How does our understanding of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands change when we view the region as one stop on a “transnational circuit of romanticized frontiers” during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? Andrew Offenburger’s new book explores this question by following three families who participated in a series of United States and British expansionist projects across two continents between 1880 and 1917. Tracing the trajectories of American and Boer colonists as they migrated from the U.S. West to southern Africa, northern Mexico and back, Frontiers in the Gilded Age demonstrates that the British South Africa Company’s campaigns against the Ndebele in Rhodesia and the designs of American investors on Yaqui territory in northern Mexico operated as two nodes in a global circuit through which the same ideas, strategies, justifications, and people circulated to fuel the rise of industrial capitalism. Offenburger’s discovery of the connections between corporate land grabs in southern Africa and northern Mexico illuminates the role of transnational mercenaries in carrying out the frontier project of capital accumulation through indigenous dispossession—and of narrating its meaning to public audiences.
The book begins by tracing the emergence of a shared frontier ideology grounded in white supremacist ideas and extractive economies that characterized American and British imperialism in the late nineteenth century. Offenburger then explores how this ideology informed the lives of three sets of settlers: Frederick Burnham, an American scout who volunteered his services to suppress indigenous resistance to a British mining company in southern Africa and an American land development corporation in northern Mexico; James and Gertrude Eaton, a missionary couple from New Jersey who attempted to convert the residents of Chihuahua to Protestantism; and Benjamin Viljoen, a Boer general who toured the United States performing his “Boer War Spectacle” before establishing a series of failed agricultural colonies in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. These parallel narratives intersect in the final chapter, when the families each encounter dual challenges to their designs on the lands, people, and resources of northern Mexico: Yaqui resistance and revolutionary nationalism. The Eatons decamp to the United States, while Burnham and Viljoen redouble their efforts to secure control over Yaqui territory—the American scout by stockpiling rifles and importing bloodhounds, and the Boer general through serving as improbable plenipotentiary for Mexican revolutionary leader Francisco Madero.
Here Offenburger introduces a fourth family—that of Ricarda León Flores—to consider how the indigenous Yaqui responded to increasing Mexican and American incursions into their territory during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on oral histories and testimonies, Offenburger demonstrates how the strategies deployed by the León Flores family to survive escalating attacks on Yaqui land and resources shed light on broader patterns of Yoemem resilience often dismissed in state archives as mere “depredations.” He argues that the frontier model of accumulation through dispossession that settlers like Burnham and Viljoen sought to reproduce in the Mexican North faltered when these men encountered strategies of Yaqui resistance that they could neither understand nor suppress. Offenburger persuasively suggests that the 1917 Mexican Constitution’s mandate to remove the control of foreign investors over the Mexican economy was first realized not through the wave of expropriations that U.S. investors feared, but instead as a result of demands for Yaqui sovereignty. Although the Yoemem did not receive the full restitution of their lands and removal of settlers that they sought, their strategic combination of violence and diplomacy did prevent U.S. investors from assuming control of their resources during a key moment of political reorganization in Mexico. The Burnhams, Eatons, and Viljoens all abandoned their frontier ventures and ended up living within a twelve-mile radius of Pasadena.
Offenburger draws on several recent trends in studies of borderlands and empire to trace the connections between British imperialism in southern Africa and United States economic expansion into northern Mexico. He adopts a transnational and global lens to make sense of local power struggles, considers the role of non-state actors in shaping the outcome of international conflicts, follows the careers of seemingly iconoclastic individuals to observe broader patterns of historical change, and highlights the centrality of family structures to both settler colonialism and indigenous resistance. While Offenburger’s attention to the role of social Darwinism in justifying imperial projects will be familiar to historians, Frontiers in the Gilded Age adds an important contribution by demonstrating not only how frontier ideologies rationalized indigenous dispossession, but also how the concept of a global frontier circuit facilitated the capital investments that underwrote U.S. extractive ventures on Yaqui lands. This dynamic is most evident in the career of Burnham, who we see convince American investors to purchase shares in the land development company he manages in the Yaqui Valley by touting his experience killing Ndebele resistance leaders for the British South Africa Company. But it also comes through as Viljoen’s experience with guerilla warfare in southern Africa qualifies him lead a “peace mission” to the Yaqui, and in the ways the Eatons’ evangelizing efforts intersect with the creation of a Boer agricultural colony in Chihuahua.
It is always easy to say that a book should have done more, and Offenburger is careful to explain how and why he set the parameters of this history. Still, for a study on industrial frontiers in the Gilded Age, it would have been helpful to hear more about how similar extractive zones—Alaska, the Yukon, Australia, Venezuela—mirrored or departed from the dynamic of the frontier circuit that Offenburg identifies. Offenburger argues that the “global frontier” he traces ultimately “closed” in northern Mexico when foreign investors could no longer call upon the particular combination of state power and extralegal violence that had facilitated corporate ventures in previous decades. What did the closure of this particular frontier circuit mean for broader trends toward mass resource nationalization and anti-colonialism in the middle of the twentieth century? But these are really questions about directions for future research. Offenburger has written a compelling account of frontiers in the Gilded Age that deepens our understanding of the relationship between capitalism and dispossession during a period of global economic transformation.
