Trading Sovereignty and Labour: The Consular Network of Nineteenth-Century Hawai‘i

Abstract

This article offers the first sustained inquiry into the consular system of nineteenth-century Hawai'i, which operated at a global level during the second half of the nineteenth century prior to its dissolution in 1900, two years after US annexation. Like minor Latin American states in the nineteenth century, the Hawaiian state exerted a degree of self-determination through appeals to inclusion within Christendom and Western Civilization, and had a consular body made up mainly of transnational British, German and American actors. Drawing upon extensive archival research, this article indicates the pivotal role of the Hawaiian consular system in facilitating the migration of over 100,000 contract labourers to the islands during the late nineteenth century in shifting governmental formations. Complementing scholarship on the efforts of indigenous elites to defend Hawai'i's sovereignty in the late nineteenth century, this article pays close attention to the role of non-national consuls and contract labour migrations in patterns of asymmetrical commercial globalisation, lending new perspectives to the international history of minor and extra-European states in the Age of Empire.

Mobile labour: an introduction

“…The extent to which displacement is embodied as race in more recent contexts of mobile labour is a question that unfolds in multiple research lines, as we explore in the project The Colour of Labourthe racialized lives of migrants (Bastos 2018a(Bastos , 2018bLe Petitcorps 2020;Macedo 2021;Miller 2019;Nóvoa 2021;Peano 2019). Racialization takes different appearances, including in the form of coexiting ethnic, national or cultural differences that obfuscate the enactment of the hierarchized inequalities associated with labour (Bastos 2020).…”

Plantation Memories, Labor Identities, and the Celebration of Heritage

“…The production of sugar required a labor force that was not available in the archipelago, which was in dramatic population decline mostly due to imported diseases. Thus, contract workers were recruited at different moments, from different sites, and under different policies of population and subjacent conceptions of race (Bastos 2018;Miller 2019): from Hawai'i, from the South Pacific Islands, and from China in larger numbers; then from the Portuguese islands of Madeira and the Azores; and later from Japan. After Hawai'i was annexed by the United States, a few restrictions regarding migration from China, and also the terms of contract work, were implemented.…”