Podcast Summary

New Books Network Episode:

Allison Powers, "Arbitrating Empire: United States Expansion and the Transformation of International Law" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Host: Dr. Miranda Melcher
Guest: Dr. Allison Powers
Date: February 23, 2026

Episode Overview

This episode features a conversation between host Dr. Miranda Melcher and Dr. Allison Powers about Powers' groundbreaking book, Arbitrating Empire. The discussion centers on how the United States' imperial expansion in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was inextricably linked with transformations in international law, particularly through state-to-state arbitration tribunals. Powers reveals how thousands of international legal claims—often by marginalized and colonized peoples—both challenged and shaped international law, and how their stories have been systematically erased from the official record.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Book's Core Intervention and Methodological Approach

• Powers positions herself as a "legal historian of the U.S. empire and a social historian of international law" ([01:47]).
• She underscores the book’s focus: not diplomats or famous jurists, but ordinary people using international law to challenge U.S. state violence amid imperial expansion ([01:47]-[03:50]).
• The U.S. Government’s effort to avoid liability for harms to people outside its borders has deep historical roots.
• Powers’ major historiographical intervention: the erasure of claims against the U.S. is itself a form of power, shaping both international law and the global record.

Memorable Quote:
"The erasure of these claims from the international legal record was itself a constitutive feature of U.S. colonial and global power."
— Allison Powers ([03:21])

2. Origins and Nature of State-to-State Arbitration

• State-to-state mass claims arbitration began in the late 18th century, famously with the 1794 Jay Treaty ([04:51]).
• Arbitration is traditionally heralded as an "enlightened alternative to war," but also served to justify and enforce new forms of imperial intervention ([05:11]).
• Arbitration tribunals became productive sites for creating, legitimizing, and contesting international legal concepts—not just regulating them.

Memorable Quote:
"These tribunals in fact become primary sites through which international legal concepts are produced, contested, and legitimized. So they're productive of power relations, not merely regulatory of them."
— Allison Powers ([05:39])

• Powers re-centers the timeline of international law not just with canonical European figures, but with anti-colonial claimants on the U.S.–Mexico border in 1868 ([06:14]).

3. The Scope and Scale of Claims

• Powers focuses on five major tribunals (Mexico 1868, Samoa 1899, post-1898 Cuba/Philippines, Panama Canal Zone, and U.S.-Mexico 1920s), but emphasizes there are "hundreds of tribunals, thousands and thousands of claims" across this period ([08:06]-[09:57]).
• The five selected are not representative, but illustrative of ruptures—moments when claimants turned imperial mechanisms against their creators.
• The arbitral claims were vast: in the Panama Canal commissions "hundreds and hundreds" of claims, and almost 800 "denial of justice" claims by Mexican citizens living within the U.S. alone in the 1923 commission ([11:14]).

Memorable Quote:
"This is not like one isolated case here or there."
— Allison Powers ([12:10])

4. Arbitrations in the Pacific and the Case of Samoa

• U.S. annexation of eastern Samoa relied on military violence and colonial governance, justified through "tridominium" (joint rule with Britain and Germany) and mediated by international law ([12:49]-[15:00]).
• Legal challenges to U.S. bombardment by Samoans were dismissed since Samoans and Chinese nationals were deemed "not sufficiently civilized" to make claims ([16:25]).
• Powers stresses that the erasure of these challenges was not accidental but part of how U.S. colonial power was constructed and narrated.

Memorable Quote:
"International law is being mobilized in this way to attempt to justify and legitimize what are really colonial power structures…"
— Allison Powers ([14:29])

5. State Department and Government Bureaucracies

• Most arbitration tribunals were managed by the State Department, though sometimes the Attorney General's office was involved (notably in post-1898 Spanish Treaty claims) ([18:09]).
• The process of arbitration helped define power relations, not just administer justice.
• Crucially, "seemingly ordinary people"—not government lawyers—shaped the meaning and reach of international law via their persistent claims-making ([21:10]).

6. The Panama Canal and "International Eminent Domain"

• The U.S. justified the takeover of the Canal Zone as an act of "international eminent domain" ([23:49]).
• Arbitrations over expropriation included not just landowners but multiracial and multinational coalitions, often challenging the violence of colonial administration ([24:42]).
• U.S. authorities used ongoing expropriations as tools to prevent residents from challenging colonial governance or seeking redress ([24:56]).
• Panama's government ultimately used these claims to renegotiate with the U.S., but this often erased or sidelined local claimants' visions of justice ([26:42]).

7. The U.S.–Mexico Claims Commission (1923–1940)

• The commission was designed to neutralize the redistribution promised in Mexico's 1917 constitution by bankrupting Mexico through damages owed to U.S. nationals ([28:18]).
• Unexpectedly, nearly 800 Mexican citizens in the U.S. brought claims against the U.S. for violence, lynching, and denial of justice ([29:28]).
• The sheer volume and level of these claims alarmed the State Department, leading to the collapse of the commission and a private settlement—claimants received nothing ([32:18]).

Notable Segment:
"The State Department wanted desperately to insulate the federal government from the international legal claims brought by Mexican citizens against the U.S. ... when faced with these international legal claims, the U.S. government ultimately chooses to abandon the tribunal rather than risk being held legally and financially liable for racist state violence."
— Allison Powers ([29:28]-[32:18])

8. Systematic Erasure and Active Forgetting

• After the 1940s, this form of state-to-state mass arbitration disappears from the international legal order ([33:07]).
• While the official explanation is inefficiency, Powers argues the real reason was that the tribunals were too effective at exposing U.S. state violence and potential liability.
• These cases were intentionally excluded from legal records, histories, and precedents to make such critiques "unthinkable" ([37:26]).

Memorable Quote:
"These claims disappeared from the international legal record not because they mattered too little, but instead because the State Department worried they mattered too much."
— Allison Powers ([38:36])

9. Unofficial Memory and Interdisciplinary Engagement

• Despite official erasure, these histories persist in community memory and in the work of ethnic and critical studies scholars ([36:45], [40:26]).
• Powers calls for international law historians and U.S. foreign relations scholars to engage seriously with these alternative archives and traditions ([40:26]).

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "The erasure of these claims from the international legal record was itself a constitutive feature of U.S. colonial and global power." ([03:21])
• "These tribunals in fact become primary sites through which international legal concepts are produced, contested, and legitimized. So they're productive of power relations, not merely regulatory of them." ([05:39])
• "International law is being mobilized in this way to attempt to justify and legitimize what are really colonial power structures…" ([14:29])
• "This is not like one isolated case here or there." ([12:10])
• "These claims disappeared from the international legal record not because they mattered too little, but instead because the State Department worried they mattered too much." ([38:36])

Key Timestamps

| Timestamp | Topic / Segment | |-----------|--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 01:47 | Powers introduces the book and its core interventions | | 04:51 | Origins of state-to-state arbitration and its dual role | | 11:14 | Scale—discussion of thousands of claims | | 12:49 | The case of Samoa and U.S. annexation in the Pacific | | 18:09 | The U.S. State Department and bureaucracy's role in arbitrations | | 23:49 | Arbitrations over the Panama Canal and "international eminent domain" | | 28:18 | U.S.-Mexico Claims Commission: plan vs. messy reality | | 33:07 | Why mass state-to-state arbitration disappears after the 1940s | | 37:26 | How and why these histories were systematically erased | | 40:26 | Powers' call for engaging with ethnic studies and unofficial histories |

Further Resources

Allison Powers' current work:

• New book project on sovereign debt and corporate power
• Edited volume on sovereign debt in the global 1860s
• Projects on the Monroe Doctrine and debt-for-nature swaps in the Americas ([41:11])

Takeaways

• U.S. use of international arbitrations was deeply entwined with its imperial projects, often facilitating expansion and the erasure of violence.
• Ordinary claimants—often marginalized or colonized people—used international law to challenge U.S. state violence, but their voices were strategically erased from the record.
• Official legal and diplomatic narratives have systematically omitted these challenges, affecting both precedent and memory in international law.
• Powers urges legal historians to look beyond traditional archives and embrace interdisciplinary, community-rooted scholarship.

"What might hundreds or even thousands of arbitral decisions, finding the everyday workings of the US Legal system to represent violations of international law, might have meant for this emerging mid 20th century the global order ... I do think it's telling that the State Department didn't want to find out."
— Allison Powers ([39:28])

For more, see: Allison Powers, "Arbitrating United States Expansion and the Transformation of International Law" (Oxford UP, 2024)