‘Nonwhiteness’ in nineteenth-century Hawai‘i: sovereignty, white settlers, and Japanese migrants

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper examines the way considerations of race factored into the colonisation of Hawai‘i and its subsequent governance of immigration and different racial groups. Throughout the nineteenth century, the Kingdom of Hawai‘i faced unprecedented demographic change due to its rapidly declining native population and inflows of people from abroad. To preserve its sovereignty, the kingdom attempted to forge solidarity with Japan and Samoa governed by nonwhite people under threat of Western colonisation. Although official rule by European and American settlers did not start until the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893, they steadily expanded their influence over Hawaiian politics and economy by monopolising the sugar industry. Wary of the effects of nineteenth-century geopolitics, the kingdom attempted to resist the establishment of a white-dominated society that pursued its political, economic, and social agenda through the management of sugar plantations and the opening up of immigration. In the process of stabilising and maintaining the kingdom's sovereignty in the late nineteenth century, nonwhiteness became a significant racial foundation to confront the white dominance in the Islands and to establish an ally with nonwhite peoples and nations in the Asia-Pacific basin.