In May 2016, I had the very good fortune to participate in a conference on Transimperial US History at the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University. Hosted by 2015-16 Harmsworth Professor of American History Kristin Hoganson and Rothermere director Prof. Jay Sexton, the conference brought together an exciting group of historians and historically minded scholars considering the relationship among Americans, the US government, and “the imperial” in the long nineteenth century, as well as the ways in which “the United States” was and was not unique when compared with other contemporary powers.
My presentation ended up being my first attempt to work through a comparison of most of the world’s consular services in 1897. I found a box at NARA with reports on those services done by DOS personnel, and I’ve been working on creating a dataset from those materials. There is still a lot of interpretive work to do, but one thing they reveal is the relatively large size of most countries’ services. It’s not just the Great Powers that have large services, but neutral powers as well:
Although the United States certainly had a large service, I’m rethinking how it relates to the services around the world, since the data indicates that the US service is on par with those of other countries, at least if we’re using number of posts as the measure. In the presentation, I shied away from my proposed title about the US Consular Service as the “colonial office of US informal empire.” I still think there’s something extremely useful there, but I’m still thinking through exactly what that is.
The data also shows us which cities were full of consuls from all over the world:
The data also indicates places that were not full of consuls, but rather hosted a single government’s representative, indicating a bilateral relationship. I’ll be focusing on that aspect as I continue to work with the data.
Many thanks to Kristin, Jay, the Rothermere staff, and the conference participants for a fantastic experience!