Between 1913 and 1916, the US-run Isthmian Canal Commission (ICC) expelled some 40,000 people from Panamanian towns in the Canal Zone. Marixa Lasso is the first to unpack this fascinating story, usually only mentioned alongside the greater epic of the construction of the Panama Canal. She debunks the myth that this depopulation was necessary to building the waterway; some towns were flooded, but many could have remained and were dismantled after the canal opened. “The story of the depopulation of the Zone,” she argues, “is the history of political—rather than technical—decisions” (p. 3).
The politics of depopulation followed the larger politics of imperial erasure of modernizing but less powerful nonwhite peoples. US canal officials insisted on seeing Zone inhabitants—some Panamanians, but mostly West Indians and other immigrants such as Chinese, Spaniards, French, and Bengali—through the tropes of the premodern: indolence, ignorance, unfamiliarity with technology, and inability to self-govern. Yet those...
