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The White Pacific: U.S. Imperialism and Black Slavery in the South Seas after the Civil War

Amazon.com Price:  $27.51 (as of 23/04/2019 15:21 PST- Details)

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Description

Worldwide supplies of sugar and cotton were impacted dramatically because the U.S. Civil War dragged on. New areas of production entered these lucrative markets, in particular within the South Pacific, and plantation agriculture grew substantially in disparate areas such as Australia, Fiji, and Hawaii. The rise in production required an building up in labor; within the rush to fill the vacuum, freebooters and other unsavory characters started a slave trade in Melanesians and Polynesians that continued into the 20 th century.

The White Pacific ranges over the broad expanse of Oceania to reconstruct the history of “blackbirding” (slave trading) within the region. It examines the role of U.S. citizens (many of them ex-slaveholders and ex-confederates) within the trade and its roots in Civil War dislocations. What unfolds is a dramatic tale of unfree labor, conflicts between formal and informal empire, white supremacy, threats to sovereignty in Hawaii, the origins of a White Australian policy, and the upward thrust of Japan as a Pacific power and putative protector. It also pieces in combination a wonderfully suggestive history of the African American presence within the Pacific.

Based on deft archival research in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Hawaii, the USA, and Great Britain, The White Pacific uncovers a heretofore hidden story of race, labor, war, and intrigue that contributes significantly to the emerging intersectional histories of race and ethnicity.

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