A/P/A Graduate Student Working Group Meeting: Elliott Jun

“‘The Wind Blows From All Directions’: Chinese Settler Labour, Indigenous Differences, and Transpacific Imperialisms in the Eighteenth Century”

On May 5th, 1789, an unfamiliar but worrying sight came into view when Esteban José Martinez sailed into the Surgidero de San Lorenzo inlet of the Northwest Las Indias Occidentales; two ships from the newly established United States and a British ship were moored in the sound. Martinez immediately occupied the inlet and arrested William Douglas and the crew of the Iphigenia Nubiana before ordering them to return to Guangzhou. Over the next two months, several more British ships arrived in short succession and were placed under arrest: the North West America, the Princess Royal, and the Argonaut. Each of these ships shared several common characteristics; they primarily bore Portuguese or British names, flags, and papers, had British captains, contained crews composed primarily of Europeans and Chinese labourers, and were connected by the same British merchant, John Meares. In negotiations with the captain of the Argonaut, James Colnett, Martinez discovered the British had already claimed the inlet as Nootka Sound in the preceding years with the intent to establish a more fortified settlement called Fort Pitt. Martinez imprisoned Colnett and the crew of the Argonaut and seized the Argonaut and the North West America along with their cargoes on the charge of violating Spanish territorial sovereignty. The competing colonial claims of British and Spanish empires across settler ownership and sovereignty over the unceded lands of the Mowachaht formed the core of the international incident known as the Nootka Crisis.

“‘The Wind Blows From All Directions’: Chinese Settler Labour, Indigenous Differences, and Transpacific Imperialisms in the Eighteenth Century” investigates how Yuquot, a seasonal fishing village of the Mowachaht, became a key transpacific site where the multiple scales of racial capitalism and competing empires converged. I show how crises in the royal monopoly system and plantation economy across the increasingly transhemispheric British empire in the late eighteenth century created the opportunity for private free traders like John Meares to look for their own solutions beyond the nation-state. I argue that Meares imagined and employed Chinese wage labour as a liberal solution to form a British settler transpacific that connected Yuquot, Hawai’i, Guangzhou, and Kolkata. While Meares’ experiment failed, I reflect on the ways in which studying the “failures” of colonial capitalism as method attunes us to pay attention to the fragility, contradictions, crisis, and reinvention that define colonialism, empire, and capital without foreclosing the relational possibilities of affinities organized around mutual struggle.