Settling the California Delta

Eiichiro Azuma is the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of several books, including Brokering a Race War: Japanese Americans in the Pacific War and the Occupation of Japan (2026) and In Search of Our Frontier: Japanese America and Settler Colonialism in the Construction of Japan's Borderless Empire (2019).

"Drawing on an astounding array of overlooked Japanese language sources, this is a gripping and compelling history of rural Japanese America, full of surprising, original findings and interventions.The clarity of the writing and analysis belies the complexity and richness of the research. Eiichiro Azuma elegantly narrates the history of the Sacramento Delta's political economy, its unique pattern of development, and the outsized role of Japanese immigrant farmers within it. This stunning microhistory is Asian American historical scholarship at its finest."—Cecilia M. Tsu, University of California, Davis "Settling the California Deltais a landmark contribution to rural history and Asian American studies. Through a deeply researched examination of the Japanese American community of Walnut Grove, California in the early twentieth century, Eiichiro Azuma deploys an original and incisive framework—the mutually reinforcing dynamics of white segregationist settler colonialism and Asian immigrant settler colonialism—to illuminate how race, land, and labor shaped rural California. Integrating theories of racial capitalism and settler colonialism rarely applied in the field, and centering interethnic relations among Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino residents with particular effectiveness, Azuma transforms a community history into a powerful case study with implications beyond the Delta. The result is an exemplary work of regional and environmental history and a significant intervention in the study of race and capitalism in the American West."—Shelley Lee, Brown University "Based on decades of original research, Settling the California Delta captures the everyday struggles of Japanese American agricultural workers before World War II. Placing personal stories in shifting contexts, Eiichiro Azuma demonstrates the power of local history—its capacity to reveal how seemingly abstract concepts like racial capitalism and settler colonialism profoundly shaped the lives of ordinary human beings."—Moon-Ho Jung, University of Washington