US empire, World War 2 and the racialising of labour

Abstract

This essay examines US empire in World War 2 and showcases how the American war was based on the extraction of colonial labour. It focuses on builders laying infrastructure and supply lines for the Pentagon in the colonial world – in the Navy Seabees, Air Transport Command and Army Corps of Engineers – to retrieve the history of the planet-spanning, trans-colonial system of labour and transit that Americans established during this period. They called this system ‘the five highways’. They knew its crucial labourer as the ‘native’. Across the wartime archive, the ‘native’ appears in these accounts, the author argues, as the trace of US settler colonialism, a resource continually renewed for imperial projects in the mid-twentieth century. Histories of racialised labour in colonial settings, meanwhile, followed the five highways home, linking the creation of a global racial capitalist US market during the war to the country’s abundant postwar economy and built environment.