Under American Occupation
Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Louisiana State University
This panel offers a long view of American occupation practices across over a century, beginning in the Ohio River Valley in the late eighteenth century and extending to the late nineteenth-century occupation of Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and the Philippines. By comparing and contrasting Native American, white and Black American, Puerto Rican, and Filipino reactions, we can see patterns of both resistance and engagement with occupying forces. Starting with the daily experiences of occupied peoples, presentations will include analysis of culture, economics, and formal politics. By assessing American practices of occupation over time and in widely different contexts – from the earliest moments of the development of the American state to its Civil War and late-century’s formal imperialism – we hope to make both continuities and differences visible. America’s own military histories have ignored or mischaracterized the country’s history of occupation, marginalizing the importance and frequency of the practice. Our chronology begins the practice of centering military occupation as an essential American practice. This step allows us to see more clearly the ways that the US military directly shaped people’s lives and indirectly provided models for other empires using occupation as a method expanding their authority.
American military forces engaged in some of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries’ most visible and historically consequential occupations, but less attention has been paid to the earlier experiences of the process. Despite contemporary Americans’ commonplace assumption that its military has historically engaged in traditional, battle-based conflicts, the presenters’ previous research shows this has not been the case. Bringing those earlier episodes into conversation with one another will generate new insights into the nature of American occupation. These case studies open up analysis of the relationship between occupation and violence, nation- and state-building, and the evolution of constitutional and legal systems. In all these respects, American practices of occupation have been unexceptional in global terms. The presentations will pay particular attention to the ways that people reacted to occupation. In all the cases under review, occupied people tried out a wide array of (sometimes contradictory) approaches – they cooperated with American officials, seeking to pacify military officers and turn policies in their favor, they violently resisted, sometimes successfully and other times provoking stronger military reactions, they used America’s legal order to try to subvert occupation, and they ignored officials, hoping that by maintaining existing practices they could outlast occupiers.
Last, by setting “internal” occupations (of the continental US) alongside external occupations of non-contiguous territory, it will allow us to analyze the fluidity and interaction between the use of military government for annexation and military government for temporary occupation. In this sense, occupation was a tool of American political practice as much as it was a tool of military practice. Beginning in the post-Revolutionary Era, the American state relied on occupation to expand its territorial reach and to incorporate people into its fold. This perspective challenges the traditional emphasis on America’s status as a republic and the measured development of a democratic political order in the early nineteenth century. The continuing reliance on occupation during the Civil War and in the late nineteenth century reveals its centrality to state-building over the whole of American history.
Panel speakers and presentations
Chair/discussant: Aaron Sheehan-Dean (Louisiana State University)
Gregory Downs (University of California, Davis): What Looks Like Peace: Occupation, Indian Relations, and the Ohio Valley Between Campaigns
Aaron Sheehan-Dean (Louisiana State University): Living Under Occupation: Southerners in the Civil War South
Oli Charbonneau (University of Glasgow): Everyday Violence and Strategies of Survival in the Moro Province
Alvita Akiboh (Yale University): What Followed the Flag: Life under US Occupation in Overseas Colonies
Photo credits:
Cover picture: The occupation of Charleston during the US Civil War
Source: US Army Military History Institute, published in Touched By Fire: A Photographic Portrait of the Civil War, Vol. 1, ed. William C. Davis. (Little Brown,1985), p.118.
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