American Economic Expansion and Influence in Hawaii, 1778-1820: a Chapter in Pacific History

Abstract

The Hawaiian Islands are set in the north central portion of the Pacific Ocean. The broad geographic setting of the group is fundamental in the story of white penetration and development, for Hawaiian affairs were often incidental, though integral, in developments in the Pacific. The group is located in the North Pacific just south of the Tropic of Cancer. Significantly, the American coast is just over two thousand miles distant, which, for the Pacific, is not immense. But this distance is unbroken by any islands, while the seas to the south and west are dotted with thousands of islands forming stepping stones to Australia and Asia. Hawaii is geographically the most isolated of the island groups of the Pacific. Often described as central in the Pacific, Hawaii's position is really eccentric, and it was only improving communications with North America that weakened her earlier affiliations with the rest of Polynesia and made her ultimately a detached bit of the American continent. At the same time the Islands were the "Crossroads of the Pacific" and their location astride the trade routes of the northern and central Pacific is one of the most important facts in the historical geography of the Pacific in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.