"Entangled in Empires: British Antillean Migrations and the World of the Panama Canal"

"Entangled in Empires: British Antillean Migrations and the World of the Panama Canal"

Greene's lecture frames Caribbean peoples as moving within a trans-imperial world, shaped by the British Empire but also drawing upon that identity as a resource in their reactions to the United States in the Canal Zone. Her talk draws from a book she is currently writing, titled Box 25; it uses testimonies written by Canal workers in recounting their travels and travails.

Julie Greene is a historian of United States labor, immigration, and empire. Her research and teaching also engage with transnational and global approaches to history. She is the author of The Canal Builders: Making America's Empire at the Panama Canal (Penguin Press, 2009), The Organization of American Historians awarded The Canal Builders its 2009 James A. Rawley Prize for the best book on the history of race relations. Greene’s recent articles include “Movable Empire: Labor Migration, U.S. Global Power, and the Remaking of the Americas,” in Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (2016) and “The Wages of Empire: Capitalism, Expansionism, and Working-Class Formation,” in Jana Lipman and Daniel Bender, eds., Making the Empire Work: Labor and United States Imperialism (NYU, 2015). Other articles include "Spaniards on the Silver Roll: Liminality and Labor Troubles in the Panama Canal Zone, 1904-1914," in International Labor and Working-Class History (Fall 2004) and "The Labor of Empire: Recent Scholarship on U.S. History and Imperialism," in Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas(Summer 2004). She is also author of Pure and Simple Politics: The American Federation of Labor and Political Activism, 1881-1917 (Cambridge, 1998); co-editor, with Eric Arnesen and Bruce Laurie, of Labor Histories: Class, Politics, and the Diversity of the Working-Class Experience (Illinois, 1998); and associate editor, with Eileen Boris, John French, Joan Sangster, and Shelton Stromquist (with Leon Fink as editor), of Workers, the Nation-State, and Beyond: Essays in the Labor History of the Americas (Oxford University Press, 2011).