| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The White Pacific: U.S. Imperialism and Black Slavery in the South Seas after the Civil War. By Gerald Horne. (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2007. vi, 253 pp. Cloth, $59.00, ISBN 978-0-8248-3121-9. Paper, $29.00, ISBN 978-0-8248-3147-9.)

The confluence of racism, imperialism, transnational migration flows, and plain old greed combined to make the Southwest Pacific Ocean an often terrifying place at the end of the nineteenth century. As the United States and Great Britain jostled for territory, markets, and new labor sources in the region, they reshaped the economies and sovereignties of Hawaii, Samoa, and Fiji. Gerald Horne argues that Euro-Americans pioneered a particularly virulent form of racial tyranny through the use of bonded labor on Queens land, Australia, and Fiji plantations growing cotton for the world markets suddenly opened by the American Civil War. This labor system ensnared Melanesians and Polynesians via a type of slave trading called "blackbirding," under which huge numbers of people were captured and sold as laborers. Some (though not the majority) of the individuals who created and led this trade were Americans, often ex-Confederates.

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