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Trading Sovereignty and Labour: The Consular Network of Nineteenth-Century Hawai‘i

Abstract This article offers the first sustained inquiry into the consular system of nineteenth-century Hawai‘i, which operated at a global level during the second half of the nineteenth century prior to its dissolution in 1900, two years after US annexation. Like minor Latin American states in the nineteenth century, the Hawaiian state exerted a degree of self-determination through appeals to inclusion within Christendom and Western Civilization, and had a consular body made up mainly of transnational British, German and American actors. Drawing upon extensive archival research, this article indicates the pivotal role of the Hawaiian consular system in facilitating the migration of over 100,000 contract labourers to the islands during the late nineteenth century in shifting governmental formations. Complementing scholarship on the efforts of indigenous elites to defend Hawai‘i’s sovereignty in the late nineteenth century, this article pays close attention to the role of non-national consuls and contract labour migrations in patterns of asymmetrical commercial globalisation, lending new perspectives to the international history of minor and extra-European states in the Age of Empire.