Dr Oli Charbonneau

Lecturer in American History (History)

email: Oli.Charbonneau@glasgow.ac.uk

Biography

I am a historian of the United States empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My work explores cultures of American colonialism in Southeast Asia and North America, attending to militarized violence, labor, and imperial knowledge production, among other topics.

My first book, Civilizational Imperatives: Americans, Moros, and the Colonial World, was a transimperial history of U.S. rule in the Muslim-majority Southern Philippines (1899-1940s). It argued for a global reading of this peripheralized space and explored a range of topics: the racialization of indigenous groups in a colonial society; the transpacific mobilities of Moro individuals and groups; the role of fear, carcerality, and violence in the daily life of the colony; and the pervasive supraregional exchanges that patterned U.S. imperial governance. It was published by Cornell University Press in 2020. A Philippine edition was published by Ateneo de Manila University Press in 2021. The latter was a finalist for a Philippine National Book Award and a Gintong Aklat Award. The project produced articles in Diplomatic History, Modern American History, and the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, as well as a chapter in the edited volume Crossing Empires: Taking U.S. History into Transimperial Terrain. For this body of work, I was awarded the 2022 Stuart L. Bernath Lecture Prize by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. The resulting keynote lecture, focusing on industrial schooling in America’s empire, was published by Diplomatic History in 2023.

I am presently engaged in two new projects. The first is a co-edited volume (with Karine Walther) titled The Gospel of Work and Money: Industrial Education and its Global Legacies. Funded by the Center for International and Regional Studies at Georgetown University in Qatar, this interdisciplinary collection argues that labor education schemes have embedded inequality and constituted capitalist modernity in a host of colonial and postcolonial societies. It will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025. My second monograph, tentatively titled Mohonk: The Progressive Origins of American Empire, is a global microhistory that uses a luxury hotel in Upstate New York to understand U.S. imperial ascendancy. It argues that conferencing at the Mohonk Mountain House helped forge an American pedagogical empire – the moralizing vision of U.S.-led global order that defined the twentieth century – by sanitizing and producing colonial projects. I have conducted research for this project in the UK, the Philippines, and the United States, including as a Gest Fellow at Haverford College in 2023.

Before arriving in Glasgow in 2019, I taught at several Canadian schools including Huron University College, King’s University College, and Brock University. I completed my PhD in 2016 at the University of Western Ontario. I live with my partner, our kid, and a weird old pug in Glasgow. I am a Scorpio and my best bowling score is 193.

Publications

List by: Type | Date

Jump to: 2025 | 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014

Number of items: 27.

2025

Charbonneau, Oli ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0563-7441 (2025) H-Diplo roundtable review of Lauren Benton. They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence. H-Net Reviews in the Humanities and Social Sciences, [Book Review] (In Press)

Charbonneau, Oli ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0563-7441 (2025) Making a militarized empire: 1898 and beyond. In: Keene, Jennifer and Huebner, Andrew (eds.) The Cambridge History of War and Society in America. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. (In Press)

Charbonneau, Oli ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0563-7441 and Walther, Karine (2025) Introduction: Labor’s classroom. In: Charbonneau, Oli and Walther, Karine V. (eds.) The Gospel of Work and Money: Industrial Education and its Global Legacies. Series: Power, politics, and the world. Penn Press: Philadelphia. (In Press)

2024

Charbonneau, Oli ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0563-7441 and Walther, Karine V. (Eds.) (2024) The Gospel of Work and Money: Industrial Education and its Global Legacies. Series: Power, politics, and the world. Penn Press: Philadelphia. (In Press)

Charbonneau, Oli ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0563-7441 (2024) Dangerous Intercourse: Gender and Interracial Relations in the American Colonial Philippines, 1898–1946, by Tessa Winkelmann. Journal of Social History, 58(1), pp. 184-186. (doi: 10.1093/jsh/shad073)[Book Review]

2023

Charbonneau, Oli ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0563-7441 (2023) Teaching the world to work: industrial education as U.S. imperial tradition. Diplomatic History, 47(3), pp. 369-390. (doi: 10.1093/dh/dhad015)

2022

Charbonneau, Oli ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0563-7441 (2022) Logics of immersion: Lake Mohonk and the U.S. colonial boarding school. In: Gerster, Daniel and Jensz, Felicity (eds.) Global Perspectives on Boarding Schools in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Series: Palgrave studies in the history of childhood. Palgrave Macmillan: Cham, pp. 213-235. ISBN 9783030990404 (doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-99041-1_10)

Charbonneau, Oliver ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0563-7441 (2022) Sarah Steinbock-Pratt. Educating the Empire: American Teachers and Contested Colonization in the Philippines. American Historical Review, 127(2), pp. 1028-1029. (doi: 10.1093/ahr/rhac194)[Book Review]

Charbonneau, Oli ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0563-7441 (2022) A view from overseas: the wild West of Scotland. Passport, 53(1), pp. 40-42.

Charbonneau, Oliver ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0563-7441 (2022) Empire Updated. Diplomatic History, 46(1), pp. 209-211. (doi: 10.1093/dh/dhab082)[Book Review]

Charbonneau, Oli ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0563-7441 (2022) John T. Sidel’s Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia. Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints, 70(2), (doi: 10.13185/2244-1638.1127)[Book Review]

2021

Charbonneau, Oliver (2021) Locating empire. In: Reeder, Tyson (ed.) The Routledge History of U.S. Foreign Relations. Series: Routledge histories. Routledge: Abingdon. ISBN 9780367473235

Charbonneau, Oliver ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0563-7441 (2021) The US Volunteers in the Southern Philippines: Counterinsurgency, Pacification, and Collaboration, 1899-1901. Small Wars and Insurgencies, 32(3), pp. 580-585. (doi: 10.1080/09592318.2021.1891624)[Book Review]

Charbonneau, Oliver ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0563-7441 (2021) Colonizing workers: labor, race, and U.S. military governance in the Southern Philippines. Modern American History, 4(1), pp. 25-47. (doi: 10.1017/mah.2021.4)

2020

Charbonneau, Oliver (2020) Civilizational Imperatives: Americans, Moros, and the Colonial World. Series: The United States in the world. Cornell University Press: Ithaca, NY. ISBN 9781501750731

Charbonneau, Oliver (2020) The permeable south: imperial interactivities in the Islamic Philippines, 1899-1930s. In: Hoganson, Kristin L. and Sexton, Jay (eds.) Crossing Empires: Taking U.S. History into Transimperial Terrain. Series: American encounters/global interactions. Duke University Press: Durham, NC, pp. 183-202. ISBN 9781478006947

2019

Charbonneau, Oliver (2019) Charbonneau on Walter, 'Colonial Violence: European Empires and the Use of Force'. H-Net Reviews in the Humanities and Social Sciences, 5 Dec. [Book Review]

Charbonneau, Oliver ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0563-7441 (2019) Review of D. Immerwahr. How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2019). H-Net Reviews in the Humanities and Social Sciences, 25 Nov. [Book Review]

Charbonneau, Oliver ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0563-7441 (2019) “A New West in Mindanao”: Settler Fantasies on the U.S. Imperial Fringe. Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 18(3), pp. 304-323. (doi: 10.1017/S1537781418000634)

2018

Charbonneau, Oliver (2018) Review of del Mar Narbona Logroño, Maria; Pinto, Paulo G.; Karam, John Tofik, eds., Crescent over Another Horizon: Islam in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Latino USA. H-Net Reviews in the Humanities and Social Sciences, [Book Review]

Charbonneau, Oliver ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0563-7441 (2018) Visiting the metropole: Muslim colonial subjects in the United States, 1904-1927. Diplomatic History, 42(2), pp. 204-227. (doi: 10.1093/dh/dhx062)

2017

Charbonneau, Oliver (2017) Review of Mckenzie, Kirsten, Imperial Underworld: An Escaped Convict and the Transformation of the British Colonial Order. H-Net Reviews in the Humanities and Social Sciences, [Book Review]

2016

Charbonneau, Oliver (2016) Review of Walther, Karine V., Sacred Interests: The United States and the Islamic World, 1821-1921. H-Net Reviews in the Humanities and Social Sciences, [Book Review]

Charbonneau, Oliver (2016) Review of Wolfgang Reinhard (ed), Empires and Encounters, 1350-1750. H-Net Reviews in the Humanities and Social Sciences, [Book Review]

2015

Charbonneau, Oliver ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0563-7441 (2015) Annekie Joubert (in collaboration with Gerrie Grobler, Inge Kosch and Lize Kriel). Ethnography from the Mission Field: The Hoffmann Collection of Cultural Knowledge. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015. 1145 pp. ISBN: 9789004297722. $301.00. Itinerario, 39(3), pp. 527-529. (doi: 10.1017/S0165115315000674)[Book Review]

Charbonneau, Oliver (2015) Review of Holmes, Kent. Wendell Fertig and His Guerrilla Forces in the Philippines: Fighting the Japanese Occupation, 1942-1945. H-Net Reviews in the Humanities and Social Sciences, [Book Review]

2014

Charbonneau, Oliver ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0563-7441 (2014) "The Moro problem": race, religion, and American colonial empire in the Southern Philippines, 1899-1939. In: Biagini, Antonello and Motta, Giovanna (eds.) Empires and Nations from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century. Cambridge Scholarly Publishers: Newcastle upon Tyne, pp. 36-44. ISBN 9781443860178

This list was generated on Sat Jun 14 21:48:51 2025 BST.

Jump to: Articles | Books | Book Sections | Book Reviews | Edited Books