Path of Empire

Path of Empire reveals how U.S. imperial projects in Panama were integral to developments in California and the larger process of U.S. continental expansion, offering a model for the new transnational history.

Aims McGuinness is Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.

This fine book tells a multilayered story about intersections among people, capital, and nations in Panama during the gold-rush era.... It has many virtues: a self-reflexive style; a rich source base in autobiographies, travel accounts, and records from both the United States and Panama; a focus that both acknowledges states and also presents them as comprised of disaggregated actors; a sense of historical change as contested.... In this small and carefully researched book, McGuinness rises above the specificity of time and place to address broad questions about race, gender, class, nation, and empire. He also stresses the often lopsided nature of historical remembrances. Scholars from many different fields will appreciate the book's expansive thematic and interpretive reach.

McGuinness is a superb storyteller.

In Path of Empire, Aims McGuinness has crafted a well-conceived and painstakingly executed account of Panama in the face of U.S. imperialism. As far as Americans were concerned, Panama was simply a transit zone, and the efforts of interested parties-Panamanians, travelers, American capitalists-to take advantage of that fact form the meat of this book. By placing this story in his chosen context, McGuinness illustrates the true breadth of his topic.

Drawing upon research in Panama, Colombia, and the United States, McGuinness's fine study Path of Empire not only provides new perspectives on U.S. expansion but explores events whose broader importance within Latin American history is often overlooked. Path of Empire is an innovative study of a largely unexamined topic. By drawing upon Panamanian sources and narratives, McGuinness places Panama at the center of a crucial episode in global history, providing a fresh perspective on Latin America's encounter with U.S. empire. This is an original and provocative book, and McGuinness's recounting of his travails in Panama's National Archive is alone worth the price. Path of Empire will appeal to scholars of U.S. as well as Latin American history and would serve as an excellent early reading in courses on U.S.-Latin American relations.

Path of Empire makes an important contribution to the historiography of the California gold rush, Panama, and U.S. expansion and intervention in Latin America. It promises not only to expand scholars' knowledge of their fields but also to challenge them to engage previously overlooked transnational connections.

Carl H. Nightingale, University at Buffalo, State University of New York:

You simply must take up Aims McGuinness's offer here, of a lyrical and troubling trip across Panama before there was a canal. What unfolds is better than the transnational history we've all been calling for. His scope takes our breath away, but his real commitment is to the density of daily life, the arc of narrative, and the oracular truths of the archive. The grasping of North America and the birth pangs of 'Latin' America will never read quite the same.

Walter LaFeber, Andrew Tisch and James Tisch University Professor Emeritus, Cornell University:

The California Gold Rush and the beginnings of U.S. interest in a Panama Canal are great stories—and here are wonderfully and imaginatively linked by Aims McGuinness's multi-archival research to open fresh, highly important insights into the explosive new characteristics of American imperialism (too many of which sound as familiar in the twenty-first century as they did in the nineteenth), as well as into a growing regional fear of that imperialism, Latin American literature and culture, the hemisphere's slave systems, and the beginnings of Panamanian nationalism.

Donna R. Gabaccia, Director, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota:

Because it was built in Panama, the first transcontinental railroad—built to connect the eastern U.S. to California—is little known to students of U.S. history. In Path of Empire, Aims McGuinness offers a fascinating example of 'connected histories.' His attention to the interplay of U.S. and Latin American nation-building and racial ideology in one small place offers an international history and a tale of historical detective work.

Nancy P. Appelbaum, Binghamton University, State University of New York:

Aims McGuinness provides a model of how to do global history from a local perspective. Path of Empire views the global transformations wrought by the California Gold Rush from the vantage points of both poor and elite Panamanians. McGuinness recasts our historical narrative of U.S. imperialism in Central America while he sheds new light on how nineteenth-century intellectuals came to form a common identity as 'Latin American.' This book makes a significant contribution not only to the historiography on Panama but also to that on Colombia and Latin America more generally.