American Historical Association

131st Annual Meeting (January 5-8, 2017)

January 05 - 08, 2017

This panel will explore the transnational history of British, Russian, and United States Empires in the Pacific World. The three papers examine how new approaches to transnational history interact with the study of localized developments. Ruth Almy’s paper chronicles the 1914 Komagata Maru incident, in which Indian immigrants were denied entry to Vancouver, and how this encounter within the British imperial system had wide implications for both Canadian autonomy within the empire and for an emerging Indian independence movement. Alexander Herbert’s paper examines how Russian Orthodox Christian missionaries narrativized their experiences within the North Pacific environment as a way to make sense of their colonial space in a broader trans-imperial context. Maxwell Johnson’s paper focuses on how Los Angeles elites viewed the city around 1910, as the growing Port of Los Angeles and the 1910 International Aviation Meet both burnished Los Angeles’ global image and amplified the city’s vulnerability. The interrelated papers for this panel link the global to the local in the context of the Pacific World. Taken together, our papers offer new ideas about scaling borderlands studies in historical work. This panel will interest scholars of the Pacific World, imperialism, and transnational history.