With the duty-free reciprocity treaty agreed with the United States in 1875, the Hawaiian sugar industry boomed, generating an acute demand for cheap plantation labour. As scholars like Gary Okihiro and Ronald Takaki have shown, this resulted in Hawaiian governmental and planter efforts to recruit Chinese and Japanese migrants (or, in the harsher terminology of the era, “coolies”), who were brought over under multiyear contracts. US annexation of Hawaii in 1898, however, meant that American law forbidding contract labour and Chinese immigration now applied to the island territory and, soon after, Japanese immigration was also curtailed, thus transforming the labour market for the planters. Ironically, however, as JoAnna Poblete demonstrates in this sophisticated work of “socio-legal labor history,” two of the United States’ other imperial acquisitions in 1898 – Puerto Rico and the Philippines – appeared to fill this labour void, thus creating new currents of immigration and community formation within the United States’ overseas empire (5).

Analysing both class and transnational relations, Islanders in the Empire contrasts the experiences of Filipino and Puerto Rican settlers and workers in Hawaii in the early twentieth century. The two groups had much in common. Categorizing them as “intracolonials” – “colonized people living in a second colonized place” – Poblete explains the consequences of their “liminal” position as neither citizens nor foreigners under US jurisdiction (6). While “liminality” offered Filipinos and Puerto Ricans a degree of mobility not available to foreign labourers in Hawaii, it also meant that they lacked either formal political representation or foreign consular protection. As a result, both migrant groups tended to rely on informal community representatives such as labour agents and ethnic church ministers when dealing with the powerful Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association (HSPA). These representatives, however, frequently occupied positions as “middlemen” with ties to both white planters and ethnic labourers; given this ambivalent role, the labourers questioned the loyalty of spokesmen who earned their bread, at least in part, from the plantation hierarchy. The limits of mediation were exposed during periods of intense labour strife – such as the 1924 strike – as Filipinos and Puerto Ricans protested the low pay, poor-quality housing, and harsh treatment they received in the sugar plantations in the so-called “Paradise of the Pacific.”

The harsh realities of plantation life contributed to the failure of the Puerto Rican experiment in Hawaii. Despite the HSPA's high hopes, post-annexation, that the newly acquired Caribbean island could supply most of their labour needs, Puerto Ricans – deterred by reports of the backbreaking work which their compatriots were enduring in the Pacific – ceased migrating to Hawaii after less than one year of recruitment. Many Puerto Ricans who went to Hawaii requested to return home but, without financial support, had no choice but to remain. Lacking local representation, Puerto Ricans soon “became an invisible population” in Hawaiian society (161).

Instead, Filipino migrants became the main source of labour for the Hawaii sugar planters. The HSPA learned lessons from the Puerto Rican fiasco, implementing special recruiting programs for Filipinos. Shifting focus from the workers’ communities to the planter elite, Poblete explores how the HSPA implemented “innovative” recruitment programs for Filipinos, including options for free return passage and family reunification. These benefits, however, were extended only to “obedient workers” and were forfeit in the event of labour protests or strikes. Thus the HSPA, albeit using subtler forms, strove to maintain “control over the behavior of their workers” (73). Nevertheless, and although few viewed Hawaii as a permanent home, Filipinos in Hawaii ultimately obtained greater control over labour issues than Puerto Ricans ever had. Intriguingly, Poblete puts this down to the “different colonial expectations” that the United States had for the Philippines in comparison to Puerto Rico. Whereas, in 1917, Puerto Ricans became US citizens, the US government, from 1913, began a policy of Filipinization designed to pave the way towards self-rule in the Philippines. In Hawaii this meant that Filipino labourers dealt directly with the Philippine government, with US officials having no involvement with Filipino labour issues in the Pacific territory. In 1923, Filipinos petitioned successfully for a resident labour commissioner – a sign of their growing influence as a major ethnic labour group. Indeed, compared to the “invisible” Puerto Rican community, the large Filipino presence in the islands is today “seen almost as synonymous with plantation labor in Hawaii” (161).

Although its comparative structure makes for occasional repetition, this is a finely researched book which defies easy categorization. It is, at once, an account of ethnic migrations, community formation, and labour relations, which also poses important questions about US imperialism and the denial of empire in US identity. Indeed, while perceptively illuminating the multiethnic labour history of Hawaii, Poblete has a broader objective: to expose and emphasize the wide-reaching imperialist strand in US expansion and history, which, she argues, is too often downplayed in the scholarship (164). With the outpouring of recent work on US imperialism in and after 1898, of course, empire is hardly as neglected as the author suggests. Nevertheless, through its exploration of the nuanced realities of “intracolonial” migration and existence, the book is a highly valuable addition to the historiography of US imperialism and of labour relations in the Progressive Era, which will also be of particular interest to students of Hawaiian, Puerto Rican, and Philippine history.