What is the place of oceans in borderlands studies? How have Japanese labour migrants contributed to the formation and evolution of the North Pacific borderlands region? These questions are at the heart of legal historian Andrea Geiger's 2022 book, Converging empires: Citizens and subjects in the North Pacific borderlands 1867-1945. The book begins in 1867, a formative year when Canada became a Dominion of the British Empire and when Alaska was purchased by the United States (US) from Russia. It concludes in 1945 following the Second World War. By situating the northern US-Canada borders in the Pacific Ocean region, Geiger shows how a dynamic legal landscape and key policies related to national identity, belonging, citizenship, and sovereign authority were forged and contested. She studies this through the personal lives of transpacific Japanese migrants and Indigenous peoples-the Haida, Tsimshian, Tlingit, and Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in (Han) among others-who develop strategies to counter boundaries and unjust race-based constraints imposed on them in the North American West during the first half of the 20 th century.Converging empires destabilizes land-centric modes of borderland studies and instead considers dynamic maritime spaces and waterways of the Pacific Ocean. The book's framing of the North Pacific as a "conduit" interrupts conventional framings of the borders of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. Geiger re-orients these northernmost borderlands within a more expansive space that encompasses contiguous landmasses, archipelagoes, and coastal regions of North America, the Pacific Islands, and Japan. These parameters are illustrated in a map of the North Pacific Ocean (p. 2). This vast area stretches from the eastern coasts of Asia to the western coasts of North America, extending northward to the Arctic region. Prominently labelled on her map are inlets, rivers, straits, channels, fjords, islands, and coastal locations in the North Pacific.The map also serves to illustrate Geiger's central point regarding the geographical parameters of this book. She explains that "to see the North Pacific borderlands only as a remote outpost that marked the westernmost edges of the U.S. or British empire, is to miss not only the central place it occupied in the lives of the Indigenous peoples whose home it continues to be, but the extent to which it functioned, in the eyes of Japanese entrepreneurs, as an economic hinterland for an expanding Japanese empire" (p. 16).Geiger's oceanic lens transcends the limits of American, British, Russian, Spanish, and Japanese empires and their respective territorial claims in the Pacific. She notes that this "allows us to engage stories that are obscured by historians that center the nation-state" (p. 8). Geiger's focus on mobility and border crossing show how imposed racial categories resulted in race-based constraints in Canada and the US. In Chapter two, "Immigrant and Indigene," Geiger reveals how Tsimshian's movements from summer to winter villages across borders made them both Indigenous ...
