Muybridge and the Imperial Pacific: Fashioning Histories of Empire and the Coffee State, 1867–1876

Abstract

This essay discusses both the continuities and discontinuities in Eadweard Muybridge’s survey photography of the western United States and the Pacific Coast of Central America and Mexico in relation to histories of empire and capital expansion. Muybridge’s photographic career followed the frontiers of US empire and capital across the Pacific Rim, and his work tended to reflect those perspectives by naturalizing the temporalities of global capital and US empire, even as it foreclosed alternate subaltern histories. Photography’s role was not passive: it participated with steam power in the integration of these regions by reimagining the disparate spaces it depicted as interconnected by the infrastructure lain by the federal government and global markets. Yet photography’s role also varied as Muybridge moved from the settler colonial context of California to societies like Guatemala with deep colonial roots. During the Liberal reforms of Justo Rufino Barrios, Muybridge’s album refashions Guatemala as a modernizing “coffee state” on the frontier of civilization. Analyzing Muybridge’s photographs alongside state archives that managed these reforms reveals how the creation of the coffee state was both a material and contested cultural production that repressed Indigenous histories of struggle, dispossession, and forced labor by representing the land and people within global currents of commodification and the photographic exhibition of Indigenous persons.