Towards a Global Past: History in an Age of Globalization

In August 1941, the U.S. and British governments secretly authorized Pan American Airways, the United States' exclusive international airline, to operate a military supply route across Africa to the Middle East and beyond. The story of Pan Am's activities as a military contractor during World War II has largely disappeared from the historical record, yet the airline played a critical role in enabling the success of the Allied war effort as well as the global expansion of U.S. military and commercial power. Pan Am's presence in Africa, moreover, was an early experiment in what would later be called "modernization and development." Employing 1,000 U.S. managers and some 10,000 local laborers, the company's wartime subsidiary, Pan American Airways-Africa (PAA-Africa), embedded American technology, manpower, capital, and culture into regions of Africa that had formerly been dominated by the European imperial powers. As such, the project embodied (and indeed facilitated) larger transformations in the international system: namely, the gradual replacement of the European colonial order by an ascendant "American Century," which purported to be based on the control of markets rather than the conquest of territory--an empire of the "air," rather than of the sea or land. Adapted from the author's forthcoming book, No Distant Places: Aviation and the American Ascendancy (Harvard University Press), this paper uses the story of Pan Am's wartime activities in Africa as a lens onto broader themes in U.S. and international history, including the role of corporations in enacting foreign policy, the transnational politics of race, the material and discursive infrastructure of American globalism, and the analytic utility of "empire" as a way of conceptualizing the United States' rise to global hegemony. 

 

Dr. Van Vleck's teaching and research focus on the United States and the world, cultural history, and the history of business and technology. Her forthcoming book, No Distant Places: Aviation and the Global American Century (Harvard University Press), argues that aviation, and ideas about aviation, were instrumental in facilitating the United States’ rise to global hegemony during the mid-twentieth century. Van Vleck’s other publications include “The Logic of the Air: Aviation and the Globalism of the ‘American Century,’” New Global Studies 1.1 (Fall 2007) and  “An Airline at the Crossroads of the World: Ariana Afghan Airlines, Modernization, and the Global Cold War,” History and Technology 25:1 (March 2009). Her new book project,Ambassadors with Bulldozers: Morrison Knudsen and the Engineering of American Global Power, is a transnational history of modernization and development, engineering, and environmental transformation.

 

Van Vleck received her Ph.D. from Yale in 2009. Her awards and fellowships include the Theron Rockwell Field Prize, the Edwin W. Small Prize, the AHA/NASA Fellowship in Aerospace History, the Daniel P. Guggenheim Fellowship (Smithsonian Institution), and the John Morton Blum Fellowship for Graduate Research in American History and Culture.