Boki’s Predicament

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory Rosenthal
Keyword(s):  
Free Trade ◽  
The United States ◽  
Qing Empire ◽  
Free Labor ◽  
Pacific World ◽  
Legal Reforms ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Land Privatization ◽  
Work Abroad ◽  
Triangular Trade

Chapter 1 begins with the opening of a trans-Pacific triangular trade in the 1780s among the United States, China, and Hawaiʻi. Boki was an aliʻi (ruling chief) and kiaʻāina (governor) of Oʻahu who in the 1820s became obsessed with the sandalwood trade and the riches flowing into Hawaiʻi from the Qing Empire of China. The story of Boki’s predicament—how to ensure enough indigenous sandalwood supply to keep pace with Hawaiian leaders’ increasing consumption of foreign goods and their debts owed American merchants—is our entryway into understanding the emergence of the Pacific World as an integrated segment of the global capitalist economy, and one in which Hawaiian workers took center stage. In the 1840s, Western concepts of “free labor” and “free trade” revolutionized the trans-Pacific economy with the imposition of “free trade” on the Qing Empire following the Opium War (1839-1842) and the imposition of a “free labor” ideology in Hawaiian land and legal reforms. By 1850, the Māhele—a process of land privatization and redistribution—had dispossessed the majority of Hawaiʻi’s indigenous people, leading many to seek work abroad or on foreign ships.

scholarly journals The Dimensions of the US-China Trade War

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-55
Author(s):  
Mohamad Zreik
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
The United States ◽  
Bilateral Agreements ◽  
China Trade ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Trade War

AbstractThe Chinese Ministry of Commerce issued a statement Friday morning, July 6, 2018, confirming the outbreak of a trade war between the United States and China. The statement came after the United States imposed tariffs on many Chinese goods, in violation of international and bilateral agreements, and the destruction of the concept of free trade which the United States calls for following it. It is a war of opposite directions, especially the contradiction between the new Trump policy and the Chinese approach. The proof is what US Defense Secretary James Matisse announced in Singapore in early June 2018 of “the full strategy of the new United States, in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific,” where China was the “sole enemy of the United States” in China’s geostrategic region. Intentions have become publicized, and trade war between the two economic giants is turning into a reality. This paper will give an overview of the US-China scenario of trade war, then a focused analysis on the Trump’s administration economic decision regarding China, and the consequences of this decision.

Hidden Island

2019 ◽  
pp. 201-230
Author(s):  
Nicholas Evan Sarantakes
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Air Power ◽  
American Military ◽  
Pacific World ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Military Units ◽  
Political Negotiation

The Pacific world of the early twentieth century, dominated by Europe, Japan, and the United States, is gone. The region’s control by outsiders has been succeeded by increasing economic importance, broader political negotiation, and wider cultural acceptance. Whether considering transoceanic communication, popular understanding of air power, the limits to training a continental Asian army, local uses of food, the role of “special” military units, the understanding of nuclear weapons, or the impact of American military occupation, these essays shed light on the volatile Pacific as a whole. The chapters in War in the American Pacific and East Asia, 1941–1972illustrate how the mid-twentieth-century world set the stage for the Pacific of our own era, offering important waypoints for explaining the transition to the twenty-first century.

Rebuilding Japantown

2014 ◽  
Vol 83 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meredith Oda
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Urban Redevelopment ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
World War ◽  
Pacific World ◽  
Success Stories ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Trade Center

This article follows the transpacific process of race-making and urban redevelopment in the Japanese Cultural and Trade Center in San Francisco. Japanese Americans carved out spaces for themselves in the Center’s development by mediating between city representatives and Japanese interests and culture. Their role built on their professional skills as well as contemporary racial thinking about Japanese Americans and U.S. expansionism in the Pacific. As the United States sought out connections with a nation understood as particularly alien, Japanese Americans rearticulated contemporary perceptions of their foreignness toward their inclusion. This story helps us better understand how Japanese Americans moved from “alien citizens” through World War II to “success stories” just decades later, as well as some of the connections of the postwar Pacific world.

scholarly journals The History and Future of Peru’s Fast Growing Economy

Perceptions ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessandra Restifo
Keyword(s):  
Free Trade ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Free Trade Agreement ◽  
Free Trade Agreements ◽  
Trade Agreement ◽  
Trade Agreements ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The World ◽  
Growing Economy

After the United States’ withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the world of free trade entered a free-for-all, as countries searched for a viable course of direction toward a new free trade agreement. Peru seems to be leading an organized effort for the development of free trade agreements both within Latin America and across the Pacific. This is not surprising, as an analysis of Peru’s economic history will demonstrate. Despite its social complications, free trade has usually led to prosperity for Peru. With it currently being one of Latin America’s fastest growing economies, the loss of the TPP grants Peru the opportunity to see if their endurance and success will continue as they become more internationally integrated. If Peru succeeds with its plans of expanding free trade, which is analyzed in this paper, the country may serve as a model for countries just embarking to participate in the world of free trade economic policy.

Transition States in the Chaotic Pacific, 1812–1848

2018 ◽  
pp. 35-86
Author(s):  
Edward Sugden
Keyword(s):  
Herman Melville ◽  
American Studies ◽  
James Fenimore Cooper ◽  
The United States ◽  
Spanish Colonialism ◽  
Pacific World ◽  
Social Forms ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The World ◽  
Transitional Forms

This chapter explores the historical fold between a declining Spanish colonialism and a coming but not inevitable US imperial nation-state. Terming this midzone the “transition state,” it shows how critical narratives often falsely read the Pacific between 1812 and 1848 in terms of the transformations that occurred subsequently. Before that, individuals who theorized the Pacific gave voice to various transitional forms of consciousness—how they reckoned time, formulated space, or articulated their politics. In each of these domains, they imagined that the world could still be remade into new social forms. A personage the chapter terms the “queer migrant” emerged and embodied these transitional energies. The coming of the United States into the region closed down this space of potential. For those writers who sought to imagine the early Pacific world, such as Herman Melville and James Fenimore Cooper, this was a tragedy. They therefore developed a form—the Pacific elegy—that mourned the loss of this world yet, in mourning it, archived it so that future readers could reactivate it. Overall, this argument challenges the narrative of westward-tending imperialism that has dominated American studies.

California, Coincidence, and Empire

2018 ◽  
pp. 42-62
Author(s):  
Elliott West
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Indigenous Population ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gold Rush ◽  
Pacific World ◽  
Long Run ◽  
Global Power ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The World ◽  
Short Run

The first modern gold rush began when gold was discovered in Northern California simultaneous with the United States acquiring California in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. In the long run, this remarkable coincidence helped send the nation on its trajectory toward global power. In the short run, three traits of this rush—its wealth, its boom of population and demand, and its isolation—created a dynamic in California that caused consequences that would be shared by other rushes across the world: catastrophic effects on the indigenous population, a telescoped development into a modern economy, and expanding connections to a wider world. That third effect was fed by another coincidence. The gold strike of 1848 came just as American and European interests in the Pacific world were maturing. The near-instant expansion of national influence—in this case, toward Asia—suggests another possible pattern of gold-rush imperialism.

Commodity history and the nature of global connection: recent developments - Guano and the opening of the Pacific world: a global ecological history, by Gregory T. Cushman. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Studies in Environment and History. Pp. xx+392. 19 illustrations, 4 tables. Hardback £70.00, ISBN: 978-1-107-00413-9; paperback £25.99, ISBN: 978-1-107-65596-6. - Andean cocaine: the making of a global drug, by Paul Gootenberg. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Pp. xvii+441. 4 illustrations, 12 tables, 2 maps. Paperback £32.50, ISBN: 978-0-8078-5905-6. - The matter of history: how things create the past, by Timothy J. LeCain. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Studies in Environment and History. Pp. xix+346. 15 illustrations. Hardback £80.00, ISBN: 978-1-107-13417-1; paperback £22.99, ISBN: 978-1-107-59270-4. - Banana cultures: agriculture, consumption, and environmental change in Honduras and the United States, by John Soluri. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2005. Pp. xiii+321. 25 figures, 2 maps, 2 tables. Paperback $18.99, ISBN: 978-0-292-71256-0. - The mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins, by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. Pp. xii + 331. 29 b/w illustrations. Paperback £14.99, ISBN: 978-0-691-17832-5.

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Specht
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
University Of Texas ◽  
Pacific World ◽  
Ecological History ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
Chapel Hill ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Recent Developments

Petrels collected by Titian Ramsay Peale in the Pacific Ocean during the United States Exploring Expedition of 1838–1842

2008 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. R. P. BOURNE
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Pacific Ocean ◽  
The United States ◽  
Important Type ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The Pacific Ocean

The report by Titian Ramsay Peale on birds encountered during the Wilkes Expedition was withdrawn for inaccuracy when few copies had been distributed, and re-written by John Cassin. A survey of the accounts of the petrels shows that this was not an improvement. Two important type localities for Procellaria brevipes and Thalassidroma lineata are probably wrong, and could be exchanged.

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