In A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth, James Tejani doesn’t tell the story we might really be interested in: the central role of the Port of Los Angeles in commerce and American life today. Instead, he tells the same tale as in his doctoral dissertation about the “making” of that port and the various shenanigans involved in turning an unpromising estuary into a world-class commercial harbor.

It is nonetheless an interesting saga, involving a cast of characters that includes a pre-Civil War Jefferson Davis and George Davidson, the pathbreaking surveyor from the U.S. Coast Survey. It was a time of heroic deeds, similar to that told in David McCullough’s The Path Between the Seas about building the Panama Canal.

“This is the story of the United States’ formative yet troubled expansion to the Pacific, of its relationship to an envisioned ocean world, and of Americans’ attempt to master this world,” Tejani writes in his introduction. “The result was the Port of Los Angeles, an engineering marvel that broke the limits of nature and distance, along with a new metropolis made in part by its claims to an artificial harbor.”

Tejani describes in great detail the machinations — political and financial — of building a transcontinental railroad, including the final link to California, which involved overcoming the obstacles of the Sierra Nevada mountains and the Mojave Desert, part of the North American Desert that blocks the approach to the Golden State.

The port in Los Angeles is inextricably linked to this railroad. It is also linked to the Panama Canal, though Tejani does not emphasize this aspect. After the collapse of efforts by Suez Canal builder Ferdinand de Lesseps, Theodore Roosevelt took charge of the long-simmering project to build a channel connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific. Like the Los Angeles project, the building of the canal and its locks required massive dredging and new technology.

The canal was finished in 1914, and the Board of Harbor Commissioners was formed in Los Angeles in 1907, paving the way for the expansion of commerce, though Asian trade long comprised the bulk of activity in L.A. It took the covid-19 pandemic and the blockage of container ships at the port to bring home the significance of this fact.

Tejani’s account is a monumental achievement of research in recording American expansionism. It is bracketed by the Mexican-American War of 1846 to 1848, whose heroes went on to play a role in creating the Port of Los Angeles, and the Spanish-American War of 1898, where hostilities in the Philippines came shortly after the USS Maine exploded in Havana’s harbor, establishing the United States as a Pacific power (Roosevelt again). Writes the author:

“The Battle of Manila Bay thrust the United States and its world into the twentieth century. By now, Europeans had carried their imperial contests to Africa, the Middle East, and East Asia. The decline of old empires opened doors to new conquest. Recently industrialized nations — Japan, Germany, and the U.S. — entered the competition. Their steam-propelled battleships foretold a shifting international order.”

It is a history worth knowing, even if the book’s blur of details and names occasionally obscures the narrative. And the negative impact of the port on wildlife and other natural phenomena, as well as on Indigenous tribes, sometimes seems at odds with the otherwise positive nature of the tale. Nevertheless, the Port of Los Angeles’ origin story is complex, and Tejani’s telling does it justice.

Darrell Delamaide, a journalist and writer in Washington, DC, explores the connections among geography, politics, and economy in his book The New Superregions of Europe.

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