Spaces of Law in American Foreign Relations: Extradition and Extraterritoriality in the Borderlands and Beyond, 1877-1898 - Hardcover

Margolies, Daniel S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0820330922 ISBN 13: 9780820330921

Publisher: University of Georgia Press, 2011

Synopsis

In the late nineteenth century the United States oversaw a great increase in extraterritorial claims, boundary disputes, extradition controversies, and transborder abduction and interdiction. In this sweeping history of the underpinnings of American empire, Daniel S. Margolies offers a new frame of analysis for historians to understand how novel assertions of legal spatiality and extraterritoriality were deployed in U.S. foreign relations during an era of increased national ambitions and global connectedness.

Whether it was in the Mexican borderlands or in other hot spots around the globe, Margolies shows that American policy responded to disputes over jurisdiction by defining the space of law on the basis of a strident unilateralism. Especially significant and contested were extradition regimes and the exceptions carved within them. Extradition of fugitives reflected critical questions of sovereignty and the role of the state in foreign affair during the run-up to overseas empire in 1898.

Using extradition as a critical lens, Spaces of Law in American Foreign Relations examines the rich embeddedness of questions of sovereignty, territoriality, legal spatiality, and citizenship and shows that U.S. hegemonic power was constructed in significant part in the spaces of law, not simply through war or trade.

About this title

About the Author:

DANIEL S. MARGOLIES is a professor of history at Virginia Wesleyan College. He is the author of Henry Watterson and the New South: The Politics of Empire, Free Trade, and Globalization.

Review:

Spaces of Law in American Foreign Relations is the first book to address the legal aspects of late nineteenth-century U.S. foreign relations. It fills a clear historiographical void and, in so doing, not only significantly enhances our understanding of U.S. foreign relations for the years 1877–1898 but also provides insight into the legal bases for governing the empire acquired after 1898. Based on prodigious and highly impressive research, it will be of interest to historians of U.S. foreign relations, of American legal history, and of the Gilded Age.

(Joseph A. Fry author of Dixie Looks Abroad: The South and U.S. Foreign Relations, 1789–1973)

At a time when the 'transnational turn' dominates U.S. historiography, Spaces of Law in American Foreign Relations unearths a forgotten history and makes fresh interventions in several fields, including the legal history of U.S. foreign relations and Mexican borderlands history. Theoretically sophisticated yet written in an accessible style, this is an ambitious and exciting book that links the local and the global, and connects the state and everyday life. Margolies provides a bold new account of law and power at the U.S. border in the nineteenth century.

(Christopher Capozzola author of Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen)

This book's analysis on legal spatiality and territoriality and its explanation on how to conceptualize extradition in terms of foreign policy, governance, and borderlands are significant contributions to the history of American foreign relations and to U.S. legal history.

(American Historical Review)

Spaces of Law is an important contribution to the scholarship on state violence and American state-building . . .This is an enthralling investigation of the sovereign exception in the making of American foreign policy practices.

(John McKiernan-Gonzalez Southwestern Historical Quarterly)

Margolie’s interpretation of cross-border raids, the legal status of anarchists as apolitical criminals undeserving of extradition exemptions, and the pride and hubris of treaty-making come through in lively narratives and offer considerable insight. Readers with an interest in critical theories of law, space, and the histories of the borderlands as a test site for U.S. empire will gain much.

(Ethan Blue Ethan Blue, Journal of Southern History)

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0820330922
• ISBN 13: 9780820330921
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 428