Asia-Pacific in the Making of the Americas: Toward a Global History

Conclusion: Knowledge of the World

Visual knowledge about the world and patriotism went hand-in-hand. “Enterprising Yankees” ventured into the Pacific not just as traders or whalers but as explorers, ambitiously recording information about the Indian and Pacific realms, as well as exploiting its resources and peoples. They took great nationalistic pride in these private endeavors. While historians still focus on America’s engagement in the Pacific attending the over-land settlement of the American West, the development of California, and intensifying with the invasion of Hawaii in 1893, or the Spanish-American War in 1898, Americans were present on Cook’s ships, and not long after Independence, hundreds of New England ships flooded Pacific waters in search of goods and raw materials to trade at home or in China, or simply to explore and claim territory.[23] U.S. expansion into East Asia and the Pacific was an essential part of the early 19th-century project of American modernization.[24] Pacific exploration always had imperial overtones for Americans, whether viewing it from a central privileged all-seeing position before Dufour’s wallpaper or onboard a ship across the world.

In the late 19th century, E. Burton Holmes, a well-traveled public lecturer in Boston, wrote an autobiography based on his travels in East Asia titled The World is Mine. He began his memoir with the observation, “To travel is to possess the world.”[25] Living in the United States “high imperial period,” he was heir to a perspective begun earlier, however, in Quincy’s panopticon, in the Pacific sailor’s crow’s nest and journals and surveys, in panoramic wallpaper in federal-era parlors. Imagining empire began at home. Homes as much as armed ships became “sites of meaning” about the role of America in the world. Homes were not merely convenient repositories for lifeless foreign commodities.[26] Nor did they merely reference female domesticity or patrician republican virtue. Whether in globes, books, Asian fineries, or a neoclassical “aesthetic of ruins” that blended Asian-Pacific motifs with ancient Rome, early national homes educuated Americans about the place and identity of the United States in relation to imminently knowable foreign lands and seas. As Dufour explicitly pointed out in his promotional brochure, surrounded by his Pacific panorama: “A mother will give effortless lessons in history to her eager, inquisitive and intelligent daughter.”[27] Even women and children at home, by virtue of the books, maps, images, and objects related to the Asia-Pacific, put before them by ambitious fathers, could engender an enthusiasm for a strong US presence in the Asia-Pacific. Dufour’s idyllic scenes of the Pacific helped to naturalize for all early Americans the idea of proximity, accessibility, and benefit of U.S.-flags across the Pacific, and by centrally positioning an all-seeing Western viewer encircled by an unending Pacific scene, he promoted the “colonial gaze”. Dufour’s view of the Pacific promoted righteous colonization. The Pacific “savages” are depicted as pre-modern primitives, set within a classical antiquity ultimately—and peacefully—headed toward European modernity.[28]

Dufour’s wallpaper of the Pacific seamlessly joins the North American Northwest with the islands and coastlines of the South and East Pacific. Therefore, we might ask why US envoy, Edward Carrington, after a decade in China, where he profited handsomely on the US engagements in the Pacific, chose Velay’s “Paysage Indien” over Dufour’s “Sauvages de la Mer Pacific.” Perhaps, fresh home from years of living in the shadow of Chinese authorities, Carrington preferred the British colonial scene where Westerners are depicted as above and distinct from the “oriental” masses, confidently master of the situation in their starched military uniforms, rather than succumbing to murder by natives, as in Dufour’s well-known “Captain Cook paper.” While the landscapes in the two sets of papers are nearly indistinguishable, the historic memories evoked in each case could not be more different. The Pacific scenes that Carrington would have liked to see were still a few decades into the future.
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[23] Damon Salesa, “Samoa’s Half-Castes and Some Frontiers of Comparison,” in Ann Stoler, Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, Duke University Press, 2006, p. 73; Ernest S. Dodge.
[24] David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American: Historical Crossing of a Racial Frontier, Stanford University Press, 1999, p. 17.
[25] Quoted in Jeannette Roan, “Exotic Explorations: Travels to Asia and the Pacific in Early Cinema,” in Re-Collecting Early Asian America: Essays in Cultural History, Josephine Lee, Imogene Lim, and Yuko Matsukawa, eds., Temple University Press, 2002: 193.
[26] Odile Novel-Krammer, “Wide Horizons: French Scenic Wallpapers,” in The Papered Wall, Lesley Hoskins, ed., London: Thames & Hudson, 1994: 94-112.
[27] Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacific, trans, Peter Rudd, in Hall, Les Sauvages, p. 33.
[28] Christine Mamiya, “Nineteenth-Century French Women, the Home, and the Colonial Vision: Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique Wallpaper," Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 28, No. 1/2, Domestic Frontiers: The Home and Colonization (2007) , pp. 100-120.

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