| Summary: | In the century from the death of Captain James Cook in 1779 to the rise of the sugar plantations in the 1870s, thousands of Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) men left Hawaiʻi to work on ships at sea and in nā ʻāina ʻē (foreign lands). Beyond Hawaiʻi tells the story of these forgotten indigenous migrant workers and their experiences of global capitalism. Each chapter tells a unique narrative of a different Pacific Ocean industry and those Hawaiian workers who traveled and toiled there: from sandalwood harvesting to whaling to guano mining to gold mining—in Hawaiʻi, California, the Arctic Ocean, China, and beyond. Using the writings of the workers themselves, published in nineteenth-century Hawaiian-language newspapers, Beyond Hawaiʻi argues that Native Hawaiian migrant workers and the global capitalist economy they served are essential to understanding how the world’s greatest ocean became a “Hawaiian Pacific World”—the world that Hawaiian labor made.
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