The US Department of the Interior is one of the federal government’s neatest rhetorical tricks. Built largely to manage land in the American West that had become “interior” to the United States only recently, through the colonial logic of Manifest Destiny, the department’s name serves to legitimize US territorial expansion. Interior’s role in expanding, managing, and obscuring American empire, however, does not stop at the California coast. Megan Black, an assistant professor of history at the London School of Economics and Political Science, has a new history of the Interior Department out that traces the department’s leading role in America’s pursuit of mineral resources around the world. Her book, The Global Interior, is a crucial contribution to our understanding of the the hidden ways American power functions around the world. I spoke with Dr. Black over email about her book and the role Interior has played in the construction of American foreign policy.
Sam Ratner: What brought you to the international history of the Interior Department as a topic for close study? Is there something about Interior in particular that speaks to your broader project as an historian?
Megan Black: I came to study the Interior Department’s global mineral pursuits in a circuitous way. In graduate school at George Washington University, I was interested in connections between US policies toward indigenous peoples and US policies toward Third World nations. Minerals became one prism through which those connections were visible. For example, I encountered the dynamic and controversial activism of an organization that claimed histories of mineral exploitation linked American Indian nations and Third World nations: the Council of Energy Resource Tribes, which self-labeled as the “Indian OPEC.” I filed this history in the back of my mind while searching for evidence of interwoven mineral histories.
Then at the National Archives, quite by chance, I stumbled onto these educational mineral films produced by the Interior Department and members of industry, like Sinclair Oil and Phelps Dodge Company. The films had surprisingly complex narratives that linked Native Americans to an array of foreign peoples from developing nations through their supposed shared inability to properly manage minerals around the world–the makings of the resource ideologies I would later identify as “resource globalism” and “resource primitivism.” I quickly discovered that these films circulated to nations like Afghanistan, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, Israel, India, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Thailand, to name just a few. What allowed these films such a wide-reaching circulation? The answer, as I came to find out, was that Interior Department personnel were venturing to these nations to supervise strategic mineral programs, along with an array of other projects more closely associated with international development, including hydroelectric dams.
As some officials joked, the Interior Department was decidedly exterior. However, other Interior officials made it clear that the Department’s global portfolio was a natural extension of its historical duties managing “frontiers”, a history that underwrote its management of natural resources and indigenous affairs. What initially appeared as a contradiction was quickly revealed to be anything but.
It was a legacy of Interior’s origins in settler colonialism in the wake of the Mexican-American War to incorporate expropriated territory into the national fold.