From Slavery to Empire: Colonization to the Black Pacific during America’s Long Reconstruction

This paper explores the relationship between slavery, emancipation, and empire through the everyday lives of Black workers in Hawai‘i and the Philippines. In the midst of several state sponsored proposals that would have relocated over sixty percent of all African Americans to America’s Pacific empire, Black migrants in the Pacific consciously attempted to access state resources as reparations for slavery while navigating the transnational anti-colonial impulses they shared with indigenous Pacific peoples. This transnational picture of Black people fighting for emancipation (long before and after 1865) not only disrupts traditional narratives of American Reconstruction but also brings what Saidiya Hartman has called the ‘afterlives of slavery’ into conversation with the existing historiography on American empire. By centering the Black Pacific—a liminal site of global Blackness where alternate formations of race, empire, and self-invention were re-imagined and contested against older identities established in what Paul Gilroy theorizes as a Black Atlantic—American colonialism reveals itself as a clear extension of American slavery. Simultaneously, emancipation emerges as a global labor crisis that the American state and industrial capitalists scrambled to solve by replicating the hierarchies and techniques of slavery though an overseas empire (and vice versa). Explicitly aware of this process, Hawaiians, Filipinos, and African Americans developed an early nineteenth-century version of Pan-Third World solidarity that drew constant connections between chattel slavery and American colonialism. Through Filipino student essays, Hawaiian plantation ledgers, African American travel diaries, Broadway musicals, and Afro-Caribbean restaurant menus in Manila this paper tells an entirely new interracial and transnational story of American slavery, its abolition, and its transformation into an empire that must now be reconceptualized in much more complex and multidirectional ways.