Awards

• Winner of Winner, 2025 LSA James Willard Hurst Book Prize.

Overview

Arbitrating Empire offers a new history of the emergence of the United States as a global power-one shaped as much by attempts to insulate the US government from international legal scrutiny as it was by efforts to project influence across the globe. Drawing on extensive archival research in the United States, Mexico, Panama, and the United Kingdom, the book traces how thousands of dispossessed residents of US-annexed territories petitioned international Claims Commissions between the 1870s and the 1930s to charge the United States with violating international legal protections for life and property. Through attention to the consequences of their unexpected claims, Allison Powers demonstrates how colonized subjects, refugees from slavery, and migrant workers transformed a series of tribunals designed to establish the legality of US imperial interventions into sites through which to challenge the legitimacy of US colonial governance. One of the first social histories of international law, the book argues that contests over meanings of sovereignty and state responsibility that would reshape the mid-twentieth-century international order were waged not only at diplomatic conferences, but also in Arizona copper mines, Texas cotton fields, Samoan port cities, Cuban sugar plantations, and the locks and stops of the Panama Canal. Arbitrating Empire uncovers how ordinary people used international law to hold the United States accountable for state-sanctioned violence during the decades when the nation was first becoming a global empire-and demonstrates why State Department attempts to erase their claims transformed international law in ways that continue to shield the US government from liability to this day.

Full Product Details

9780190093006

Table of Contents

Reviews

In Arbitrating Empire, Allison Powers takes the story of law and empire into fascinating new terrain. Arbitral tribunals, she shows, were important parts of U.S. colonial strategy: the purpose was to assuage opposition and consolidate power. However, their attempts to bolster American legitimacy did not always go as planned. By focusing on the actions of ordinary people, Powers shows how legal tools could be turned against their makers. This is the book I've been waiting for: a multinational social history of international law that transforms our understanding of the U.S. empire. * Ben Coates, Associate Professor, Wake Forest University * This remarkable book affirms why international lawyers need non-lawyers, particularly careful historians, to re-examine the 'truths' we tell ourselves. Allison Powers' deep dive into the archives of five claims commissions-starting with the 1868 US-Mexico Claims Commission and ending with one between those same states in 1923-undermines progress narratives that characterize the rise in 'neutral arbitration' as a victory for the rule of law and the politics of non-intervention. * José E. Alvarez, Herbert and Rose Rubin Professor of International Law, NYU School of Law * Powers demonstrates that in the shadow of the well-known Alabama Claims Arbitration of 1862-1872 and claims against Latin American governments by U.S. investors alleging denials of justice and unlawful takings, there existed a welter of claims directed against the U.S. by refugees from slavery, dispossessed Mexican women and Indigenous peoples, displaced residents of the Panama Canal Zone, sharecroppers, miners and many others who used the commissions to press their own denial of justice charges against the ostensible defender of the 'standard of civilization'. * José E. Alvarez, Herbert and Rose Rubin Professor of International Law, NYU School of Law * This book also traces how this alternative view of the right to life and property under international law got erased from the record, and why the U.S. shut these claims commissions down. This is an exceedingly useful corrective for those of us who think that the contribution these commissions made to the doctrines of diplomatic protection and state responsibility can be reduced to the differences between Carlos Calvo and Elihu Root. * José E. Alvarez, Herbert and Rose Rubin Professor of International Law, NYU School of Law *

Author Information

Allison Powers is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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