Roads to American Empire: U.S. Military Public Works and Capitalist Transitions, 1898–1934.

Abstract

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.

Summaries of Doctoral Dissertations

“…From the outset, officials emphasized the urgency of providing “good roads from seaboard towns into the interior and of substantial trails branching out into the less populous communities” to develop areas lacking transport facilities (Governor of Porto Rico 1901, p. 427). The construction of roads to benefit the local economy conflicts with claims that public investments were intended to narrowly benefit American sugar corporations (e.g., Picó 1983) or to project military power (Jackson 2020).…”