Envisioning the Future: Samuel Colt and the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands

Abstract Samuel Colt is often remembered as the inventor of the repeating revolver, but he was also a visionary international entrepreneur who worked energetically to promote his guns in North America and across the globe. In the 1850s, he invested in mining in Arizona and sent his brother-in-law Richard Jarvis to Sonora, in northern Mexico, to acquire property and develop local contacts. The two became particularly interested in the sheltered harbor of Guaymas, Sonora, which they expected to become the terminus for a transcontinental railroad and an important port onto Pacific markets. This article focuses on how Colt, Jarvis, and their fellow investors sought to profit by rethinking the relationships among geographical space, private capital, and the nation-state. Even as they hoped that the U.S. government might invade or annex Sonora, they imagined an alternative map of a borderlands region where capital and commodities moved freely across international boundaries. Although their real estate investments and mining ventures were unsuccessful, these men were prescient in their thinking about capitalist expansion. They envisioned the future, anticipating the mechanisms of informal empire that would propel the U.S. state and its citizens’ private interests to a position of global dominance in the twentieth century.