U.S. settler colonial climates: Southern California, Hawai‘i, and the healthful tropics

Abstract

This article traces how Anglo-Americans invoked climatic and racial ties between Hawai‘i and Southern California in the late nineteenth century to forecast an American settler colonial future for the islands and obviate Native Hawaiian efforts to restore native sovereignty, after white elites overthrew Queen Liliuokalani and sought annexation to the United States. This climatic binding between continental and insular spaces – present in U.S. tourist and travel writing, diplomatic correspondence, and press coverage – brings into stark relief Hawai‘i’s often detached status in American history and historiography. By focusing on transpacific discourses of race and climate, I seek to show how – rather than as disparate places, separated by vast watery and intellectual gulfs – Hawai‘i and California were conceived in much more connected ways, as benign and (racially) healthful tropics for U.S. settler colonists in the Pacific West.