Blog Posts – Page 2 – Researching the US Consular Service

N. Phelps’s U.S.-Habsburg Relations

Chapters 3, 4, and 5 of my 2013 Cambridge University Press book, U.S.-Habsburg Relations from 1815 to the Paris Peace Conference: Sovereignty Transformed deal with US consuls in the Habsburg Empire and Habsburg consuls in the United States, particularly as they attempted to deal with the effects of migration between the two countries in a period when passports were not required; questions about citizenship were rife.

Chapter 3 offers a broad history of the US Consular Service, stressing the expansion of its mandate from facilitating trade to promoting trade and then protecting citizens abroad. As I have done more research on consular services, I do think that trajectory holds for the US presence in the Habsburg Empire, but consuls in other parts of the world performed the full range of functions from the beginning of the service’s existence. Each individual post had its own unique profile of activities.

F. de Goey’s Consuls and the Institutions of Global Capitalism

Ferry de Goey’s 2014 book, Consuls and the Institutions of Global Capitalism, 1783-1914, was published in the Perspectives in Economic and Social History series from the London-based Pickering & Chatto. It offers a comparison of the British, German, US, and Dutch consular services in the Americas, Africa, the Middle East, and East Asia. Brief case studies of particular consuls make up most of the chapters, and there is considerable emphasis on the first half of the nineteenth century.

De Goey points out that consuls as a whole have an ambiguous record when it comes to generating international trade, but they did facilitate the growth of capitalism by concentrating a wide variety of state functions in one flexible and inexpensive office.

B. Whelan’s American Government in Ireland

Bernadette Whelan’s 2010 book from Manchester University Press, American Government in Ireland, 1790-1913: A History of the US Consular Service, provides a detailed, analytical account of the consuls who represented the United States in Ireland in the long nineteenth century. The consuls’ roles in the US Civil War, immigration and naturalization, and Irish nationalism feature prominently.

Ulbert and Prijic’s Consulship in the 19th Century

Jörg Ulbert and Lukian Prijac, eds., Consuls et Services Consulaires Au XIXe Siecle = Die Welt Der Konsulate Im 19. Jahrhundert = Consulship in the 19th Century (Hamburg: DOBU, Dokumentation & Buch, 2010).

The volume contains an overview of the US Consular Service that emphasizes reform and professionalization: Christoph Strupp, “Das US-amerikanische Konsularwesen im 19. Jarhundert” (218-33).

The thirty-four other essays in the volume include overviews of several services, as well as more focused studies. A few of the essays are in English; most are in French or German.

T. G. Paterson’s “American Businessmen”

Thomas G. Paterson’s 1966 article “American Businessmen and Consular Service Reform, 1890’s-1906” appeared in the January 1966 issue of Business History Review (vol. 40, no. 1, pages 77-97).

Reform-minded officials at the State Department in Washington generally welcomed the assistance of American businessmen in lobbying Congress for consular service reform. The 1906 reform introduced an inspection system and provided salaries for consuls and consuls general. Consular agents continued to work for fees, but after the reform, agents began to be phased out.

R. Kark’s American Consuls in the Holy Land

Ruth Kark’s 1994 book from Magnes Press of Hebrew University and Wayne State University Press, American Consuls in the Holy Land is one of the few book-length treatments of US consuls in a particular part of the world. In the Ottoman Empire, the capitulation system operated, giving consuls extraterritoriality, which meant that, in addition to regular consular duties, they also operated courts and jails for US citizens. Similar systems operated in China and Japan as well.

AHA 2017: Making Digital History Work

At the American Historical Association conference held in Denver in January 2017, I participated in a panel on “Making Digital History Work,” which dealt with challenges of digital projects, especially outside of large-scale, well-funded collaborative projects. Our chair and commentator was Dr. Seth Denbo, the director of scholarly communication and digital initiatives for the AHA, and the other panelists were Dr. Konstantin Dierks of Indiana University, who spoke about the challenges for mid-career historians in learning the myriad skills required for digital projects, and Dr. Fred Gibbs of the University of New Mexico, who stressed the value of failure in constructing digital history projects and the importance of individuals understanding not only the historical content of their projects, but the technical aspects as well.

I showed this website as a form of digital history emphasizing process, small steps, and the value of iterative mapping. I also passed along six tips about building a dataset, based on my experiences to date:

Be prepared to start over. It’s probably better to use Excel than a database program, at least as first, as it is more flexible.

Keep a log or journal that reflects where your information has come from, the notes about the organization of your database (such as what your column headings mean), and where you have saved relevant files.

Use “save as” liberally so you can go back to earlier versions if you make a mistake or otherwise go down the wrong path.

Atomize your data and then concatenate as needed. It’s easier to put pieces of data together than it is to separate it.

If you’re using Excel and you’re unfamiliar with the “vertical lookup” function (VLOOKUP), you should learn that function.

Practice in other venues, like Zotero, iTunes, your grade book, or other administrative tasks. Doing so will help you get a sense of how data needs to be organized to achieve the desired ends.

Poultry in the Archives

I have long wished for information on a subject which at first blush you may not deem worthy of notice…

Theodore Sternberg of Ellsworth, Kansas divulged his enduring passion in a letter to Secretary of State Walter Gresham in May, 1893: “I should much like to see Consular reports … regarding the several breeds of fowls native to the [world’s] countries, their habits and special tendencies.” Secretary Gresham and his DOS colleagues apparently concurred with Sternberg that “out of such information may come some thing which may be of economic value to our own people,” but they weren’t sure at that point what specific information Sternberg wanted. They invited him to submit a list of questions and, upon receipt, issued a circular instruction to the entire service, calling on them to provide local data in response to Sternberg’s ten questions. At the time, the service consisted of approximately eight hundred posts across the world. Consular officials from Spain to Saigon sent back reports—my favorite titled “Chickens of Egypt”—that addressed Sternberg’s questions about local varieties, including “pure races” and “fancy” fowls, as well as artificial incubation techniques and the methods by which Americans could import the birds.

This isn’t the only instance I’ve found of an individual’s request for information producing a massive, time-consuming response from the US Consular Service, but it is certainly my favorite so far, not least because the experience of looking through the responses at the US National Archives in College Park felt sort of like stepping into a Far Side cartoon. I haven’t yet looked for the final report, but I’m confident that it can’t be as cool as the raw materials in archives. Here are some of my favorites; click on the images to view larger versions. The best is, of course, at the end…

An assortment of color drawings — presumably not produced by a member of the consular staff — depicting some chicken breeds in Asia:

A consul’s photograph of the Egg Market at Ghent, in Belgium:

The Game-Cock of Bruges, pictured first in its — potentially delinquent — youth and then in a more domestic setting appropriate to full maturity:

Belgium was (is?) definitely quite the place for poultry. One consul sent a translation of a newspaper article on “The Brussels Chicken,” and another provided this artistic rendering of a woman with examples of cock and hen “Barbus Dwarfs of Antwerp”:

Apparently, the “Artificial Mother” and these other incubators didn’t make the department’s final report:

But the absolute best thing in the collection were these marvelous feathers. The consul at Brunswick, Germany provided them as “proof of light and dark buff spangled booted Bantams.” They’re held onto a card with sealing wax. I am so used to reading reports that provide tantalizing mention of enclosures that are no longer with the documents that I had no expectation at all of turning this report over to find an envelope with the promised feathers in it. But there it was! In all its feathery glory!

All of these items can be found in the US National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland, Record Group 59: General Records of the Department of State, Inventory 15, Entry 86: Miscellaneous Consular Trade Reports, Folder 1. Declassification via State Letter 1/11/72.

Transimperial US History

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!

The US Customs Service: A Glance from 1872

I’m thinking through the relationship between the US Consular Service and the US Customs Service, as well as the true nature of the US-Canadian border in the late nineteenth century. As an initial exercise, I made a quick map of US Customs posts in 1872, based on the US Register. As you can see, they’re certainly thick on the ground, especially in the northeast. Some of that may have something to do with the fact that James G. Blaine of Maine was the speaker of the House at the time and already in possession of a significant network of people who needed patronage appointments, but it also speaks to the realities of the coastline and the importance of tariffs to the federal government. I look forward to expanding the maps across time and across other agencies.