Publishers Weekly
★ 05/20/2024
The decision to build a port in Los Angeles’s San Pedro Bay was driven by commercial interests, local and national politics, and personal agendas, not by thoughtful analysis of geography and geology, according to this enthralling debut. Historian Tejani documents the mid-19th-century political maneuvering and “machines of the modern state and corporate capital” that heedlessly “tore apart” 3,400 acres of mud and salt marsh, which engineers at the time considered wholly unsuitable for a commercial harbor. But others—among them landowners, surveyors, railroad magnates, shipping merchants, and U.S. senators—saw opportunities to get rich via land speculation, lucrative government contracts, and monopolistic port access. Tejani’s narrative revolves around these men and the conflict, competition, and deception involved in their ambitious decades-long efforts to get the port built, which unfurled in parallel with America’s westward expansion and displacement of Native peoples and the acquisition of Mexican territory by force. Powerful players massaged government policy on these and other issues in the direction most beneficial to the port, which subsequently became central to U.S. imperial aspirations in the Pacific. Tejani astutely conveys the deep entanglement of political and economic interests at the highest echelons of power. The result is a beguiling history of Southern California, early industrial development, and U.S. empire. (July)
Michael Hiltzik
"James Tejani’s meticulously researched and brilliantly told book places one of the truly transformative enterprises of California’s development within the grand sweep of the state’s—and America’s—historical pageant. Specialists, students of history, and general readers alike will be fascinated by this sprawling narrative of how capitalists, political operators, and swindlers managed over the course of a century to turn a muddy bay on the Pacific shore into a behemoth of international commerce."
Steven Hahn
"Weaving the many threads of Indigenous, environmental, maritime, political, and economic history, James Tejani shows how a local story became one of national and global proportions. With shifting perspectives and deep dives, Tejani excavates the unlikely nineteenth-century rise of the Port of Los Angeles as a crucial, though relatively unknown, chapter in America’s ascent to world power. Well researched and finely crafted, A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth is a significant contribution to our understanding of the development of the nation as well as the West, and it will surely be of interest to scholars in multiple fields."
Maurice Isserman
"In a work reflecting both a deep dive into obscure archives and a masterful crafting of historical analysis and narrative, Tejani weaves a complex story of conquest, expansion, exploration, nature, technology, trade, and diplomacy, peopled by indigenous Native Americans, Spanish missionaries and ranchers, American soldiers, scientists, swindlers, labor radicals, capitalist empire builders, and civic reformers. The development of a few square miles of Southern California coastline, in Tejani’s telling, becomes the story of America’s Pacific destiny."
Eric Foner
"This remarkable book is a major contribution to the history of California and, more broadly, of the economic and political transformations unleashed during the Civil War era. It transcends the boundaries that too often separate subfields of history, bringing together national and international events and political, economic, and environmental processes. If you wish to understand not only the rise of the Port of Los Angeles, but the roots of American empire itself, this is the place to begin."
