The Open Ocean for Interimperial Collaboration

This chapter examines the Pacific Ocean as a transnational space from the perspective of the US as a new maritime empire in the region, and proposes an alternative analytical perspective for this analysis, interimperialism, to three currently dominant ones; imperialism versus nationalism; a vertical analysis of an empire; and power conflicts among the empires. The chapter focuses on experts at the two institutions, namely, the Institute of Pacific Relations and the Pan Pacific Science Congress, in the 1920s, and examines the nature of their Pan Pacific visions, a Pacific version of Pan Americanism. It argues that these experts saw the ocean as an open space that connected the people in and across the Pacific and pursued interimperial cooperative schemes, not as a space divided into closed seas where various polities competed for territorial control. Their interimperial schemes had two distinct characteristics; first, they framed their objectives in the rhetoric of a shared “imperial civilizing mission.” which satisfied moral guilt of the metropolitan elite, but still reinforced their empires’ superior position over the colonized. Second, Pan Pacific schemes ensured interimperial cooperation of managing the ocean space, rather than a conflict.

A New Pacific Community

American liberal Protestants continued to promote cultural internationalism and racial understanding through the interwar period. In 1923, American missionaries who had worked to defend the civil liberties of Asian North Americans established the Institute of Pacific Relations through which they recruited powerful U.S. officials. During the 1928 Conference of World Missions, they challenged international mainline Christian associations to do more to challenge racial discrimination both in and outside their institutions. Taken together, these examples show how liberal Protestants adapted their social reform during a period characterized by American isolationism and immigrant exclusion.