Path of Empire: Panama and the California Gold Rush
by Aims McGuinness
Cornell University Press, Ithaca (2008)
249 pp, $35 in hardcover
ISBN 978-0-8014-4521-7

Anyone who got a primary and secondary education in US schools and didn't flunk history will know that the California Gold Rush was an important episode in the settlement of the North American continent by English-speaking people. Some will even have learned that for most of those who made their way from the eastern part of the United States to California in the late 1840s and 1850s, their journey took them through Panama.

The California Gold Rush is thus an important part of Panamanian history. It coincided with the construction of the first Atlantic to Pacific railroad, a project that the local economic and social elite expected to increase their fortunes. It transformed local demography. It came as the master and slave system was finally ending on the isthmus, to be replaced by the smoldering tensions of a caste system in some ways like the one we have today and in other ways not. Panama was then a part of New Granada with modern-day Colombia, and the changes wrought by the Gold Rush aggravated tensions between the isthmus and Bogota.

Not only was the Gold Rush an important part of Panamanian history, but coming as it did just after the United States forced a huge cession of territory from Mexico and at a time when American adventurers were trying to conquer former Spanish possessions in the hope of creating new slave states, it prompted Spanish-speaking intellectuals from the Americas to think in terms of América, a phenomenon that didn't pertain to Spain and most definitely was something other the United States of America: the region we all know today as Latin America.

These are the broad strokes of the story that Aims McGuinness tells, and they're filled in with details from laborious research in such primary sources as municipal voting records, mid-19th century petitions to the Cabildo, local newspapers of the time, letters, business records and the registers of professional associations. Out of these details we get a more complicated understanding of that century's outstanding Panamanian statesman, Justo Arosemena. Railroad company security chief and gringo businessman Ran Runnels puts in an appearance. We find that while Jack Oliver may have been pseudonymous, Manuel Luna definitely wasn't and the nature of their argument that led to the bloody Watermelon Slice Incident is put in its social, racial, economic and political context.

This is not Panama as a footnote to US history, but Panamanian history at a time when the United States was a new factor here. It's a tale of elite Liberals inside the walls that then existed around the Casco Viejo who so feared their fellow party members in the wooden shacks in the surrounding neighborhood that they sought the protection of US military forces. It's the story of disappointed business leaders and ruined micro-entrepreneurs, and an act of violence that pitted residents of a humble neighborhood against a railroad company that wanted to take their homes. It's an account of arrogant military officers and pompous diplomats who played their bit parts, and more subtle international businessmen who ended up with most of the marbles. It's an example of what happens to a country that takes a "heads we win tails you lose" offer from a foreign company that suggests that its prosperity will naturally trickle down.

This is one of these books that really needs to be translated into Spanish. That's because above all Path of Empire is about who Panamanians were and are, and that's critical knowledge to have if this country is ever to become close to as good as it can be.