This chapter emphasizes the importance of studying race and empire as dynamic, interactive processes, where race and empire are formed in relation to each other. Through a relational history approach, scholars historicize the complex nature of racialization within various imperial and colonial contexts. The chapter further explores how scholars engage with relational histories by examining intellectual and disciplinary genealogies, engaging in deep contextualization through critical archival research, and incorporating diverse sources like oral histories and local colonial records into their historical narrative. Additionally, the chapter discusses the ethical considerations and historiographical challenges inherent in researching race and empire, encouraging scholars to acknowledge their positionality and the implications of their findings. By employing relational history, the chapter concludes that scholars can offer deeper insights into how race and empire have co-constituted each other in the past and augment our contemporary understandings of power and resistance.

This Introduction provides an overview of the main arguments and contributions of the book to the literature on the environmental and economic history of French colonial Vietnam and the larger French colonial empire. It emphasizes how the book pays special attention to the significance of local networks and the role of diverse indigenous actors as it explores the formation of a regional and transnational coal regime of French colonial Vietnam. The Introduction also offers outlines of all chapters as well as the book’s key sources.

This chapter documents the conflicts among Đông Triều Coal Company (also known as SCDT), the city of Hải Phòng, and the French colonial government in Tonkin over the protection of potable water at a time when uncontrolled mining expansion in the Đông Triều highland, where SCDT was based, threatened to pollute the Hương River – Hải Phòng city’s source of potable water. This chapter argues that the French colonial state’s environment-centered attempts to safeguard the Hương River and public health, such as the creation of a massive water protection zone, were primarily driven by French concerns about the lack of hygiene and infectious diseases circulating within the indigenous communities located close to the Hương River rather than the industrial pollution caused by SCDT. The chapter also underlines issues pertaining to environmental laws, such as the logistical challenges of surveying and protecting water sources, and the lack of compliance with environmental regulations by big coal companies such as SCDT. More importantly, the chapter underscores the complex impact of mining expansion and environmental regulations on local ethnicities, such as the Dao communities.

Scholarship on the gendered dimensions of US foreign relations flourished in the twenty years following the appearance in 1986 of Joan Scott’s “Gender: A Useful Category of History Analysis.” But a worrisome drop-off in the last decade or so merits a reminder that gender matters and that we have good tools for integrating gender analysis in our work. This chapter encourages historians of US foreign relations to pay careful attention to the types of sources we use and the questions we ask of them; the assumptions and stereotypes that permeate diplomatic interactions; the ways in which gender helps create, maintain, and justify hierarchies of power; and the role of sex and sexuality in shaping relations between the United States and the world.

This chapter documents the development of urban mining centers along the coal frontier of Quảng Yên and their impact on the landscape and its people. It examines the French vision of turning coal towns into orderly landscapes where spatial and racial segregation, as well as medical and hygiene surveillance, could be applied. The architects of these emerging mining towns expected their newly designed urban spaces to stabilize the restless and highly mobile indigenous migrant mining workforce while also protecting the towns’ tiny European population from epidemic diseases and security threats. However, several factors reduced these urban visions to a patchwork of modernity. Racial divides, security and medical concerns, coupled with strained resources, led to the unequal distribution of living space and public resources between the European and indigenous quarters. Infectious diseases, such as malaria, tuberculosis, cholera, and plague, spread rapidly across the overcrowded dormitories of mine workers. In addition, crime and illicit activities flourished on the commercial streets of these towns and cities.

Building an empire demands more than political will, abundant wealth, and military might. It also requires a tremendous amount of stuff. This chapter considers the ways that materials and material have been essential to the consolidation of US power and influence in the postwar world. It explains why and how materiality should be considered a utensil in the historian’s toolbox, helping find and tell the richest stories possible.

What is the status and practice of US foreign relations history in China? The author observes that scholars in the field have not experienced the kind of self-examination and self-criticism that American (and other) scholars undertook during the 1980s and 1990s. Although Chinese historians today participate in global historiographical trends, the field, in his view, remains too much in a neopositivist mode.

This chapter examines the assumptions, concepts, and narratives historians use to study US relations with the natural world: with biological and chemical agents, environmental and physical phenomena, natural resources, and plants, animals, and microbes. Looking beyond the experiences and activities of human beings, it asks how non-human actors and forces can help explain the history of foreign relations. It surveys some of the key medical, scientific, and environmental issues that have shaped the history of foreign policy and international affairs, with an eye toward the methods scholars can employ to analyze these topics most profitably. Although studying these subjects can present methodological challenges, this chapter offers tools and strategies for overcoming those potential roadblocks. Becoming more attuned to medical, scientific, and environmental topics, as the chapter shows, challenges our assumptions about foreign relations in productive ways, offering fresh perspectives on conventional narratives and novel ways of studying the past.

This Epilogue documents the colonial coal regime’s struggle for survival during the twilight of French colonialism in Indochina. It also examines the closure and decolonization of large-scale coal mining enterprises and discusses the legacy of coal mining in postcolonial Vietnam.

This chapter introduces students of US foreign relations to the methods of studying religion in US diplomatic history. The challenges in thinking about (and with) religion might be divided into three general issues: how to understand the relationship between religion and historical causality; how to make sense of the ways that religion is embedded in supposedly secular forms and institutions; and, perhaps most importantly, how to define religion. Making sense of religion demands attention to all these issues, as well as a willingness to engage with nonstate actors and ideology. Perhaps most importantly, it demands diplomatic historians take seriously the religious language, institutions, and behaviors they encounter in the archive. After a brief historiographical overview of the religious turn in diplomatic history and the global turn in religious history, the chapter focuses on the key themes of secularism, humanitarianism, causality, and mapping. It ends with a discussion of how attention to religious studies scholarship can help attune diplomatic historians to new dimensions in our traditional archives.

This chapter provides practical guidance for using four types of digital resources: finding aids, digitized analog records, databases, and born-digital records. It points out a variety of potential pitfalls to consider, including searching finding aids in ways limited to the immediate and most obvious object of interest, compared to the benefits of wider searches based on a fuller understanding of bureaucratic structures and personnel. Effective use of the National Archives Catalog requires a full awareness of its limitations and how it can obfuscate relationships among various organizations and records. The discussion of digitized analog records describes various approaches, using as examples the online resources of the National Reconnaissance Office and the CIA, as well as the digitized microfilm of Department of State records by the National Archives. The World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers Data Files and the Disaster History Files are examples of traditional databases discussed. The Department of State Central Foreign Policy File for the years 1973–1979 is discussed in depth, including what is and is not online, how to effectively search the records, the use of P-Reels, and how to interpret the TAGS system. The chapter closes with suggestions on steps to take before visiting research institutions.

The treatment of North American Indigenous nations as domestic rather than foreign nations is deeply woven into the political-legal fabric of the United States. Even before the United States could exert any real authority in vast regions of Native North America, US officials fancifully defined the independent Indigenous nations whose territories they sought to expropriate as falling under the preeminent sovereignty of the United States. The customary exclusion of US–Indigenous relations from the history of American foreign relations reflected and reinforced this imperial project. Of course, Indigenous nations were, and are, sovereign peoples. This chapter provides a roadmap for those endeavoring to narrate histories that more accurately reflect the nation-to-nation dynamics of US–Indigenous relations. Drawing on the work of Native American and borderlands historians, along with those of Native American and Indigenous Studies scholars more broadly, it offers guidance on how to engage with frameworks such as settler colonialism and methodologies such as ethnohistory to contribute to building a critical and ethical body of work that explicitly frames US–Indigenous relations as international rather than domestic history.

This chapter explores the debate about the post-1890s expansion of the United States. Taking as a starting point the creation of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) in the 1960s, the chapter suggests that the Left has shaped our field’s discourse since that transformative decade. What constitutes and orients this intellectual movement has, however, changed over time: from the New Left, to the Cultural Left, to the Millennial Left. None of these three organic traditions regarded itself as a rigid School of Thought. Nevertheless, these three manifestations denaturalized, in turn, capitalism, nationalism, and liberalism by presenting each “-ism” as a synonym for US imperial power. Collectively, these three Left Turns have inspired field-defining debates about military power, free trade, cultural hegemony, and legal exception. The discussions have shaped the questions, methodologies, and interpretive tendencies of US foreign relations history. Rather than judging the cumulative effects of this six-decade debate, this chapter illuminates its often unappreciated genealogy. Hopefully, thinking historically about the historiography of US foreign relations history can suggest generative vistas for the future.