Empire and Industry in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century

In the interest of cohesiveness and breadth, we address three aspects of how business interacted with empire in the nineteenth century: among German railroad designers in China, U.S. mining firms that were adjacent to Indian reservations in Arizona, and the ways one mining and railroad corporation approached cooperation development in Mexico.
​​These social histories of infrastructure development in China and labor market formation in the American Southwest make clear modern business processes have never existed autonomously from the world of empires. Rather, they have long been embedded in complex relationships with imperial states, colonized peoples, and competing sovereignties. By reconstructing these relationships and understanding firms in their imperial contexts, this panel sheds light on empire as a key condition for the extraction of profits and the reproduction of economic processes / class power.
Although “disruption” is a trendy term of the 21st century, it is not new. By looking at industrialization, capital, and globalization in another era of rapid change--the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era--we shed light on the challenges and possibility of international business and trade. In addition, with a nod to our location in Mexico City, two of our papers examine the US-Mexico railroad and mining industries and their relationship with local and indigenous peoples.