“Shall I Go?”: Black Colonization in the Pacific, 1840–1914

Abstract: This article explores the development of mass Black migration plans to Hawai‘i and the Philippines both before and after emancipation. Through a transnational archival collection, it analyzes the political, intellectual, social, and material conditions that Black activists and white statecrafters faced in their attempts to secure state funding for Black migration within an ever-expanding US empire. From Northern white abolitionist cotton planters in Hawai‘i to radical Black socialists employed by the US state in the Philippines, the complexities of Black colonization in the Pacific offer a fresh look at a Civil War Era and a Black internationalism largely fixated on the Atlantic World. In the end, this article argues that colonization in the Black Pacific reveals a deep and abiding dialectic between US slavery and its overseas empire—a relationship too often obscured by the existing historiography.