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.

Andrea Geiger pays particular attention to the ways in which Japanese migrants and the Indigenous people—Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian, among others—who have made this region their home for millennia, negotiated the web of intersecting boundaries that emerged over time, charting the ways they infused these reconfigured national, provincial, and territorial spaces with new meanings.

Through its examination of the northernmost stretches of the Canada–U.S. border, this book makes a vital contribution to our understanding of North American borderlands history.

View Converging Empires: Citizens and Subjects in the North Pacific Borderlands, 1867–1945 at University of British Columbia Press. For distribution in the U.S. please visit the University of North Carolina Press.