Book Review: Pacific Gibraltar – William Michael Morgan
Ford, G. (2012). Pacific Gibraltar by William Michael Morgan, Asian Review of Books, 1 March.
Despite the title, this is a history of Hawaii in the run up to the overthrow of the monarchy by U.S. ‘colonizers’ in 1893 through to Hawaii’s annexation by the United States in 1898. Morgan is currently a professor of strategic studies at the Marine Corps War College and previously served with the State Department including time in Tokyo. His revisionist thesis is to claim the annexation was less due to the exigencies of the Spanish American War of 1898—Morgan claims the traditionally accepted motivation—and more to the fears of a Japanese creeping takeover of the islands with Tokyo’s demands for Japanese suffrage.
The back story is important. When Captain Cook discovered the “Sandwich Islands” in 1778, they were the most isolated population in the world in time and space. Consequently, natives had no natural immunity from disease. Cook’s sailors and subsequent visitors introduced virtually every disease known to man and wave after wave of epidemics swept through the hapless islanders
decimating their number time and time again. In a century, the native population withered from a total of around half a million to less than forty thousand.
Hawaii was ideal for growing sugar cane. After the 1876 Reciprocity Treaty with Washington that allowed the duty-free entry of sugar into the US, the industry took off. It became the world’s most productive with technical innovation in process and product, with new varieties, irrigation systems and machinery doubling the yield. But it was labor-intensive and its very success demanded increasing volumes of labor. The native Hawaiians were too few, so there was a massive migration from Portugal and China. The trouble is the Portuguese were expensive and didn’t like the field work while the Chinese frightened the white settler community as they soared to more than 10% of the islands population. By 1884, Chinese were only allowed entry with travel documents and the Hawaiian Consulate in Hong Kong stopped issuing them. The answer was a sweetheart deal with the Government of Japan that shipped thousands of impoverished Japanese farmers to Hawaii supposedly on temporary contracts.
Yet as the producers labored in the fields, the increasingly wealthy plantation owners sought commensurate political power. They and the other whites squeezed more and more concessions out of the Hawaiian monarchy. In 1887, King Kalakaua reluctantly accepted the Bayonet Constitution—named after the manner of its imposition—that limited Royal power. After his death in 1891, his surfing sister Lili’uokalani became Queen. She was determined to push back and regain power for herself and the native Hawaiians. When she announced a new Constitution that did exactly that, she was promptly overthrown by supporters of the Hawaiian League, composed of hundreds of Americans and Europeans who supported paramilitary action “to protect the white community against arbitrary or oppressive action of the Government.”
After her overthrow, U.S. President Grover Cleveland initially disavowed the rebels and ordered the Queen’s restoration. Washington’s entreaties were ignored as the rebels were confident no U.S. Government would fire on its own citizens to restore native rule. The plotters propagated a new constitution that restricted the franchise with property and income requirements to such an extent that native Hawaiian participation fell by 90% compared to 25% for other voters. It also excluded all Asians. Tokyo had argued that the Japanese residents in Hawaii were entitled under the 1871 Hawaii-Japan Treaty the same privileges as other nations.
Morgan is a good writer and weaves the various strands of domestic and international politics, great power intrigues and military evolution together well. He certainly undermines the orthodox view of the annexation. Hawaii in the war had voluntarily served the U.S. Navy and the Spanish were already well-beaten after the battle of Manila Bay considerably prior to annexation. But he doesn’t convince with his alternative explanation. All Tokyo was demanding was equal treatment for its nationals, not universal suffrage. This would have posed no problem for Hawaii’s xenophobic rebels as barely a dozen or so Japanese would have met the new franchise conditions. Morgan forgets the domestic context in Japan. The Meiji Constitution had extended the franchise in 1890 to barely 1% of the population. Tokyo’s argument, was discrimination rather than democracy.
Pacific Gibraltar hints at the conjunction of forces that saw Washington seize Pearl Harbor. In 1890—the year Alfred Mahan published The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783, arguing effectively that Hawaii’s remoteness gave it an unparalleled geostrategic position—the U.S. Navy ordered the new battleships that were to defeat Spain with the new and better engines, armor and rifled guns that made the ships an order of magnitude more powerful. This “new” Navy needed forward positioning in the Pacific so that, quoting one of Mahan’s supporters, “in the case of maritime war being waged against us, the island group will be the scene of the earliest, perhaps the only conflict on Pacific waters.” It was this contingence of technological innovation, new military thinking and settler self-interest that finally put an end to Hawaii’s independence: less Pacific Gibraltar than American Tibet.