Abstract: This dissertation explores the relationship between commerce and coercion in the nineteenth-century history of US global power, using New Orleans and its relations with Latin America as the lens. From the Texas Revolution (1835-1836) through the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), merchant capitalists in New Orleans aggressively pursued trade and investment opportunities throughout the Gulf of Mexico and the Greater Caribbean. At the same time, they used money and violence to encourage and exploit regional political instability in pursuit of their economic objectives. Historians of the US and Latin America usually frame the mix of commerce and coercion as complementary, even essential to the rise of US hegemony in the hemisphere. But the merchant community in New Orleans often found their designs frustrated rather than fulfilled by coercive intervention. This urban history of the entwined evolution of inter-American capitalism and US imperialism deepens our understanding of both. “Port of Call to Arms” demonstrates that New Orleans’s century-long fight for commercial opportunities in Latin America was inextricable from its century-long history of political meddling in Latin America. The city’s well-earned reputation as a place where armaments, financial backers, and soldiers of fortune could always be found made it a crucial axis of paramilitary mobilization. This seemed to offer opportunities for ambitious exiles, unscrupulous speculators, and filibusters eager to exploit the political instability in neighboring countries and colonies. However, being a hemispheric hotspot had the disadvantage of frequently putting the city’s considerable business interests in a precarious situation. New Orleans elites’ aspiration to exert a controlling influence over the Greater Caribbean repeatedly faltered in the face of geopolitical crises they helped create.
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