Plantation Proprietors Pressed the U.S. Government to Secure More Than 100 Pacific Islands from 1855 to 1900

During the mid-19th century the U.S. military seized Pacific Islanders and African Americans or otherwise enticed them to isolated and mostly empty Pacific atolls so they could toil on estates harvesting guano for fertilizer and copra for oil.

The estate owners amassed great fortunes and urged the U.S. government to send armed forces to open fresh commercial prospects for them throughout the Asia-Pacific.

The imported workers faced grim realities: supervisors were harsh, the sun burned fiercely, supplies of water and food ran short, rodents swarmed, wages stayed low, and the ammonia-laden air made breathing nearly impossible.

Conditions were so severe that a visiting American sailor asked how any person could remain in such surroundings without losing their mind.

The sailor’s remarks appear in Miles M. Evers and Eric Grynaviski’s volume The Price of Empire: American Entrepreneurs and the Origins of America’s First Pacific Empire.

Evers teaches political science at the University of Connecticut while Grynaviski teaches the same subject at George Washington University.

Standard histories of U.S. expansion in the Asia-Pacific usually begin with the 1898-1902 Spanish-American conflict over the Philippines, yet Evers and Grynaviski demonstrate that America built a Pacific domain fifty years earlier by claiming American Samoa and more than one hundred other islands, among them Midway, which later became a pivotal site in the Pacific War.

The authors trace U.S. growth to surges in commodity demand and to lobbying by business figures who wanted plantations and other ventures on newly acquired American soil.

A chief worry was that rival powers might seize the islands and favor their own merchants.

The State Department depended on these entrepreneurs for information about the islands, which were portrayed as fresh El Dorados.

The 1856 Guano Act declared that any uninhabited and unclaimed island bearing guano deposits discovered by an American citizen could, at the President’s discretion, be regarded as belonging to the United States.

Belonging meant the islands fell under U.S. statutes and that presidents could keep them for whatever period they chose.

Alfred J. Benson headed the pro-expansion guano lobby; he was a leading shipping merchant with holdings in New York and Brooklyn, took part in the California gold rush, and secretly offered to buy the Hawaiian kingdom to profit from trade with San Francisco.

According to Evers and Grynaviski, Benson was a swindler with a record of cheating the government on ventures that never appeared; once he tried to dodge arrest after filing false reports with the New York Police Department.

The Samoa lobby in Washington was led by H.J. Moors, a businessman drawn by high copra prices; copra is the dried meat of the coconut that yields oil and cattle feed.

Moors began as an overseer on a British estate around 1878 and was dismissed for his brutality toward laborers.

He later backed a revolt against the local authorities headed by Mata’afa, who declared himself king after taking Apia, Samoa’s capital.

Moors sought American intervention to break a rising German hold on copra output; Germany kept Apia after Samoa was divided.

American Samoa remains a U.S. territory, yet its residents do not receive American citizenship.

The authors’ final chapter examines the U.S. annexation of Hawaii after a coup against Polynesian Queen Liliuokalani backed by sugar planters and other American settlers.

Henry A.P. Carter led the pro-expansion lobby; his father had arrived in Hawaii seeking rising sandalwood prices. Carter helped pass an 1875 reciprocity treaty that granted advantages to U.S. investors and placed Hawaii under American political sway.

Queen Liliuokalani became a target for regime change because she followed King Kamehameha V in seeking to limit American political power in Hawaii.

Thoroughly researched and persuasive in its conclusions, the book by Evers and Grynaviski reveals that commercial interests shaped the American empire in the Pacific from its very start.

Today that empire operates independently, with the United States maintaining dozens of military bases that ring China. The drive for profit and exploitative labor practices remain prominent.

Miles M. Evers and Eric Grynaviski, The Price of Empire: American Entrepreneurs and the Origins of America’s First Pacific Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2024), 48, 70.
Evers and Grynaviski, The Price of Empire, 48.
Evers and Grynaviski, The Price of Empire, 60.
Evers and Grynaviski, The Price of Empire, 97.
Evers and Grynaviski, The Price of Empire, 110.

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Plantation Proprietors Pressed the U.S. Government to Secure More Than 100 Pacific Islands from 1855 to 1900

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