Agricultural expertise, race, and economic development: small producer ideology and settler colonialism in the Territory of Hawaiʻi, 1900–1917

ABSTRACT

This essay explores the technical practices of economic development in early twentieth-century Hawaiʻi, where agrarianism, race, and competing colonialisms shaped agricultural experts’ perceptions of the islands’ future. Technical activities in the form of horticultural experiments aimed at introducing new crops, research on soil and fertilizers, work on plant diseases and insect pests, shipping experiments and marketing efforts, analytical testing services, and outreach to farming communities constituted the key means by which the United States Department of Agriculture’s Hawaii Agricultural Experiment Station pushed for fundamental economic and social transformations in the Territory of Hawaii. A populist anti-imperialist ideology drove the experiment station’s agenda, in an explicitly stated project of Americanization that sought to break Hawaiian dependence on sugar and plantation agriculture, expand small farming, and remake the islands’ racial order through white settlement from the mainland. Ultimately, the USDA’s brand of settler colonialism failed to supplant the existing plantation economy.

KEYWORDS:

• Agriculture
• Hawaiʻi
• race
• development
• populist anti-imperialism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Foster, Projections of Power, 8–9.

2. On the structure of the sugar industry in Hawaiʻi and its unusual degree of centralization and vertical integration as compared to sugar producers elsewhere in the world from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, see MacLennan, Sovereign Sugar, ch. 2, esp. 38–41 and 44–50.

3. With respect to the transformation of American agriculture that was already taking place in the US west by the late nineteenth century, Carey McWilliams described the transition from Mexican to US rule in California and how it produced highly concentrated holdings of agricultural land in the last third of the nineteenth century. Consequently, as he noted in a classic work of investigative journalism from the 1930s, ‘California more than once has been referred to as a colonial empire’. McWilliams, Factories in the Field, ch. 2, quotation on 21. This point reinforces Megan Black’s more recent description of US continental expansion and the development of mineral resources in the nineteenth-century west as a settler colonial project. Black, The Global Interior, ch. 1.

4. Harry S. Truman, Inaugural Address, 20 January 1949, text available via the American Presidency Project: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=13282 (October 2018).

5. Owen, “The United Nations Program of Technical Assistance,” 109.

6. See, for example, “Technical Assistance Contracts Increase”; “New Technical Assistance Agreements”; and “American Technical Assistance Contracts.”

7. Meng, “China Goes to Geneva for Technical Assistance in Reconstruction Program,” 362–9.

8. On the latter set of meanings, see, for example, Letter from George J. H. Evatt, “Technical Assistance for Branch Secretaries”; and Stull, “The Need of Technical Assistance in the Brick Industry.” In a new age of industrial science and ever more sophisticated mass production techniques, Stull emphasized the need for research laboratories and other mechanisms for cooperative research that could keep the brick industry on the technological cutting edge.

9. For Native Hawaiian usages, I have followed J. Kēhaulani Kauanui’s explanation: Kanaka Maoli indicates either the singular or the Native Hawaiian people as a whole (literally, “real or true people”), whereas the use of the macron in Kānaka Maoli “denotes a countable plural.” Kauanui, Hawaiian Blood, xi–xii. David Chang’s magisterial study, The World and All the Things Upon It, conveys the wealth of geographical understanding that defined Kanaka Maoli engagement with the world both before and after 1778. Chang’s close renderings of Kānaka Maoli travels include an important revisionist account of ‘Ōpūkaha’ia (Henry Obookiah) that emphasizes his Native Hawaiian religious motivations, rather than his conversion to Christianity. Chang, 80–92. For a different approach to missionary history in the islands, Sarah Vowell has brought the world of New England missionaries and their relationships with Kānaka Maoli to life with the wry perspicacity that is her hallmark. See Vowell, Unfamiliar Fishes.

10. On the adoption of constitutional government and private land ownership as means to defend Hawaiian sovereignty, see MacLennan, Sovereign Sugar, 55–57, 61. The Māhele’s role as a hedge against annexation is discussed in Banner, “Preparing to Be Colonized.” On Hawaiʻi-US relations in the early 1840s, see Weeks, The New Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, 238–39, although Weeks arguably overestimates the extent to which Tyler’s response compromised Hawaiian sovereignty and rendered the islands a “de facto protectorate” of the United States.

11. Banner, “Preparing to Be Colonized,” 279–80.

12. MacLennan, Sovereign Sugar, 62–63, 83 (quotation on 63).

13. Ibid., 62.

14. Consult MacLennan, Sovereign Sugar, 68–69, on missionaries’ acquisition of land. On the impact of the Reciprocity Treaty of 1876, see Jung, Reworking Race, 12. Information on the racial composition of Hawaiʻi’s plantation workers is drawn from Jung, ch. 3, esp. 68, 72, and 78. Filipino labor migration came later, after the US acquisition of the Philippines in the War of 1898. Jung, 86–87.

15. MacLennan, Sovereign Sugar, 65–76; and Okihiro, Pineapple Culture, 120–24.

16. For the text of the Hatch Act, see Public Laws of the United States of America [1887], 440–2, also commonly cited as 24 Stat. L. 440. On the history of the Hatch Act and the competing farming constituencies behind it, see Marcus, Agricultural Science and the Quest for Legitimacy. Experiment stations’ ideological commitment to yeomanry is discussed in Rosenberg, “Unintended Consequences,” esp. 188–90. Although the essay is somewhat dated in its assumption of too strong a conflict between stations’ regular scientific work and a German-inspired, professionalized drive for pure science, it adeptly captures experiment stations’ organizational mission in support of small farmers. Lou Ferleger, in a later publication, captured more precisely the tensions between practical scientific work that addressed farmers’ immediate needs and the desires of the OES to develop a more robust research agenda: Ferleger, “Uplifting American Agriculture,” esp. 18–19 and 21. On the cultivation of political constituencies among farm communities as the key to USDA bureaus’ success, see Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy, chs. 6–9.

17. Merleaux, Sugar and Civilization, ch. 1, quotation on 34.

18. Smith’s professional background has been gleaned from Cattell, ed., American Men of Science, 298.

19. Jared G. Smith to A. C. True, 15 July 1901, Box 39, Folder “2 of 3 Hawaii,” Records of the Office of Experiment Stations, General Records, General Correspondence and Other Records Concerning Insular Stations, 1897–1937, National Archives (US), College Park, MD. Collection cited hereafter as OES Records. See also Jared G. Smith to A. C. True, 14 July 1901, Box 39, Folder “2 of 3 Hawaii,” RG 164, OES Records.

20. Jared G. Smith to A. C. True, “Estimates for 1904,” 9 July 1902, Box 40, Folder “1 of 4 Hawaii 1901–02,” OES Records. See also Jared G. Smith to W. H. Evans, 17 October 1904, Box 43, Folder “3 of 4 Hawaii,” OES Records. In an era obsessed with the closing of the frontier in the American west and its threat to the United States’ destined path of national greatness, Smith echoed countless commentators who looked across the Pacific for new economic opportunities that could stave off stagnation and ruinous class conflict within US borders. On trans-Pacific trade, naval strategy, and the US foreign policy imagination at the turn of the century, see, for a classic account, LaFeber, The New Empire.

21. For additional information on this point, see, for example, Jared G. Smith to A. C. True, 22 June 1901, 24 June 1901, 26 June 1901, and 16 July 1901, all in Box 39, Folder “2 of 3 Hawaii,” OES Records; Jared G. Smith to A. C. True, 8 October 1901, Box 40, Folder “4 of 4 Hawaii 1901–02,” OES Records; Jared G. Smith to A. C. True, 4 April 1903, Box 41, Folder “1 of 4 Hawaii 1902–03,” OES Records; Jared G. Smith to A. C. True, 22 March 1904, Box 42, Folder “2 of 4 Hawaii,” OES Records; Jared G. Smith to A. C. True, 8 April 1904 and 10 April 1904, Box 42, Folder “1 of 4 Hawaii,” OES Records; and Jared G. Smith to Walter H. Evans, 17 January 1905 and 21 February 1905, Box 43, Folder “2 of 4 Hawaii,” OES Records.

22. For typical statements of the USDA’s dedication to the diversification of agriculture in Hawaiʻi, see, for example, W. H. Evans to Jared G. Smith, 14 December 1906, Box 45, Folder “2 of 4 Hawaii,” OES Records; and W. H. Evans to J. M. Westgate, 23 April 1915, Box 50, Folder “Hawaii 2 of 4,” OES Records.

23. For Wilcox’s professional background, see Cattell and Brimhall, eds., American Men of Science, 3^rd ed., 739.

24. Ibid., 211.

25. E. V. Wilcox to W. H. Evans, 30 October 1909, Box 47, Folder “3 of 3 Hawaii 1909–11,” OES Records.

26. W. H. Evans to E. V. Wilcox, 12 November 1909, Box 47, Folder “3 of 3 Hawaii 1909–11,” OES Records.

27. For example, in August 1901, he requested the USDA to send ‘some of the best varieties of American Garden Seeds for the use of this station,’ especially ‘tomatoes, lettuce, radishes, celery[,] cabbage, turnips, beets, beans, cauliflower, sweet corn, muskmelons, and Irish potatoes’. Jared G. Smith to A. C. True, 14 August 1901, Box 39, Folder “1 of 3 Hawaii,” OES Records. Early work at the station focused on potato and taro diseases, which were devastating yields of both crops. See USDA, Annual Report of the Hawaii Agricultural Experiment Station for 1901, 374–76; and USDA, Annual Report of the Hawaii Agricultural Experiment Station for 1902, 310–13.

28. USDA, Annual Report of the Hawaii Agricultural Experiment Station for 1901, 365–66, quotation on 366.

29. Jared G. Smith to A. C. True, 17 May 1901, Box 39, Folder “3 of 3 Hawaii,” OES Records.

30. Jared G. Smith to A. C. True, 28 May 1901, Box 39, Folder “2 of 3 Hawaii,” OES Records. See also Jared G. Smith to A. C. True, 29 April 1901, Box 39, “Folder 3 of 3 Hawaii,” OES Records.

31. USDA, Annual Report of the Hawaii Agricultural Experiment Station for 1902, 318–21 (quotation on 318); USDA, Report on Agricultural Investigations in Hawaii, 1905, 63. On tropicality and the USDA’s enthusiasm for promoting the cultivation of tropical fruits in Florida, the arid Southwest, and in the United States’ insular possessions, see Pauly, Biologists and the Promise of American Life, 81–83.

32. USDA, Annual Report of the Hawaii Agricultural Experiment Station, 1904, 381. The station carried out similar experiments in subsequent years, such as the shipping of avocados to New York City via cold storage with various methods of packing in the summer of 1904 (USDA, Report on Agricultural Investigations in Hawaii, 1905, 60–61), or the avocados sent to Guam via Army transport the following year (HAES, Annual Report of the Hawaii Agricultural Experiment Station for 1906, 60–61).

33. HAES, Annual Report of the Hawaii Agricultural Experiment Station for 1907, 16. See also J. E. Higgins to Walter H. Evans, 15 May 1906, Box 45, Folder “1 of 4 Hawaii,” OES Records.

34. USDA, Annual Report of the Hawaii Agricultural Experiment Station for 1903, 402–3.

35. Ibid., 404. See also Jared G. Smith to A. C. True, 28 May 1901, Box 39, Folder “2 of 3 Hawaii,” OES Records.

36. Jared G. Smith to A. C. True, 29 April 1901, Box 39, “Folder 3 of 3 Hawaii,” OES Records (sisal, Manila hemp); USDA, Annual Report of the Hawaii Agricultural Experiment Station for 1902, 314–22 (for discussion of castor beans, cassava starch, sisal, olonā, and another fiber plant that Smith referred to as malina, or Furcraea gigantea); USDA, Annual Report of the Hawaii Agricultural Experiment Station for 1903, 403–4 (sisal), 404–5 (castor beans), 412 (Manila hemp); E. V. Wilcox to W. H. Evans, 20[?] September 1912, Box 48, Folder “2 of 4 Hawaii,” OES Records and E. V. Wilcox to W. H. Evans, 23 May 1913, Box 48, Folder “1 of 4 Hawaii,” OES Records (kukui nut oil); USDA, Report on Agricultural Investigations in Hawaii, 1905, 25 (on cassava starch), and 62 (Manila hemp).

37. HAES, Annual Report of the Hawaii Agricultural Experiment Station for 1906, 80.

38. USDA, Report on Agricultural Investigations in Hawaii, 1905, 22–23; HAES, Annual Report of the Hawaii Agricultural Experiment Station for 1907, 18–21; Jared G. Smith to Walter H. Evans, 18 May 1907, and Jared G. Smith to Walter H. Evans, 29 May 1907, both in Box 46, Folder “4 of 4 Hawaii,” OES Records; Jared G. Smith to A. C. True, 8 June 1908, Box 46, Folder “1 of 4 Hawaii,” OES Records; E. V. Wilcox to C. E. Johnston, 15 September 1908, Box 47, Folder “4 of 4 Hawaii 1908–09,” OES Records; W. H. Evans to E. V. Wilcox, 9 April 1909 and E. V. Wilcox to Walter H. Evans, 22 April 1909, both in Box 47, Folder “3 of 4 Hawaii 1908–09,” OES Records. For additional evaluations of the HAES’ rubber samples, see H. W. Wiley to Walter H. Evans, 22 July 1909 and W. H. Evans to E. V. Wilcox, 30 July 1909, both in Box 47, Folder “2 of 4 Hawaii 1908–09,” OES Records; and W. H. Evans to E. V. Wilcox, 8 April 1910, Box 47, Folder “3 of 3 Hawaii 1909–11,” OES Records.

39. For example, in January 1906, Smith wrote triumphantly to Walter H. Evans that ‘a wealthy German cigar manufacturer’ had stopped by the station, examined tobacco samples on hand, and declared the station’s Sumatra tobacco worthy of the Amsterdam market and the German trade. Jared G. Smith to Walter H. Evans, 2 January 1906, Box 44, Folder “1 of 4 Hawaii,” OES Records. Poor sample quality due either to mold or improper curing, however, meant that the station’s tobacco generally fared poorly when sent to cigar manufacturers on the mainland for evaluation. See, for example, Joseph J. Schaefer to US Department of Agriculture, 3 May 1907, M. Kemper & Sons to Walter H. Evans, 6 May 1907, both in Box 46, Folder “4 of 4 Hawaii,” OES Records; and The Waldorf-Astoria Segar Co. to W. H. Evans, 17 April 1908, Otto Eisenlehr & Bros., 1 May 1908, and Benito Rovira Company to Walter H. Evans, 12 May 1908, all in Box 46, Folder “1 of 4 Hawaii,” OES Records.

40. Gudmundson, “Peasant, Farmer, Proletarian.”

41. On agricultural officials’ early hopes for smallholder coffee holdings in Hawaiʻi, consult USDA, Annual Report of the Hawaii Agricultural Experiment Station for 1901, 366–73.

42. J. M. Westgate to W. H. Evans, 2 April 1915, Box 50, Folder “Hawaii 3 of 4,” OES Records.

43. J. M. Westgate, “Estimates for Fiscal Year 1917, Appendix F,” 23 July 1915, Box 51, Folder “Hawaii 3 of 3,” OES Records. Westgate came from rural upstate New York, and he earned an undergraduate degree at Kansas State University before working as an assistant botanist at Kansas State. He then undertook graduate study at the University of Chicago before joining the USDA in 1903, where he conducted research on sand binding and on alfalfa and clover in the department’s Office of Agrostology before taking over the HAES in 1915. J. Cattell and Brimhall, eds., American Men of Science, 3^rd ed., 729.

44. The Gros Michel dominated the global banana trade from the 1890s until the 1950s. The spread of Fusarium oxysporum, the fungal source of what became known colloquially as Panama disease, destroyed the variety’s viability as a commercial product. The Panama-resistant Cavendish banana replaced the Gros Michel and is the variety sold in American supermarkets today, but a new, rapidly spreading strain of F. oxysporum is now threatening Cavendish production worldwide. Bananas’ propagation as clones and their production through monoculture on large plantations renders them highly vulnerable to infection. Soluri, Banana Cultures, 52–57, 178–83; Peed, “We Have No Bananas”; and Dunn, “Humans Made the Banana Perfect.”

45. Jared G. Smith to A. C. True, 20 March 1905, Box 43, Folder “1 of 4 Hawaii,” OES Records.

46. J. E. Higgins to Walter H. Evans, 20 December 1910, Box 47, Folder “1 of 3 Hawaii 1909–11”; J. E. Higgins to Water H. Evans, 20 July 1911, Box 48, Folder “1 of 4 Hawaii”; E. V. Wilcox to Walter H. Evans, 24 January 1912, Box 48, “Folder 3 of 4 Hawaii”; A. T. Longley, Superintendent, Marketing Division, “Memo regarding visit of Messrs. Pearson and Anderson to the Islands, Jan. 11^th to 15^th [1916],” Box 51, Folder “Hawaii 1 of 3”; W. H. Evans to J. E. Higgins, 21 December 1917, Box 54, Folder “Hawaii 1 of 4,” all in OES Records.

47. Jung, Reworking Race, 48.

48. Quoted in USDA, Annual Report of the Hawaii Agricultural Experiment Station for 1902, 319. On Clark’s background, see Hawkins, A Pacific Industry, 16.

49. USDA, Annual Report of the Hawaii Agricultural Experiment Station for 1903, 406; Jared G. Smith to Walter H. Evans, 26 December 1907, Box 46, Folder “3 of 4 Hawaii,” OES Records; HAES, Annual Report of the Hawaii Agricultural Experiment Station for 1907, 57; Jared G. Smith to Walter H. Evans, 10 February 1908, Box 46, Folder “2 of 4 Hawaii,” OES Records; Jared G. Smith to A. C. True, 8 June 1908, Box 46, Folder “1 of 4 Hawaii,” OES Records; E. V. Wilcox to E. W. Allen, 4 August 1909, Box 47, Folder “4 of 4 Hawaii,” OES Records (for the quotation).

50. HAES, Annual Report of the Hawaii Agricultural Experiment Station for 1909, 58–63 (soil chemistry); E. V. Wilcox to Walter H. Evans, 15 January 1909, Box 47, Folder “4 of 4 Hawaii 1908–09,” OES Records (initial manganese research); E. V. Wilcox to J. M. Westgate, 17 April 1916, Box 52, Folder “Hawaii 4 of 4,” OES Records (chlorosis); M. O. Johnson to P. L. Gile, 8 August 1916, Box 52, “Hawaii 2 of 4,” OES Records (chlorosis); W. H. Evans to J. M. Westgate, 13 October 1916, Box 52, Folder “Hawaii 1 of 4,” OES Records (chlorosis); W. H. Evans to J. E. Higgins, 13 October 1911, Box 48, “Folder 1 of 4 Hawaii,” OES Records (fumigation experiments); E. V. Wilcox to W. H. Evans, 23 May 1913, Box 48, Folder “1 of 4 Hawaii,” OES Records (food chemistry).

51. Jung, Reworking Race, 48–49; and Okihiro, Pineapple Culture, 137 (including the quotation).

52. J. M. Westgate to W. H. Evans, 10 April 1915, Box 50, Folder “Hawaii 2 of 4,” OES Records.

53. A. M. Longley to E. V. Wilcox, 10 May 1915, Box 50, Folder “Hawaii Dec. 1914 – July 1915 1 of 4,” OES Records.

54. A. M. Longley to E. V. Wilcox, 2 July 1915, in Box 50, Folder “Hawaii Dec. 1914 – July 1915 1 of 4,” OES Records.

55. J. M. Westgate to W. H. Evans, 24 August 1915, Box 51, Folder “Hawaii 3 of 3,” OES Records.

56. East Hawaii Cane Planters’ Association, Circular No. 2, “The Real Issue in Hawaii,” February 1915, copy in Box 50, Folder “Hawaii 4 of 4,” OES Records. See also W. H. Evans to J. M. Westgate, 6 October 1916, Box 52, Folder “Hawaii 1 of 4,” OES Records.

57. East Hawaii Cane Planters’ Association, Circular No. 2, “The Real Issue in Hawaii,” February 1915, copy in Box 50, Folder “Hawaii 4 of 4,” OES Records.

58. W. H. Evans to J. M. Westgate, 7 May 1915, Box 50, Folder “Hawaii 2 of 4,” OES Records.

59. J. M. Westgate to W. H. Evans, 12 July 1915, and A. M. Longley, “Proposed Plan for Marketing Hawaiian Pineapples on the Mainland,” n.d., approx. July 1915, both in Box 50, Folder “Hawaii 2 of 4,” OES Records. In an earlier letter, Westgate also described the HAES as ‘the godfather so to speak of so many of the cooperative producers’ societies’. J. M. Westgate to W. H. Evans, 15 February 1915, Box 50, Folder 4 of 4, OES Records.

60. F. G. Krauss to Walter H. Evans, 10 November 1908, Box 47, Folder “2 of 4 Hawaii 1908–09,” OES Records.

61. US Department of Agriculture, The Mediterranean Fruit-Fly, 6–7; “Quarantine of Hawaiian Fruit,” 518, 520.

62. E. V. Wilcox to Walter H. Evans, 26 September 1911, Box 48, Folder “4 of 4 Hawaii,” OES Records.

63. US Department of Agriculture, The Mediterranean Fruit Fly in Hawaii, 82–105.

64. E. V. Wilcox to Walter H. Evans, 16 February 1912, Box 48, Folder “3 of 3 Hawaii,” OES Records.

65. E. V. Wilcox to Walter H. Evans, 9 June 1914, Box 49, Folder “Hawaii 3 of 4,” OES Records.

66. E. V. Wilcox to Walter H. Evans, 14 July 1914, Box 49, Folder “Hawaii 3 of 4,” OES Records.

67. F. G. Krauss to E. V. Wilcox, 18 December 1914, and F. G. Krauss, “Agricultural Projects covering Extension Work in Hawaii under the Smith-Lever Bill, for balance of year ending 30 June 1915,” n.d., both in Box 50, Folder “Hawaii Dec 1914 – July 1915 1 of 4,” OES Records.

68. J. M. Westgate to W. H. Evans, 20 December 1915, and W. H. Evans to J. M. Westgate, 6 January 1916, both in Box 51, Folder “Hawaii 2 of 3,” OES Records.

69. Owen, “Settler Colonization in the Middle East and North Africa”; and Shafir, “Settler Citizenship in the Jewish Colonization of Palestine.”

70. J. M. Westgate to W. H. Evans, 13 January 1916, Box 51, Folder “Hawaii 1 of 3,” OES Records.

71. J. M. Westgate to W. H. Evans, 26 August 1915, and W. H. Evans to J. M. Westgate, 17 September 1915; both in Box 51, Folder “Hawaii 3 of 3,” OES Records. The quotation is from Evans’ letter of 17 September.

72. E. C. Moore to F. G. Krauss, 19 August 1915, Box 51, Folder “Hawaii 3 of 3,” OES Records.

73. C. W. Carpenter, “Office Report … Trip to Maui June 8th. to 10th., 1917,” submitted 11 June 1917, Box 53, Folder “Hawaii 1 of 4,” OES Records; C. W. Carpenter, “Office Report … Trip to Maui, August 6 to 8, 14 to 20, 1917,” Box 54, Folder “Hawaii 3 of 4,” OES Records.

74. Keesing, Hawaiian Homesteading on Molokai, 7, 17.

75. On this point, consult the Introduction of Kauanui, Hawaiian Blood. Tellingly, in a 1937 study of small farming by a professor of agricultural education at the University of Hawaii, the general population figures that he cited from a 1930 census distinguished between the categories of “Hawaiian,” “Caucasian Hawaiian,” and “Asiatic Hawaiian.” Armstrong, A Survey of Small Farming in Hawaii, 17. For a social scientific narrative that identified the threat of Hawaiian extinction with the abandonment of tradition and of “a healthy, open air life on the land,” see Keesing, Hawaiian Homesteading on Molokai, 13–18, quotation on 17. On the myth of Indian extinction and the cultural functions of extinction narratives, consult Jean M. O’Brien’s work on Native peoples in New England: O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees; and O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting.

76. Armstrong, A Survey of Small Farming in Hawaii, 11–12.

77. Ibid., 16. The survey also identified five Portuguese and two Puerto Rican farm operators, but people in these categories did not count as white in the Territory of Hawaii’s racial imagination during this time period.

78. Ibid., 22.

79. For the statistic on the amount of cultivated land dominated by sugar and pineapples, see Coulter, Land Utilization in the Hawaiian Islands, 122.

80. Black, The Global Interior.

81. Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy, chs. 6–9.

82. Wang, “Colonial Crossings,” 202–3.

83. Duara, “Between Empire and Nation.”

84. One should acknowledge that the demographic tragedy of Native Hawaiian depopulation meant that in Hawaiʻi, plantation agriculture also constituted a form of settler colonialism, through its dependence on foreign contract labor. For the most part, however, American policy viewed most of the laboring population, particularly Filipinos, Japanese, and Chinese, as sojourners rather than settlers, and as either subjects or foreigners, and not citizens.