from the balkans to baghdad (via baltimore): labor migration and the routes of empire

From the Balkans to Baghdad (via Baltimore): Labor Migration and the Routes of EmpireAuthor(s): Keith BrownSource: Slavic Review, Vol. 69, No. 4 (WINTER 2010), pp. 816-834Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27896138 .

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From the Balkans to Baghdad (via Baltimore): Labor Migration and the Routes of Empire

Keith Brown

This article will examine two groups of long-distance labor migrants: one

that traveled from Hamburg to Houston via Baltimore on a ship called the Cassel in 1907, and another that was part of a transnational work force in Iraq in 2004.1 begin by presenting excerpts from two accounts of traumatic events they encountered?one immediate, one mediated?97

years and 6,000 miles apart. The first comes from a letter written by a U.S.

Immigration Inspector at the port of Baltimore, Maryland, in April 1907: "At the time when the disaster occurred, I happened to be not far from the door of the 'doctor's room' and hearing many persons crying and

yelling 'the new pier is going down!,' through natural impulse I looked

through the window ... I saw the SS Cassell [sic] heavily leaning to one

side and listing until the bridge connecting her with the Pier went down and dragged along a Bulgarian immigrant, who happened to be a pas senger for Galveston."1 The second comes from an AP news story filed in

Baghdad, Iraq, on 22 October 2004: "Al-Jazeera reported on Monday that Islamic militants had executed two Macedonian contractors in Iraq.

. . .

Viewers said the images made it clear the men were Macedonians. Some said they could decipher from Lazarevski's lips the words: 'Please say "hi" to all those who knew me.' "2

Connecting these two seemingly arbitrarily chosen events?each of which I explore further?is not simply an exercise in far-fetched com

parison but a way to energize the practice of Macedonian ethnography and history, by bringing both into dialogue with theoretically innovative and politically engaged work on past and present imperial formations. In particular, I explore a comparison that, in Ann Laura Stoler's terms,

would be outlawed by existing "scholarly commitments, historiographical conventions and political investments," and follow two specific pathways of labor migration, to suggest that these are useful steps in moving beyond

The primary research on which this paper is based was conducted with the support of a

fellowship from the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute. Earlier versions were

presented at the Institute and at the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Stud

ies at the University of California, Berkeley. I am grateful to audiences at these venues

and to the participants at the conference "Re-Thinking Crossroads: Macedonia in Global

Context" organized by the Center for East European and Russian/Eurasian Studies at the

University of Chicago for their feedback, especially Victor Friedman and Susan L. Wood

ward. I would also like to thank Catherine Lutz, Jane Cowan, and Ann Laura Stoler for

their close readings and encouragement.

1. The letter is in the employment record of John Grgurevich at the Civilian Person

nel Records in St. Louis, Ohio: File number 53000/599, Drawer 124. 2. Associated Press, "Iraq: 'Missing Men Are Dead,'" 22 October 2004, at www.news

24.com/News24/World/Iraq/0?2-10-1460_1609433,00.html (last accessed 1 Septem ber 2010).

Slavic Review 69, no. 4 (Winter 2010)



Labor Migration and the Routes of Empire 817

Macedonian anthropology's tight focus on ethnonational identity and ex

panding its disciplinary reach and impact.3

Macedonian Anthropology: In the Ethnonational Ghetto?

Since the early 1990s, Macedonia?whether one uses that term to des

ignate a former Yugoslav Republic, a province of Greece, or the whole

territory wrested from the Ottoman empire (and then from one another)

by Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria in the Balkan Wars of 1912-13?has be come a major site of ethnographic production. Besides the wealth of work on different aspects of the "Macedonian question" in northern Greece

by a range of American- and European-trained ethnographers, the same

period has produced a significant number of theses and books, in a range of disciplines, based on fieldwork in the Republic of Macedonia.4 Addi

tionally, a rich literature has been generated from fieldwork in diaspora communities in North America, Australia, and Europe, and a number of edited volumes combine work on Macedonia from across the borders of countries and disciplines.5

3. Ann Laura Stoler, "Intimidations of Empire: Predicaments of the Tactile and the

Unseen," in Ann Laura Stoler, ed., Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North Ameri

can History (Durham, 2006), 1. 4. For the Macedonian question in northern Greece, see Giorgos Agelopoulos,

"Mothers of the Nation: Gender and Ethnicity in Rural Greek Macedonia," Anthropology

of Ethnicity: A Critical Review 4 (1994): 1-14; Anastasia Karakasidou, "Politicizing Culture:

Negating Ethnic Identity in Greek Macedonia," fournal of Modern Greek Studies 11, no. 1

(March 1993): 1-28; Anastasia Karakasidou, Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood: Passages to Na

tionhood in Greek Macedonia, 1870-1990 (Chicago, 1997); Paschalina Sistani, "Native Di

lemmas: Histories, Memories and Identities in 'Macedonia'" (D.Phil thesis, University of

Bristol, 2004) ; and a number of contributions in Peter Mackridge and Eleni Yannakakis,

eds., Ourselves and Others: The Development of a Greek Macedonian Cultural Identity since 1912

(Oxford, 1997). For studies based in the Republic of Macedonia, see Gaelyn Aguilar, "Image (a) nation:

Dance and the Parapolitics of Being in the Republic of Macedonia" (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 2005); Keith Brown, The Past in Question: Modern Macedonia and the

Uncertainties of Nation (Princeton, 2003); Burcu Akan Ellis, Shadow Genealogies: Memory and

Identity among Urban Muslims in Macedonia (Boulder, Colo., 2003); Miladina Monova, "Par

cours d'exil, r?cits de non-retour: Les Eg?ens en R?publique de Mac?doine" (PhD diss., L'?cole des hautes ?tudes en sciences sociales, Paris, 2002) ; Vasiliki Neofotistos, "Resisting Violence: Hegemonic Negotiations of Ethnicity in the Republic of Macedonia" (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2003).

5. On diaspora communities, see Loring Danforth, The Macedonian Conflict: Ethnic

Nationalism in a Transnational World (Princeton, 1995); Peter Hill, The Macedonians in Aus

tralia (Carlisle, Australia, 1989); Gregory Michaelidis, "Salvation Abroad: Macedonian Mi

gration to North America and the Making of Modern Macedonia, 1870-1970" (PhD diss., American University, 2005) ; Carl-Ulrik Schierup and Alexandra Alund, Will They Still Be

Dancing? Integration and Ethnic Transformation among Yugoslav Immigrants in Scandinavia

(Umea, Sweden, 1987); Peter Vasiliadis, Whose Are You? Identity and Ethnicity among the To ronto Macedonians (New York, 1989). On interdisciplinary and cross-boundary work on

Macedonia, see Victor Roudometof, ed., The Macedonian Question: Culture, Historiography, Politics (Boulder, Colo., 2000); Jane Cowan, ed., Macedonia: The Politics of Identity and Dif ference (London, 2000).



818 Slavic Review

Much of this literature shares a major focus on identity politics and, more specifically, issues of nation formation and interethnic relations. This is hardly surprising, as the meaning of the apparently straightfor ward phrase "I am Macedonian" has been contested in different ways for over a century and has acquired new geopolitical ramifications since the

breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991-92. Spoken by a Bulgarian citizen in Sofia, it might indicate a speaker's family's regional origins or a claim to repre sent a national minority; but if uttered by a citizen of either Greece or the

Republic of Macedonia, the range of plausible meanings is much wider and could be taken as an index of patriotic pride, civic loyalty, collective

identity, or historical error. In keeping with anthropology's direction in the past three decades, most of the authors cited above have steered clear of making claims to adjudicate between the truth-claims embedded in different uses of the term and have instead sought to explain the sources of such diversity and analyze the frictions that arise. Tending toward con structivist approaches and attentive to specific historical and political pro cesses, they have by and large resisted simplistic or parsimonious framings of the region's surplus of facticity.

In so doing, anthropologists of Macedonia have avoided, and indeed

challenged, the hegemonic and essentialist "western" views of the Balkans identified by Maria Todorova.6 The continued commitment to writing about identity?albeit in nuanced, critical terms?has other costs, how ever. The sources noted above aggregate to make Macedonian anthropol ogy into a candidate for inclusion in the schema of anthropological the

ory identified by Arjun Appadurai where, as he puts it, one can trace how

"particular theoretical handles . . . hierarchy in India, honor-and-shame

in the circum Mediterranean, filial piety in China" operate to "limit an

thropological theorizing about the place in question, and . . . define the

quintessential and dominant questions of interest in the region."7 In the case of Macedonia, the conditions of knowledge-production in the 1990s installed national history and ethnic conflict as "gatekeeping concepts."8

There were, of course, compelling reasons for this new focus on iden

tity politics. In the context of the breakup of Yugoslavia, when existing republican borders were transformed into state frontiers that did not circumscribe populations with shared national sentiments, the dynam ics of ethnonationalism generated intense interest on the part of politi cians, funders, and scholars. This was true across eastern and southeastern

Europe and generated innovative work on the identity issues of political

6. Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford, 1997). 7. Arjun Appadurai, "Theory in Anthropology: Center and Periphery," Comparative

Studies in Society and History 28, no. 2 (April 1986): 356-61. 8. Ibid., 357. As evidence of the historical specificity of this focus, it is noticeable that

earlier work in Greek Macedonia by authors cited earlier, and in the Republic of Mace

donia, treated identity issues only in passing. See, for example, Jane Cowan, Dance and the

Body Politic in Northern Greece (Princeton, 1990) ; Loring Danforth, Firewalking and Religious Healing: The Anastenaria of Greece and the American Firewalking Movement (Princeton, 1989);

George Ford, "Networks, Ritual, and 'Vrski': A Study of Urban Adjustment in Macedonia"

(PhD diss., Arizona State University, Tempe, 1982).




transition, especially those involving disputed pasts.9 But while other post socialist settings also generated work on issues such as commodification and exchange, ritual, or property relations and personhood that speak across regional boundaries to classical anthropological themes, Macedo

nian anthropology remained confined to the ethnonational ghetto.10 Its limited horizons are especially clear when one considers the sub

stantial body of work from eastern and southeastern Europe dealing with issues of the new international influence in postsocialist contexts.11 De

spite substantial international engagement and transnational connection, the dominant themes for anthropologists in Macedonia have remained, until recently, the existential status of Macedonian identity, interethnic

relations, unresolved issues arising from the displacement of communi ties in and after World War II, and rival claims on the legacy of Alexander the Great.

This work is compelling in both political and intellectual terms. But

the enduring and ongoing focus on issues of ethnonational identity car

ries more than a whiff of involution. And this would be ironic: for as a

variety of scholars have made clear in recent years, and as a recent confer ence indicated in its title, Macedonia shares with the rest of the Balkans an ongoing openness to the rest of the world. It has been, to adapt James Clifford's felicitous usage, where routes matter as much, if not more than, roots.12 Recently, scholars of security have noted the clandestine or crimi nal dimensions of these movements, and their impact on conventional ideas of Westphalian-style state sovereignty.13 But people, goods, and ideas

9. Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change

(New York, 1999); Rogers Brubaker, Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transyl vanian Town (Princeton, 2006).

10. See, for example, Gerald Creed, Domesticating Revolution: From Socialist Reform to Ambivalent Transition in a Bulgarian Village (University Park, 1997); Caroline Hum

phreys, The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies after Socialism (Ithaca, 2002); Kathe

rine Verdery, The Vanishing Hectare: Property and Value in Postsocialist Transylvania (Ithaca,

2003); Elizabeth Dunn, Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor (Ithaca, 2004) ; see also Thomas Wolfe, "Cultures and Communities in the Anthropology

of Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union," Annual Review of Anthropology 29 (2000) :

195-216.

11. Steven Sampson, "The Social Life of Projects: Importing Civil Society to Alba

nia," in C. M. Hann and E. Dunn, eds., Civil Society: Challenging Western Models (London,

1996) ; Gerald Creed and Janine Wedel, "Second Thoughts from the Second World: In

terpreting Aid in Post-Communist Eastern Europe," Human Organisation 56, no. 3 (Fall

1997) : 253-64; see also Janine Wedel, Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe (New York, 2001); Katherine Verdery, "Transnationalism, Nationalism,

Citizenship and Property: Eastern Europe since 1989," American Ethnologist 25, no. 2 (May

1998) : 291-306; Kimberley Coles, Democratic Designs: International Intervention and Electoral

Practices in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina (Ann Arbor, 2007). 12. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cam

bridge Mass., 1997); see also Nina Glick Schiller, Linda G. B?sch, and Cristian Blanc

Szanton, eds., Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity and

Nationalism Reconsidered (New York, 1992). 13. Aida Hozic, "The Paradox of Sovereignty in the Balkans," in Douglas Howland

and Luise White, eds., The State of Sovereignty: Territories, Laws, Populations (Bloomington,

2009), 243-60.



820 Slavic Review

have been in motion within the region, as well as in and out of it, and have left traces of that motion, for at least 2,500 years?long before the forces of nationalism came into play.

Talking about routes and movement has the potential to sidestep ar

guments around identity that risk becoming sterile or static. In the fierce debate over what Philip II and Alexander III were (Greek or Macedonian?) there is general consensus over what they did?lead a significant body of adult males from their homes in and around Pella to the borders of In dia. Whatever their "actual" ethnic origins or sentiments (Slavic, Greek, or other), the ninth-century educators, Saints Cyril and Methodius, pio neered Slavic literacy and brought the Christian gospel to new communi ties. In the late nineteenth century, the revolutionary leader Goce Delcev

may have thought of himself and the organization he led as Bulgarian, or

Macedonian, or both, in a wide array of senses. But no one disputes that he recruited and organized couriers and institutionalized mobile armed

bands, or cetas, that covertly moved into, out of, and across Ottoman controlled territory.14 When the scale shifts beyond the individual, longer currents of history are revealed. Slavic settlers, Tartar invaders, Sephardic Jewish refugees, Ottoman bureaucrats and colonists, Greek merchants, British landlords, and American evangelists have all entered the region at

different times, contributing to different currents of history.15 Recognition of this traffic of people, goods, and ideas can be, and

often is, absorbed into nationalist narratives: an emphasis on movement from outside into Macedonia?as a majority of these latter examples represent?leaves available tropes of pollution, penetration, and victim hood for would-be saviors of the nation. The figures around whom today's political debates are waged so intensively?Alexander, Cyril and Metho

dius, Goce Delcev?can all be claimed to demonstrate a particular vision of assertive, expansionist identity that, however nuanced in its original version, becomes narrativized in a mode similar to that described by Rich ard Handler in his acute study of nationalist thinking?a kind of stand-in for an aggregate we, a heroic instantiation of the collective.16

Nevertheless, I propose that it is possible to challenge this tendency, and I suggest that for much of Macedonian history, empire is as signifi cant a category as nation. And this then allows us to draw our empirically grounded ethnographic work on and in Macedonia into dialogue with

contemporary, innovative scholarship on the nature of empire. This argu ment advocates replacing "nation" (or "nation-state") with empire as the frame of reference and recognizing the intellectual aridity, as well as the

political hypocrisy, of "testing" the Republic of Macedonia against a blue

print of macro-polity that has yet to take corporeal form anywhere. This

is, of course, a politically difficult move, for in some sense, it demands that

14. Duncan Perry, The Politics of Terror: The Macedonian Revolutionary Movements, 1893-1903 (Durham, 1988).

15. Trajan Stoianovich, "The Conquering Balkan Orthodox Merchant," fournal of Economic History 20, no. 2 (June 1960): 234-313; Tatyana Nestorova, American Missionaries

among the Bulgarians, 1858-1912 (Boulder, Colo., 1987). 16. Richard Handler, Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec (Madison, 1988).




we think past the nation in a context where, up to the present, many citi zens consider it a matter of vital concern to find a place for their country in a geopolitical order still built around the ideal of national sovereignty. But I would argue that the alternative, keeping our eyes fixed only on the domain of identity politics, is ultimately unproductive and limiting.

Instead, I suggest framing Macedonia as connected to, and part of, a wider world than the Balkans. In the second part of this article, I want to outline the possibilities of writing an ethnographically informed ac count of modern Macedonia that emphasizes not its national but its trans national aspects. My particular focus is on the ways in which we might conceive of our object of study as not only grounded in disputes around nationhood and statehood but also entangled in the workings of global ized labor regimes, shaped by the particular dynamics of empire.

Ethnographies of Globalization and Empire

There is now a substantial ethnographic literature on what Jonathan Inda and Renato Rosaldo term "complex mobilities and uneven interconnec tions."17 Inda and Rosaldo note the continuing influence of studies of "cultural imperialism" in this literature, insofar as it has tended to empha size power-laden cultural flows from the so-called first to the third world.

They counter this emphasis by pointing to the work of "interpretation, translation and customization" by allegedly passive recipients and also to the increasing phenomenon of people, goods, images, and ideas circulat

ing among Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. They draw particular atten tion to the increased significance of transnational migrant circuits that

challenge the hegemony of models that privilege putatively bounded and

homogenous nation-states as meaningful units, or sites, of analysis. And

they conclude their discussion of cultural imperialism by calling instead for a focus on dislocation, and for viewing the world as "a complexly inter connected cultural space, one full of crisscrossing flows and intersecting systems of meaning."18

Anna Tsing's recent work, Friction, has attracted particular attention as an example of what she terms, in her subtitle, "the ethnography of

global connection."19 Tsing explores how mining and forestry in Indone sia are demonstrably (and literally) eroding natural resources, as well as

transforming existing social relations. Another exponent of global ethno

graphy, Catherine Lutz, examines both the domestic and international ef fects of heavy U.S. military spending and deployment, arguing that Ameri can anthropologists should pay ethnographic attention to the "many faces of imperialism"?not just soldiers, bases, and weapons, but the collusion of ostensibly civilian enterprises like the Peace Corps, USAID, and Ful

bright scholars in the project of expansion, as well as the an ti-American

17. Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo, "Tracking Global Flows," in Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo, eds., The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader (Maiden,

Mass., 2008), 6.

18. Ibid., 29.

19. Anna Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton, 2005).



822 Slavic Review

activism that it provokes around the world.20 Finally Ann Laura Stoler, in

provocative and imaginative work comparing empires past and present, urges attention to imperial formations as "Supremely mobile politics of

dislocation, dependent not so much on stable populations as on highly moveable ones ... on relocations and dispersions."21

Stoler, Lutz, and Tsing, then, in different ways, are advocates and expo nents of new ways to envisage the ethnographic site and the ethnographic source. They explore how processes of consumption and speculation are

intertwined with projects of coercion and exploitation: commodifica tion and militarization, argues Lutz in particular, march together around the contemporary world. They also acknowledge, though, that "classical

ethnography"?the lone fieldworker in a remote fieldsite discovering new

data through firsthand inquiry and building a model of the world from it?cannot simply "scale-up" to tackle such complex and dynamic relations across time and space. In this regard, they are in dialogue with a wider set of contemporary anthropologists of complex systems, all of whom deploy the "intellectual poaching license" claimed for anthropology by Clyde Kluckhohn and complement "firsthand" data from informants?whether chance-met fellow travelers, formal interviewees, long-term interlocutors, academic collaborators?with journalistic accounts, advertisements and other marketing material, and archival material of various kinds.

The Politics of Continuity: Macedonia and the Labor Regimes of American Empire

Drawing on this abbreviated and selective account of the "state of the art" in global ethnography, I want to sketch out how we might narrate Mace donia's past and present in theoretically productive ways by foreground ing stories of human movement that are generally considered marginal or irrelevant in the study of the nation-state. I chose two particular stories

separated by a century as the building blocks of the kind of history that Stoler evokes in the preface to a recent volume exploring the politics of comparison. Stoler's case involves the invisible connection between Ohio's tire factories and the rubber plantations of North Sumatra?a his

tory, in her terms "severed by historiography but held taut by imperial ligaments."22 The history I explore here is perhaps more contingent, as

men from Macedonia, at two moments separated by a hundred years, are drawn into nationally ordered industrial labor forces thousands of miles

apart. I contend that this remains, nonetheless, a history that demands

ethnographic inquiry and in which knowledge of and sensitivity to the

specificities of language, place, and habit are both indispensable and re

velatory of the workings of the larger system.

20. Catherine Lutz, "Empire Is in the Details," American Ethnologist 33, no. 4 (Novem ber 2006) : 598; see also Lutz, "Making War at Home in the United States: Militarization and the Current Crisis," American Anthropologist 104, no. 3 (September 2002): 723-35.

21. Ann Laura Stoler, "On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty," Public Culture 18, no. 1

(Winter 2006): 138-39. 22. Stoler, Haunted by Empire, xii.




Pecalba, 1907-Style: From Veles to Beaumont, via Baltimore and Galveston

In strictly empirical terms, this first story is not new. Scholars have docu mented the central cultural formation of pecalba?sojourning, or cycli cal labor migration?from Macedonia across history, from the Otto

man period (when men traveled mostly to other parts of the empire or to neighboring Balkan countries) through the socialist Yugoslav period (when western Europe, Australia, and North America were all major des

tinations).23 The particular case of early twentieth-century sojourning, and later settling, in North America, forms the focus for a variety of work

by historians.24 One of the most exhaustively studied sites has been To

ronto, and in an introduction to an oral history of an elderly Macedonian

woman, Canadian labor historian Robert Harney wrote:

An efficient network extended from her tiny village [Bobista] to the

Junction and East End of Toronto. Like any good communications sys tem, its strength cannot be measured by mule trips, railway schedules to Sal?nica, ship's passages to the Piraeus and to Marseilles, immigrant hotels and Cunard and CP arrangements, but rather by the intensity and ease offlow of goods, people and news throughout the network. Remittances,

prepaid passages, savings, wives, brides-to-be, comitadji with a Turkish

price on their heads, migrants and returnees passed back and forth from the Macedonian hinterland to Toronto, Chicago, and Detroit as if they

formed a single society.25

This observation and the history it points to allow a couple of possible moves. First, it provides support for distinguished historical anthropolo gists who question the claim that the simultaneity and entanglement of

contemporary globalization are radically new, generated by new technol

ogy.26 Second, it can certainly enrich debates over ethnic and national be

longing in the Balkans. For these journeys left archival traces in which mi

grants and returnees are recorded in passenger manifests as members of a Macedonian race or people. According to Greek, Bulgarian, and Serbian nationalist narratives, then and now, as well as the "scientific" categories of "race or people" in use by the Immigration Bureau, this term should not appear. Yet in thousands of records, so regularly that its meaning de

23. Dusko Konstantinov, Pecalbarstvo (Bitola, 1964); Basil C. Gounaris, "Emigration from Macedonia in the Early Twentieth Century," Journal of Modern Greek Studies 7, no. 1

(May 1989): 133-53; Michael Palairet, "The 'New' Immigration and the Newest: Slavic Mi

grations from the Balkans to American and Industrial Europe since the Late Nineteenth

Century," in T. C. Smout, ed., The Search for Wealth and Stability: Essays in Economic and Social

History Presented to M. W Flinn (London, 1979), 43-65; Schierup and Alund, Will They Still Be Dancing?Jovan Cvijic, Balkansko Poluostrvo (1922; reprint, Belgrade, 1966).

24. Lillian Petroff, Sojourners and Settlers: The Macedonian Community in Toronto to 1940

(Toronto, 1995); Vasiliadis, Whose Are You ?; Michaelidis, "Salvation Abroad"; see also Keith

Brown, "Archive-Work: Genealogies of Loyalty in a Macedono-Bulgarian Colony," History and Memory 20, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2008): 60-83.

25. Robert Harney, "A Note on Sources in Urban and Immigrant History," Canadian

Ethnic Studies 9, no. 1 (1977): 69 (emphasis added). 26. Sidney Mintz, "The Localization of Anthropological Practice: From Area Studies

to Transnationalism," Critique of Anthropology 18, no. 2 (June 1998): 117-33.



824 Slavic Review

mands explanation, people emerge from U.S. immigration stations classi fied as Macedonian, thereby representing a strikingly concrete challenge to those who deny that such sentiment was even thinkable at the time.27

Here I want to explore instead the perspective that these journeys of fer on the larger contexts they created. To do so, I pick up the thread with which I began, the story of the SS Cassel, which happened to be moored in Baltimore when, in the words of the eyewitness, "the disaster occurred."

Newspaper accounts from the following day reported that a new, larger pier that was under construction collapsed, killing and injuring several workers and sending waves across the harbor that pitched the passen ger from the gangway into the water?and into a number of historical narratives.

This incident, and its recounting, illuminates something of the work

ings of culture and capital in the United States, and across the Atlantic and

Europe, at the time. The eyewitness was an immigration inspector named

John Grgurevich, whose personnel file indicates that he was born in Ra

gusa (Dubrovnik) in 1871, came to the United States in the mid-1890s, and joined the immigration bureau in 1902 through the competitive ex

amination system. His account of the event survives in his file because he was accused of insurbordination as a result of his actions. According to his immediate supervisor, Bertram Stump, Grgurevich had left his station without permission, motivated by "excitement" and his desire to rescue "his countrymen." Grgurevich's response corrects the geographical error,

identifying the man in the water as "Bulgarian," and goes on to refute the

charge of "excitability." The charge against Grgurevich was dropped: It

reveals, nonetheless, a glimpse of the nativism, anti-Slavic prejudice, and dimensions of class in the immigration bureau. Stump, born a decade before Grgurevich, had had a private education, and his pathway to the

immigration bureau was through his work from 1891 to 1895 as a clerk for the House of Representatives Committee on Immigration and Natu ralization: he was appointed to the Bureau on 16 November 1895, before

competitive examinations were introduced. His biography contains other clues of a well-connected life of patronage and ties to capital: the 1870 census lists the value of his uncle's estate as $30,000; an April 1911 letter of

support for a promotion, preserved in his personnel file, indicates friends in high places.

The collapse of the new pier reveals another aspect of capital's career at the time. The new construction was a joint venture by North German

Lloyd (NGL), the owners of the Cassel and one of a number of European shipping companies engaged in the transatlantic business, and the Balti

more and Ohio Railroad (B&O). NGL's connections with Baltimore ex tended back to 1868: fast steamers had been making the crossing since the

mid-1880s as part of an emergent rivalry both among different German lines (in particular, NGL and the Hamburg-America line) but also?as

27. For further discussion of these materials, see Keith Brown, "Friction in the Ar

chives: Nations and Negotiations on Ellis Island (NY), 1904-10" (paper presented at the Tenth Annual Conference of the Council for European Studies, Chicago, March 1996).




Bismarck continued the consolidation of German national unity under Prussian leadership?between German and British companies.28 The

huge new pier?planned to be 1,000 feet long, 160 feet wide, and two stories high?was the further extension of this enterprise: through their

partnership, NGL and B&O sought to make the processing of passengers from point of origin to final destination more seamless. But it was also built by immigrant labor. The victims of the collapse, which some journal ists speculated was a result of contractors cutting corners and an overac

celerated construction pace, were manual workers?at least three Afri

can-Americans, as well as a number of casual immigrant laborers, whose deaths were not confirmed until they did not show up for the following payday.

The pier project, then, was entangled with narratives of speed, effi

ciency, and opportunism that were central to NGL's history of success. Al

ready in the 1890s, NGL was the largest steamship company in the world, and in 1902 it sent 81,000 emigrants from Bremen and another 29,000 from its Mediterranean ports?roughly twice as many as its leading Brit ish and French competitors. Besides oil and other freight, their most lu crative cargo at this point in time was human. The year 1907 marked the

high-water mark of immigration to the United States, as 1,285,349 people entered that year.29 Typical of the latest generation of large steamers, the SS Cassel carried almost 2,000 passengers, the majority of whom traveled in steerage?multiple-occupancy cabins in the lower parts of the ship.30

Advertisements for NGL stressed the speed and reliability, as well as the

affordability, of the service. The reach of NGL's marketing and sales network can be glimpsed

in the passenger manifests of the SS Cassel in the U.S. National Archives.

Steamship companies were obliged to complete and provide copies of standardized manifest sheets, documenting a range of information for

every passenger. These manifests were then checked by immigrant in

spectors at the port of admission. By 1907, in addition to basic personal data (name, marital status, ability to read and write), crude physiological characteristics (height, eye color, skin complexion) and a set of "litmus tests" for admission (statements that the individual was not a polygamist or anarchist and was in possession of at least some U.S. currency), the information also included statements of "race or people," place of birth, and the names and addresses of contacts both at home and in the United States. The latter name and address was the immigrant's presumptive final destination and was generally described as a friend, acquaintance, or rela

tive, for reasons that will be discussed further below. Of the 1,825 passengers aboard the Cassel, whose names were re

corded on 68 manifest sheets, with up to 30 travelers listed on each, a

28. Stephen Fox, Transatlantic: Samuel Cunar?, Isambard Brunei, and the Great Atlantic

Steamships (London, 2003), 367-85. 29. Edward Alsworth Ross, The Old World in the New: The Significance of Past and Present

Immigration to the American People (New York, 1913), 310. 30. Broughton Brandenburg, Imported Americans: The Story of the Experiences of a Dis

guised American and His Wife Studying the Immigration Question (New York, 1904).



826 Slavic Review

majority were men.31 While a good number?perhaps the largest single contingent?were classified as Germans on the passenger manifests, the

ship also boasted Magyars, Bohemians, Italians, Jews (or "Hebrews"), and a host of groups who would now be identified as Slavs, including Monte

negrins, Croatians, Russians, Ruthenians, Moravians, Slovaks, and Poles.

Among the Slavs, the largest single group, numbering around 340, was

made up of men whom the record states came from Macedonia in Ot toman Turkey, and who in terms of "race or people" were classified as

Macedonians, Servians, or Bulgarians. At least 40 gave Veles, a town in

the Vardar Valley between Skopje and Gevgelija, as their point of origin: in several more cases, the manifests record the village Grnciste, which is

close to Veles, as the point of origin. Taken together, the eyewitness accounts, news reports, and passenger

manifests indicate that the man who fell from the CasseFs gangplank was

likely one of this large group of laborers. He was pulled out and returned to the ship toj?in his fellow-travelers before Grgurevich made it onto the dock. Only around one-fifth of the passengers disembarked in Baltimore: the remaining 1,500, including all those who listed their place of origin as

Macedonia (and, as Grgurevich notes, the man who escaped drowning in

the harbor) traveled a further 1,200 miles by sea, to the Cassels final port of call, Galveston, Texas.

They were following a trail blazed by their "countrymen" over the pre vious two years, ever since NGL began running steamship lines to Galves ton in May 1905. Describing the arrival of the first steamship, the Wit

tekind, on 17 May 1905, the New York Commercial reported that the 600

immigrants on board were "swamped" by as many labor agents. Writing later of the excitement of this new venture, E. B. Holman, the inspector in charge in Galveston, stated:

Beginning in the early spring of 1905, there was considerable agitation over the south [sic] and Southwest on account of the great scarcity of labor on the farms, in the factories, and, in fact, the entire industrial life of those sections; and about that time, presumably in response to this

agitation, the North German Lloyd Steamship Company began to bring a hitherto unknown class of aliens to this port, consisting chiefly of Bulgar ians and Macedonians. These aliens had all been farm laborers in their native lands and were so classed upon their arrival here.32

In 1908, NGL's commercial empire was represented in Galveston by the F. Missler steamship agency. Founded in Bremen in the late nineteenth

century, the agency was one of the best-known and largest in the business,

handling 1.8 million transatlantic passengers in the period between 1885 and 1923.33 By the early twentieth-century the agency boasted a network

31. Record Group (RG) 85, Ml 259, Roll 5. 32. Letter from Holman to Powderly, 3 February 1908. Copy in RG 85, Entry 9,

Box 79, File 52066/3, Part II. 33. Christine Harzig, "Gender, Transatlantic Space and the Presence of German

Speaking People in North America," in Thomas Adam and Roth Gross, eds., Traveling between Worlds: German-American Encounters (College Station, 2006), 158.




of subagents across the rich immigrant sources of the Russian, Austro

Hungarian, and Ottoman empires of eastern and southeastern Europe, as well as the new nation-states of the Balkans.34 In a detailed report on Balkan labor migration in 1908, Immigration Inspector John Gruenberg estimated that in the years 1904-1907, Missler sold roughly 35 percent of the total number of steamship tickets purchased in Bulgaria (7,000 out of 20,000) and Macedonia (20,000 out of 59,000). Gruenberg estimated that the agency handled 45 percent of the total NGL trade across Europe and enjoyed a monopoly for that line in the Balkan region.35 Missler's

subagents included Bogomir Jakich in Belgrade and Emanuel Krapf in Monastir and later Thessaloniki.

Missler's business model, according to Gruenberg, was to advance would-be immigrants the cost of their tickets, usually against promissory notes at high rates of interest, and backed by their property in Macedo nia.36 For the model to succeed, clients needed to be assured of personal success in their enterprise: that they would be admitted to the United

States, and that they would find good-paying work there, at a time when federal restrictions on immigration, as well as competition for jobs, were on the increase. Missler and NGL expanded their customer base by finding means to circumvent these deterrents: the new line to Galveston was one

of their initiatives. In 1908 Gruenberg located and collected, in Missler's Balkan offices, descriptions of Galveston, distributed in Bulgarian, as an

entry point where "no address or money" needed to be shown to the im

migration officials?thus avoiding two reasons for exclusion?and where the company guaranteed the would-be immigrant his return fare, should he not gain entry.37 In 1910, a federal immigration official reported that Galveston had a reputation in Europe as lax in standards of immigration control, which stimulated immigration to the city.38

If the new pier in Baltimore, then, represented an effort to make the

immigrants' passage to their final destination simpler by facilitating the transfer from ship to train, Missler's extended network of agents pursued the same goal by seeking to minimize the friction created by the formal

procedures of inspection at the border. By this time, Ellis Island had gar nered a fearsome reputation in immigrant circles: further from the scru

tiny of superiors and the centers of power, steamship and labor agents were able to create personal relations with local immigration bureau per sonnel and work them to their advantage.

34. Ibid.; Brandenburg, Imported Americans, 275-76.

35. The opening of this route coincided with a parallel effort launched by the sec

retary of immigration and labor in Louisiana to break the stranglehold of railroad and

steamship interests in the northeast, which controlled immigration, and to promote New

Orleans as a route for immigrants. See Mark Stolarik, Forgotten Doors: The Other Ports of Entry to the United States (Philadelphia, 1988), 110.

36. Report no. 1, Relating to "Induced Emigration," submitted to Daniel J. Keefe, Commissioner-General of Immigration, by Inspector John Gruenburg, 18 December

1908. RG 85, Entry 9, Box 79, File 52066/1, Folder 2. 37. Ibid.

38. New York Times, 21 August 1910, cited in Bernard Marinbach, Galveston: Ellis Island

of the West (Albany, 1983), 106.



828 Slavic Review

Evidence of the success of Missler's business, and of the shape of the

transnational labor regime it created, can be read in the CasseFs mani fest. As noted above, many of the men listing Macedonia as their place of origin were from Veles and its surrounding villages, on the main trans

portation route down from Skopje through the Vardar Valley to Geveglija and Thessaloniki. This would be in keeping with the system described by Gruenberg and other special agents in their investigations, which refer to opening up new "sections" of Macedonia to the trade and stress the

importance of ensuring that the first emigrants from any given section succeed in finding work and then let their family and friends know, in

order to keep the movement flowing. The stated destinations of the group included St. Louis, Missouri;

San Francisco, California; Lincoln, Nebraska; Jasper, Wyoming; Trinidad,

Colorado; and Durant in the Oklahoma territories. The biggest contin

gents, though, were inscribed as heading for two locations closer at hand:

Beaumont, Texas, which 90 men gave as their final destination, and Les

lie, Arkansas, given by 120. In both cases, the manifests do not include the names and addresses of friends or relatives to whom the men claim to be traveling, as law and custom required.39 Instead, they include the names of the companies or agents who have recruited them, either prior to departure, on board, or on shore, prior to passing through immigra tion control. In Leslie, for example, the chief name given was Binks and

Joseph. It appears likely that this firm either was, or had close connections

with, what was at the time the world's largest whiskey barrel factory, which

employed almost 2,000 people, 600 of them cutting wood for the barrels. Beaumont represents a slightly different case, where the boom was less

specific. It was the closest town to Spindletop, site since 1901 of the largest single oil well of the era, and grew substantially in the first decade of the

century?creating a demand for short-term labor in construction and on

the railroads, which?it appears?these Macedonians, in the middle of

1907, filled.40 This hundred-year-old story?in which a pier's collapse and a near

drowning highlighted tensions between nativists and newcomers within the United States immigration bureau and a group of over two hundred

men from the heart of Macedonia made their way to Texas and Arkansas

along a path created and maintained by the agents of a Bremen-based

39. The federal government required that a destination address be recorded on the

manifest for each passenger. Immigrants and steamship companies conspired to steer

between the Alien Contract Labor Law, which demanded the exclusion of any immigrant who had a guarantee of work from any U.S. business, and the designation "Liable to Be

come a Public Charge" that would be affixed to any immigrant whom the inspector sus

pected was unlikely to find work at all, by providing the name and address of a relative or

friend. These were often false or mass-produced by steamship companies: their authentic

ity was nevertheless the fiction on which the whole system depended. On the dilemmas of

LPC and ACL designation, see Victor Safford, Immigration Problems: Personal Experiences of an Official (New York, 1925), 36, 110, 213-21.

40. In a letter to his Monastir (Bitola) branch on 2 September 1907, included as part of Gruenburg's report, F. Missler reported that a substantial number of "our Bulgarians" had secured railroad work at Beaumont, at $1.75 per day.




business able and willing to work around the law?illuminates some of the

entangled connections between culture, commerce, and labor that also tie Macedonia into transnational history. On the Cassel, migrants from dif ferent empires and nations traveled together in steerage. In some sense,

then, this ship represents an industrial-age version of the role played by ships of the slave economy of the Atlantic, described by Paul Gilroy in Black Atlantic as "the living means by which the points within that Atlantic world were joined. They were mobile elements that stood for the shifting spaces in between the fixed places that they connected ... they need to be

thought of as cultural and political units rather than abstract embodiments of the triangular trade."41 The ships?together with ticket agents' offices across the Balkans and the piers, railroads, and workcamps in the United

States, were all links in a chain of connection by which, in the terms used

by an author in 1927, "American capital set out to discover new sources

of labor and to that purpose ransacked the very ends of the earth."42

Pecalba, 2004-Style: From Kumanovo to Baghdad

And this story also has contemporary resonance. On the evidence of foot

age played on the Arab-language news network Al-Jazeera, the Macedo nian government in October 2004 confirmed that three Macedonian na

tionals who had been kidnapped in Iraq two months earlier had been executed. Although their killers, the Islamic Army in Iraq, accused them of spying for the United States military, the three men?Dalibor Laza

revski, Zoran Nastovski, and Dragan Markovik?had come to Iraq in a

group of twenty construction workers. According to others in the group who returned home safely, their main activity had been building bases for U.S. soldiers and hundreds of other Macedonian citizens had also been

working in Iraq at the same time. The televised deaths of Lazarevski and Nastovski generated a substan

tial response in their hometown, and in the Macedonian media. In larger terms, though, this was one tragic incident among all too many. A New York Times article published in March 2007 reported a total of over 900 con tractor deaths in Iraq since the U.S. invasion in 2003.43 Although specific information is often hard to obtain, and fact-checking is difficult, Internet sites like icasualties.org nonetheless provide data that put these Macedo nian deaths in context. The summer of 2004 was marked by a number of

high-profile kidnappings and subsequent executions of foreign civilians,

including truck drivers from Pakistan, Egypt, Bulgaria, Turkey, and?in the bloodiest single case?twelve Nepali cooks and cleaners in late July.44

41. Paul Gilroy, Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.,

1993), 16-17. 42. Constan tine Panunzio, Immigration Crossroads (New York, 1927), 45.

43. John M. Broder and James Risen, "Contractor Deaths in Iraq Soar to Record," New York Times, 19 May 2007, at www.nytimes.com/2007/05/19/world/middleeast/19 contractors.html?_r=l January 2010 (last accessed 1 September 2010).

44. Individuals from South Korea and Britain were also kidnapped and killed in this

period.



830 Slavic Review

Most of these acts were committed by the Islamic Army in Iraq, with the

apparent goal of putting pressure on governments included in the U.S. "coalition of the willing." When the Philippine government withdrew its small military contingent early in exchange for the release of a Filipino

migrant worker, Angelo De La Cruz, on 20 July 2004, critics argued that the decision fueled the spate of subsequent attacks.

The executions of 2004, though, were part of a longer history of

"third-country" national deaths in Iraq, which in turn serves as an indica tor of just how substantial the civilian presence is. What has also become

increasingly clear is the misleading quality of the category of "civilian." Of the 447 cases documented by the Iraq Casualties project to date, roughly half were identified as security guards, security contractors, or security consultants. These, then, are the employees of the major companies like

Blackwater, MPRI, and Erinsys, and the less well-known with names like

Triple Canopy, Edinburgh Risk, and CTU, whose work has been docu mented in a number of recent studies.45 Among security personnel, as

these and other eyewitnesses report, an overwhelming majority are either American or British citizens: also well-represented are Fijians, Nepalis, and South Africans, with smaller numbers from Latin American and east ern European countries.

On the residual civilian side, the range of occupations and nation alities is wider. Among those killed have been American truck drivers,

engineers, police liaison officers, communications specialists, firefighters, and construction workers. But there are also, besides those listed above, Indian, Croatian, and Sudanese truck drivers; South Korean, Brazilian,

Portugese and Indonesian engineers; Russian power plant technicians; a Honduran paramedic; a Bosnian carpenter; a Georgian coordinator; and a Jordanian munitions disposal expert. Anecdotal accounts from journal ists and others with firsthand experience confirm both this wide diversity of origins and also the rigid organization of labor along national lines, which creates hierarchies of status and pay.46 Many note, for example, the dominant coding of skin tone: the better-paid armed mercenaries are most likely from Britain and its former settler colonies, while the major ity of the workers doing the more menial service work?serving food,

operating the laundry, or cleaning toilets?are either South Asians, with citizens from the native populations of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and

Nepal all well represented, or Filipinos, heirs of the U.S. early twentieth

century imperial ambitions in the Pacific.47 The existence and character of this globalized labor market is well

known and almost taken for granted. But the presence in Iraq of over

100,000 civilians from so many other parts of the world, and the condi tions under which they live, work, and, in many cases, die demands closer

45. Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater: The Rise of the Worlds Most Powerful Mercenary Army (New York, 2008) ; Peter Singer, Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry (Ithaca, 2007).

46. Rory Stewart, Prince of the Marshes, and Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq (Orlando, Fla., 2006), 109.

47. Michael Hastings, I Lost My Love in Baghdad (New York, 2008), 20, 95, 156.




attention. As ethnographers of transnationalism remind us, echoing Har

ney's account of the network that linked Toronto to Bobista in Macedo

nia, there is a system at work here. At its heart are a number of highly prof itable commercial businesses, including the well-known U.S. Halliburton

subsidiary, Brown & Root (BRS). BRS, headquartered in Houston, Texas,

provides much of the logistical support for U.S. bases around the world,

undertaking whatever construction is needed, as well as providing clean

ing services, convoying in food, and staffing the mess halls. Their domina tion of this military-industrial market dates back to 1992, when the com

pany won its first major open-ended contract with the U.S. military; by the time of the large U.S. military deployment to Bosnia after 1995, the cor

poration had "perfected the instant American military base."48 Expertise and contacts acquired during this deployment then led to BRS fulfilling the same logistical role for operations in Kosovo, where the United States established two new enduring bases, and BRS operated as "supply and

engineering corps wrapped into one corporate element."49 The rise of BRS and its smaller business rivals Bechtel and Dyncorp

is in turn tied to the downsizing of the U.S. military after the end of the Cold War and the expanded range of hybrid interventions, occupations, and reconstructions that have been part of U.S. foreign policy since the

early 1990s. Over time, the business model has evolved to derive profit not just from the contingency planning of the U.S. government (which

guarantees a percentage of costs to contractors who can deliver at short

notice, in difficult situations) but also from the differential between the labor rates and hazard premiums set in U.S. government contracts and the far lower wages and benefits commanded by workers from depressed economies. By using non-U.S.-based subcontractors with flexible business

practices, and greater freedom from U.S. laws, to recruit their labor force, BRS trades a small margin of its profit for the ability to maintain its own

formal compliance with U.S. regulations. For the most part, the operations and identities of these subcontrac

tors are much less well known than their U.S. employers. It is only when

things go awry?when promises are not kept or when lives are lost?that more information surfaces and makes clear the inequities of the system. Recent news stories in the United States and Britain, for example, de scribed the plight of a number of South Asian men who had taken huge loans and paid substantial fees to make the journey to Iraq but then did not get the work they were promised and accused the subcontractor Naj laa Catering Services, with offices in Kuwait, of human trafficking.50 The

48. Singer, Corporate Warriors, 138; Robert Kaplan, Imperial Grunts: The American Mili

tary on the Ground (New York, 2005), 197. 49. Singer, Corporate Warriors, 146.

50. Deborah Haynes, "Baghdad's Forgotten Migrants Who Pay for Jobs End Up Lost in Hangar 'Hotel,'" The Times, 3 December 2008, at www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/

news/world/iraq/article5276154.ece (last accessed 1 September 2010); Lourdes Garda Navarro, "Trafficking of Foreign Workers Flourishes in Iraq," National Public Radio, 6 April 2009, atwww.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=l02705618 (last accessed 1 September 2010).



832 Slavic Review

web of contracts and subcontracts involved in tragedy also includes, from

April 2005, a case of a Jordanian firm, Al-Daoud, employing Sudanese drivers (six of whom were kidnapped and executed) and a complicated series of leases in which a Toronto-based company, SkyLink Air and Logis tic Support, leased a Russian-made helicopter from a Bulgarian company,

Heli Air, to transport a group of Blackwater security personnel employed by the U.S. State Department. The "civilian" helicopter was shot down

by a missile, and the one man who survived the crash, Bulgarian pilot Lyubomir Rostov, was shot, and the footage again was released to the world.51

The case of the Macedonians from Kumanovo is even better docu

mented, thanks to the work of freelance journalist Chris Deliso, who in terviewed one of the other members of the group some time after their

return, in February 2005.52 In the interview, 30-year-old Ljubcho Kuz manovski narrates his own experience of being recruited to work in Iraq. The key figure in his story is Sergio Tanguma, a former U.S. soldier who had served in the Balkans since the mid-1990s and continued to live and work in the region as a civilian. Kuzmanovski reports that Tanguma had worked for BRS but that in 2004 he was representing Soufan Engineering, a company based in the United Arab Emirates that recruited laborers to work in Iraq. Someone from Kuzmanovski's neighborhood had worked for BRS and knew Tanguma, and it was by that route that Kuzmanovski found out about the opportunity to work in Iraq. He and the three men

who were killed flew out in late July 2004 with fifteen others, on a small charter plane piloted by Greeks. The Macedonians were separated into smaller work teams when they arrived in Iraq: Kuzmanovski worked first at a base outside Kirkuk for an Irish boss and later in Ramadi. He and his teammates learned of the kidnapping and execution of the other men in late August but were told not to inform friends or family at home.

Kuzmanovski's own experience was less traumatic. Kirkuk, he reports, was a "safe base," and he and the others were allowed to share facilities with U.S. soldiers and to socialize with them. In Ramadi, though, they were

segregated from U.S. personnel, instead mixing with, in his words, "many different people, like Turks, Lebanese, Sudanese, Jordanians."53 By con

trast, he describes keeping his distance from the drivers, who were Croa tian and Serbian. As for relations with Iraqis, he reports playing football

with them, although he also learned that Iraqi workers were implicated in the kidnapping of the other Macedonians?allegedly, they tipped off the attackers on which car to target, motivated by anger at the higher pay the Macedonians received for the same work. For this and other reasons, the U.S. camp officials isolated Iraqi workers, allowing them less contact

51. John F. Burns, "Video Appears to Show Insurgents Kill a Downed Pilot," New York

Times 23 April 2005, at query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A05E0D61431F930Al 5757C0A9639C8B63&sec=&spon=8cpagewanted=all (last accessed 1 September 2010).

52. Christopher Deliso, "Tanguma Wanted Us to Come Back to Iraq, Macedonian

Contractor Says," 7 March 2005, atwww.balkanalysis.com/2005/03/07/tanguma-wanted

us-to-come-back-to-iraq-macedonian-contractor-says (last accessed 1 September 2010). 53. Ibid.




with the other foreign workers, in addition to separating U.S. soldiers from all civilians.

Kuzmanovski in fact indicated in the interview that he would have

preferred to stay and work out his full contract, but in the light of the

publicity around the deaths, the Macedonian government insisted that he and his coworkers return home. He evinced no enduring ill-will toward

Tanguma (whom he refers to by his first name), reporting that as they were leaving the camp at Al Assad Tanguma told them that they should come back to work for him, as he had now set up his own new company.

Despite the reported bonhomie of this parting, Tanguma had a hostile

reception when, for unclear reasons, he returned to Kumanovo in early November 2004 and visited Agino Selo, a haunt of NATO soldiers and BRS employees. Tanguma got into an argument with some locals and was

beaten up; subsequently, he was forbidden from further operations in Macedonia after it transpired that he had not followed the law in setting up his recruiting office.

This second story, in which many of the players are still active, is per

haps harder to neatly wrap up?in part because of the difficulties in herent in the contemporary ethnography of globalization, with regard to research methodology and access. But I want to conclude by suggesting that this story offers a case for sustained ethnographic inquiry and analysis in an activist mode, of the kind that Lutz and Tsing have advocated, but

which is difficult to undertake. One of the key elements of the story is the organization of nationalities in Iraq, where people from one area of

U.S. military and civilian contracting, the Balkans, find themselves slotted into subordinate roles elsewhere, taking their place alongside Nepalis, Filipinos, and others whose labor, and lives, carry lower costs than those of "Westerners." A second is the role of multiple intermediaries as a means

by which a wealthy private corporation, operating under the auspices of the U.S. government, makes profits and avoids accountability.

What I propose here, drawing on Stoler's suggested methodologi cal and analytical approaches, is to re-envisage the stuff of Macedonian

ethnography as routes rather than roots and as constituted from acknowl

edged transnational relations rather than contested national essence. The

comparative turn I make, to focus on what might seem ancient history, is intended to provoke reflection on the politics of comparison and the

significance of empirical data in the study of empire. Are today's investi

gative journalists exploring the shady legalities of transnational capital ism the successors to the principled and progressive immigrant inspectors of the early twentieth century? Are Sergio Tanguma and Soufan Engineer ing the entrepreneurial heirs to F. Missler? Is BRS Engineering now op

erating on a similar business model to that developed by NGL? Are bases in Iraq, where low-wage employees from around the world come together in a construction project that is tied closely to the political and economic future of the United States, the analogues of the transatlantic steamers, Baltimore's pier, or Beaumont's oil-fueled labor communities? How could the migrants from Veles aboard the Cassel have imagined that one hun dred years later, Macedonians would be leaving home to make a living



834 Slavic Review

in what was in their time the other end of the Ottoman empire? What

might the construction workers of Beaumont, Texas, make, in particular, of the strange symmetry whereby their successors' access to work oppor tunities in Iraq depends on the role of a company founded a few hours

journey beyond their own destination? And how might they, or we, view the shift in "peer peoples" across the century, whereby in 2004 Macedo nians in Iraq work alongside Turks, Lebanese, Sudanese, and Jordanians and are placed or place themselves in a different occupational category from Serbs, Croats, and Bulgarians, as well as western Europeans? These

speculative questions, I suggest, point beyond the preoccupations of na

tion and state and represent opportunities to put rich and diverse data from Macedonia's past and present to work in a cross-disciplinary and

transregional dialogue on labor regimes and their enduring significance in a world connected and propelled by the ligaments of empire.



from the balkans to baghdad (via baltimore): labor migration and the routes of empire

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