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A Complex of Seas: Passages between Pacific Histories

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Paul Kramer
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By the late 1880s, Salt Lake City had embarked on its rocky career as the eastern hub of Oceania. The Mormons had first landed in Hawai'i in the 1850s and, having failed among Euro-Americans, turned their attention to Native Hawaiians, learning their language, converting leaders and establishing plantation settlements enabled by new laws allowing foreign land ownership. For Natives, the faith aided the preservation of communal beliefs and practices in the context of rapid, dislocating change, including those brought by Mormon newcomers themselves. In the absence of a temple in the Pacific, Native converts began migrating to Utah, settling in the Warm Springs area of North Salt Lake City. The movement enacted the Mormon concept of “gathering,” but was also continuous with historically deep Hawaiian journeys of discovery, trade and labor that spanned the Pacific, including the Western edges of the imperial United States. Inscribed in Mormon imaginaries as Lamanites—descendants of Abraham who had traveled to the Americas and, after great wars, into the “west sea” in an “exceedingly large ship”—and gathered into a racially-stratified American West, the Hawaiian arrivals were socially and economically subordinated.

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Research Article
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Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 15 , Issue 24 , December 2017, e1
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Copyright © The Authors 2017

References

Notes

1 Matthew Kester, Remembering Iosepa: History, Place, and Religion in the American West (Oxford University Press, 2013).

2 On the challenges of writing Pacific history see, especially, Matt K. Matsuda, “The Pacific,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 111, No. 3 (June 2006), pp. 758-80; Damon Ieremia Salesa, “The World from Oceania,” in Douglas Northrup, ed., A Companion to World History (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), pp. 391-404; David Armitage and Alison Bashford, eds., “The Pacific and Its Histories,” in Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land, People (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 1-28.

3 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995 [1949]), Vol. 1, p. 18.

4 For an illuminating, parallel discussion of the constructedness of continents, see Martin W. Lewis and Kären Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

5 See Matsuda, “The Pacific.” On the broader Western ideological construction of the “tropics,” in which the Pacific played a key role, see Gary Y. Okihiro, Pineapple Culture: A History of the Tropical and Temperate Zones (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). On the challenges of asserting an Islands-centered history, see Salesa, “The World from Oceania”; Teresia K. Teaiwa, “On Analogies: Rethinking the Pacific in Global Context,” Contemporary Pacific, Vol. 18 (2006), pp. 71-88.

6 For histories centered on Oceania and Pacific Island peoples, see, for example, Damon Ieremia Salesa, “The World from Oceania,” in Douglas Northrup, ed., A Companion to World History (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), pp. 391-404; Damon Salesa, “The Pacific in Indigenous Time,” in David Armitage and Alison Bashford, eds. Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land, People (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 31-52; David Chang, The World and All the Things Upon It: Native Hawaiian Geographies of Exploration (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

7 On critical empire history in the contexts of Japanese and US historiographies see, respectively, see Jordan Sand, “Subaltern Imperialists: The New Historiography of the Japanese Empire,” Past and Present, Vol. 225, No. 1 (November 2014), pp. 273-88; Paul A. Kramer, “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World,” American Historical Review, Vol. 116, No. 5 (2011), pp. 1348-91. For the US context see, for example, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawai'i and the Philippines (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013); Adria Lyn Imada, Aloha America: Hula Circuits through the U. S. Empire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012); Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). For Japan, see Yujin Yaguchi, Akogare no Hawai [Longings for Hawa'i: Japanese Views of Hawai'i] (Tokyo: Chuo Koron Shinsha, 2011); Robert Thomas Tierney, Tropics of Savagery: The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Jun Uchida, Provincializing Empire: Omi Merchants in the Japanese Transpacific Diaspora (work in progress). For an innovative juxtaposition of US and Japanese race-making amid inter-imperial war, see Takashi Fujitani, Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). On militarization and resistance in the Pacific, see Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho, eds., Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

8 See, for example, Armitage and Bashford, “The Pacific and its Histories”; Matt K. Matsuda, Pacific Worlds: A History of Seas, Peoples, and Cultures (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); David Igler, The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Gregory T. Cushman, Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World: A Global Ecological History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Takeshi Hamashita, China, East Asia and the Global Economy: Regional and Historical Perspectives, Mark Selden and Linda Grove, eds., (Routledge, 2008).

9 Kornel Chang, Pacific Connections: The Making of the U. S.-Canadian Borderlands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).

10 For a path-breaking works in the new, transnational Asian-American history, see, especially, Madeline Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration between the United States and South China, 1882-1943 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2000); Eiichiro Azuma, Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

11 For scholarship along these lines, see Gary Y. Okihiro, Island World: A History of Hawai'i and the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Keith Camacho, Cultures of Commemoration: The Politics of War, Memory and History in the Mariana Islands (University of Hawai'i Press, 2011); Moon-ho Jung, “Seditious Subjects: Race, State Violence, and the U. S. Empire,” Journal of Asian American Studies, Vol. 14, No. 2 (June 2011), pp. 221-47; Kariann Akemi Yokota, “Transatlantic and Transpacific Connections in Early American History,” Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 83, No. 2 (May 2014), pp. 204-19; Simeon Man, “Aloha, Vietnam: Race and Empire in Hawai'i's Vietnam War,” American Quarterly, Vol. 7, No. 4 (Dec. 2015), pp. 1085-1108; Azuma, Between Two Empires; Imada, Aloha America.

12 See, for example, different efforts to rethink US history from the Pacific, in Bruce Cumings, Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), and Gary Y. Okihiro, American History Unbound: Asians and Pacific Islands (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015).