Read (subscription needed) in the February 2025 issue of the IJMH Cory Davis’ review of “On the Waves of Empire: U.S. Imperialism and Merchant Sailors, 1872–1924” by William D. Riddell

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/08438714241309507

This book explores how class conflict shaped U.S. imperial expansion between the 1870s and 1920s. It shows how class struggle between white merchant sailors and shipping capital powerfully informed an emerging U.S. imperial system, and how that struggle shaped and reshaped the system’s internal and external boundaries. Sailors were among a handful of workers who crisscrossed these boundaries every time they went to work. More conceptually, this book examines where citizenship ends and subjecthood begins or, more precisely, where it overlaps. It is about whom citizenship and subjecthood overlapped within and where they overlapped–where the metropole or nation became the empire or the colony, what that meant, and why it mattered. The struggle between white merchant sailors and U.S. shipping companies demonstrates that the lines between nation and empire and foreign and domestic were contested spaces of racially inflected class conflict centered around extending the country’s racialized immigration regime to both U.S. colonial possessions and U.S. flagged merchant ships. The conflict over these imperial boundaries illustrated the real-life consequences they held for working people. These were not just abstractions. These lines often determined the type of labor systems within which workers toiled. An analytical focus on sailors also helps us see empire and imperial boundary formation as a process in motion.

https://academic.oup.com/illinois-scholarship-online/book/55632