Ideas for Conceptualizing the Pacific World within the US Survey Course, 1400-1850

This resource was developed as part of the AHA’s Globalizing the US History Survey project. 

 

By Allison Frickert-Murashige

Chronological Approaches

Pre-History

• Kelp Highway hypothesis (Jon Erlandson), which complicates the Berengia thesis

European Exploration

• Asian voyages (Zheng He)
• Asia-Pacific trade that provides the context for European exploration
• Indigenous histories on the Pacific Coast, Hawaii, etc.

Colonial Era (pre-Seven Years War)

• Role of the Manila Galleon trade connecting the Americas to Asia 1565 for 250 years. This is really when globalization began to happen.
• Globally connected Mexican provinces, secularization of missions
• Triangle trade:
  • From San Diego/San Francisco to Hawaii (for sandalwood)
  • From San Diego/San Francisco to Canton (for Chinese products)
• Atlantic world connection into American slave trade in the Spanish Empire
• Russian expansion into North America

Post- Seven Years War Colonial era and Revolutionary War

• Role of the (Pacific) China trade in the British Empire (and American interest)
• European trade networks in Oceania and Asia

Nation Building

• Establishing the China trade and conceptions of national identity
• West coast immigration ad expansion under the Spanish Empire
• Role of West Coast access and China trade in Louisiana Purchase and Lewis and Clark Expedition
• Monroe Doctrine and the Pacific
• Oregon dispute

Western Expansion and the Pacific

• Whaling and industrialization connecting East and West Coasts
• Hudson Bay Company
• Role of Chilean guano in American industrialization, military expansion, and commercial West-Coast agriculture
• Continentalism /Manifest Destiny and the Pacific World
• 1830s and 40s naval expeditions and growing conceptions of the importance of the Pacific for commercial and strategic interests
• Hawaii as a pivotal Pacific commercial and strategic port
• Competition for Hawaii between powers
• Missionary impulse and tie to Manifest Destiny
• Missionaries as a first wave to soften zone for free trade capitalism
• Mexican-American War
• Railroad, specifically as a conduit to China trade
• Two competing Pacific-named companies
• Influx of Chinese labor for the railroad and agricultural trade
• Empire building from the Pacific perspective: Kamehameha’s strategies
• US plans for Japanese expedition
• Japanese views of Perry

Thematic Approach

• Trade connections and commodities
• Migration and immigration
• Religion
• Maps and other visual conceptions of the US in the world rather than nation-state history
• Environment and natural resource consumption
• Borderlands and identity formations
• Overlapping timelines and geographies, complicating a chronological approach
• Maritime history
• Multiple perspectives (ex: Aleut hunters)
• Cross-cultural relations between indigenous people of the Asia Pacific region and residents of the Atlantic world
• Identity formation in the Pacific world
  • Native Hawaiian Studies
  • Native American Studies
  • Pacific Islander Studies
• Explorers
  • Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast
  • Charles Wilkes (1838-1842): Federally financed by US, circumnavigated the globe from the Pacific.
  • Commodore Jones, head of Pacific fleet, who took Monterey in 1842
  • John Ledyard (American colonist), A Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage to the Pacific Ocean (1783)