Migrant Peoples, Migrant Natures: Tracing Economic and Ecological Changes in 19th-Century Polynesia

The nineteenth century was a period of tremendous economic and ecological integration across the Pacific Ocean. Peoples, ports, and products were linked together as never before, characterizing the shape and scale of a new trans-Pacific capitalist economy. Hundreds of thousands of laborers left home, on the move from China to Hawaiʻi to California and to remote islands in the middle of the sea. In this paper I trace the movement of four different things: technology, material culture, food, and stories. By following these, we may better understand how production (technology), consumption (material culture), workers' experiences (foodways), and indigenous epistemologies (stories) combined to manifest an integrated oceanic space that scholars now call the “Pacific World.” In this paper I argue that indigenous and working-class peoples were a major force in the nineteenth-century Pacific, setting nature into motion through their labors. I focus on Hawaiʻi as a center of exchange, detailing the histories of, for example, Chinese tangshi (sugar experts) and Mexican cowboys in Hawaiʻi; South Pacific whale teeth in Hawaiʻi and Hawaiian sandalwood in China; Northwest Coast salmon and Chinese rice in Hawaiʻi and Hawaiian poi in California; and other stories of trans-Pacific ecological exchanges. By studying people and nature in motion, we may better understand how transnational migrant labor continues to shape and reshape the ecological and economic networks of our twenty-first-century world.