Converging Empires examines the role the North Pacific borderlands played in the construction of race and citizenship, from 1867, when the United States acquired Russia’s interests in Alaska, through to the end of World War II. Imperial, national, provincial, territorial, reserve, and municipal borders worked together to create a dynamic legal landscape that both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people negotiated in myriad ways. As they crossed from one jurisdiction to another, on both sides of the British Columbia–Alaska border, adventurers, prospectors, laborers, and settlers from Europe, Canada, the United States, Latin America, and Asia made and remade themselves. This book makes a vital contribution to our understanding of North American borderlands history.

Andrea Geiger's profile page

Andrea Geiger is author of the award-winning Subverting Exclusion: Transpacific Encounters with Race, Caste, and Borders, 1885–1928.

"By situating the northern US‐Canada borders in the Pacific Ocean region, Geiger shows how a dynamic legal landscape and key policies related to national identity, belonging, citizenship, and sovereign authority were forged and contested."

Canadian Geographies

"Geiger’s meticulous analysis of law and its ironies clarifies the dynamics of immigration, discrimination, and exclusion in North American western borderlands."

BC Studies