The Special Issue: “Separate and Unequal in Unsettling Territories of Asia and Beyond”

The concentration of African and indigenous labourers in Caribbean plantations, however, posed significant challenges for colonial powers, as the harsh conditions and systematic exploitation of enslaved people sparked frequent uprisings and rebellions against colonial rulers.On the island of Hispaniola, for example, enslaved Africans rebelled against French colonial rulers in 1791. 4This revolution culminated in Haiti's independence in 1804, marking the establishment of the first successful Black republic in the Caribbean.Through 13 years of conflict, hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans in Hispaniola overcame French forces, as well as Spanish and British colonial armies.Significantly, the Haitian revolution embodied a large-scale uprising of "unpaid" labourers and came to represent one of the earliest and most significant working-class revolutions in modern history (Horne, 2015).The impact of anti-colonial revolution and resistance extended to the Pacific and Asia, where U.S. colonial expansion into this region was driven by economic ambitions and strategic interests.U.S. settlers began arriving in Hawaii in the early nineteenth century as missionaries and merchants.By the mid-nineteenth century, these settlers had established lucrative sugar plantations.In 1842, President John Tyler issued a warning that the U.S. would not tolerate foreign interference in Hawaii, asserting American dominance over the islands in the Pacific, as it previously had when declaring the 1823 Monroe Doctrine in Latin America (Horne, 2007).Turning its attention towards Asia, the U.S. sent Commodore Matthew Perry to pressure Japan into opening trade relations in 1853, marking a critical step in ending the two centuries of Japan's isolationist policies.Meanwhile, U.S. economic interests in Hawaii deepened, culminating with the overthrow of Queen Lili'uokalani in 1893, accomplished with the backing of U.S. Marines and American political elites, such as U.S. Minister to the Kingdom of Hawaii John Stevens and pineapple plantation owner Sanford B. Dole (Horne, 2007