Around the turn of the twentieth century, the United States acquired an economic, political, and colonial empire. That empire transformed the US. Yet while scholars have examined many aspects of American expansionism, they’ve neglected a key issue: imperial labor migrations.

From across North America, the Caribbean, southern Europe, and Asia, men and women labored in the service of global American power. They built roads and canals; cooked, washed, and cleaned homes; they served in the military, assisting in colonization and pacification of foreign populations. They nursed the wounded, and they harvested bananas and sugar cane to build profits for corporate capitalism. Their labor built the empire from the bottom up.

These dynamics shaped a project at the center of the United States’ assertion of global power: the construction of the Panama Canal. Building the canal required the labor of a global working class. Yet in their search for manpower, US officials refused to hire more than a few local Panamanians, believing indigenous labor would not work hard enough, would abandon labor sites to return home, or would cause trouble.