Acknowledgments
This book is the product of a long collaboration. We noticed several years ago that there was a connection between our work on the Pacific, corporate power, and the power of betweenness. The central intuition – that the nineteenth-century American imperial experience had special qualities owing to the structure of its economy and government – took several years and a book to iron out.
Portions of this manuscript were presented at the American Political Science Association and the International Studies Association and also a virtual conference organized by Austin Carson at the University of Chicago. Comments from Sarah Kreps from Cornell University and Benjamin Fordham from Binghamton University were especially helpful at that stage, clarifying key ideas in the book. We would also like to thank the participants in a book workshop at the George Washington University, including Rosella Capella, Adam Dean, Richard Maass, Paul Macdonald, and Jittip Mongkolnchaiarunya, as well as Amoz Hor and Sverrir Steinsson for reading the proposal and portions of the manuscript. We would also like to thank Robert Dreesen and Cambridge University Press, as well as the anonymous reviewers for insightful comments and helpful suggestions. We would finally like to thank our colleagues at George Washington University and the University of Connecticut for their support.
This book in many ways is a product of COVID. The first draft of a paper version was written just before the pandemic started, and a slow shift toward writing the book happened during the year that the country was under lockdown. Like all COVID-era projects, this had an unusually tortured trajectory as we and our families needed to move, change schools, shift to virtual teaching and learning, and contracted and recovered from the virus. Trips and vacations were canceled and rescheduled, and the tempo of academic life – conferences and workshops – was disrupted. For us, this book will always be associated with this time. The first discussions about “the book” happened at the Georgetown waterfront, sitting six feet from everyone else, in the open air over cocktails. The first full draft was finished just as the pandemic began to ebb.
In this environment, our families and loved ones were the largest support in writing this book. During the writing process, life moved along for our families, sometimes with us only barely participating. Miles thanks Tolu for her continued support and apologizes for his coffee breath throughout the writing of this book. Tolu’s incessant encouragement – and her willingness to listen to random stories of entrepreneurs – was instrumental to the completion of this book. Mara was less likely to enjoy these stories. Yet, Eric thanks Mara and Ethan for their continued support. Ethan continues to be a wonderful source of jokes, and Mara helps keep Ethan’s sense of humor from becoming unmanageable.
