Despite its long and contentious encounter with the U.S. empire, Panama has received little attention from North American scholars. Rather than a lived-in place with its own history, it usually appears as a transit point. This is certainly true of most studies of the California Gold Rush, which rarely note that 200,000 Americans crossed the isthmus between 1848 and 1860, and even more rarely consider the impact of that migration on Panama itself. Yet, as Aims McGuinness observes, “the making of the United States as a transcontinental nation and U.S. expansion overseas in Panama were coincident with one another and intertwined” (p. 12). Drawing upon research in Panama, Colombia, and the United States, his fine study Path of Empire not only provides new perspectives on U.S. expansion but explores events whose broader importance within Latin American history are often overlooked.
In mid-nineteenth-century Panama, questions of transit, sovereignty, and empire were...
