Between 1898 and 1934, in synchronous and successive U.S. military interventions and occupations in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, American soldiers made public works, and especially roads, into a global technology of imperial power. This essay examines infrastructure as a factor in state formation and capitalist transition in these five different imperial spaces as a way to study U.S. empire, and its effects on foreign societies, through a comparative, global, and intra‐imperial approach often precluded by the methodological nationalism of historical and sociological literatures. Despite significant differences between these sites of U.S. war and occupation, both prior to American interventions and during them, U.S. military public works expressed and advanced a common political‐economic logic of state centralization and capital accumulation. Colonial and post‐colonial political institutions and political economies, the strength of central governments, the extent of plantation agriculture and rural proletarianization, world commodity markets, and geography and natural events varied, but determined U.S. imperial infrastructure's outcomes. By the 1930s, the U.S. military had elevated infrastructural improvement to a key repertoire of American imperial power in the world, and one which persisted as the United States turned away from formal colonialism in the era of the Cold War and decolonization.

While the La Follette Seamen's Act of 1915, a landmark Progressive Era labor law, is often understood as the culmination of a heroic campaign for industrial efficiency, consumer safety, and workers' rights, its origins lie in the political milieu of the Spanish-American War. When the 1898 war exposed critical resource shortages in the domestic American maritime industry on which the US navy had traditionally depended in wartime, white seamen's unionists and their Democratic allies in the US Congress sought to turn concerns about maritime and naval weakness into a political strength. They stressed a nineteenth-century institution of flexible capacity, in which private industry had furnished the vessels and men that allowed the US navy to temporarily expand for war, to legitimate and pursue their legislative goals. Dominated by white, European-born immigrants jealous of their jobs and wages in a rapidly industrializing global industry hiring more nonwhite and low-wage seamen in foreign ports, the unions and their allies linked a nationalist politics of maritime and naval crisis to a nativist and racist politics of immigration and citizenship in order to drive Chinese and other Asian seamen from private and US military vessels in the Pacific. By 1905, changes in the industry, ship technologies, and naval manpower eroded the navy's older reliance on commercial vessels and seamen. Yet an imperial politics of flexible capacity left a mark on maritime labor reform and its crusade to exclude Chinese workers from American vessels that endured at the heart of the La Follette Act.

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In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, white working-class activists and their allies in the United States acted as a political vanguard in efforts to limit the entry, naturalization, and civil rights of Chinese migrants, especially laborers. First in California in the 1850s, and then throughout the North American West and the nation at large, a militant racist-nativist minority of trade unionists and labor reformers assailed Chinese as an economic, cultural, and political threat to white workers, their living standards, and the republic itself. Uniting with Democrats and independent antimonopoly parties, workers and their organizations formed the base of a cross-class anti-Chinese movement that, by the 1880s, eroded Republicans’ support for Chinese labor migrants and won severe legal restrictions against them. Organized labor, especially the American Federation of Labor and its leadership, played a key role, lobbying Congress to refine and extend Chinese exclusion and erect similar barriers against other Asian migrants, including Japanese and Filipinos. Anti-Chinese labor advocates also influenced and coordinated with parallel pro-exclusion movements abroad, leading a global white working-class reaction to the Chinese labor diaspora across parts of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. In many ways, anti-Asian working-class nativism prefigured early-20th-century measures placing unprecedented constraints on white European migration. Yet organized labor barely opposed the demise of anti-Chinese and national-quota restrictions during World War II and the Cold War, as diplomatic demands, economic expansion, and a changing international system weakened domestic political support for exclusion.