Path of Empire

Panama and the California Gold Rush

Bibliographic Data

ID2804983
AuthorsJason M Colby (University of Victoria, corresponding author)
Year2009
Volume89
Issue3
Pages558-559
Publication date2009-08-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHispanic American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-2168 • E-ISSN: 1527-1900
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00182168-2009-039
OpenAlexW1981395561
LanguageEN
Citations received8

Despite its long and contentious encounter with the U.S. empire, Panama has received little attention from North American scholars. Rather than a lived-in place with its own history, it usually appears as a transit point. This is certainly true of most studies of the California Gold Rush, which rarely note that 200,000 Americans crossed the isthmus between 1848 and 1860, and even more rarely consider the impact of that migration on Panama itself. Yet, as Aims McGuinness observes, “the making of the United States as a transcontinental nation and U.S. expansion overseas in Panama were coincident with one another and intertwined” (p. 12). Drawing upon research in Panama, Colombia, and the United States, his fine study Path of Empire not only provides new perspectives on U.S. expansion but explores events whose broader importance within Latin American history are often overlooked.In mid-nineteenth-century Panama, questions of transit, sovereignty, and empire were inextricably tied to race. A loosely controlled province of Nueva Granada, Panama had long held promise as a potential “emporium” of the world. Yet, like the rest of Latin America, it struggled to reconcile republican ideals with colonial legacies. Panama suffered from deep racial and class divisions though not the binary racial divide of U.S. society. This social hierarchy helped shape Panama’s encounter with the American migrants who began appearing in the late 1840s. Despite their predictions of U.S. domination, white Americans found Panama’s racial complexity unsettling. As McGuinness notes, “while many recognized that color mattered in Panamanian society, they were often unsure how it mattered” (p. 42). Particularly jarring was the effectiveness with which black laborers controlled transit across the isthmus, forcing migrants to depend upon their services. This entrepreneurial success, in turn, contributed to Afro-Panamanians’ political inclusion, marked by the abolition of slavery in 1852 and the establishment of universal manhood suffrage the following year. This resulted in the rising power of the Liberal Party, which most people of color supported. In short, black Panamanians were becoming increasingly assertive and empowered even as the influence and demands of American interests grew.As McGuinness shows, these tensions reached new levels in the mid-1850s, as U.S. transportation companies consolidated their power at the expense of local entrepreneurs. The key player was the New York – based Panama Railroad Company, which completed the first transcontinental railroad in 1855. Although many Panamanians had hoped the railroad would bring prosperity and progress, the completed line instead created a foreign-controlled transit enclave that sharply curtailed the economic benefits foreign migration had brought to Panama. Indeed, McGuinness observed that, although historians have dated U.S. enclaves to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, “the classic strategies of the enclaves were pioneered by the Panama Railroad Company in Panama half a century before” (p. 82). This included not only the use of West Indian immigrant labor but a private police force and strictly enforced racial hierarchy.Resentment of this foreign domination contributed to the famous “Watermelon Slice Riot” of April 15, 1856. Sparked by the refusal of a white American migrant to pay a vendor for fruit he had sampled, the riot left 15 Americans and 2 Panamanians dead and helped prompt the first U.S. military intervention in Panama months later. Yet McGuinness convincingly argues that the uprising must be placed in the context not only of resentment toward the railroad company and U.S. racism but of local anxiety toward William Walker’s filibuster war in neighboring Central American nations. Equally important, as he shows in his fascinating analysis of Panamanian intellectual Justo Arosemena, these events helped lay the foundation for both Panamanian nationalism and an early formulation of Latin American regional identity. In a July 1856 essay entitled “La cuestión americana,” for example, Arosemena posed a “spiritual” and “chivalrous” Latin race against the “cold” Yankees’ “invasive spirit of conquest” (p. 160), thereby anticipating themes later advanced by figures such as José Enrique Rodó and José Vasconcelos. Yet, as in the case of those authors, Arosemena’s conception of national and regional identity left little room for people of African and indigenous descent.In sum, Path of Empire is an innovative study of a largely unexamined topic. By drawing upon Panamanian sources and narratives, McGuinness places Panama at the center of a crucial episode in global history, providing a fresh perspective on Latin America’s encounter with U.S. empire. Although some discussion of later, seemingly related events, such as the 1885 Prestán rebellion, might have proved useful, this is an original and provocative book, and McGuinness’s recounting of his travails in Panama’s National Archive are alone worth the price. Path of Empire will appeal to scholars of U.S. as well as Latin American history and would serve as an excellent early reading in courses on U.S. – Latin American relations

Ancient history · Archaeology · Colonialism · Economic history · Empire · Ethnology · Genealogy · Geography · Gold rush · Latin Americans · Panama · Political science · White (mutation) · Cuban History and Society · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law

Tools

Open DOI