Illusions of Empire

In his most recent book, Illusions of Empire: The Civil War and Reconstruction in the US-Mexico Borderlands, William Kiser has taken on the long-overdue task of tracing the inextricable connections between the American Civil War, Napoleon III's “Grand Scheme” of a new American empire, and Mexico's second war of independence. Adding to his formidable list of publications on the US-Mexico borderlands, Kiser argues for the centrality of this region in shaping Civil War diplomacy and military strategy. Showcasing his fine-grain analyses of governmental correspondence and congressional records, Kiser both informs and entertains with his surprising stories of the US borderlands' most pivotal political players and what he calls their “irregular” and often illicit venues of diplomacy and alliance (p. 127). In doing so, however, he falls into one of the common traps of writing diplomatic histories that attempt to go beyond a gloss of official correspondence and formal treaties. Though he has succeeded in raising awareness of less commonly celebrated political and economic forces in affecting broader political and territorial outcomes of key military conflicts such as the American Civil War and the Napoleonic occupation of Mexico, he has nonetheless left unanswered a number of key theoretical questions: How and why do these forms of “irregular” diplomacy get buried? How might we reassess our understandings of “informal” and “illicit” versus “regular” and “official” diplomacy and history in the first place? And what happens to imperial and national borderlands when we make that reassessment? Kiser also leaves out key players in a borderland history of the Civil War and of “informal” cross-border diplomacy more specifically: African Americans.Kiser's work takes on an era of territorial cleavage and political conflict not only in the United States but also in Mexico, where civil war from 1858 to 1861 was followed by French imperial occupation from 1863 to 1867. Both the Union and Confederate armies repeatedly used their commercial, political, and military connections in Mexico—be they with the Mexican republicans or those supporting the French imperial takeover—to increase their access to recruits, war materiel, sanctuary, spies, buffer zones of neutrality, and other resources. In the balance hung the strip of territory straddling either side of the Rio Grande, where long-standing conflicts, such as those between Apache groups and settlers, and mid-nineteenth-century battles, such as that surrounding Texan independence and annexation, added to the political ambiguity of the borderland area and thus reaffirmed the region's role as a political wild card. Key players in this story include Santiago Vidaurri, the traitorous Mexican governor of the borderland states of Nuevo León and Coahuila who played a variety of sides in multiple wars in order to maintain a monopoly on cross-border trade; Mangas Coloradas, the Chiricahua Apache leader who directed a multitude of subsistence and later retributive raids on borderland settlements as well as Confederate camps; and Thomas Corwin, US emissary to Mexico under Abraham Lincoln, who attempted to convince Mexican authorities to accept US loans in exchange for putting up their four northwestern borderland states as collateral.Missing among these historical players are the many African American refugees, merchants, bandits, militants, and spies on both sides of the border, who exemplify a key claim: the importance of “irregular diplomacy” and conflicting individual and collective political aims in influencing broader processes of empire making (pp. 6–7). As a field currently experiencing an exciting new surge of excellent contributions, the history of Afro-Latin America and of the African American diaspora in Latin America (and even more specifically in the US-Mexico borderlands—see recent works by Alice Baumgartner and James Nichols) are noteworthy in their absence.Despite Illusions of Empire's claim to contribute to the history of “Greater Reconstruction,” the book's focus seems to be less on the racialized implications of the Civil War in Mexico or the United States. Instead, for Kiser, the term “Greater Reconstruction” appears to fall under his broader concept of imperial “illusions”—aspirations of conquest shared by competing groups during the 1860s. In Kiser's account, these aspirations collide with unforeseen obstacles in the borderlands, such as the strength of Mexican governors' “regional autonomy” and “idiosyncratic modes of diplomacy and intrigue” (p. 3). Still, Kiser's vagueness on “empire” and what constitutes an illusion of it—these “illusions” are shared by a South Texas con artist (p. 128) as well as Napoleon III—does little to clarify how this might be a useful model for understanding other borderland or empire-making histories.Notwithstanding these few drawbacks, Illusions of Empire provides a persuasive, carefully researched, and much-needed examination of the US-Mexico borderlands' political dynamics and the circuits of alliances traversing the region during a particularly transformative era in both countries' histories. In connecting the strategies of state and nonstate actors, criminals and emperors, and patriots and traitors, Kiser also artfully exposes some of the many unresolved contradictions produced at the national and international levels during this period in the history of empire and nation building more generally. His efforts will be welcomed by scholars of US and Mexican history alike

Alliance · Diplomacy · Empire · Independence (probability theory) · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Archaeology and Natural History · Historical Studies in Latin America · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law