Blog Posts

A Non-Consular Accomplishment

Book cover image with stylized world map

My new US diplomatic history textbook is now out and available for adoption! It has primarily taken a long time to come to fruition because of all the work with the publishing company to create workable maps; I am very, very glad to be done with that process!

The book can stand alone as an interpretation of the history of the United States in the world to 1921, but it is designed to be one component of a more broadly conceived course. I chose to focus on issues of sovereignty and border construction in relations with Britain and Native Americans, with the idea that instructors would augment this narrative with their own work on other parts of the world and/or via student research projects. The book also contains the text of a half-dozen essential primary sources and more than eighty maps and images that can provide the basis for assignments and discussion.

The book is available on Amazon, but at this point buying directly from the publisher is cheaper, and that’s definitely where you want to start if you’re considering adopting the book for your course. I am also building a teaching-related site to support the book.

Podcast: Consolation Prize

In Fall 2020, the Roy Rozenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University launched a new podcast on consular history called “Consolation Prize.” The host and executive producer is Prof. Abby Mullen, an expert on the Barbary Wars. When they were originally recording, I had a nasty case of laryngitis, so my work was quoted in Episode 1, but I did not directly participate. Fortunately, my voice eventually came back, and Abby and I were able to do an interview. That’s available as Bonus Episode 1: What Is a Consul, Anyway? Check out all the episodes in this awesome series! You can listen, or you can read transcripts on the web. The first series is focused on US consuls during the Early Republic, but they have exciting plans for discussing other time periods and foreign consuls in upcoming series!

Publications and Other Distractions

I am pleased to announce that, in January 2020, my first article-length work on the US Consular Service was published in the volume Crossing Empires by Duke University Press. For more information and a pre-print, please visit the new “My Publications” page on this site.

My consular project has been somewhat on the back burner in the last couple of years as I have worked on two other significant projects.

One project is my lengthy (like, significantly longer than my first book!) annotated bibliography on “Expansion and Diplomacy after the Civil War, 1865-1914” that appears as part of The SHAFR Guide Online. Visit Brill for more information about the latest edition of this important US diplomatic history reference work. The next update is due out in 2021.

The other project is a US diplomatic history textbook for undergraduates titled Americans and International Affairs to 1921. It is due out with Cognella in time for Fall 2021 teaching–and perhaps for Spring 2020, if things move smoothly now that the manuscript is in press. At some point, someone else will be writing a second volume, but interested instructors might pair it with one of the existing textbooks focused on the post-1945 period. Fans of Walter LaFeber’s The American Age, which had its most recent edition in 1994 but is still in widespread use, should find much to like in my textbook.

UVM Humanities Center Fellows

I was fortunate to be a UVM Humanities Center Fellow in the 2019-20 academic year, receiving a reduction in my teaching load and an opportunity to engage with several other fellows as we each pursued research projects. In February 2020, we presented work-in-progress updates for the campus community at a “Research Salon.” (Turnout was excellent! Thanks to all who attended!)

I enjoyed this effort to explain the consular service and my interest in the development of the state and the human elements of bureaucracy to a general audience of UVM community members. My title was “Masters of 187 Forms: US Consular Officials and the Uneven Projection of US Sovereignty Abroad, 1856-1924,” and I used a hypothetical case study of a Canadian family arriving at the St. Catherines, Ontario consular agency in 1896 seeking the necessary paperwork for entry into the United States to illustrate some of the themes that are present in my larger project.

I also had some fun experimenting with “Smart Art” in PowerPoint…

The data here is from the 1896 Department of State Register, with my own assignment to one of the three consular systems I see in operation (informal empire, extraterritorial, major port) in the last line.

Into the Outward State

In late February 2019, I received a most welcome email from Prof. Holly Case of Brown University, who was exploring the possibility of putting together a day-long conference/workshop on consuls to be held … in May 2019. Those of you in US academia will know that this is an exceptionally short timeline for putting an event like this together. I was enthusiastic about participating, and so were many other people. It turned out to be a fantastic conference bringing together people working on a range of countries’ consular services, often with a particular interest in consular officials operating in the Ottoman Empire.

Here is the conference program:Download

My presentation, titled “Complicated, but Crucial … and Exceptional? Sovereignty and State Building in the US Consular Service,” was basically a brief summary of my chapter in Crossing Empires, showing the growth of the service over time and the post-Civil War expansion into the British Empire before offering my theory of three co-existing consular services, stressing the importance of consular activities to the functioning of the US government more broadly, and providing some comparative international data.

This is a basic visualization of my interpretation of the US Consular Service, with three systems in concurrent operation. At major ports, trade and travel was the emphasis, and any government could participate as equals if they played by the Europeans’ rules. In the extraterritorial system, Europeans and Americans operated their own legal systems on their hosts’ territory without extending reciprocal privileges; the Ottoman Empire and China are the main places in which this system operated. In the “informal empire” system, consular officials from a single country were the only consular officials present, and their efforts to promote their government’s interests could result in a weakening of European colonial ties or independent sovereignty in favor of closer ties with the consular official’s government.

OAH Panel on Digital History and the State

In April 2018, I had the pleasure of being on a panel on “Reinterpreting the American State: Digital History’s Intervention” at the Organization of American Historians annual conference. Cameron Blevins organized the session and presented some of his work on the postal service, and our other two presenters were Jamie Pietruska, working on meteorological data collection, and Benjamin Hoy, working on the Canadian presence at the border with the United States. Our commentators were Susan Schulten and Gregory Downs.

My presentation included praise for the process of iterative mapping, as I showed some of the maps I have made for previous presentations.

On the subject of the state, I concluded:

I haven’t yet made up my mind if the lack of knowledge at the center was a help or a hindrance to the daily operation of the US Consular Service. Certainly, some might see it as evidence of a “weak” state. I lean toward the idea that the vacuum at the center allowed for officials to adapt to what was most effective in their local circumstances, thus more effectively projecting US sovereignty abroad.

Looking for the National Dream

Ulf Brunnbauer and Ursula Prutsch very kindly invited me to present a paper at the conference they organized on “Looking for the National Dream: Austro-Hungarian Migrants in the Americas in Comparative Perspectives,” held at the Center for Advanced Studies at LMU-Munich in July 2017.

I presented on “The Habsburg Consular Service in Comparative Perspective,” using data from the US National Archives that surveyed global consular services in 1897 and select consular services in 1907, as well as the listings of foreign consuls in the United States published annually in the Register of the Department of State. (Thanks to Natalie Coffman and Kiara Day for their assistance with data entry!) I argued that the Habsburg government did not opt to use their consular service to the extent that most other European governments did, though they were in the process of a significant expansion when World War I began in 1914.

US and European governments used the flexible institution that was the consular service in a variety of ways, but one key use was to maintain ties with migrants living and working abroad. In that sense, the Italian consular service was the most active, and the Habsburg service was headed in that direction in 1914. I pointed out that there were many reasons for not having a large consular service; in particular, because most consular officials worked for fees rather than salaries, they were difficult to control and hold to professional standards. Here’s a comparison of the Italian and Habsburg services in the United States in 1907:

The Habsburg government’s consular presence in the US was slightly higher than average, but well below most large European countries. (Russia’s service was smaller.) For much of the late nineteenth century, the Swedes had the largest US presence:

I gave a similar presentation at the 2018 Austrian Studies Association annual conference held in Burlington, Vermont.

SHAFR panel on Aid and Emotions

At the 2017 SHAFR conference, I participated in a panel entitled “The Gift of Giving? Aid and Emotion in U.S. Foreign Relations,” which united alumni of the 2012 SHAFR Summer Institute, including Institute organizers Frank Costigliola and Andy Rotter. My co-panelists included Shaul Mitelpunkt, Elisabeth Piller, and David Greenstein, and our commentator was Barbara Keys.

My contribution was titled “’The sympathies of the Consul are strongly aroused’: Contemplating US Consuls’ Out-of-pocket Aid to Americans in Distress Abroad in 1902,” and it was based on responses to a survey that the State Department conducted in early 1903. Unlike the governments of many other states, including the Great Powers, the US government did not have a public fund for assisting the return to the United States of Americans who fell into financial destitution abroad, or for short-term relief of such people. A few consuls in larger cities with significant numbers of Americans could call on private American aid societies to offer such assistance, but most consuls had to pay out of their own pocket. If they refused to pay, they risked criticism from their local hosts and the press back home.

In their responses to the survey, consuls expressed a wide variety of emotions, but frustration was perhaps the most frequently in evidence. Consuls were annoyed with the large numbers of people who came to ask for help, disrupting the routine of the office. Many who asked for help were professional fraudsters, and consuls were frustrated when they were conned, though most seemed to take that as par for the course. “Tramps” came in for particular opprobrium, and consuls expressed a range of reactions, from those who always gave tramps money to get them moving out of the district to those who refused all requests and made statements that expressed deeply held class prejudices.

I am working on an article based on this material. And since I can’t do a post without a visualization, here’s another work in progress coming out of these records: consulates with typewriters in 1903.

Studies on the British Consular Service

This is not a complete list, but it provides a starting point for those with an interest in the British consular service.

D. C. M. Platt, The Cinderella Service: British Consuls since 1825 (London: Longman, 1971).

P. D. Coates, The China Consuls: British Consular Officers, 1843-1943 (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1988).

Lucia Patrizio Gunning, The British Consular Service in the Aegean and the Collection of Antiquities for the British Museum (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009).

The Works of Rudolf Agstner

Rudolf Agstner, an Austrian foreign service officer, wrote dozens of books and articles about aspects of the Habsburg consular service in various parts of the world. His work is a good source of specific details about the location of posts and who occupied them.

A few of his publications:

Rudolf Agstner, Austria (-Hungary) and Its Consulates in the United States of America since 1820: “Our Nationals Settling Here Count by the Millions Now’’ (Zürich: LIT Verlag, 2012).

Rudolf Agstner, “From Apalachicola to Wilkes-Barre: Austria(-Hungary) and Its Consulates in the United States of America, 1820-1917,” Austrian History Yearbook 37 (2006): 163–80.

Rudolf Agstner, From Halifax to Vancouver: Austria (-Hungary) and Her Consular and Diplomatic Presence in Canada, 1855-2005 (Vienna: Institut für Strategie und Sicherheitspolitik, 2005).

Rudolf Agstner, “Austria (-Hungary) and Her Consulates South of the Rio Grande (1828-1918): A Survey,” in Transatlantic Relations: Austria and Latin America in the 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. Klaus Eisterer and Günter Bischof, Transatlantica 1 (Innsbruck: StudienVerlag, 2006), 85–120.