Debt and the Transnationalization of Hawai'i

The article argues that beginning in the 1820s, the U.S. engaged in a militarized diplomacy that ensured ongoing Hawaiian willingness to participate in international trade, managing the terms of Hawaiian sovereignty so as to promote the expansion of American capitalism. In this dynamic, a particular vision of Hawaiian identity is recognized that facilitates U.S. transpacific exchange, constructing and enforcing a version of independence that allows Hawai'i to serve as a placeholder in globalizing trade networks. In October 1826, Commander Thomas ap Catesby Jones arrived in Hawai'i, and by December, he had negotiated two agreements: one guaranteeing Americans' right to trade in Hawai'i and securing most favored nation status for the U.S.; and the other for Hawaiians to gather sandalwood and assorted other items to pay back debts Hawaiian chiefs supposedly owed to U.S. merchants. This mission comes to serve as precedent not only for later visits by U.S. war-ships, but also for threats of military intervention by both Great Britain and France. In this context, though, what precisely does "debt" mean? Looking carefully at the documents surrounding Jones's mission and situating them within an analysis of the dynamics of Hawaiian political-economy, the article examines the presuppositions about international trade and national sovereignty at work in the institutionalized American narration of Hawaiian "debt."

As practiced in the late-twentieth-century, control exerted through apparently non-coercive relations of debt has been called "neocolonialism." While appearing as a self-evident empirical tabulation, debt functions as a mechanism for materially reconstituting the domestic policy of "debtor" nations in ways that increase foreign influence and investment, seeking to circumscribe radically the options available to such countries for autonomous policy-setting and to make their natural, human, and business resources available for expropriation. The kind of generic national subjectivity produced in this dialectic of formal independence and foreign economic manipulation usefully can be described as debt sovereignty. Such a dynamic is not merely a contemporary phenomenon, instead appearing in U.S-Hawaiian relations as early as the 1820s. U.S. articulations of debt redefine Hawaiian political identity in ways that stabilize its multidimensional role as a pivot in U.S. commercial geographies, particularly the China trade. The article further argues that more than merely being a prelude to conquest, this political and economic intervention is organized around markedly different ideological and institutional structures than the annexation at the end of the nineteenth century and needs to be treated as a distinct imperial project.