The Global Interior: Mineral Frontiers and American Power

by Megan A. Black

Winner of the George Perkins Marsh Prize
Winner of the Stuart L. Bernath Prize
Winner of the W. Turrentine-Jackson Award

When one thinks of the history of U.S. global expansion, the Department of the Interior rarely comes to mind. Its very name declares its narrow portfolio. Yet The Global Interior reveals that a government organ best known for managing domestic natural resources and operating national parks has constantly supported and projected American power.

Interior's first task was to oversee settler colonialism in the American West. When that seemed complete, the department maintained its role but expanded its reach. Megan Black's detailed analysis shows how, throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, Interior cultivated and exploited its image as an innocuous scientific-research and environmental-management organization in order to drive and satisfy America's insatiable demand for raw materials. Interior continues to operate in indigenous lands through, for instance, coal mining on the Crow reservation and oil leasing on the Blackfeet reservation. It pushes the boundaries of territoriality through offshore drilling. And in the guise of sharing expertise with the underdeveloped world, it has led lithium surveys in Afghanistan, among other activities abroad. Indeed, Interior is more than global: the department now manages a satellite that prospects natural resources in outer space.

Black demonstrates that in a period marked by global commitments to self-determination, Interior helped the United States maintain key benefits of empire without the burden of playing the imperialist villain. As other expansionist justifications--manifest destiny, hemispheric pacification, Cold War exigencies--fell by the wayside, Interior ensured that the environment itself would provide the foundational logic of American hegemony.

Genres: History, Environment, Nonfiction

360 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2018

Reviews

[Sar · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to hate this because of the subject content but Megan Black is the only person who could’ve written a book this engaging about seemingly dull topics. 3.5 stars

[Nils · Rating 5 out of 5]

How the department of the interior reinvented itself in the 20th century from an internal Indian-suppression and national economic development agency into a global natural resource management agency — a “development” institution in the classic colonial mode, targeting “minerals, those sticky symbols of imperial lust” (6): “Interior’s cooperative approach to extraction ultimately reveals that US global reach could and did merge activities attributed to soft and hard power, taking advantage of a contradictory, illegible status in between them” (7). In classic example of bureaucratic reinvention to ensure continuation once the original mandate was exhausted, Interior dropped its legacy of subjection of indigenous people in support of settler colonization of the North American continent and “came to see and present itself as a neutral clearinghouse of scientific expertise” (8). All of this depending on upholding “a fictive binary between between politics and nature” (9).

Established in 1849 to manage the various newly acquired Western territories that had enlarged the United States by a third in the 1840s, the role of Interior was in many ways to oversee the domestication of “indigenous peoples and expropriated lands that were, in important ways, foreign.” (17) Conversely, closing of the internal frontier in 1890 forced the Interior to find a new mission.

[Anaya · Rating 5 out of 5]

I never knew the Department of Interior had so much to do with America's Imperialism abroad. I truly believed it was only conservation-focused and ran National Parks. This is the history we should be learning in school. So many Americans don't even know about America's Imperialism abroad. I read this book as part of an American history course. This course has taught me so much about how exploitation and Imperialism were integral to America's foundation and growth into a world power. Knowing these stories about how we exploited Native American land and "third-world" countries abroad is so important to understanding how we became a rich country. America is only "number one" because it tore other countries down first.

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

One word: FANTASTIC. Black's monograph is both original and engaging as she interweaves the role of the state in American empire from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. She considers American expansion in all its forms-from the taking of indigenous lands to create national parks to space missions-and does so in a coherent, organized fashion. Her writing is sharp, her points are well made, and her is argument fresh. Would strongly recommend!

[Cabot · Rating 5 out of 5]

As someone wanting to do research work on American empire and mineral frontiers, this book is beyond valuable (but also readable). An excellent contribution to the literature on a ton of subfields, and filled with lots of interesting ways of thinking about the Department of the Interior’s role in empire, different forms of mineral/commodity frontiers and spatial fixes, technopolitics, and how government bureaucracy legitimates itself.

[Phil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Black develops a really creative way to look at US Empire, i.e., she tracks its expansions through the global activities of the Department of the Interior. Thinking of Empire as making external peoples, lands, and here especially mineral resources interior—call it interiorizing—is a memorable take. Memorably vast in scope as well.

[Mills College Library]

333.85097 B6277 2018