The history of how Hawaii came to be part of the United States is not, in my opinion, a shining moment in our nation’s history. The Hawaiian archipelago consists of five major islands and a number of smaller islands – including Midway at the extreme northwest. The five major islands and several smaller ones in proximity were united under the great King Kamehameha in 1795. It was not a bloodless unification, but the Kamehameha dynasty was the reigning monarchy of the Hawaiian Kingdom. The Kingdom was formally recognized by the United States in 1846 and as a result of the recognition of Hawaiian independence, the Hawaiian Kingdom entered into treaties with the major nations of the world and established over ninety legations and consulates in multiple seaports and cities.

Europeans had first come across the islands in the late 1700s and by the 1790s was an active destination for American merchants. The arrival of outsiders brought new technologies, goods, diseases, and political dynamics, ultimately leading to Kamehameha’s unification of the islands. One of the key elements of Hawaiian that outsiders quickly encountered was that the land is a gift and not to be owned by individuals. It is a concept that the Hawaiians managed well enough in the normal matters of houses, villages, farms and the such. It was a concept unthinkable to merchants, missionaries, and members of the western business community.

Over the next 100 years more and more outsiders came to the islands. American merchant ships began stopping in Hawaii for supplies, and some sailors jumped ship to live among Hawaiians. The first wave of Americans were the New England missionaries who arrived in 1820. They were soon followed by business men, investors, and all manner of commerce. Plantation agriculture first appeared in Hawaii with the establishment of the first permanent sugar plantation in 1835, marking the start of large-scale commercial sugarcane production that would define the islands’ economy for over a century. It also led to immigration from China and Japan.

Immigration to Hawaii

Between 1852 and 1899, around 46,000 Chinese immigrated to Hawaii. Although many came as laborers for sugar plantations in Hawaii, they concentrated on getting education for their children. When their contracts expired, many decided to remain in Hawaii and opened businesses in areas such as downtown Honolulu’s Chinatown.

In 1868 the first documented group of Japanese immigrants arrived seeking work in Hawaii’s sugarcane and rice fields, though this initial wave was small. The major waves began in 1885 when the first large-scale, government-sponsored group of almost 1,000 Japanese laborers arrived, following King Kalākaua’s diplomatic efforts to secure workers from Japan for the plantations. Following this, many Japanese women arrived as “picture brides,” marrying men they’d only seen in photographs to join the growing immigrant community. In time, the Japanese community was well established in the islands.

All during this period land ownership was a constant source of friction between the native Hawaiians and the outsiders. In 1875, the U.S. considered Hawaii as critical to their national interest in the Pacific region and began discussions with the Hawaiian government about the use of Pearl River Lagoon as a naval base. We know the area as Pearl Harbor.

Imperialism from within

During the summer of 1887, while the Legislature was out of session, a group of Hawaiians (most also U.S. citizens) with land and business interests, essentially hijacked the nation. Under the threat of armed revolt and assasination, King Kalakaua signed what is known as the Bayonet Constitution. This resulted in disenfranchising two-thirds of the native Hawaiians as well as other ethnic groups who had previously held the right to vote but were no longer able to meet the new voting requirements. The new constitution was to the benefit of the white, foreign plantation owners. Of interest to this series is that Asian immigrants were completely shut out and were no longer able to acquire citizenship or vote at all.

The ruling elite almost immediately began to petition the U.S. to annex Hawaii. They sent a delegation to Washington in 1894 seeking annexation, but the new President, Grover Cleveland, opposed annexation and tried to restore the Queen. Spurred by the nationalism aroused by the Spanish-American War, the United States annexed Hawaii in 1898 at the urging of President William McKinley. Hawaii was made a territory in 1900.

Why annex Hawaii?

What were the considerations when the U.S. annexed Hawaii? Perhaps it can best be explained in three arenas: strategic considerations, economic motivations, and political rationale.

The strategic motivations can arguably be seen as an extension of “manifest destiny” extended into the Pacific for access to Asian markets. At the same time, acquiring territories like Florida and Louisiana was crucial to secure borders, control Gulf Coast ports, and prevent European powers from establishing footholds near U.S. territories. In the same light, security and economics merged by establishing Hawaii (Pearl Harbor) and the Philippines as vital naval bases and coaling stations, projecting American power into the Pacific and challenging European empires. This was also part of the political calculus

Economic motivations were basic: American industry needed raw materials and new consumers, making territories rich in resources or with potential trade routes in the Pacific highly valuable. This also gave added impetus to the development of west coast ports such as San Francisco, Los Angeles and Portland. 

From a distance

By the 1880s Hawaii had become strategically and demographically important to Japan as Japanese laborers were the single largest ethnic group on the islands with many under state-supervised emigration contracts. Hawaii was also strategically important sitting astride Pacific sea lanes. Japanese naval planners viewed it as vital to Pacific security. Hawaii also had a symbolic importance to the Japanese. It was an independent non-Western monarchy, like Japan. Thus, its fate was watched closely as a test of whether non-Western states could survive. Thus Hawaii was both a practical concern (citizens, trade, security) and a symbolic mirror of Japan’s own vulnerability.

After the Hawaiian coup, Japan formally protested, viewing the coup as an illegal seizure of power and a threat to Japanese residents’ rights. The protests focused on unequal treatment of Japanese subjects as agreed to under international law. Japan dispatched the warship Naniwa to Honolulu (1887) to signal their protest in sign of deliberate restraint as there was no attempt to restore royal authority.

Despite outrage in some Japanese newspapers and among naval officers Japan feared diplomatic isolation and being labeled an “uncivilized” power – and mostly conflict with the United States and Britain. Many Japanese commentators concluded: “Even civilized, independent states can be destroyed if they lack power.”  This sentiment was to come to a fuller fruition in the years to come. 

When the U.S. annexed Hawaii, there were diplomatic objections similar to the ones a decade earlier, but there was also a pragmatic realism: Hawaii was firmly within the U.S. sphere. At the same time Japan was between wars in their own home region. The First Sino-Japanese War had just concluded and other war clouds were gathering for possible conflict with Russia. Japan protested symbolically but accepted the new reality.

Lesson learned

The events in Hawaii had a tremendous influence on the Japanese strategic mindset. The elites and military of Japan drew these lessons:

• International law follows power
• Legal sovereignty offers no protection without force.
• Western powers will not tolerate non-Western autonomy in strategic zones
• Emigration creates strategic vulnerability
• Japan must secure its own buffers and so Korea and Manchuria became increasingly urgent.

Japan responded to the Hawaiian crisis with protest and symbolic force but no intervention, and it accepted U.S. annexation as unavoidable—drawing from Hawaiʻi the sobering lesson that even “civilized” non-Western states could not survive without overwhelming power, a conclusion that hardened Japan’s later imperial strategy.

Image credit: various photographs from Naval Aviation Museum, National World War II Museum, and US Navy Archives.

In the previous post we considered Japan’s 19th century transition from the Tokugawa Shogunate to the Meiji Restoration which transformed the nation of Japan to an outward facing nation, under the Imperial guidance of the divine Emperor, with a moral obligation to bring order and harmony to the Asian world in the face of western colonial power.

In this post, we need to “back up” and catch up with U.S. activities since the time of Admiral Perry’s 1853 visit to Tokyo Bay. In a previous post we noted that making the journey to China and maintaining the U.S. presence there also required a network of ports extending across the Pacific Ocean, and as such, the China trade soon drove the United States to expand its presence throughout the Pacific region.  At its root, Perry’s primary mission was to establish a foothold that would strengthen the U.S. position for trade and diplomacy in the region. In other words, the United States opened relations with Japan in large part to enhance its status in China. On a smaller scale, as U.S. merchants began to stop at many of the Pacific Islands to replenish supplies and acquire goods to trade with Chinese merchants, the U.S. Government appointed consuls to several of these places. For example, consulates were established in Fiji in 1844, Samoa in 1856, and the Marshall Islands in 1881. 

There was a lot going on in the period 1889-1900. I will mention some of the key events in order to keep them in context – and then go on to mention some later events with the United States – before returning the series to a more orderly arrangement.

• The First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895)
• The U.S. annexation of Hawaii in 1898
• The defeat of Spain in the the Spanish-American War of 1898

The China trade led to a growing U.S. presence in Hawaii that grew out of the need for a substantial base of maritime operations in the Pacific to support U.S. interests in China. Ultimately this need became so great, and the U.S. presence so large, that the United States annexed the islands in 1898. We will cover the annexation of Hawaii in its own post.

Following the defeat of Spain in the Spanish-American War of 1898, the United States acquired overseas colonies in the Caribbean and the Pacific. The two key Pacific acquisitions were the Philippines, Wake Island, and Guam in the Mariana Islands. Overnight the U.S. was solidly ensconced in the Central Pacific. 

In one year the U.S. was in possession of locales that would be critical places in the Asia-Pacific War: Hawaii, Wake Island, Guam, and the Philippines. U.S. possession of Guam and the Philippines would be of principle concern for Japan.

In its new status as a global power, the United States pursued a series of policies designed to protect American territories and aggressively expand its international commercial interests. These policies included the promotion of the “Open Door” policy in China and the attachment of the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine that formally announced the intention to use military force to defend the Western Hemisphere against European incursions. It was in this same period that President Theodore Roosevelt oversaw the construction of the Panama Canal, which would have profound economic implications for American trade and ease the movement of merchant and military shipping between Atlantic and Pacific regions. In just over a decade, the United States had redefined its national and international interests to include a large overseas military presence, overseas possessions, and direct engagement in setting priorities in international affairs.

It is noteworthy that from 1909 to 1913, President William Howard Taft and Secretary of State Knox followed a foreign policy characterized as “dollar diplomacy.” Taft shared the view held by Knox, a corporate lawyer who had founded the giant conglomerate U.S. Steel, that the goal of diplomacy was to create stability and order abroad that would best promote American commercial interests. Knox felt that not only was the goal of diplomacy to improve financial opportunities, but also to use private capital to further U.S. interests overseas. “Dollar diplomacy” was evident in extensive U.S. interventions in the Caribbean and Central America, especially in measures undertaken to safeguard American financial interests in the region. In China, Knox secured the entry of an American banking conglomerate, headed by J.P. Morgan, into a European-financed consortium financing the construction of a railway from Huguang to Canton. In spite of successes, “dollar diplomacy” failed to counteract economic instability and the tide of revolution in places like Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and China. But the idea reflects the underlying principle: diplomacy, military capability, and business were at the root of America’s international interests.

Image credit: various photographs from Naval Aviation Museum, National World War II Museum, and US Navy Archives. Source credit: “Dollar Diplomacy, 1909–1913” | Office of the Historian, Department of State.