Non-state Actors with Tattoos

Abstract

Readers of this journal know the history of foreign relations is replete with accounts of high status individuals such as heads of state. The bottom-up historical approach pioneered by Marxist New Left scholars during the 1960s and 1970s has not come to dominate diplomatic histories. Fifty years in, the “new” social history has become old, and American leaders are still depicted as setting the agenda for the United States’ interaction with the world. Brian Rouleau’s new book forces us to reconsider the ways in which foreign relations work. Ordinary people, it turns out, have had an enormous impact on international affairs. Rouleau’s provocative book explains how common maritime laborers shaped the contours of America’s entanglements with foreign peoples during the nineteenth century. Mariners constituted the “single most sizeable cohort of Americans abroad” (p. 7). These “nonstate actors” represented “the country’s international face” (p. 6). They “crafted the channels along which other actors flowed outward into the world and often set the terms by which those groups could relate to their hosts” (p. 7). Rouleau convincingly demonstrates that American seafarers opened these channels through commercial, cultural, and sexual interactions with the world. He makes a strong case that these commonplace exchanges came long before more formal state-to-state diplomacy. Mariners were, in Rouleau’s words, “working-class diplomats” (p. 7). Seafaring shouldn’t be seen as peripheral to diplomatic history. “Maritime history is the history of early U.S. foreign relations,” he writes (p. 7).