrew,
• HerausgeberIn: Bender, Daniel E.,; Lipman, Jana K.,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : New York University Press, , [2015]; ©2015
• Year of Publication: 2015
• Language: English
• Series: Culture, Labor, History ; 13
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

Millions of laborers, from the Philippines to the Caribbean, performed the work of the United States empire. Forging a global economy connecting the tropics to the industrial center, workers harvested sugar, cleaned hotel rooms, provided sexual favors, and filled military ranks. Placing working men and women at the center of the long history of the U.S. empire, these essays offer new stories of empire that intersect with the “grand narratives” of diplomatic affairs at the national and international levels. Missile defense, Cold War showdowns, development politics, military combat, tourism, and banana economics share something in common-they all have labor histories. This collection challenges historians to consider the labor that formed, worked, confronted, and rendered the U.S. empire visible. The U.S. empire is a project of global labor mobilization, coercive management, military presence, and forced cultural encounter. Together, the essays in this volume recognize the United States as a global imperial player whose systems of labor mobilization and migration stretched from Central America to West Africa to the United States itself.Workers are also the key actors in this volume. Their stories are multi-vocal, as workers sometimes defied the U.S. empire’s rhetoric of civilization, peace, and stability and at other times navigated its networks or benefited from its profits. Their experiences reveal the gulf between the American ‘denial of empire’ and the lived practice of management, resource exploitation, and military exigency. When historians place labor and working people at the center, empire appears as a central dynamic of U.S. history.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- PART I. SOLIDARITIES AND RESISTANCE -- 1. The Wages of Empire -- 2. Revolutionary Currents -- 3. The Secret Soldiers’ Union -- 4. The Photos That We Don’t Get to See -- PART II. INTIMACIES IN COLONIAL SPACES -- 5. Sexual Labor and the U.S. Military Empire -- 6. Making Aloha -- PART III. MIGRATION AND MOBILIZING LABOR FOR THE EMPIRE -- 7. The Advantages of Empire -- 8. Empire and the Moving Body -- 9. Slavery’s Stale Soil -- PART IV. IMPERIAL LABOR AND CONTROL IN THE TROPICS -- 10. The Colonization of Antislavery and the Americanization of Empires -- 11. Progressive Empire -- 12. What Is Imperial about Coffee? -- 13. Home Land (In)security -- About the Contributors -- Index