Hawaii in U.S. Strategy and Politics.

• Author: White, James W.
• Position: 'Pacific Gibraltar: US-Japanese Rivalry Over the Annexation of Hawaii, 1885-1898' - Book review

Hawaii in U.S. Strategy and Politics

Reviewed by James W. White

William Michael Morgan, Pacific Gibraltar: USJapanese Rivalry Over the Annexation of Hawaii, 1885-1898. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, ISBN 978-1-59114-529-5, 2011, 330 pp., $34.95.

In this book, William Morgan offers a plausible, readable analysis of the annexation of Hawaii by the United States in 1898. He begins by noting the stunning strategic position of the archipelago: no other spot in the world dominates such a vast space so absolutely, and in the late 19th century age of steam (and consequent importance of coaling stations), US control of the islands (and especially Pearl Harbor) made the American west coast (and later the Panama Canal) essentially impervious to attack. Still, there was nothing inevitable about annexation, and Morgan addresses--successfully, in my view--both both the causation and the timing thereof. Morgan's analysis proceeds on three levels: the global--economics, imperialist designs, technological change, disease, and population movement all played a role--the US national, including strategic thought, trade policy, and ideology; and the local Hawaiian, featuring racial and political conflict. Three themes run throughout the analysis: the overall primacy of geostrategic factors, the conflicts between native Hawaiians, Asians, and whites; and American rivalry with a rising Japan.

In chapters 1-4 Morgan sets the stage. In the century after Captain Cook's arrival in 1778 three trends dominated: the horrific decline of the native population in the face of imported disease (the native population declined by perhaps 90%, to less than one-fifth of the total); the gradual emergence of sugar as the core of the economy, which entailed the rising role and desire for power of the white grower stratum and its allies; and the rapid growth of the immigrant Japanese labor force until, by the 1890s, it constituted a non-citizen, disenfranchised plurality of the total population. By the 1880s a tense status quo had emerged: a limited native monarchy in acute tension with much of the white population, a subordinate Japanese population, growing but regulated by Hawaiian-Japanese agreement, and a predominant role for the US, which would brook no foreign interference, in Hawaiian foreign affairs.

Chapters 5-9 trace in great detail--sometimes day by day--domestic Hawaiian politics in the 1880s and early 1890s, culminating in the deposition of the Queen in an 1893...