The Pacific Ocean is the world’s most geographically vast and culturally diverse ocean highway for migration and trade. However, exploration of how transpacific connections influenced contemporaneous events in the Americas, central Pacific, and Asia across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries lags behind other scholarly fields. While historians have invested much time and energy in examining various Atlantic Worlds and the transatlantic connections fostered between Europe and the Americas, a similar engagement with the Pacific World is still a relatively new historiographical development; one whose contours are still being formulated. This panel focuses on the shared modes of commerce and cultural exchange between inhabitants of the United States and communities across the Pacific. It presents an opportunity for participants and audience members to discuss how adopting Pacific perspectives might change the ways that we view and interpret mobility and exchange across maritime spaces.

The first half of the nineteenth century saw emerging global markets and expanding sovereignties draw the coastal Americas, the central Pacific, and Asia into more frequent and sustained interaction with one another. Graeme Mack examines how the American whaling industry contributed to nineteenth-century American expansion to the Hawaiian Islands. He demonstrates how the expansion of the whaling industry, along with a “crisis” of sailor unrest, prompted U.S. officials to assert American influence in the Hawaiian Islands. Alastair Su explores the nexus between opium addiction, American shipping, and the Chinese coolie trade during the two decades following the Opium War (1842-1862). It argues that the maritime legalization of opium was effected not as a program of social control, but to cope with the deadly problem of comorbidity between opium addiction and infectious disease.

Stronger cultural and economic connections between the United States, the central Pacific, and Asia formed over the first half of the twentieth century as peoples and products increasingly traversed the Pacific Ocean. By examining women’s education and reform during the interwar period, Courtney Sato highlights movements of Asian women scholars across the Pacific as they navigated anti-Asian exclusion laws. Her paper charts the transnational circuits that Barbour scholars undertook and shows how Asian women became the frontispiece for internationalist and modernization projects in the Pacific. Kristin Oberiano examines the relationship between United States settler colonialism, militarism, indigeneity, and migration in the Pacific island of Guam in the immediate post-World War II era (1947-1955). Rather than seeing Guam as an unincorporated territory, she argues that Guam is a settler military colony of the United States.

This panel brings together often-disparate fields of North American, Pacific Islander, Chinese, and Latin American histories, while examining how transpacific connections challenge and enlarge the customary boundaries of U.S. history. Together these papers encourage reflection on the United States’ changing role in the Pacific and ask how its imperial interests impacted the economic possibilities and political freedoms of communities across the Pacific World.