Beyond Hawai'i Native Labor in the Pacific World

by Gregory Rosenthal

  32. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Capitalist World-Economy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton Univeresity Press, 2000); Robert B. Marks, The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002); A.G. Hopkins, ed., Globalization in World History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002).

  33. Prestholdt, Domesticating the World; Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).

  34. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 1–18.

  35. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I: A Critique of Political Economy [1867] (New York: The Modern Library, 1906); E.P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present 38, no. 1 (1967): 56–97; Wolf, Europe and the People Without History; Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (New York: Verso, 2001); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Vintage Books, 2015).

  36. Kameʻeleihiwa, Native Land and Foreign Desires, 140.

  37. Ibid. On the history of the commons, see Peter Linebaugh, Stop, Thief! The Commons, Enclosure, and Resistance (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2014).

  38. Banner, Possessing the Pacific; Mark Rifkin, “Debt and the Transnationalization of Hawaiʻi,” American Quarterly 60 (2008): 43–66; Beckert, Empire of Cotton, esp. 309–11.

  39. On capitalism and the body, see Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Ava Baron and Eileen Boris, “‘The Body’ as a Useful Category for Working-Class History,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 4, no. 2 (2007): 23–43; Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012).

  40. On workers’ experiences of nature, see Richard White, “‘Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?’: Work and Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 171–85; Andrew Hurley, Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945–1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Kathryn Morse, The Nature of Gold: An Environmental History of the Klondike Gold Rush (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003); Myrna I. Santiago, The Ecology of Oil: Environment, Labor, and the Mexican Revolution, 1900–1938 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Chad Montrie, Making a Living: Work and Environment in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Stefania Barca, “Laboring the Earth: Transnational Reflections on the Environmental History of Work,” Environmental History 19, no. 1 (2014): 3–27; Douglas Sackman, “Trafficking Nature and Labor Across Borders: The Transnational Return of US Environmental History,” International Labor and Working-Class History 85 (2014): 177–93.

  41. On capitalism and nature, see Donald Worster, “Transformations of the Earth: Toward an Agroecological Perspective in History,” Journal of American History 76, no. 4 (1990): 1087–1106; Jason W. Moore, “Capitalism as World-Ecology: Braudel and Marx on Environmental History,” Organization & Environment 16, no. 4 (2003): 431–58; Bartow J. Elmore, Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism (New York: W.W. Norton, 2015); Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017).

  42. Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin, 1985); Lawrence Kessler, “Planter’s Paradise: Nature, Culture, and Hawaiʻi’s Sugarcane Plantations” (Ph.D. diss., Temple University, 2016). On animals in the Pacific, see Ryan Tucker Jones, “A ‘Havock Made among Them’: Animals, Empire, and Extinction in the Russian North Pacific, 1741–1810,” Environmental History 16, no. 4 (2011): 585–609; Ryan Tucker Jones, “Running into Whales: The History of the North Pacific from below the Waves,” American Historical Review 118, no. 2 (2013): 349–77; Bathsheba Demuth, “The Power of Place: Ideology and Ecology in the Bering Strait, 1848–1988” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2016).

  43. Thomas G. Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 122–56.

  44. On cosmopolitanism, see Glenda Sluga and Julia Horne, “Cosmopolitanism: Its Pasts and Practices,” Journal of World History 21, no. 3 (2010): 369–73. On poor people’s environmentalisms, see Ramachandra Guha, Environmentalism: A Global History (New York: Longman, 2000), esp. 98–124; Joan Martinez-Alier, The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2002); Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

  45. On proletarianization, see Marx, Capital, 784–848; Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 175–98.

  46. Haunani-Kay Trask, “Natives and Anthropologists: The Colonial Struggle,” The Contemporary Pacific 3, no. 1 (1991): 159–67; Haunani-Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaiʻi (rev. ed.; Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1999); Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (Dunedin, New Zealand: University of Otago Press, 1999); Julie Kaomea, “Contemplating Kuleana: Reflections on the Rights and Responsiblities of Non-Indigenous Participants in Programmes for Indigenous Education,” AlterNative 5, no. 2 (2009): 79–99; also, Noelani Goodyear-Kaʻōpua, Ikaika Hussey, and Erin Kahunawaikaʻala Wright, eds., A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land, and Sovereignty (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).

  CHAPTER ONE. BOKI’S PREDICAMENT

  1. Auguste Duhaut-Cilly, A Voyage to California, the Sandwich Islands & Around the World in the Years, 1826–1829, trans. and ed. August Frugé and Neal Harlow (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 204, 207.

  2. Samuel Manaiakalani Kamakau, Ruling Chiefs of Hawaii (Honolulu: Kamehameha Schools Press, 1961), 278, 294–96; Gavan Daws, “The High Chief Boki: A Biographical Study in Early Nineteenth Century Hawaiian History,” Journal of the Polynesian Society 75, no. 1 (1966): 65–83, esp. 79; Dorothy Shineberg, They Came for Sandalwood: A Study of the Sandalwood Trade in the South-West Pacific, 1830–1865 (Melbourne, Australia: Melbourne University Press, 1967), 20–22.

  3. On the Canton trade, see Jacques Downs, The Golden Ghetto: The American Commercial Community at Canton and the Shaping of American China Policy, 1784–1844 (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 1997); Robert B. Marks, Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt: Environment and Economy in Late Imperial South China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Paul Van Dyke, The Canton Trade: Life and Enterprise on the China Coast, 1700–1845 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005); William T. Rowe, China’s Last Empire: The Great Qing (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009), 122–148. On China as the center of the early nineteenth-century global economy, see R. Bin Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Robert B. Marks, The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002).

  4. David Mackay, In the Wake of Cook: Exploration, Science & Empire, 1780–1801 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985); Edward G. Gray, “Go East, Young Man,” Common-place 5, no. 2 (2005), http://www.common-place-archives.org
/vol-05/no-02/gray/index.shtml (accessed June 17, 2016).

  5. Lilikalā Kameʻeleihiwa, Native Land and Foreign Desires: Pehea Lā e Pono ai? (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 1992), 3, 13, 25, 29–30. On pono, also see Sally Engle Merry, Colonizing Hawaiʻi: The Cultural Power of Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 60; Noenoe K. Silva, Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 16, 33, 37–40. On ka pono o ke kino (the pono of the body), see S.W.B. Kaulainamoku, “No ka maikai o na Aina Kukaemanu o G.P. Judd [Concerning the well-being of the Guano Lands of G.P. Judd],” Ka Hae Hawaii, December 14, 1859; Kaulainamoku et al., “Mea hou ma Jarvis Island [News at Jarvis Island],” Ka Hae Hawaii, November 9, 1859; “He mau wahi olelo no ka holo ana o na kanaka maoli i Kaliponia [A few words on the going of Native Hawaiians to California],” Ka Hae Hawaii, April 17, 1861; T.B. Kamipele, “No Kalifonia Mai [From California],” Ka Hae Hawaii, July 3, 1861. For more complex discussions of ahupuaʻa, see Theodore Morgan, Hawaii: A Century of Economic Change, 1778–1876 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), 16–31; Marion Kelly, “Changes in Land Tenure in Hawaii, 1778–1850” (M.A. thesis, University of Hawaiʻi, 1956), 11–20; Kameʻeleihiwa, Native Land and Foreign Desires, 26–29.

  6. Marshall Sahlins (with Dorothy B. Barrère), Anahulu: The Anthropology of History in the Kingdom of Hawaii: Volume One, Historical Ethnography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 27–33, 108–15, 146, 149–50. On forced labor at Āliapaʻakai, Oʻahu’s “Salt Lake,” see C.S. Stewart, Journal of a Residence in the Sandwich Islands, during the years, 1823, 1824, and 1825 [1830] (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1970), 285–88; Sahlins, Anahulu, 146n13.

  7. Adele Ogden, The California Sea Otter Trade, 1784–1848 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1941); James R. Gibson, Otter Skins, Boston Ships, and China Goods: The Maritime Fur Trade of the Northwest Coast, 1785–1841 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992).

  8. On tea and sugar, see Sidney Mintz’s classic Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin Books, 1985). On triangulating among China, Hawaiʻi, and the northwest coast of North America, see Marshall Sahlins, “Cosmologies of Capitalism: The Trans-Pacific Sector of ‘The World-System,’” in Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory, ed. Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Sherry B. Ortner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 412–55.

  9. On the Russian Pacific, see John F. Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 517–46; John R. Bockstoce, Furs and Frontiers in the Far North: The Contest among Native and Foreign Nations for the Bering Strait Fur Trade (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Ryan Tucker Jones, Empire of Extinction: Russians and the North Pacific’s Strange Beasts of the Sea, 1741–1867 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). On Russia and Hawaiʻi, specifically, see Glynn Barratt, The Russian View of Honolulu, 1809–26 (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1988); Peter R. Mills, Hawaiʻi’s Russian Adventure: A New Look at Old History (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2002).

  10. O.A. Bushnell, The Gifts of Civilization: Germs and Genocide in Hawaiʻi (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1993), 156–59; David Igler, “Diseased Goods: Global Exchanges in the Eastern Pacific Basin, 1770–1850,” American Historical Review 109, no. 3 (2004): 693–719. On Hawaiian migrant workers along the northwest coast of North America, see Janice K. Duncan, Minority without a Champion: Kanakas on the Pacific Coast, 1788–1850 (Portland: Oregon Historical Society, 1972); Jean Barman and Bruce Watson, Leaving Paradise: Indigneous Hawaiians in the Pacific Northwest, 1787–1898 (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2006).

  11. John Suter, copy of a letter to Messrs. James & Thomas Lamb, July 15, 1808, Miscellaneous Papers, 1804–1811, John Suter Papers, 1804–1848, Microfilm P-451, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston; J.C. Jones Jr. to Josiah Marshall and Dixey Wildes, December 23, 1821, Volume 1, Josiah Marshall Letters and Accounts, 1821–1841 (MS AmW 63), Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  12. Morgan, Hawaii, 59; Edward Beechert, Honolulu: Crossroads of the Pacific (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), 23.

  13. Morgan, Hawaii, 59. Turnbull, as quoted in John Ryan Fischer, Cattle Colonialism: An Environmental History of the Conquest of California and Hawaiʻi (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 89. On Hawaiian salt extraction, also see William Ellis, Journal of William Ellis: A Narrative of an 1823 Tour Through Hawaiʻi [1825] (Honolulu: Mutual Publishing, 2004), 17–18, 407.

  14. Stewart, Journal of a Residence, 285–88. Early descriptions of Āliapaʻakai also include: Duhaut-Cilly, A Voyage to California, 225–26; Lahainaluna, “He mau ninau no Aliapaakai, ma Moanalua i Oahu [Questions concerning Aliapaakai, at Moanalua in Oahu],” Ka Nonanona, March 23, 1843; response from Ioane [John], letter to the editor, Ka Nonanona, April 25, 1843.

  15. “Journal by C. Pickering. In his handwriting, kept by him while on the United States Exploring Expedition, Wilkes, Commander,” entries for October 2 and November 30, 1840, Charles Pickering Journal, 1838–1841, Microfilm P-118, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston; Stewart, Journal of a Residence, 288; Sahlins, Anahulu, 146, including note 13. On the geology and limnology of Āliapaʻakai, see Kost A. Pankiwskyj, “Geology of the Salt Lake Area, Oahu, Hawaii,” Pacific Science 26 (1972): 242–53; J.A. Maciolek, “Lakes and Lake-like Waters of the Hawaiian Archipelago,” Occasional Papers of Bernice P. Bishop Museum 25, no. 1 (1982): 1–14. Economist Theodore Morgan’s data demonstrates that Hawaiian salt production peaked in 1847; see Morgan, Hawaii, 96–97.

  16. Beechert, Honolulu, 11–14; Alastair Couper, Sailors and Traders: A Maritime History of the Pacific Peoples (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2009), 83–84; Robert J. Hommon, The Ancient Hawaiian State: Origins of a Political Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), ch. 15.

  17. Sahlins, Anahulu, 42. On Kamehameha’s control over international trade in the 1810s, see Samuel Hill, Journal and Log of Two Voyages, Samuel Hill Papers, New York Public Library.

  18. Isaac Iselin, Notes and Excerpts, 1880, Volume 1, 43–44, New-York Historical Society.

  19. Ibid., Volume 1, 23; Nicholas Thomas, Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 20, 80.

  20. “Pages from James Hunnewell’s Journal,” entries for December 17, 1817, December 19, 1817, and June 10, 1818, Folder 1a, Box 13 (Volume 25 1817–1840), James Hunnewell, Business Papers, 1823–1883, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School, Boston, Massachusetts; Isaiah Lewis, instructions for John Scovill, 2nd Officer of the ship Arab, April 1820, Isaiah Lewis Letter Book, 1819–1821, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School, Boston, Massachusetts.

  21. On the mutability of things, see Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I: A Critique of Political Economy [1867] (New York: Modern Library, 1906), 41–96; Daniel Miller, Stuff (Malden, MA: Polity, 2010).

  22. “Sandalwood in the Pacific: A State-of-Knowledge Synthesis and Summary from the April 1990 Symposium,” and Mark Merlin and Dan VanRavenswaay, “The History of Human Impact on the Genus Santalum in Hawaiʻi,” in Proceedings of the Symposium on Sandalwood in the Pacific; April 9–11, 1990; Honolulu, Hawaiʻi, ed. Lawrence Hamilton and C. Eugene Conrad (Berkeley, CA: Pacific Southwest Research Station, Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1990), 1–11, 46–47; Christopher Cottrell, “Splinters of Sandalwood, Islands of ʻIliahi: Rethinking Deforestation in Hawaiʻi, 1811–1843” (M.A. thesis, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, 2002), 68–70.

  23. Morgan, Hawaii, 40–41; Cottrell, “Splinters of Sandalwood,” 20–21; Merlin and VanRavenswaay, “The History of Human Impact,” 46, 49–50. William Ellis described the process by which women made (and perfumed) kapa in Journal of William Ellis, 91–95.

  24. “He Lahui puni hanohano, puni maikai, pun
i hookano, puni hoohiehie, he puni i na mea aala, i na luakapa i hoopeia i na mea ala”; S.M. Kamakau, “O ke ano o kekahi mau mea o ka Lahui Hawaii [The character of some things of the Hawaiian Nation],” Ka Nupepa Kuokoa, August 8, 1868. This translation is from the permanent exhibition at Hawaiian Hall, Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, Honolulu, Hawaiʻi (visited January 7, 2010); also see the permanent exhibition on kapa and fragrances at the Kauaʻi Museum, Lihuē, Hawaiʻi (visited January 13, 2010).

  25. John Kieschnick, The Impact of Buddhism on Chinese Material Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 277–78; also, Valerie Hansen, The Open Empire: A History of China to 1600 (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000), 153–75. Edward Schafer claims the first mention of sandalwood in Chinese literature was in the fifth century CE; see Edward H. Schafer, The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of T’ang Exotics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), 137, 157.

  26. John S. Strong, “Gandhakutī: The Perfumed Chamber of the Buddha,” History of Religions 16, no. 4 (1977): 390–406. Also see James McHugh, Sandalwood and Carrion: Smell in Indian Religion and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

  27. W.W. Wood, Sketches of China (Philadelphia: Carey & Lea, 1830), 250. On the commercialization of the Pearl River Delta region in the Qing era, see Marks, Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt.

  28. Wood, Sketches of China, 147, 185, 193.

  29. On the naming of Xianggang, see Chan Ka Yan, “Joss Stick Manufacturing: A Study of a Traditional Industry in Hong Kong,” Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 29 (1989): 94–120. On the longue durée history of aromatics in China, see Schafer, Golden Peaches of Samarkand, 133–38, 155–63; Edward H. Schafer, The Vermillion Bird: T’ang Images of the South (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 193–200.