Boki’s Predicament

Chapter 1 begins with the opening of a trans-Pacific triangular trade in the 1780s among the United States, China, and Hawaiʻi. Boki was an aliʻi (ruling chief) and kiaʻāina (governor) of Oʻahu who in the 1820s became obsessed with the sandalwood trade and the riches flowing into Hawaiʻi from the Qing Empire of China. The story of Boki’s predicament—how to ensure enough indigenous sandalwood supply to keep pace with Hawaiian leaders’ increasing consumption of foreign goods and their debts owed American merchants—is our entryway into understanding the emergence of the Pacific World as an integrated segment of the global capitalist economy, and one in which Hawaiian workers took center stage. In the 1840s, Western concepts of “free labor” and “free trade” revolutionized the trans-Pacific economy with the imposition of “free trade” on the Qing Empire following the Opium War (1839-1842) and the imposition of a “free labor” ideology in Hawaiian land and legal reforms. By 1850, the Māhele—a process of land privatization and redistribution—had dispossessed the majority of Hawaiʻi’s indigenous people, leading many to seek work abroad or on foreign ships.