Robert D. Aguirre. Mobility and Modernity: Panama in the Nineteenth Century Anglo-American Imagination. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2017. Pp. 232. $69.95 (cloth).

Abstract

He was a heroic postman. Through all types of weather, he walked, rode, and surveyed mail routes for the British Empire. Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), better known as a novelist of his native England, also "traveled by every conceivable modality" as a postal worker (55). In the mid-nineteenth century, when the sun never set on the British Empire, it was essential to create and maintain long-distance communication networks. Efficient transit routes linked the metropole with its colonies; and establishing these routes required an army of sailors and explorers, surveyors, postal workers, authors, and colonial administrators traversing the globe. In 1858, for example, Anthony Trollope, while on an official postal mission, traveled on a Royal Mail ship to the Caribbean and the Isthmus of Panama. Surveying potential carrier routes by day, his notes of "travail" also became a classic travelogue, The West Indies and the Spanish Main. Trollope's journey, among other microhistories of mobility, is excellently chronicled in Robert D. Aguirre's book, Mobility and Modernity: Panama in the Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Imagination. By examining people, ideas, and goods that traveled through Panama in the nineteenth century, Aguirre offers a case study of the modern history of globalization. In the 1840s and 1850s, he writes, the discovery of gold in California inspired both British and American ambitions to develop new and faster transportation networks linking the Atlantic world with the Pacific rim. It was a race westward, dependent on a "global network of ships, ports, coaling stations, and railways, facilitated by arrangements and treaties with other nations" (57). A key stop on this transnational route was the Isthmus of Panama. Decades before the building of the Panama Canal, the isthmus was an important land bridge between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Between the 1840s and 1860s, Aguirre documents, more people migrated from the US east coast to the Pacific coast by way of Panama than all those who used the overland North American route. Panama was part of westward expansion. The Panama Railroad, for instance, carried more than 400,0000 travelers between its opening in 1856 and the year 1865. During that same period, it also transported $750 million in gold (mostly from California) and approximately 300,000 bags of international mail (8). All of this movement, Aguirre argues, depended fundamentally on speed. The "annihilation" of space and time, a long running subject of historical and philosophical study, is also a guiding issue in Aguirre's book. Drawing on contemporary theorists such as David Harvey, Aguirre shows how "time-space compression" sped up the pace of life and intensified social relations. Focusing in time on the mid-nineteenth century and in space on the tropics of Panama, Aguirre chronicles the history of four technologies that contributed to global timespace compression: (1) railroads, (2) mail and communication networks, (3) the camera and photography, and (4) the printing press. These collectiv...