Isthmuses, Empires, and Internationality, c.1850-1924

Abstract

Isthmuses connect two areas of land at the same time as they divide two bodies of water. These narrow stretches of land are sites from which it is possible to interrogate globalisation, imperial geography, histories of the future, and internationality. In the nineteenth century, technological developments combined with globalising impulses to inspire a range of ambitious transisthmian engineering works. From the perspective of European and North American imperial geographic imaginations, isthmuses constituted barriers to maritime navigation and everything that mobility entailed including the circulation of people and goods. Transisthmian projects had consequences for international trade, diplomacy, and various nations’ geostrategic interests. This dissertation uses case studies drawn from the Suez, Central American, Kra, and Schleswig-Holstein isthmuses across the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. It considers how and why empires imagined isthmuses as international spaces and the consequences of that internationality. The first section examines isthmuses and international order, and how concessions and international legal mechanisms were invoked to manage isthmian interventions and their consequences. The following two sections examine how isthmian internationality was imagined and constructed through a variety of thematic case studies spanning geographic exploration, scientific data, a second Suez Canal, and environmental, labour, and cultural histories. The complex history of connections and divisions across isthmuses offers a unique setting within which to consider how and why a space, project, or piece of infrastructure might be deemed international and with what consequences.