The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 18 (2007)

Looking Eastward:
Paciﬁc and Global Perspectives
on American History in the Nineteenthand Early Twentieth Centuries

Ian TYRRELL*

In the transnational reappraisal of the American past going on today,much of the emphasis has been placed upon Atlantic history. Though
clearly modiﬁed by the American environment, American culture hasroots in western civilization, and in the political and religious institutions of Britain. The revolt against Britain was part of a wider struggle
to achieve republicanism but it did not break trans-Atlantic ties. Rather,
it extended them, to use the term of R. R. Palmer, through the Age of the
Democratic Revolutions.1 The strength of economic and cultural ties with
Europe in the nineteenth century continued this trans-Atlantic attachment. American historians responded to these realities by focusing initially on European connections when considering history beyond thenation’s borders. The scholarly apparatus of professional history reinforced this frame of reference. Historians were originally trained in thescientiﬁc method derived from German scholarship. Leading historiansof the ﬁrst generation in the United States often studied in Germany—
or England—in the 1870s to 1900. Aside from American history, themajor area of historical specialization continued for many years thereafter to be European history. American college students studied western
Copyright © 2007 Ian Tyrrell. All rights reserved. This work may be used, withthis notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may
be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission
from the author.
*Scientia Professor, University Professor, University of New South Wales, Australia

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IAN TYRRELL

civilization rather than world history in the 1920s, and dialogue between
European and American history remained strong. Asian history was
under-developed, though Latin American history was beginning to makea stronger impression by the 1930s. Post-World War II Eurocentrism
was reinforced by academic specialization, with the cordoning off of areastudies, such as Asian Studies in the 1950s and 1960s, not to mention
the rise of a social history requiring close attention to local places rather
than transnational connections.2 All this is now changing, however.
Attention to the Paciﬁc as a framework for studying world history is
growing, and the need to examine the Paciﬁc as “oceanic history” isacknowledged, but the implications for transnational approaches to
American history need greater attention than hitherto.3
The Paciﬁc does provide a new perspective on American history.4
Several key issues centre on immigration, strategy, reform movements,
and trade. These matters show not only that the Paciﬁc was, in its own
right, as early as the nineteenth century, an important ﬁeld of American
endeavour shaping the nature of American history. Considering the
Paciﬁc does more than that: it recasts our understanding of American
history as a whole. Whereas American historians have approached this
topic from the point of view of the Atlantic versus the Paciﬁc, American
involvement in the Paciﬁc in the nineteenth century was part of a global
outlook, not just a regional one. Adding the Paciﬁc and the Atlantic perspectives together produces in the end something much more exciting:a new way of conceptualizing American history as a whole.
What constitutes the Paciﬁc is the ﬁrst issue. The important tie is not
the geographical fact that the coastlines of certain nations, including theUnited States, lie adjacent to the same body of water. Rather, the realityof a Paciﬁc ﬁeld of activity depends upon intensifying networks of communication. The intensity of communications varied over time and fromone portion of the Paciﬁc to another. As far as the United States is concerned, a growing density of communication connections can be dated
broadly from the opening of Japan to western commerce from 1853 andthe establishment of regular steamship routes operating with government
postal subsidies to Yokohama in 1867 (later with services to China) andto the South Paciﬁc from 1875. In 1885 there was only one line ofsteamers plying the route from the United States to Japan, but by 1898
there were six, “crowded with passengers and weighted down withfreight.”5 The San Francisco-Yokohama trip took 22 days in 1886, but
could be done in less than 12 days by 1898. These increasingly intense

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43

and efﬁcient networks were extended by the American takeover of thePhilippines, when defence experts and commercial interests joined topromote the construction of a telegraphic cable route across the Paciﬁc
linking San Francisco, Guam, and the Philippines, and from there to
Japan and China, through the Commercial Paciﬁc Cable Co. The cable
opened for business in 1903. Previously, the United States relied upon
the cable resources of the British empire, and cable routes went via
Singapore and the Middle East. Together with the British empire cableroute via Vancouver, the Paciﬁc could be said to be “wired” by the endof the ﬁrst decade of the twentieth century. Trade, social interaction, themovement of peoples and ideas and scientiﬁc cooperation developed on
the basis of these foundations.
These networks still require exploration by historians. The story of thepolitical and economic competition over and impact of cabling, forinstance, has hardly been told at all. Nor is there adequate coverage of awide variety of social activities promoting a Paciﬁc identity that developed on the basis of closer communications, such as the example of the
Pan-Paciﬁc Science Congresses of the 1920s and 1930s, though the PanPaciﬁc women’s movement conferences of the same era have been skilfully charted.6 The political agitation for women’s suffrage also grewacross these Paciﬁc communications networks. Carrie Chapman Catt’s
visit to Asia in 1912 to promote votes for women provides one prominent
example deserving further study. As Ellen DuBois argues effectively,“From a Paciﬁc perspective, the history of woman suffrage . . . looks
more varied, more complex, and more open-ended than it does from a
Eurocentric point of view.”7 But the implications of this statement havenot been explored for many areas of trans-Paciﬁc connections. On thebasis of improved communications, Asian and Australasian inﬂuences
upon the United States grew after the 1850s. One of these inﬂuencespromising to reshape our understanding of American history is immigration.
I.

IMMIGRATIONIn all, over ﬁve million immigrants entered the United States from1820 to 1860, and 32 million by 1924. Of these, some 350,000 were
Chinese immigrants entering the United States from 1857 to 1916, of
which 290,000 came before the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Overthe period 1857–1916, Chinese immigrants represented only 1 to 2

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percent of total American immigration, but 9 percent of the populationof California, where they ﬁrst congregated.8 The Chinese were an evenmore important component of California’s labouring class at about oneﬁfth of the males gainfully employed in the state; and they were also an
important component of the labouring class of Hawaii, admitted in 1898
as a territory of the United States.
Though most 19th century North American migratory ﬂows wereindeed across the Atlantic, viewing migration from within a Paciﬁc perspective does alter the picture of American immigration, which has been
typically conceived of in terms of ﬁrst and second waves. This is a
Eurocentric and Atlantic-centred notion. As is well known, a shift in thecomposition of European migrants occurred from the 1880s, when thepace of capitalist market change spread to southern and eastern Europe
to produce second-wave immigration of Catholics, Jews and Orthodox
Church adherents from the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires, theBalkans, Italy, and Greece. The political and religious views of the newimmigrants, together with their transient habits and apparently unassimilable nature produced a severe nativist reaction in the 1890s, leading to immigration restriction movements and laws.
But the view from the Paciﬁc complicates these neat sequences. If
ﬁrst-wave European immigrants had begun by the 1860s to be assimilated, Asian immigration is more difﬁcult to ﬁt into this two-wave model.
With China drawn more into the capitalist world economy in which theneed for labour mobility was becoming apparent, the 1850s to 1870s—
during the so-called ﬁrst wave—saw substantial Chinese migration to
the west coast of the United States (and to Hawaii, Peru and other Paciﬁc
destinations such as Australia).9 These Asian immigrants had many of
the characteristics of second-wave immigrants. They were subject tosimilar attempts at racial exclusion; their customs were much stranger
to Anglos even than Irish Catholicism, and assimilation was much more
difﬁcult.
This leads to a second point. The old model of a unidirectional ﬂow
across the Atlantic will not work any better than ﬁrst- and second-wave
theory. Chinese moved east instead of west, going as far as the
Massachusetts town of North Adams where a shoe factory owner imported them as strike breakers in 1870,10 though more commonly they
spread to such states as Oregon, Washington and Nevada. As they spread,they introduced multilateral aspects to immigration patterns. Congresslargely eliminated Chinese immigration as a political issue through the

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45

Chinese Exclusion Acts of 1882 and 1892, but Chinese immigration was
in fact not completely stopped, as the ﬁgures cited above show. The
category provided for under the acts to be excluded was “laborers”, but
this was broadly interpreted to cast a very wide net. Meanwhile, other
Asian labour came in the form of Koreans to Hawaii and California, andalso the far more prominent case of the Japanese until 1907–08 whenthat ﬂow in turn was restricted through the so-called “Gentleman’s
Agreement.” By 1900, there was also a threat of South Asian labour,which agitated Canadian legislation in the ﬁrst decade of the twentiethcentury.
It is now widely accepted that the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was
not an aberration, but signalled a new policy of racial exclusion, in which
as Erika Lee has observed, racial borders and problems of alien immigrants began to dominate American immigration practice.11 All thisstarted during the time of the so-called ﬁrst-wave immigration, and contributed powerfully as precedent, intellectual inﬂuence and institutional
medium for the second-wave exclusion of unwanted European immigrants, completed in the Immigration Act of 1924 (the National Origins
Act). The American nation was as a result reshaped, historian Mae Ngai
shows, as a “raced” nation by the 1920s.12 Thus our entire concept of therelationship between immigration and national identity has changed
recently as a result of the new studies of Paciﬁc immigration exclusion,
though there is clearly much more work to be done on this topic concerning the ways Asian immigration changed internal American debates.
The impact of the Japanese on California has not been fully appreciated,
for instance. The relationship between the arrival of the Japanese and thedevelopment of Californian and federal land policies to secure—throughirrigation policies, government ﬁnancial aid and technical help—thesmall-scale white agricultural proprietor has only recently become a
topic of serious comparative research.13
The different perspective of trans-Paciﬁc immigration is also enhanced when we look at the subject through the lens of gender analysis.
The importation of Chinese and Japanese women and the unequal sex
ratio in the immigrant communities created many problems both for thecommunities themselves and in terms of the reaction from the host
American society’s punitive and censorious attitudes towards unfamiliar
Asian customs. Work on the transnational communities of the Paciﬁc
immigration will cast new light on these matters. Transnational networks
developed out of the experience of immigration, and out of the inﬂuence

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of transnational American women’s organizations. Historian Rumi
Yasutake shows how Japanese Woman’s Christian Temperance Union(WCTU) workers visited, advised and otherwise collaborated with theIssei WCTU women in California, seeking to raise the level of respectability of their communities, to stop the practice of importing picture
brides and to protect immigrant Japanese women from domination andother ill-treatment by their husbands.14
II.

STRATEGIC ISSUES

The broad-ranging U.S. government expedition led by Lt. Charles
Wilkes to the Paciﬁc from 1838 to 1842 indicated an early interest in
mapping and the exploration of potential strategic ports. The expedition
was part of a larger pattern of American interest in East Asia and its trade,which went back to the American Revolution. This transnational trading connection will be discussed further below. Though the Wilkes expedition had no immediate payoff in terms of United States’ commercial
inﬂuence in the South and West Paciﬁc, the acquisition of Paciﬁc coast
territories in 1848 and of Alaska in 1867 realized the potential that
Wilkes and others saw for a stronger political, trading, and strategic presence on the American Paciﬁc coast. These territorial gains were not simply expressions of Manifest Destiny, but signalled the beginning of themodern American empire based upon American geo-political interestsin the Paciﬁc as well as the Atlantic. Commodore Mathew Perry’s visit
to Japan was a key development and signal of the trend, coming as it didin this period, in 1853. Strategically speaking, the Alaskan takeover complemented the American nation’s growing commercial interest by
putting the US potentially very close to Asia indeed. In terms of cultural
outreach too, missionary groups in the early nineteenth century had
already pioneered the American interest in Hawaii, where, as Patricia
Grimshaw shows in her study of American missionaries’ wives in
Hawaii, Paths of Duty, an important attempt at transmission of an eastern
American domesticity culture to a new “frontier” environment occurred
beyond the formal boundaries of the United States. The Christian missionaries who went there after 1819 and to the Marshall Islands, as theextended family of Sidney Gulick did, had important reciprocal consequences in the form of their missionary tales of heroism, domesticity,
family values, and Christian conversion brought back to inspire missionaries and their supporters in the United States, as did the many

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47

American Christian missionaries who served in China in the hundredyears from the 1840s.15 Paciﬁc interests were strongly reinforced by theacquisition of California in 1848, which state soon developed important
trading ties with American economic interests in Hawaii, particularly inthe sugar industry. California itself began to initiate many contacts oftrade and culture with East Asia by the 1860s, including the importationof roses, camellias, fruit trees and other elements of the horticultural
economy that thrived in California in the 1870s and 1880s.16
Thus when historians say that the United States was an Atlantic or
inward focused civilization in the nineteenth century, their comment is
not strictly true even of that early period. All this trans-Paciﬁc intereston the part of the United States began well before the nation acquired
formal colonies in the Paciﬁc in 1898. This period of increasing USinterest in the Paciﬁc culminated in the opening of the Panama Canal in
1915. The Canal would prove after its completion an immense boon to
American strategy, giving the nation in effect access to both the Atlantic
and Paciﬁc oceans, and thus turning the nation from an Atlantic to apotentially global military force. Naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahanbelieved in the late 1890s that American economic and strategic interests in the Paciﬁc demanded a stronger navy and political control of theIsthmus of Panama and the Atlantic approaches to any proposed canal.
This necessity lay behind the decision to retain the quasi-colony of
Puerto Rico after the 1898 war with Spain, a decision which made manifest the connections between the United States’s expanded Paciﬁcvision and Atlantic interests.
The acquisition of the Philippines also paralleled and contributed to aheightened American interest in Asia, ideas that can be traced in the workof Mahan. Though a student of the navies of Europe, Mahan’s thought
on Asia was particularly important. He saw the Paciﬁc and East Asia as
the future key to global security. Mahan feared two things. One was the
expansionist land power of Russia, and the other the impact of economic
modernization upon the previously somnolent Chinese empire. The two
problems were linked, as a weak China was a possible space for Russian
expansionism. Writing at the time of the Boxer Rebellion, Mahan alsofeared the inchoate forces unleashed by European penetration and thenationalist reaction in China. An awakening China he believed could bea threat to peace if its reformist forces were simply powered by economic
interests or revolutionary principles. He predicted danger in a China thatmimicked European progress without the “higher ideals, which in

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Europe have made good their controlling inﬂuence over mere physicalmight.” The consequent threat of an East-West clash could only beaverted by “the extension of American power and its corollary, Christiancivilization.”17 American expansion was therefore seen as part of “adivine strategy for the incorporation of East Asia within Christianity.”18
Mahan believed that an Anglo-American naval consortium would benecessary in the Far East to maintain stability, though he did not until
after the Russo-Japanese War fear Japan,19 and earlier he saw Japan asa successful modernizing power that had adapted to and incorporated
western civilization’s standards of conduct.
The US acquired these external cross-oceanic political and territorialinterests and commitments in the Paciﬁc before it acquired possessions
in the Atlantic. The move away from political isolation came ﬁrst in
regard to American interests across the Paciﬁc rather than the Atlantic
Ocean, principally through the desire to preserve the Open Door for
American commerce and missionary interests in China, a policy derived
from British sources.20 The strategic moves of the United States in the
Paciﬁc also necessarily involved Latin America, with American whaling, guano fertilizer, and ﬁnance interests involving investments in therailroad development of Bolivia; a number of so-called guano islands
were annexed under an 1856 act of Congress.21 The Monroe Doctrine,
too, asserting the US interdiction against European action in Latin
America, involved a political interference in the former Spanish colonies
and, after the Roosevelt Corollary of 1904, possible military action toprevent internal instability in the Latin American republics from providing a pretext for European intervention.
III.

TRANS-PACIFIC REFORM MOVEMENTS

A third way of looking at American history eastward across the Paciﬁc
instead of as a westward progression of American inﬂuences across the
Paciﬁc is the role of trans-Paciﬁc connections in reform movements suchas Progressivism. This case brings out especially strongly the need to
critique the current tendency to see transnational history as purely
Atlantic history. Through the efforts of Daniel Rodgers, historians havecome to realize the importance of European stimuli upon developmentof American Progressivism. The United States lagged in many areas ofsocial and economic reform, such as in providing insurance against
industrial injuries, even though the nation had an extremely high rate of

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49

accidents. In social insurance, it was Germany that took the lead in modernizing the older capitalist political economy. Americans themselvesbegan to develop accident compensation schemes, but more slowly and,in search of models, reformers drew on both British and German legislation.
Such cases as accident law reform have been conceptualized as“Atlantic crossings.” Yet the pattern of Progressive borrowings wascross-Paciﬁc as well as Atlantic. The state accident compensation
scheme introduced in California “borrowed” from New Zealand, forexample.22 Indeed a wide variety of ideas ﬁltered from Australia and New
Zealand into American Progressive schemes. In Newest England, social
reformer Henry Demarest Lloyd wrote that New Zealand democracy was“the talk of the world today,” and there he looked for inspiration insettling the competition of capital and labour through systems of industrial arbitration.23 Peter Coleman has demonstrated the international circulation of ideas concerning Progressivism drawn from New Zealand,
and has shown their impact on American reforms. Reformers such as
irrigation promoter William E. Smythe in California proclaimed the needfor “New Zealandizing” the United States through land legislation topromote small-scale agriculture, petit bourgeois proprietors, and thewhite race.24 In a parallel fashion, the role of the labour movement inAustralian social democracy was studied with equal interest by social
reformers as well as academics such as economist Victor S. Clark. The
extension of the secret or “Australian” ballot was one reform widelyadopted in North America.25 Less well known is the antipodean inﬂuencein irrigation policies through the work of Elwood Mead. The National
Reclamation Act of 1902 set an important benchmark for the federal government’s role in the building of dams and distribution of water for
power, farming, and ﬂood control. The Progressive Mead, who would
go on to serve as National Bureau of Reclamation chief in Washington
after 1924, became an advocate of national regulation of water as a resultof his work as Chief of the Victorian Rivers and Water Supply Commission in Australia from 1907 to 1915. There he experienced the inefﬁciencies of competition between states under a federal system, as wellas the Australian tendency to rely on government intervention in theeconomy. When he returned to the United States he advocated vigorous
government intervention and federal-state cooperation in the regulationof irrigation and water supply questions. He also urged quasi-socialist
schemes to aid closer settlement by providing state aid to farmers, not

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just the traditional American policy of supplying them with small quantities of cheap land. Daniel Rodgers has noted Mead’s inﬂuence as partof “fashioning a new physical frame for agricultural settlement,”26 eventhough this case reveals not an Atlantic exchange, strictly speaking, as
one would expect from the title, Atlantic Crossings, but a broader patternof white-settlement connections around the world.
As the case of reform movements indicates, the trans-Paciﬁc perspective looking at the United States from the Paciﬁc means reevaluating not only the more obvious Asian inﬂuences upon American history
but also the less well-known Australian and New Zealand ones. The roleof white European “settlement societies” has been given considerable
attention in recent post-colonialist scholarship, but not the intricate
relations between these places.27 Not only did Australian social democratic movements provide examples for the United States, but a wide
range of Australian inﬂuences upon the United States require greaterattention from historians—from environmental matters such as the introduction of Australian ﬂora (eucalyptus trees in California and Hawaii,
and melaleuca species in Florida) and diseases (citrus scales on theAmerican west coast orchard crops) through to the inﬂuence of theAustralian or secret ballot upon the American electoral system. Theseinﬂuences were, once again, possible because of the trans-Paciﬁc communications networks already established. Though numerically lessimportant than Asian contacts overall, the Australian and New Zealandinﬂuences should not be forgotten.
In these non-Asian inﬂuences from the Paciﬁc Rim, it is noticeable,
however, that Asia is often indirectly present. It is striking how, forexample, there are shared patterns of racial exclusion being introduced
at almost exactly the same time in regard to Asian immigrants inAustralia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States. The Immigration
Commission established by Congress in 1907 included as one of its volumes a study of comparative immigration law, in which the examples ofAustralian literacy tests and Canadian immigration restrictions wereboth considered favourably.28 While the United States’s policies of racial
control were becoming well known and inﬂuential within the British
empire in the 1890s,29 the reverse impact of racial controls upon the
United States remains to be studied, and the extent of reciprocity in termsof information ﬂows and policies must be established. When Americans
considered the social democratic experiments in Australia and New
Zealand, they were well aware that those experiments rested on policies
of racial exclusion that deﬁned Asians as an inferior Other.30

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IV.

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RECIPROCAL AND MULTILATERAL INFLUENCES

It must be emphasized that these connections were reciprocal relationships. They were also very complicated ones, not only involving theUnited States versus, say, Japan or Australia, but also involving mediating connections between the East and the West of the Paciﬁc. An example is found in the scientiﬁc aspects of environmental policy. As in muchof the environmental reform surrounding irrigation policy, American
scientiﬁc agriculture was thought to be far in advance of that in Australia,
New Zealand, and other places in the Paciﬁc. The work of the US Bureau
of Agriculture Experiment Stations was the subject of widespread
imitation from the 1880s. A good example is the sugar industry, whichshared American advice and pesticide and biological control technology
around the Paciﬁc basin, from Hawaii to the Philippines, Fiji, and North
Queensland. Among the biological control initiatives was the introduction of the cane toad Bufo Marinus as a predator to combat the grey-backcane beetle destroying sugar cane crops. This had been successfully trialed in Puerto Rico and imported into Hawaii. Because of the close
contacts between Hawaii and Australia via the steamship lines and thecomparable areas of plantation agricultural settlement, Australian Department of Agriculture experts allowed the importation of the cane toad
into Australia from this intermediate location. But the life cycles of thetype of beetle in Australia and the cane toad did not match. The latterproved a pest, not a biological control, and has since run wild acrossnorthern Australia. Studying the disastrous history of the cane toadrequires a transnational approach, since it was introduced almost simultaneously into Fiji and the Philippines as well (and possibly other places).
No one has traced the transnational connections to see how the toad
adapted in these different environments and what political, cultural andeconomic effects its introduction has had.31
V.

THE GLOBAL OUTLOOKYet if the Paciﬁc is important in its own right, it is more important stillfor how it can lead us to reconceptualize US history as a whole, insteadof weighing the speciﬁc contributions of Atlantic versus Paciﬁc inﬂuences, or the impact of either in comparison with the adaptation ofEuropeans to the American environment. American historians need toappreciate much more than they appear to do that when you add the
Paciﬁc to the Atlantic focus, it is not like adding two and two together

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to come up with four. There is a dynamic mix in the equation, because
adding the Paciﬁc to American economic and strategic outlooks createsor tends toward a global outlook. This is the global signiﬁcance of the
Paciﬁc outlook on American history. The United States has been since1898 neither an Atlantic nor a Paciﬁc power, but a global power, andAmerican interests had been global for a very long time before that; but
the process of globalization has been one in which the Paciﬁc was integral, essential, even foundational.
Let us turn to the economic aspects of American transnational activity
to see how this globalizing process worked, speciﬁcally in the area oftrade. This point will require us to delve deeper into American connections with the rest of the world, connections that went back to the beginning of the American republic itself. To be sure, the Atlantic provided
the major focus of American economic transnational connections in theyears from 1790 to 1900 in shipping, ﬁnance and capital investment, andto a slightly lesser extent in labour supply and trade. Together, ﬁnancial
and transport improvements had already effectively created by the 1830s
one market that was trans-Atlantic. Three-quarters of American exports
went to Europe and 60 percent of imports at mid-century came in returnfrom the same source. From Europe came the nation’s major trading partners, most notably Britain. The percentage of American exports goingto Europe had dropped only slightly to 72 percent by 1900, but imports
from outside Europe increased to one half of the total at the turn of thetwentieth century and to 70 percent by 1920. The biggest increase was
not from Latin America, but Asia, from which imports nearly doubled
between 1860 and 1901–05, reaching 15.4 percent of imports and thennearly doubled again to more than a quarter of all US imports by the ﬁrst
half of the 1920s. Asia also became an increasingly important export
market, from just 2.4 percent in 1860 to 11.3 percent of the total by
1921–25. Much of this increase was with Japan, where the United States
sent kerosene, raw cotton, ﬂour, locomotives, rails, cigarettes, watches
and timber,32 but the United States was also becoming increasingly
dependent on diverse international sources for its raw materials andexotic goods. By 1920, Europe was no longer so central to Americancommercial connections.33 The United States was becoming commercially interdependent with Asia and Latin American nations.
It must be kept in mind, however, that much of the Asian trade wasmediated via Europe until this time. Only a small proportion of UnitedStates trade actually entered via Paciﬁc ports in the second half of theLOOKING EASTWARD

53

nineteenth century (around 8–9 percent of total trade).34 Charles Denby,
the Secretary of the American legation in China noted in 1898 that there
was a “considerable trade” in American cotton goods, oil, ﬂour, machinery, iron, and lumber credited to England and Hong Kong.35 This factemphasizes the importance of the global networks within which thenation’s Paciﬁc relationships were enmeshed. Since the American merchant marine slumped post-Civil War to be carrying, by 1900, less than
10 percent of American trade, the United States was heavily dependent
until after World War I on British shipping and insurance networks,
which were centred on London. The sudden soaring of US commercewith Japan from 1916 and with Asia generally after 1919 reﬂected in part
this fact, because during World War I British shipping was imperilled
and stretched to the limit by its own war effort. With British decline setting in during World War I, the way was open to extend American Paciﬁc
trade still further and to make California more central to that trade.
Yet even for the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century, the global rather
than Atlantic nature of economic relationships must be recognized. As
one gushy newspaper editorialist put it, “Young America . . . pours its
energies through all the channels of commerce in all quarters of the
globe.”36 Antebellum American commerce responded to this globalizing
process by thinking globally on a commercial level. In 1857, Freeman
Hunt, editor of Hunt’s Merchant’s Magazine in New York City, could
proclaim, “Commerce now pervades the world.”37 But commentators
drew particular attention to Asian trade in this scheme of things. Boston
merchant and peripatetic traveller George Francis Train wrote of South
East Asia that Salem sea captains “know foreign markets, understandsupply and demand, and the art of treating with the natives, and carry intheir heads the whole history of these islands, and the ports where youcan exchange, or buy and sell.”38 Freed at the end of the American
Revolution in 1783 from mercantilist policies that required trade to be
via Britain in British vessels, Americans sought direct trading opportunities, including in the Mediterranean region,39 the South Paciﬁc andSouth and East Asia. American imports from Asia were 8.3 percent of
the American total in 1860, with spices from the Dutch East Indies, tea
and silk from China, and whaling products from the South Paciﬁc serving
as important commodities in American trade. The patterns of trade were,like migration, complicated and multilateral, spanning the globe from
East Asia to the Mediterranean and the Americas, as shown by enterprising Salem and Philadelphia merchants. These merchants scoured the

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ports of the Ottoman Empire in the Eastern Mediterranean (along with
Western Mediterranean ports where opium and other Middle Easterngoods had been shipped) for opium to sell to China and, once the journey
to China had been made, in return took many products back to the UnitedStates. Since the Chinese did not want large quantities of American
goods, Yankee merchants also joined the Latin American silver tradewith China, taking specie to pay for imports of Chinese tea, porcelain,silk, and nankeen cloth, and other items from East Asia. From 1795 to1831, hundreds of American ships visited the coast of the then independent Muslim sultanate of Atjeh (Aceh) to trade in pepper, sandalwood
and opium. The Salem, Massachusetts market set the world price for
pepper for several decades.40
Massachusetts was also the source of further Paciﬁc commercial andintellectual interest. Whaling was yet another reason for Americans to
set their sights commercially and culturally upon the Paciﬁc in antebellum times. American whaling was extremely important in the South
Paciﬁc along with sealing around New Zealand from the 1790s, as registered culturally through the ﬁctional but highly descriptive works ofHerman Melville.41 It was the Civil War, and the discovery of kerosene
as an alternative heating oil that drastically reduced the importance of
this trade post-1865, along with the effects of the Confederate raider
Shenandoah’s depredations against the Yankee whaling ﬂeet in 1865.
With its domestic shipping ﬂeet partly destroyed by the war and increasingly uncompetitive, United States investment turned decisively inland
after 1865. Though after the Civil War American internal development
together with changes in Asia and the European empires diminished theimportance of this trade for two decades, the memory of the China trade
powerfully informed American attitudes towards external expansion,and lay behind the demand for the Open Door policy in China (1899).
These nineteenth-century Paciﬁc and global interests laid the foundations of twentieth-century world power for the United States. It is signiﬁcant that the United States did not enter World War II via Europe. It
was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the United States
to war, and so precipitated a conﬂict that became global, and that turned
the United States away from the so-called “independent internationalism” of the interwar years to the making of a new multilateral system ofinternational security after 1945.42 The Paciﬁc was not an afterthought
in US calculations but intrinsic to its global aspirations. Gauged roughly,
the Atlantic focus can explain the majority of American connections with

LOOKING EASTWARD

55

the rest of the world in the nineteenth century, but not all, and less thanhalf of those connections in the twentieth. Laudable though it is, a purely
Atlantic approach to transnational history leaves a good deal unexplained. As in all ﬁelds of history, we Americanists should not remain
insular and rooted in Eurocentric ways of approaching our subject. We
must look for more encompassing theories. The multilateral framework
encouraged by the Paciﬁc connection adds a new dimension to the morecommon focus on the Atlantic, enabling us to broaden our vision toward
the global.
NOTES
1Robert R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolutions, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1959–64).
2
Ian Tyrrell, Historians in Public: The Practice of American History, 1890–1970(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), chap. 2; Robert A. McCaughey, International Studies and Academic Enterprise: A Chapter in the Enclosure of American
Learning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).
3
Pekka Korhonen, “The Paciﬁc Age in World History,” Journal of World History 7(no. 1 1996), 41–70; Matt K. Matsuda, “AHR Forum: The Paciﬁc,” American Historical
Review, 111 (June 2006), 758–80.
4
See especially my “Beyond the View from Euro-America: Environment, Settler
Societies and Internationalization of American History,” in Thomas Bender, ed.,Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2002), 168–92.
5Charles Denby, Jr., “America’s Opportunity in Asia,” North American Review, 166(January 1898), 32–33.
6
Fiona Paisley, “Performing ‘New Zealand’: Maori and Pakeha delegates at the PanPaciﬁc Women’s Conference, Hawai’i, 1934,” New Zealand Journal of History, 38(April 2004), 22–39; Fiona Paisley, “Cultivating Modernity: Culture and Internationalism in Australian Feminism’s Paciﬁc Age,” Journal of Women’s History, 14(Autumn 2002), 105–132; Angela Woollacott, “Inventing Commonwealth and PanPaciﬁc Feminisms: Australian Women’s Internationalist Activism in the 1920s–30s,”
Gender & History, 10 (November 1998), 425–448.
7
Ellen DuBois, “Woman Suffrage: The View from the Paciﬁc,” Paciﬁc Historical
Review, 69 (November 2000), 539–551. For the varieties of Asian feminism see Louise
Edwards and Mina Roces, eds., Women’s Suffrage in Asia: Gender, Nationalism and
Democracy (London: Routledge, 2004).
8
Sidney Gulick, American Democracy and Asiatic Citizenship (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1918), 138; Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor andthe Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1971), 3, 7.
9
Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (Boston: Twayne, 1991),
105–07; Sucheng Chan, This Bittersweet Soil: The Chinese in California Agriculture,
1860–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 389–93; K. Scott Wongand Sucheng Chan, eds., Claiming America: Constructing Chinese American Identities
During the Exclusion Era (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998); Adam

56

IAN TYRRELL

McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago, Hawaii,
1900–1936 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
10
Andrew Gyory, “Rolling in the Dirt: The Origins of the Chinese Exclusion Act and
the Politics of Racism, 1870–1882,” PhD diss., University of Massachusetts Amherst,
1991.
11
Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era,
1882–1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 24.
12
Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern
America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
13
See Ian Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods: Californian-Australian Environmental
Reform, 1860–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
14
Rumi Yasutake, Transnational Women’s Activism: The United States, Japan, andJapanese Immigrant Communities in California, 1859–1920 (New York: New York
University Press, 2004), 132–33ff.
15
See Patricia Grimshaw, Paths of Duty: American Missionary Wives in NineteenthCentury Hawaii (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989). The study of American
missions to China is a vast ﬁeld. For an indication of the transcultural exchanges that
occurred across the Paciﬁc among missionaries and converts, see Jane Hunter, The
Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the-Century China (NewHaven: Yale University Press, 1984).
16
Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods, 15.
17
A. T. Mahan, “Effects of Asiatic Conditions upon International Policies,” North
American Review, no. 528 (November 1900), 616.
18
Brian Stanley, “Church, State and the Hierarchy of ‘Civilization’: The Making ofthe ‘Missions and Government’ Conference, Edinburgh, 1910,” in Andrew Porter, ed.,The Imperial Horizons of British Protestant Missions, 1880–1914 (Grand Rapids, Mich.:
William B. Eerdmans, 2003), 61.
19
Jon Sumida, “Alfred Thayer Mahan, Geopolitician,” Journal of Strategic Studies(G.B.) 22 (no.s 2–3, 1999), 56.
20
Walter A. McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter
with the World since 1776 (New York: Houghton Mifﬂin, 1997), 116; George F. Kennan,
American Diplomacy, expanded ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), chap.
2.
21
Kenneth E. Shewmaker, “Forging the ‘Great Chain’: Daniel Webster and the Origins of American Foreign Policy toward East Asia and the Paciﬁc, 1841–1852,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 129 (Sept. 1985), 225–259; John H.
Schroeder, Shaping a Maritime Empire: The Commercial and Diplomatic Role of theAmerican Navy, 1829–1861 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985); Dan
O’Donnell, “The Lobos Islands: American Imperialism in Peruvian Waters,” Australian
Journal of Politics and History, 39 (March 1993), 37–55; Dan O’Donnell, “The Paciﬁc
Guano Islands: The Stirring of American Empire in the Paciﬁc Ocean,” Paciﬁc Studies,
16 (March 1993), 43–66; Christina Duffy Burnett, “The Edges of Empire and the Limits
of Sovereignty: American Guano Islands,” American Quarterly, 57 (no. 3 2005),
779–803.
22
Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 250.
23
Henry Demarest Lloyd, “New Zealand: Newest England,” Atlantic Monthly, 84, no.
506 (Dec. 1899), 789–794.
24Peter J. Coleman, Progressivism and the World of Reform: New Zealand and theOrigins of the American Welfare State (Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas,

LOOKING EASTWARD

57

1987); Coleman, “New Zealand Liberalism and the Origins of the American WelfareState,” Journal of American History, 69 (September 1982), 379, 384–85, 390 (quote).
25
Victor S. Clark, The Labour Movement in Australasia: A Study in Social Democracy(New York: H. Holt Co., 1906); L. E. Fredman, The Australian Ballot: The Story of an
American Reform (East Lansing, Mich.: Michigan State University Press, 1969).
26
Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 345.
27
Daiva K. Stasiulis and Nira Yuval-Davis, Unsettling Settler Societies: Articulationsof Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Class (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1995).
28
Marilyn Lake, “The White Man under Siege: New Histories of Race in the Nineteenth Century and the Advent of White Australia,” History Workshop Journal, no. 58(2004), 41–62; Charles Price, The Great White Walls are Built: Restrictive Immigration
to North America and Australasia, 1836–1888 (Canberra: Australian Institute ofInternational Affairs in association with Australian National University Press, 1974);
61st Congress, 3rd sess., Sen. Doc. no. 761, Reports of the Immigration Commission: The
Immigration Situation in Other Countries (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing
Ofﬁce, 1911).
29
R. A. Huttenback, “The British Empire as a ‘White Man’s Country’: Racial Attitudes and Immigration Legislation in the Colonies of White Settlement,” Journal of
British Studies, 13 (November 1973), 108–137.
30
Elwood Mead, Helping Men Own Farms : A Practical Discussion of Government
Aid in Land Settlement (New York: Macmillan, 1920), 131; Jessie Ackermann,
Australia: From a Woman’s Point of View [1913], abridged edition, Sydney, Cassell,1981), 4–5, 23; and Hugh H. Lusk, “Chinese Exclusion in Australia,” North American
Review, 174 (January-June 1902), 359–75, provides examples of literature on this theme
circulating in the United States; the shared racial discourse of Progressive America andAustralia is a theme in Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods, 162–63; and Marilyn Lake,“The White Man under Siege,” 41–62.
31
There is no academic history of this problem to speak of, but see my True Gardensof the Gods, 204.
32
Denby, “America’s Opportunity in Asia,” 37
33
Jonathan T.R. Hughes, American Economic History, 2nd ed. (Glenview, Ill: Scott,Foresman Co., 1987), 368–69.
34
See Ben J. Wattenburg, Statistical History of the United States (New York: Basic
Books, 1976), 903, 907.
35
Denby, “America’s Opportunity in Asia,” 37.
36
George Francis Train, Young America Abroad (London: Seth Low, 1857), vii.
37
Ibid., v.
38
Ibid., 58.
39
Paole Gemme, “Imperial Designs of Political Philanthropy: A Study of Antebellum
Accounts of Italian Liberalism,” American Studies International, 39 (February 2001),
19–26.
40
Jacques M. Downs, “American Merchants and the China Opium Trade, 1800–
1840,” Business History Review, 42 (Winter 1968), 418–42; David F. Long, “ ‘Martial
Thunder’: The First Ofﬁcial American Armed Intervention in Asia,” Paciﬁc Historical
Review, 42 (May 1973), 144.
41
For American whaling in the Australian case, see Gordon Greenwood, Early
Australian American Relations (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1944).
42
Michael Hogan, “Introduction,” in Hogan, ed., The Ambiguous Legacy: U.S.
Foreign Relations in the “American Century” (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1999), p. 6.