Empire, Dredges, and the Control of Water

Although you wouldn’t know it from reading the historiography, dredges played an essential role in expanding and retaining the American empire in the Pacific. Dredges built a string of ports on the Pacific Coast, from Seattle, WA to San Diego, CA. Dredges constructed seaports in Honolulu and Pearl Harbor in Hawai’i and Manila Bay in the Philippines. Dredges turned atolls and desert isles, such as Midway, Guam, and Wake, into a constellation of harbors for ships and seaplanes. In short, dredges literally built the infrastructure of the empire. 1