Ph.D. - History

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10125/2072

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Imagining Tōhoku: Perceptions and policies of postwar rural northeastern Japan
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2025) Ii, Tokikake; Stalker, Nancy K.; History
This dissertation examines how metropolitan institutions, such as mass media, and national government viewed and treated Tōhoku (northeastern Japan) both as the source of labor, economic, and energy extractions for the national development from the postwar period and the current post-2011 Great East Japan Disaster (commonly known as the 3.11 Disaster) period. In doing so, these various institutions established and deployed their images of “pure and underdeveloped” countryside of Tōhoku while simultaneously treated the region as the authentic, ideal homeland (furusato). This dissertation demonstrates the existence of historical continuity in the metropolitan and government’s treatment and use of Tōhoku. The examination of the continuity as well as of the role of metropolitan media and government throughout the postwar to the 3.11 Disaster period is significant. In fact, most scholarships on Tōhoku, focus on pre-modern and/or the post-Disaster period only, and do not contextualize Tōhoku within metropolitan cultural and media stereotypes of Tōhoku, and within national economic development. This dissertation examines various newspapers, photograph collections, popular magazines, novels, films, and government policies on land and infrastructural developments in the Tōhoku countryside and on national labor migration to and from Tōhoku. Analysis of these sources demonstrates that the mechanism of resource extraction by the national government and metropole, and of the persistent existence of cultural stereotypes of rural Tōhoku, is a key defining socioeconomic feature of postwar and post-3.11 Disaster Japan.
Re/producing islands: Migrant Filipino kinship, subjectivity, and settlerism within and across imperial and national peripheries
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2025) Alarilla, Adrian Ellis J.; Lanzona, Ma. Vina A.; History
At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States declared war against Spain and annexed Hawaiʻi, eventually enabling the US to claim Spain’s island possessions—including the Philippines—and start its own overseas empire. American agricultural industrialists subsequently established their own plantation economies on America’s new island possessions. The occupation of the Philippines enabled the US to recruit Filipinos in order to exploit their labor in their plantations in Hawaiʻi and elsewhere. But the Filipinos were not powerless amidst these dislocations. Filipinos chose where to take their labor to, which borders (political, cultural, social) to obey, and which ones to transgress. Just as the US empire attempted to transform Indigenous lands in plantation islands, Filipinos also created and recreated their own communities wherever they went across the empire. In some ways, they paralleled the US’s formation of an imperial archipelago across the Pacific. With the plantation as a site of encounter, they met other people—fellow laborers, managers, landowners, lovers, and dispossessed Indigenous people whose lands were stolen and turned into plantations. They came with their own culture and subjectivities, and used these to not only make sense of their host land, but also recreate their own homelands. As the social and political situation changed wherever they resided, they navigated between the US imperial archipelago and the emergent archipelago of the nation-state of the Philippines. In time, they would also make Mindanao, an island in the Southern Philippines, a parallel periphery, an island with rich resources ready for the taking, turning it into a plantation island, oftentimes in cooperation with and constrained by the US empire and later, the Philippine nation.This dissertation aims to retell the story of Filipino migration within and outside the US Empire from the point of view of the migrants themselves, decentering imperial and national narratives and recentering Filipino migrants in motion. I trace the crossed histories of Hawaiʻi, California, and Mindanao from the perspective of the Visayan migrant laborers and settlers who worked the land, raised their families, and interacted with Indigenous peoples. I follow the stories of migrants by taking a closer look at biographies and family histories of Filipino migration from a transPacific perspective that encompasses but ultimately transcends the borders of empire and nation. Indeed, while working within the empire, these Filipino migrants did not necessarily see themselves as immigrating to or emigrating from different territories; they were just moving from one locale to another in order to pursue opportunities, run away from conflict, rejoin families, or create their own communities. Looking at their narratives, through journals, memoirs, diaries, films, and other stories from up-close and on the ground, we obscure grander notions of nation and empire, and better understand their journeys from their ever-changing points of view. By focusing on their own subjectivities, stories, experiences, and encounters, I aim to show how they navigated empire and nation to find their own sense of belonging—a sense of belonging that can present possibilities of decolonial futures where migrants and Indigenous people are not estranged from each other by imperial and national logics, but are instead brought together by shared experiences, and even kinship.
The Way of the Hegemons: Politics and Hegemony in the Sixth Century and Early Seventh Century North China
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2024) Wong, Wengpok; Wang, Wensheng; History
This is a study of the political history of the 6th to early 7th centuries China. After the Northern Wei北魏 dynasty gradually disintegrated into pieces in the early 6th century, its territories in northern China were controlled by strongmen who valued political and military capabilities and talents. In this circumstance, the author of this dissertation argues that a political culture came to form in northern China, and it had dominant effects on the qualities of the imperial rulers of the successor regimes of the Northern Wei and the patterns of imperial succession of these regimes, as most of the imperial rulers and their designated successors in northern China after the demise of the Northern Wei ended up becoming the hegemons of their eras who had political and military experiences and merits. Those who failed to accumulate experiences and/or merits - if they were not ultimately replaced by more competent candidates - would usually try to consolidate their positions through other methods. The author of this dissertation further argues that this political culture continuously existed for about eighty years as it was shared by the rulers of the Sui隋 and early Tang唐 dynasties after the demises of the two successor regimes of the Northern Wei. Many of the political incidents that took place during the 6th to early 7th centuries were the direct results of this political culture or were heavily influenced by it, and it would only gradually fade away during the early 7th century when the Tang dynasty successfully consolidated itself as one of the major powers in Northeast Asia.
Tides of Law: Maritime Predation and International Law in the South China Sea, 1840-1950
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2024) English, Lee Bryant; Wang, Wensheng; History
During the 1850s, delegates from numerous states met in Paris and formed an agreement that would prohibit the sponsorship of privateers in warfare. On the other side of the world during the same decade, the South China Seas saw an explosion of private maritime raiding which resulted in the Qing and British Empires working to stamp out those they agreed were pirates despite the animosity and conflicts that existed between them. Both events were part of a broader reshaping of the world to one of states with strong borders connected and strengthened by an emergent system of international law and order, a reshaping that turned special attention to the sea, traditionally lawless and borderless, where pirates, privateers, and other maritime predators thrived in the political and legal ambiguity that existed in the differences between different cultures’ views of the sea, which this new order sought to erase. This dissertation examines the relationship between maritime predators and both international and maritime law in the context of the South China Seas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and demonstrates that maritime predators were active and important players in the events that would help shape the emerging legal systems. The first two chapters provide the context necessary to handle such a complex and opaque relationship. Specifically, the first chapter explains the historical methodology and historiography which this dissertation fits into, while the second chapter examines the historical context of the evolution of global maritime predation over time. The third chapter then moves on to investigate the development of maritime and international law in this period, especially as it relates to maritime predation, including the readings of key treaties and more general trends in anti-maritime predation activities by various powers, especially the Qing Dynasty and the British Empire. The fourth chapter demonstrates the ways various forms of media, from newspapers to paintings, influenced both the public perception of maritime predators and, through public opinion, the formation and execution of laws concerning those maritime predators. The fifth chapter provides a chronological overview of developments concerning maritime predation and law in the region, highlighting the various ways they influenced each other. The sixth and final chapter reviews the insights gleaned from the dissertation’s examination of these topics, and what future research remains to be done.
FRAMING A REVOLUTION: KOREA’S ENGLISH-LANGUAGE NEWSPAPERS IN 1960
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2023) York, Rob; Kim, Cheehyung H.; History
This study examines the content of the two English-language newspapers of South Korea during the tumultuous year of 1960. The Korea Times, founded in 1950, and The Korean Republic, which launched in 1953, began with the mission of keeping the foreign community in Korea – and those outside Korea with an abiding interest in peninsular affairs – informed as to developments within the country. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis, as well as the concept of “framing,” this study will examine how the independent Times and the pro- government Republic described the rule, downfall, and aftermath of President Syngman Rhee. Broadly aligned on much in terms of the policy matters of the day – namely anti-communism, support for the US alliance, and distrust of Japan – the two papers were divided, before the April Revolution of 1960, over their views of Rhee and his power consolidation. In the aftermath of Rhee’s fall, as The Republic sought to shift to a model of greater reporting and editorial independence, it remained separated from The Times by its greater focus on foreign policy matters such as Japan policy and anti-communism.This study finds that, while The Times’ greater focus on domestic issues and more in-depth reporting resulted in conflict with the Rhee administration, it also left readers better prepared for the revolution that would topple Rhee, as well as brewing discontent that would doom the post- Rhee experiment with democracy. The Republic, ahead of the Revolution, largely ignored the mounting discontent of the public with Rhee and his Liberal Party government over their vote- rigging, campaigns of violence and intimidation against opposition parties and media, and the country’s economic stagnation, instead painting a picture of an imperiled but united bulwark of the free world under Rhee’s benevolent leadership. The Times, by contrast, described a terrorized political climate ahead of elections, with its editorial page warning that such a façade could not continue indefinitely. When the April Revolution came, The Times provided in-depth coverage from the moment the rallies, some of them violent, began, while The Republic largely ignored and dismissed them as the work of communist agitation and impressionable youth. When it became evident that the Revolution would not subside and that Seoul’s American partners would not countenance the Liberal regime’s hardline tactics, The Republic transitioned to a post-Rhee reporting environment, which placed greater priority on domestic reporting and an independent editorial status. Quantitative analysis of its editorials reveals that its interest in foreign affairs still surpassed that of The Times, however, and The Times could still be counted on for more in-depth reporting on the political rancor that would ultimately doom the country’s experiment in parliamentary governance. Both papers, however, appeared unaware of the mounting discontent brewing in the military that would one day contradict – in spectacular fashion – their vows of political neutrality. It ends by noting the subsequent military dictatorship’s co-opting of the media for its own ends, and the long-term effects this has had on stifling independent reporting.
E Tuai Tuai, Ta Te Māʻona Ai: A Food History Of Sāmoa
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2023) Hillyer, Garrett Lowell; Hanlon, David; History
This dissertation seeks to tell histories of Samoan food from the deep past to the contemporary period, with an eye toward the adoption and adaptation of food over time, and to answer the central research questions—how has “Samoan food,” contemporarily understood, come to be, and what implications have any changes in Samoan food had for the economy of Samoan polities and the health and wellness of Samoan people over time?The first chapter explores the interplay between history, orality, food, and contemporary sciences and social sciences. The chapter highlights five forms of orality—tala (stories, myths, or legends), fāgogo (fables or bedtime stories), alagāʻupu (proverbial sayings derived from tala), muāgagana (proverbial sayings akin to idioms), and gao (village nicknames)—showing how these forms use food to propagate history and core values of the FaʻaSāmoa. The chapter also shows how archaeologists, ethnobotanists, linguists, geneticists, and remote sensing methodologists utilizing LiDAR have all contributed to fields of knowledge surrounding the origins, use, and social significance of food in Sāmoa over time. The second, third, and fourth chapters are case studies that show how imported foods and beverages, which are often both deeply local and inherently transliminal histories unto themselves, are adopted into Samoan culture and adapted by Samoans over time. Focusing on corned beef, alcohol, and Samoan-style “Chop Suey,” respectively, these chapters highlight food’s material value, notions of taste, Indigenous resistance and protest to racism, and labor migration to Sāmoa. The fifth chapter, ʻO le Taumafa ma le Tupe, seeks to articulate the implications that changes in Samoan food had for the economies of both Samoan polities, with a particular focus on the efforts of leaders in either polity to use food as a commodity to gain increased self-sufficiency. Two case studies—one of Western Samoa Breweries Limited’s efforts to grow the brand of Vailima beer, and another of American Sāmoa Delegate-at-Large Fofō I.F. Sunia’s efforts to establish a pīsupo processing plant and exporting business in Pago Pago—drive the chapter’s analysis and narrative. Finally, Maʻi Suka explores contemporary issues of health and wellness in either Samoan polity and their historical connection to imported foods. Maʻi Suka explores drastic rises in cases of diabetes, obesity, and hypertension, all of which are noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) linked to diet.
The Macao formula: a study of Chinese management of Westerners from the mid-sixteenth century to the opium war period
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1978) Fok, Kai Cheong
Remaking The Pacific: Ecological Imagination And Transformation In France’s Pacific Island Empire 1842-1931
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2022) Cavert, William Matthew; Lauzon, Matthew; History
This study considers the projects behind particular forms of environmental change across France’s Pacific Empire. Specific attention is paid to the shifting nature of imagined, desired, and created environments as settlers, merchants, administrators, and islanders, among others, competed to manifest their vision over island landscapes. The study takes the 1931 Exposition coloniale internationale in Paris as emblematic of the colonial narratives that promoted, justified, and reinforced a particular colonial vision for the environment. It was a key moment for retrospectively considering the two developments analyzed in this study: the coffee plantation economy of New Caledonia and the phosphate mining operation on Makatea.
Health, Welfare, and a Nation-In-Transition: The Philippine Sanidad in the Late U.S. Colonial Period
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2022) Moralina, Aaron Rom Olimba; Andaya, Leonard Y.; Reiss, Suzanna J.; History
The dissertation is a history of public health, medicine, and welfare in the late U.S. colonial Philippines. It argues that the late U.S. colonial period, roughly the late 1920s–1941, witnessed the emergence of the Sanidad, the health-centered welfare state that evolved from the health bureaucracy of the early years of colonial conquest. Already captured and predominantly administered by Filipino doctors, the Sanidad was endowed with an expansive public authority that encompassed various levels of policymaking and agenda-setting—from the departmental-ministerial, down to the level of the provincial municipio. At the eve of the Pacific War, the Sanidad's presence had been established throughout the Islands, from the capital Manila to the provinces. It deployed a variety of approaches, from the preventative to curative, from the medico-carceral to medico-technocratic, so much so that the Sanidad generated new forms of material, institutional, and symbolic power. Finally, the Sanidad brought about new articulations of health citizenship from several stakeholders, including public and private medical interests which clashed at various points in history on the issue of state-provided healthcare.
Kāneikawaiola ma Mānoa: The Life-Giving Waters of Mānoa and a History of Water Rights in Hawaiʻi from Antiquity to 1900
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2022) Hopkins, Jaime; Rosa, John P.; Kameeleihiwa, Lilikala; History
This dissertation explores the history of water in Hawaiʻi and its importance not just as a necessity for life but also as a central agent in organizational and management systems, with a narrowed focus on the transitional period between 1840 and 1907. It begins with a conceptual understanding of wai, water, as an akua, environmental force. Due to its importance in sustaining life, the flow of water and access to it became the foundation for kānāwai, the word used for “law” in Hawaiian. The law of water was implemented through Ua-ala-ka-wai, the Mōʻī Māʻilikūkahi’s kānāwai that instituted the ahupuaʻa land divisions, and this dissertation argues that ahupuaʻa were shaped around access to ka wai ola, water that sustains life. The word “waiwai,” the reduplication of “wai,” also meant “value” or “wealth” thus indicating that water and its management was associated with abundance. Starting in the 1840s, land ownership and western-styled laws solidified boundaries and appurtenant water rights accompanied this petrification. This work will focus on the Private Ways & Water Rights Commission, the judicial body that governed water rights after the imposition of western-based legal structures. It then narrows the scope down to a case study of Mānoa on the island of Oʻahu by identifying the valley’s water sources, reviewing water management and usage, and analyzing several disputes over water in Mānoa and Kamōʻiliʻili between the 1870s and 1890s that were adjudicated by the Commission. These cases show that the imposition of land ownership in Mānoa precipitated the drying out of the land, thus proving that fair access to communal water is directly related to how well a community cooperated together and that the deterioration of a communal mindset correlates with the slow but sure transition to the individualization of water rights.
Sacred Songs of the Central Altar: Texts and Histories of the Ritual Master in the Religious World of Southern Taiwan
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2019) Flanigan, Stephen McIver; Davis, Edward L.; History
This study examines the ritual manuscripts used by Ritual Masters in the Táinán region of southern Táiwān and shows that the kind of lyric invocations used in this and similar traditions employ literary conventions, ritual techniques, and religious symbols that developed in tandem with the broader Ritual Master tradition during the Sòng dynasty. In turn, the specific characteristics of these lyric invocations directly express the central elements of the Ritual Master tradition, while the history of these invocations and their related texts helps illuminate the historical formation of the tradition as a whole. To account for the nature of this broader tradition and its specific manifestations, I build on an earlier generation of scholarship to argue that the Ritual Master phenomenon is best understood as a historic movement, produced by interaction among Tantric adepts, Spirit-mediums, and Daoist exorcists, and that this movement manifests in two hemispheres or domains: one I call Tantric-Popular, and one more fully Daoist. Historical inquiry shows, however, that symbols and textual developments arising from ancient Daoist exorcism directly informed the entire movement and the genre of lyric invocations that would become the basis of those used across southeastern China, including in the Mínnán littoral and its diasporic communities. In examining the ritual world of temple religion, I argue that there is a fundamental linkage between healing rites for individuals and the cultic life of community temples, and that this essential linkage is reflected in the integrated symbols of the religious system. Moreover, the Ritual Master or Minor Rite tradition in the Mínnán littoral does not merely provide individual-oriented “minor rites” of healing, but is rather the main ritual tradition responsible for the establishment, reproduction, and maintenance of the temple cult itself, and that this role exhibits great historical depth, as fundamental elements of the Tantric-Popular Ritual Master tradition have become universally embedded within the structure of the temple-cult throughout the wider region, while certain Ritual Master rites are deemed mandatory to the establishment and maintenance of the temple-cult and its precinct. Furthermore, the extent of Daoist integration within the networked temples of the Common Religion is overwhelmingly expressed in the general orientation of temples toward the symbols of a Daoist Heaven as experienced through the Daoist Jiào altar and its analogue, the Lord of Heaven Temple. Within a single temple’s precinct, the Ritual Master and Spirit-medium tend to predominate, but where multiple temples are joined into temple-alliance networks, rites which mobilize the entire extended network tend to be large-scale Daoist Jiào. Hence there is a direct relationship between temple precinct organizations and the performance of Daoist ritual in Táinán (and elsewhere), though previous Western scholarship of Daoism in Táinán has not taken notice of these precinct alliance networks despite their central importance. This study also argues that in Chinese historical sources of all kinds, the terms Wū 巫 and Wū-xí 巫覡, which originally meant “Spirit-medium,” acquired a dual reference following the emergence of the Tantric-Popular Ritual Master in the Sòng, and that where historical texts of many kinds refer to both Spirit-mediums and Ritual Masters as Wū, such usage is not merely the result of confusion or conflation, but reflects the specific relationships, historical and performative, that bind these two primary ritual experts of the Common Religion together. While Tantric-Popular Ritual Masters came to be labeled as Wū in these sources, Daoists are consistently excluded from this category, which further indicates the specificity with which historical authors used these terms. From late imperial gazetteers and other sources, we can observe the cultural and geographic ubiquity of Ritual Masters and Spirit-mediums in Fújiàn and Táiwān from the Sòng dynasty and into the 20th century.
He Kami Initini: How Native Hawaiian Governance And American Indian Policy Became Linked In The Nineteenth Century
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2019) Buchanan, Shirley Elaine; Reiss, Suzanna; History
In the nineteenth-century, Native Hawaiian governance and American Indian policy in the U.S. were connected, reverberating across the Pacific and back in a loop of proactive and reactive legislation. This study follows an arc of history from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to the year 1887. In this period, an “American” space was problematically tested and defined, but that space was only possible by dispossessing others of their space. My dissertation asserts that the development of what became American governance was intricately linked to the power of indigenous places. Those policies live on with us today in America and get imported and transformed around the world “as needed.” This dissertation seeks to consider troublesome questions in U.S. history and assert new connections between Native American, Native Hawaiian, and American developments in the nineteenth century. It shows that the expansion of the U.S. and the fulfillment of an American national paradigm hinged on the interactions and negotiations that were cultivated with native people. These negotiations became the founding principles of American domestic and international policies and traversed territory from New England to Oʻahu. What is more, the negotiators between and within nations were frequently women, and native people interacted with and learned from the experiences of other indigenous nations as they encountered American imperialist ambitions. Following social, religious, political, legislative, cultural and commercial networks across both Euro-American and indigenous worlds, this research disrupts notions that Native American and Native Hawaiian governmental policies were separate and distinct entities, uninfluenced by one another and thus "by-products" of "manifest destiny." Additionally, the research reveals the emerging concepts of "rightful" possession of land and the patriarchal ambitions of American colonizers. Most importantly, this study focuses on the women absented from traditional histories of the period, “recovering” the integral space that women – both native and non-native – created and governed, acting as authorities and mediators in policymaking, challenging suppression, and ultimately altering the trajectory of indigenous and American destinies.
Literacy, Statecraft And Sovereignty: Kamehameha Iii's Defense Of The Hawaiian Kingdom In The 1840s
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2019) Corley, Janetta Susan; Chappell, David A.; History
Kamehameha III’s struggle for sovereign control of his kingdom began in earnest in 1842 when he sent his diplomats on their long journey to confront the world’s greatest maritime powers in their own capitals. His struggle began several years before that, however, when as a young boy he pronounced that his rule would be characterized by literacy, and he ordered his people to learn to read and write. Without literacy, Kauikeaouli could not have defended his sovereign rights and privileges in the public forums of his opponents—and without literacy, there would be no record from the king himself how he chose to meet the threats that confronted his kingdom. Although Kamehameha III (r. 1825-1854) secured guarantees of territorial sovereignty in 1843-1844 from Great Britain, France and the United States, those guarantees did not preclude western agents’ attempts to limit the king’s ability to exercise his sovereign powers by imposing extraterritorial restrictions over key economic and juridical functions. Kamehameha III recognized that his loss of authority to exercise functional powers threatened the Hawaiian kingdom’s ability to retain its territorial sovereignty. Western opponents already had a foothold in the kingdom, and the king needed innovative tactics and strategies to prevail in his struggle. This dissertation examines the comprehensive strategy that Kamehameha III devised to retake full sovereign control of Hawaiian kingdom governance. Documentary evidence demonstrates that the king collaborated with his chiefs, ministers and legislators to implement specific governance, political and diplomatic measures. Kamehameha III’s tactics worked in tandem to structure the kingdom’s political interactions with western nation-states in ways that would restore power and authority to the Hawaiian government and secure continued independence. This dissertation explores kingdom governance records and other contemporary evidence about each of the measures taken, the king’s rationale for selecting the specific measure, its implementation, and its effectiveness. These records easily disprove accusations contemporary to his times that Kamehameha III’s ministers ruled in his stead. This examination contributes to a reevaluation of Kamehameha III’s leadership role and an expanded understanding of the threats and opportunities presented him during his reign.
One Ship, Thousands of Lives: A Transnational History of Shipbuilding, Shipping and the Maritime World as Seen Through the Life of an Average Merchant Sailing Ship, 1886-1930.
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2018-05) Tachco, Brandon T. L.; History
Over many generations, numerous scholars have produced impressive and useful work covering the history of shipping in countless different ways, but most have been limited by nation-based scopes and framings. When viewing this global system from the perspectives of the individual ships and the individual people that were a part of it, it becomes clear that the reality was not so easily identified or defined. Whether made for war or trade, ships often survived through multiple owners, names, and purposes, and so represented the lives of many people from many different classes, races, nationalities, and creeds. This dissertation, therefore, views the history of shipping based on the birth and life of a single merchant ship from the late-nineteenth century: the square-rigged sailing ship Balclutha, which was built in Glasgow in 1886 and is now a museum ship in San Francisco. Rather than falling-back on more generalized nation-based definitions, this focused framing enables the study to be more precise and specific in its analyses of these historical subjects, which provides useful insight into the history of this global shipping system, and the history of the thousands of individuals whose lives were in some way connected to, and dependent on, nineteenth-century ships. The entirety of the dissertation looks broadly at Balclutha’s whole life and analyzes world historical topics and people that were connected through ships like it. First, a detailed look at Balclutha’s construction on the Clyde River and the commodity chains of materials needed for its construction reveals a local shipbuilding community with connections to other communities and people across the world. Then, analyzing the specific commodity chain example of the important shipbuilding wood, teak, connects this Glaswegian shipbuilding community and the ships they built to complex geo-politics, corporate imperialism, and teak extraction in Burma. And finally, an overview of the working lives of those that lived on Balclutha while the ship sailed the sea, traversed traditional historical periods, and changed owners and purposes, demonstrates a transnational and trans-social maritime space. These analyses together exemplify a world system that was dependent on various imperial negotiations and collaborations. Those with or without power and wealth were not focused in any particular geographic region, such as center or periphery, but were present to varying degrees in all parts of the system. In this way, imperial metropoles, centers, or peripheries were more socio-economic than geographical. Many of these historical subjects lived non-national or nationally indifferent lives. The local expands to the global, transnational, and back to the local, traveling on networks of investment, work, and labor, all without necessarily being medicated by the national. Thus, the national, in many instances, could be skipped over in analyses of the globalization of the world.
The Use of Plants for the Reconstitution of History: Duhamal du Monceau, Arthur Young, Ōkura Nagatsune and Alternative Agricultures
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2017-12) Witten, Adam P. J.; History
Utilizing the agricultural manuals of Duhamel du Monceau (1700-1782), Arthur Young (1741-1820) and Ōkura Nagatsune (1768-1860), this dissertation examines commonalities among best practices in eighteenth and nineteenth century French, British and Japanese agronomies. These practices offered significant possibilities for agrarian improvement in an ecologically sustainable context, but were supplanted by the advent of industrial agriculture before their full potential could be attained. In recovering these past and in many cases forgotten approaches, I link their practices and potentialities with present-day farm literature, tracing continuities that suggest how contemporary agriculture might more fruitfully unfold.
The Pax Cinemana: Film and the Pursuit of Peace, 1914-1939
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2017-12) Holowicki, Alex C.; History
Between 1914 and 1939, the role of film in fostering international peace and understanding was a mainstream discussion within all facets of film production and exhibition. Of course, utopian ideals have always surrounded film and new technologies. As a result of the unprecedented violence that characterized World War I, however, the enthusiasm for cinema’s ability to prevent another global catastrophe proved exceptional. Idealist filmmakers in the United States and Europe not only reflected on their liberal ideology, but also developed a loose infrastructure to support their lofty ambitions. Though many historians have long dismissed the peace efforts of the interwar period as little more than naïve activism, this study argues that cinema made tangible contributions to international business, law, education, and organization. These ambitions have received little scholarly attention to date. Though there is a large body of work that examines film’s critical role in war efforts, few scholars have tackled its significance to peace movements. Consequently, this dissertation traces the development of “peacekeeping cinema,” an international initiative that encouraged the making of motion pictures as a means to generate empathy between divergent societies. The ability to see the lived experiences of “other” peoples, supporters insisted, would help remediate the effects of World War I and prevent global conflict. By surveying the peacekeeping activities of diverse filmmakers and organizations, this dissertation articulates how communities in the United States and Europe interpreted peace and it attempts to shed new light on the relationship between film and diplomacy.
Indigenous Protest in Colonial Sāmoa: The Mau Movements and the Response of the London Missionary Society, 1900-1935
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2017-12) Alofaituli, Brian T.; History
The two Sāmoan-led pro-nationalist movements, Mau a Pule and Mau, have dominated Sāmoan historiography. The word Mau represented a firm “opinion” of Sāmoans against both Germany and New Zealand’s colonial regimes. Before the two recognized movements, Sāmoan clergymen successfully protested in various maus of their own against the London Missionary Society (L.M.S.), and challenged European mission leadership, which resulted in multiple reforms and the Sāmoanization of the L.M.S. At the start of the 20th century, Sāmoans experienced a peaceful period, and had proven their potential ability to govern themselves politically, economically, and religiously. Despite Sāmoa’s move toward modernization, the L.M.S. church and colonial institutions attempted to limit agency in leadership, implement colonial policies against fa’a-sāmoa (Sāmoan customs and traditions), and disregard Sāmoa’s nonviolent attempts to instigate changes. Although intense at times, the different mau movements reflected a Christian society under the authority of titled chiefs or matai who maintained peace. The aim of this study is twofold. The first is to investigate whether a hybridity between fa’a-sāmoa and the civilizing mission by missionaries and colonizers produced a civil society within the colonial context that organized nonviolent protests to effect reforms within the foreign institutions. The second is to explore the link between the Mau movements and the L.M.S. While there has been plenty of research on the Mau movements, few studies have focused on the mau protests within the L.M.S., or their response to the Mau a Pule and Mau. This reexamination places the Sāmoan Mau movements within the wider discourse of protest studies in Oceania, and the rise of an indigenous civil society within the colonial context.
Land & Water: A History of Fifteenth-Century Vietnam from an Environmental Perspective
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2017-05) Phung, Hieu M.; History
Debates and concerns about contemporary environmental problems have challenged historians to examine the human past from a perspective that explores the role of the natural environment in the historical development of individual societies. This dissertation examines how premodern Vietnamese rulers, officials, and scholars perceived “the environment” in the fifteenth century and how they documented the human-environment interaction. The fifteenth century, especially the long reign of King Thanh Tong of the Le dynasty (1460-97), was one of the most prosperous eras in Vietnam’s pre-twentieth-century history, and the aim of this study is to shed new light on this historical period. Rather than focusing on court politics, intellectual developments, or warfare, this dissertation uses the Vietnamese primary sources in classical Chinese as a basis for understanding how the environment was conceptualized. A recurring theme in these sources concerns the attitudes towards land and water, which were fundamental in facilitating humannature interactions in fifteenth-century Vietnam. The evidence shows that when the Le rulers established their dynasty in northern Vietnam, they focused on understanding how the landscape should be conceptually “mapped” and on recording the natural resources that different regions within this land could provide. Their emphasis on land resources reveals a deeper environmental goal: how to transform the land into an environment that would be eminently suited to wet rice farming. This goal is also illustrated in the Vietnamese state’s efforts to build dikes and to develop strategies to cope with water-related natural disasters such as droughts and floods. Overall, the environmental analysis in this dissertation posits that “geographical considerations” can have some application in certain contexts, like fifteenth-century Vietnam. However, it was through a long historical development that the Vietnamese people came to self-identify as inhabitants of a society where rice-growing lay at the cultural core. In this history, both the particular environmental conditions of northern Vietnam and the historical conjunctures of the fifteenth century lent impetus to a Vietnamese self-perception of themselves as quintessential wet rice producers.
The Origins, Building, and Impact of a Social Welfare State in Late Colonial Singapore
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2016-12) Ho, Chi Tim
This study asks two broad questions: How did state and society in colonial Singapore respond to the social needs of a human life over time, at birth, youth and adulthood, during illness, injury and unemployment, and finally old age, retirement and death? What kind of state eventually emerged to address those needs? Addressing those questions, this study offers an augmented understanding of state-building via a colonial policy that created a social welfare state in late colonial Singapore. The state is more than a series of institutions, bureaucracies, and policies erected for the purposes of administering a territory and its peoples. The state is also the result of historical processes and experiences arising from individual decisions and actions. The social welfare state here refers to the institutions, structures, processes, and the individuals working within to effect social welfare. Arising from a mix of metropolitan and global factors, social welfare was part of a new imperial policy after the Second World War to create cohesive communities out of plural societies that would eventually be self-governing, and ideally join the British commonwealth of nations. The history presented is a local one as the introduction and implementation of social welfare in postwar Singapore were complicated by local circumstances, namely the unpredictable responses of a colonial society unfamiliar with a deliberate state presence in social welfare and the challenges of decolonization. This study puts at the forefront the migrant worker, the colonial administrator, the concerned volunteer, the social welfare officer, the social worker, and the people they helped. Their lives and experiences gave meaning and coherency to the social welfare state that emerged in late colonial Singapore. Each individual moreover experienced colonialism differently and vividly, making it more than an ordinary period of time in Singapore’s past. Colonialism’s varied legacies on Singapore have yet to be fully appreciated, especially those affecting social policy, state-societal relations, nation-building, and historical research. This study is an attempt at elucidating those issues.
Captivating Hearts and Minds: The Attempted Americanization of Asian Cultures, 1945-1970
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2016-05) Findlay, Robert
This dissertation investigates the interaction between Asian societies and the United States Information Agency (USIA), the official propaganda apparatus of the United States, during the “cultural Cold War,” in which the United States, China, and the Soviet Union attempted to use culture – books, films, festivals, language, television, the popular press – as propaganda to attain foreign policy goals. While the political, military, and economic histories of the Cold War era have been well researched and debated, the cultural dimensions of the Cold War, particularly in East and Southeast Asia, have been largely ignored. Culture, however, mattered, and understanding US and Asian interactions and exchanges within a larger transnational history of a liberalizing postwar Asia reveals the critical role cultural values and products played in shaping individual Asian citizens’ ideas about themselves, their society, and America’s foreign policies during the Cold War era. The types of propaganda products employed by USIS branches in Asia during the cultural Cold War included the printed word through posters, newspapers, magazines, and books in both English and local language translations designed to undermine Soviet and Chinese foreign policies while lionizing the United States. The agency likewise employed film and television to project American superiority while entertaining and capturing the largest possible audience for its propaganda messages. Furthermore, USIS officials encouraged the acquisition of English as a second language to open new channels of communication and to reduce tensions in nations facing an increased presence of American personnel. This use of US cultural products to fight the Cold War not only acted as propaganda to win hearts and minds, but also shifted cultural practices in Asia toward a globalized version of American culture bolstering U.S. economic, political, and military power in the region. The creation of new spaces and opportunities for cultural consumption and practices is traced primarily in Thailand, the Philippines, and Japan across target audiences ranging from local student groups to authoritarian military leaders who both embraced and resisted aspects of American technology, values, and institutions they found relevant to themselves, their communities, and their nations in the second half of the twentieth century.

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