Toiling for the invader
US imperialism has been built on local labour. Review: The Work of Empire, Justin F Jackson, by Gavin O'Toole
The Work of Empire: War, Occupation, and the Making of American Colonialism in Cuba and the Philippines, Justin F Jackson, 2025, University of North Carolina Press
If there was ever any doubt about the true nature of imperialism, the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Gaza reveal this in shameful detail.
Imperialism, both through proxies and puppets, is a corporate enterprise advancing the interests of mercantile and financial capital with huge equity stakes in security industries and an insatiable hunger for government debt.
This was as true for British imperialism 400 years ago as it is for its contemporary heir, the United States, but easily obscured in the vast literature on this complex subject.
Britain’s empire was less the product of a sovereign state than corporate colonialism by which the most significant actors were not national armies but chartered and joint-stock companies such as the East India conglomerate.
The historian Philip Stern has even given this a name, “venture colonialism”, a brand of overseas expansion driven by a conviction that the business of empire is best conducted by private enterprise.
In his brilliant book, Empire, Incorporated, Stern has argued that corporations took the lead in the global expansion and administration of imperialism in many instances—from sixteenth-century Ireland to the Falklands in the 1980s.
Most importantly, he provides a strong basis for acknowledging that venture colonialism did not cease with the end of formal empires but persists right now in the corporate power that lurks behind our era’s most vicious conflicts.
The US has generated excellent examples of this imperial privatisation because, despite the country’s military might and access to seemingly limitless capital, it has been vulnerable historically in one area in particular: access to labour.
The post-9/11 wars provide emphatic proof that the labour-intensive work of extending and maintaining imperial control not only requires massive levels of investment and innovation—supplied by the military industrial complex—but also requires cheap, exploitable workers.
That is why in Afghanistan and Iraq the US Department of Defense—poorly prepared for counterinsurgency, under-equipped, and above all undermanned—turned to private contractors to ensure its mission could succeed.
By recruiting local and migrant workers to run their field operations and logistics, these corporations created an army of non-military staff to support US warfare in the region numbering by 2008 at least 260,000 civilians. Nearly half were “local” or “host-country” nationals, but up to 100,000 hailed from Africa and Asia.
Contractors were then, and continue to be, routinely accused of mistreating such workers—often far from home, desperate for a wage, without access to labour unions—further underlining the exploitation at the heart of the imperial relationship.
As the Watson Institute has noted, private contracting had grown to such a level by 2011 that there were more contract employees involved in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan than uniformed military personnel.
It points out that by 2019, the ratio of contractors to troops had grown to 1.5:1—or 50 per cent more contractors than troops in the US Central Command region that included Iraq and Afghanistan.
If the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan may have ultimately benefited from public works programmes and reconstruction, the global US corporations that undertook them by exploiting local labour benefited even more. The Watson Institute noted that of the total $14 trillion spent by the Pentagon since the start of the Afghan war in 2001, up to one-half may have gone to military contractors.
A tragic aspect of the overseas exploitation of labour in this way is that its imperial outcome may ultimately serve to benefit domestic workers, create a hierarchy of labour, and strengthen the international division of labour.
While elements of the US labour movement, for example, have been reflexively hostile to the old-fashioned political control that characterises traditional imperialism, they have simultaneously turned a blind eye to the economic exploitation of their comrades overseas.
Yet as author Justin Jackson points out, none of this is new—since 1898, when the US assumed Spain’s imperial mantle in the Caribbean and Philippines, local and migrant labour has been press-ganged to do the “work of empire”, and this has in turn shaped both the entire enterprise of American imperialism itself and the military institution.
He writes: “Whether they guided or translated for American troops, cleaned or built city streets and rural highways, or carried supplies and sold sex, Cubans and Filipinos enabled the martial activity that made the United States a world power by the dawn of the twentieth century. In turn, this work of empire decisively shaped Americans’ colonial project in the Philippines and neocolonial relations with Cuba, leaving lasting imprints on insular societies and states.”
Using these two cases, Jackson embarks in The Work of Empire on a fascinating exploration of the critically important role played by labour in the creation of an empire.
Standard narratives of US empire-building that emphasise national and international political institutions and elites tend to overlook the importance of social relations, he observes.
Citing the brilliant work of historian Julie Greene, the author agrees that these narratives do not consider the possibility that empire has often been “a modality through which class was lived” making empire-building heavily reliant on the control and regulation of labour.
Jackson’s focus is on the very beginning of that relationship: the labour that occurs at the point where imperial sovereignty is produced and reproduced in the military exercise of war and occupation itself.
The literature, he says, “often misses how the militarised elaboration and operation of sovereignty so central to empire’s expansion and contraction was itself work”, unintentionally abstracting labour relations under empire from the violence of its initial formation.
He writes; “Labour was essential to US empire not for producing commodities or trade unionism but for generating the coercive state capacity that imperial and national elites required to assert and maintain sovereignty.”
Accordingly, Jackson turns his attention to the coercive and voluntary work of Cuban and Filipino workers, the politics of US Army officers’ attempts to manage manual colonial labourers, the military-colonial political economy of public works, and how the work of war and occupation married ideologies of race and gender.
There are many echoes of today. Just as in Iraq and Afghanistan where US military authorities were woefully unprepared for the enterprise of neo-imperialism, in the Cuba and Philippines of 1898 the “old” US army was similarly unprepared and under-resourced for its novel global missions and therefore had to exploit colonial labour to carry them out.
Jackson provides an extremely valuable new focus on US imperialism that orients our attention to the role of workers themselves in empire-building—as well as instances in which they asserted the power to change it.
In particular, military colonisation in Cuba and the Philippines left its martial imprint on the early development of capitalist economies and politics in both countries.
The author writes: “Despite tensions in US military regimes’ policy, however, their exploitation of tropical labour ultimately consolidated colonial trends in insular capitalist economies that favoured wealthier landowners and foreign businessmen at the expense of poorer peasants and workers.”
With its contribution to creating a subaltern history of US empire, Jackson offers important advances in how we understand class relations in the exercise of imperialism.
He writes: “Labour relations particular to colonial war and occupation rarely resembled those between workers and employers in industrial-capitalist metropoles. If ‘class consciousness’ remains the lodestar of working-class politics among some labour historians, the subjectivity of subalterns working for US troops … cohered in a politics of sovereignty.”
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