American Postcolony: Imperial Citizenship and the Rise of Garment Metropolis in the Pacific, 1944-1999

My dissertation is a history of the latest overseas territorial acquisition of the United States. It is also a history about the rise and fall of an unlikely offshore manufacturing enterprise in the Pacific. This multifaceted story is set in the Northern Marianas, a chain of islands in Micronesia that remains little known to outsiders but serves as a microcosm for understanding the intersection of territorial status and capital accumulation in the age of decolonization. My dissertation explicates why and what followed after the Northern Marianas, a dependent territory under the UN trusteeship, renounced sovereignty at the height of anticolonial movements around the globe and joined the U.S. political union in 1976.

To answer these questions, my dissertation traces the long lineage of the Marianas garment industry, one of the most controversial byproducts of the Marianas’ membership in the U.S. political union. The newly attained U.S. territorial status and the attendant shipping advantages transformed the Northern Marianas’ capital of Saipan into a garment metropolis in the Pacific, inviting garment manufacturers and laborers from neighboring Asian and Micronesian regions to produce for popular American brands such as Polo, Levi’s, and Gap. Through the revenues it generated for the local government, the garment industry substantially contributed to the Marianas’ economy in the decades following the U.S.-Marianas affiliation. The garment industry, however, entailed irreversible repercussions when the controversies over “made-in-the-USA” apparel from the Marianas prompted federal interventions that ultimately circumscribed the local autonomy.

Situating the Marianas garment industry at the intersection of American empire and transnational capital, my dissertation underscores the ways that U.S. territoriality has channeled global circulation of money, people, and goods in the age of decolonization. In this story, I bring together multiple actors ranging from American officials, Indigenous leaders, transnational entrepreneurs, and migrant workers, all of whom hoped to take advantage of the geopolitical and economic values they found in the Marianas. Their varying perceptions of and negotiations with the U.S. jurisdiction of the Marianas illuminate the ways imperialism and capitalism overlapped in the late twentieth century. Furthermore, their multilayered interactions in the Marianas suggest that histories of U.S. territories are not reduced to the metropole-colony binary but unfold in larger regional and global contexts that give distinct meanings to places like the Marianas.