Two columns of people are shown on the outskirts of a town. One column is soldiers holding rifles. The other column is people wearing hats and white clothing.
Module 1: Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, and the Asia-Pacific
To what extent are the histories and memories of colonialism part and parcel of Asian American and Pacific Islander identity?
For over 350 years from the seventeenth to the mid-twentieth century, Western aggressions in Asia and the Pacific Rim have influenced Asian Americans’ and Pacific Islanders’ lives. As a result, Asian American and Pacific Islander histories and experiences are inextricably connected to European empire-building, US colonialism, and post-colonial reverberations of the modern era. This historical legacy and its ramifications continues to affect the present day in numerous ways, including the migration of people from Asia to the United States.
Colonialism is a system in which a foreign power takes control over a native people or nation, usually for the benefit of that foreign power. These interests might include territorial expansion, access to natural resources, cheap labor or manufactured products, religious conversion, and geopolitical positioning. The results for the colonized people are multifaceted, including dispossession, displacement, and systemic disadvantage, with some opportunities benefiting the colonized. Additionally, colonialism disrupts colonized peoples’ ways of life, often resulting in the loss of lands and homes, sometimes leading to emigration to other places.
Euro-American colonizers justified their power over others with Social Darwinist theories that purported the racist claims of the inferiority of the colonized “Other.” They believed that their domination of other nations was inevitable due to European and American superiority. They developed a theory about the “Orient,” which crafted opposing stereotypes to describe the “East” and “West” in order to explain the rise of the West. This includes the ideas of “stagnation versus progress,” “superstition versus scientific thinking,” and “tradition versus modernity.”
This module offers an introduction to Western colonialism and related military conflicts, spanning from European empire-building projects to the US wars in Asia during the long twentieth century.
How is European imperialism and US colonialism in the modern period different from earlier patterns of global trade?
To what extent did the unequal treaty system contribute to colonization?
How are colonialism and war intimately tied to migration patterns?
From the Silk Road to European Domination
In the year 1271, a seventeen-year-old teenager from Venice, Italy, named Marco Polo, traveled with his father and uncle to China. The merchants traveled along the Silk Road, an ancient trading route that brought silks, spices, goods, and new ideas to and from the Far East to Europe via the Middle East and the Mediterranean. The Polos journeyed for four years over eight thousand miles on foot and by horse and camel. After his arrival to China, Marco stayed for seventeen years, working and traveling extensively for the Mongolian Emperor, Kublai Khan (the grandson of Genghis Khan), the founder of the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368).
Image 03.01.01 — The Silk Road was an ancient trading route that connected Asia to Europe, by merchants who traveled by foot, horse, or camel.
After Marco Polo returned to Italy in 1297, he published The Travels of Marco Polo. The book introduced Europeans to the Far East, with Marco depicting China as an exotic land with fabulous riches, advanced inventions and infrastructure such as gunpowder, the compass, printing press, a postal service system, roadways, and a benevolent ruler Mandated under Heaven. It was an instant bestseller! Two hundred years later, when Christopher Columbus set sail in search of India on behalf of the Spanish empire, he carried a copy of Marco Polo’s book.
However, when Columbus sailed across the Atlantic in 1492, he arrived on a Caribbean island, not China, which was inhabited by the Taíno people. After Spanish colonization, the island came to be known as Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic today). By claiming this land for the king and queen of Spain, Columbus inaugurated a shift in global connections and relationships.
Following Columbus, Spanish conquistadors defeated the Inca and Aztec empires in the early sixteenth century. Spain and Portugal ruthlessly colonized South America, Mexico, and the Caribbean, decimating native populations through war, disease, and enslavement. In the process, they looted the New World of twenty-five thousand tons of silver, and a hundred tons of gold.
In the East, the Silk Road and its far-reaching system of trading networks established crucial conduits for the dissemination of culture, technology, and goods. Those involved in trade prospered and benefitted tremendously in large part due to the trade routes, technology, or social progress that began in China. However, by the mid-fourteenth century, the world was hit by a shock. It turned out that not only goods and ideas traversed the trade routes, but also disease and illness. The bubonic plague caused the death of twenty-five to fifty million people in Europe and Asia, including two-thirds of the European population. Known as the “black death,” the widespread disaster originated in rats carrying infected fleas that traveled onboard ships and caravans along the Silk Road between Europe and Asia.
The plague not only disrupted global trade routes, but also resulted in social upheavals. By the early fifteenth century, whatever trade that was left from the devastation of the plague was further tightened by strict Chinese trade policies and the closing of borders by the Ottoman Empire. At one point during the fifteenth century, the Ming Dynasty’s navy had led large trading expeditions across the Indian Ocean, as far as the East Coast of Africa. However, by the mid-fifteenth century, the Ming largely stopped its trade routes and recalled its navy from the Indian Ocean and South China Sea, adhering to its closed borders policy.
Image 03.01.02 — The Ottoman Empire began in the fourteenth century and ended in the early twentieth century, and controlled much Western Asia, Southeastern Europe, and parts of North Africa. The Ottomans closed their borders to land trade during the bubonic plague in the fifteenth century.
When Portuguese warships traveled around the southern tip of Africa and reached the Indian Ocean in the early sixteenth century, no one stopped them from attacking unarmed Arab and Indian merchant ships. Soon thereafter, the Dutch and British followed in the path of the Portuguese. Europeans established trading ports, plantations, and factories in South and Southeast Asia, China, and Japan where there once were trading posts along the Silk Road.
In some cases, European powers operated through private joint-stock companies. Companies such as the Dutch and British East India Companies had their own private armies to seize territories and suppress local populations. In many cases, colonialism involved a combination of direct and indirect rule, as seen with the British in India and Malaysia, the French in Vietnam, the Dutch in Indonesia, and the Spanish (followed by the Americans) in the Philippines. Later, the Japanese would use direct, coercive rule in their annexation of Taiwan, Korea, China, and other South and Southeast Asian countries. The process of empire-building and colonization in Asia also resulted in wars used to conquer native populations, as well as conflicts between colonial powers competing for control over maritime routes and access to ports.
Image 03.01.03 — This map shows the various colonial spheres of influence in Asia between 1850–1914.
British Colonialism in India
The British East India Company, for example, took significant control of Punjab in Northern India after the first Anglo-Sikh War in 1846. Under the Treaty of Lahore, the Sikh Empire was forced to surrender a large territory including Kashmir, as part of the remuneration to the British of 1.2 million pounds for its loss. They also were forced to turn over the famous Koh-i-Noor diamond, one of the largest cut diamonds in the world at 105.6 carats. This was just one of many regional wars in South Asia that the British waged to wrest territory away from control by the Sikh Empire.
Image 03.01.04 — The flag of the British East India Company, a corporation which ruled large areas of the Indian subcontinent before ceding rule to the British government in the mid-1800s, which then controlled much of South Asia until 1947.
Still, there was resistance to colonialism, including the Great Rebellion of 1857 (Sepoy Rebellion), led by an uprising of Indian soldiers originally serving in the East India Company’s army. As a result of that conflict, the East India Company ceded its control of India to the British crown, with Queen Victoria becoming the Empress of India. Britain called India the “jewel” of its empire, gaining immense riches from taxes on Indian land and from the production and export of Indian goods such as cotton, tea, opium, and spices.
The displacement and impoverishment of Indian peasants led to the emigration of millions of people to labor abroad in the colonies of the British empire. This included two hundred thousand indentured workers sent to British plantation colonies in the Caribbean and Africa after the abolition of slavery in the 1830s. An additional twenty million Indian workers migrated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to work in the British colonies of Southeast Asia including Malaysia, Burma (now Myanmar), Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and East Africa. Another five thousand Indians migrated to Canada and the United States.
China and the Opium Wars
Unlike India, China was never formally colonized. In fact, for two hundred years, from 1550 to 1750, even as European powers were establishing colonies in South and Southeast Asia, China was still the single largest domestic economy in the world. It was also at the center of long-standing diplomatic and trading networks connecting Southeast Asia to Japan. Europeans grafted themselves onto these older trading systems while they struggled to establish direct trading and diplomatic relations with more favorable terms, such as tax privileges and inland trading rights.
China also became the premier destination market in the 1600s for silver produced in Spanish America. The Ming Dynasty replaced paper currency with coins, and its insatiable demand for silver fetched the highest prices in the world. Europeans shipped silver to China not as currency, but as commodity arbitrage—the practice of buying low and selling high. Notably, silver was the first transpacific trade. Each year, a galleon, a huge armed Spanish sailing ship, ran between Acapulco, Mexico, and Manila, Philippines, linking Europe and Asia with trade of South American silver for Chinese luxuries. In fact, the first people from Asia or the Pacific to come to the Americas were possibly Filipino seamen from the galleon trade. They jumped ship in Mexico and ended up in what is now New Orleans, Louisiana.
Europeans began trading silver for Chinese tea in large quantities in the early eighteenth century. Like silk, tea was a luxury item in Europe, but it had greater potential for a mass market. The creation of such a market for tea in Europe coincided with the rise in consumption of sugar from the plantation-slave colonies of the Caribbean in the late 1600s. Tea and sugar, along with tobacco, formed a global trade in stimulants based on slavery, colonialism, and new mass-consumer economies in Europe, especially Britain.
By the late 1700s, the British worried about the drain of its silver to China and its unfavorable trade imbalance. It switched from using silver to using opium grown in India to buy tea, silk, and other commodities, including silver, back from China. Opium ravaged India, its producer, and devastated China, its consumer. By 1838, the East India Company was illegally importing forty thousand chests of opium into China each year—a massive operation involving smugglers, underground drug dealers, and corrupt officials. This reversed Britain’s unfavorable trade imbalance by creating a new triangular trading network consisting of opium from India to China, and tea and silver from China back to Britain through India. The illegal trade resulted in twelve million opium users in China. In response, the Qing court aggressively tried to crack down on opium. It dispatched imperial Commissioner Lin Zexu, who had successfully cleared opium from Hunan and Hubei provinces, to Guangzhou.
Lin wrote to Queen Victoria, requesting that Britain stop the sale of opium into China. With no response, Lin arrested Chinese opium dealers and confiscated seventy thousand opium pipes, and seized over two million pounds of opium in the foreign section in Guangzhou. Afterwards, he blocked the Pearl River, trapping Westerners in Guangzhou. A series of failed diplomatic efforts led to the first Opium War (1839–1842), which awakened China to the realities of Western military aggression. Although the Qing deployed ten thousand soldiers and fleets of sailing ships called ‘junks’ to defend its harbors, rivers, and cities, they were no match for British gunboats, which were iron-hulled, steam-powered, and mounted with far heavier cannons.
Image 03.01.05 — An 1843 painting by Edward Duncan depicts the British navy’s more technologically-advanced gunboats destroying Chinese sailing ships known as “junks” during the first Opium War.
In the aftermath of China’s defeat to Great Britain, the Treaty of Nanjing extracted humiliating concessions from China, including the cessation of Hong Kong, the payment of twenty-one million silver dollars, and the opening of five treaty ports to foreign trade. Additionally, it granted extraterritorial rights to British citizens, exempting them from Chinese law on Chinese soil. Soon thereafter, France and the United States demanded the same access and rights.
Image 03.01.06 — The First Opium War occurred after the Qing Dynasty attempted to stifle the opium trade that was brought into China by the British, which had resulted in millions of Chinese opium users. The Chinese defeat in the war led to further concessions for the British.
A second Opium War (1856–1860) resulted in the Treaty of Tianjin between China and the foreign powers of France, Britain, Russia, and the US. Under its terms, China had to open ten additional ports, allow foreign merchants and missionaries into the interior, legalize the trade of opium, and was forced to establish diplomatic relations. Additionally, China had to pay Britain and France eight million silver dollars in indemnities. This method of conducting foreign relations through military force became known as “gunboat diplomacy.”
The Opium Wars resulted in an unequal treaty system, enabling Europeans to force open ports favorable to Western economic expansion and brought British business and missionary interests directly into China. The British flooded the Chinese market with cheap cotton imports, which hurt local production and destabilized economic and social conditions. China entered into a global economy and system of international relations in a weak and disadvantaged position. Chinese reformers, like the diplomat and scholar-poet Huang Zunxian, believed that China had to modernize in order to survive.
The British, Dutch, and other European powers led the way in the colonization of Asia. After the American Revolution, the United States entered the picture, seeking trade, especially in China, and joined the opium trade carrying opium from Turkey. The US became more aggressive in the second half of the nineteenth century, sending missionaries to China and Hawaiʻi, for example, and began to covet territorial acquisitions. Notably, American designs across the Pacific took place after the US had gained control of the North American continent through the US-Mexican War (1848–1849) and the last Indian Wars. The Asia-Pacific was the next “frontier” to be conquered.
In Japan, the famous case of its surrender to American “black ships” marks the beginning of an era in which Japanese foreign trading posts were opened without violence or even a single death. The port of Nagasaki was opened to the Portuguese, and then the Dutch from the seventeenth century. However, it was not until 1854 that US Navy commodore, Matthew Perry, and the arrival of his “black ships” forcibly opened Japan to western trade. Unlike China, Japan quickly modernized during the late nineteenth century and became a regional force itself, competing with the West for colonial power in Asia. Ultimately, Japan’s defeat of China (Sino-Japanese War of 1895) led to its colonization of Taiwan, and its defeat of Russia (Russo-Japanese War of 1905) led to Japan’s annexation of Korea.
Colonialism in the Pacific
Starting in the fifteenth century, European and American trade with Asia initially took place across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. It was not until the mid-sixteenth century that Europeans began to traverse the Pacific. A few early examples include the Spanish Acapulco-Manila galleon trade from 1565 to 1815, and British naval officer James Cook’s explorations of the Pacific in the 1770s and 1780s. Cook was the first European to visit Hawaiʻi, Tahiti, Australia, and New Zealand, in which his explorations laid the basis for colonization in the Pacific, beginning with the settlement of Australia as a British penal colony.
In the early nineteenth century, North Americans traded beaver pelts from the Pacific Northwest and sandalwood from Hawaiʻi to China. However, no major trading routes were established in the Pacific Rim between the Americas and Asia until the California Gold Rush (1848–1855) that stimulated a robust transpacific trade. The most active routes included those connecting Hong Kong to Yokohama, Japan, to San Francisco, California, and Sydney, Australia.
The Pacific Islands along these routes were of interest for Europeans and Americans as colonial possessions for several reasons. In the late nineteenth century, steam-powered ships required coal refueling stations in the Pacific. Americans coveted the Philippines for its proximity to China, as well as its markets that sold not only luxury goods like teas and silks from China, but also Filipino abacá (Manila hemp, a plant known for its fiber and textile applications), sugar, and tobacco. Hawaiʻi was also prized by the US not only for its sugar plantations, but also for its location in the middle of the Pacific, a strategic military position.
The islands that comprised the nation of Sāmoa also became a battleground for colonial competition between the US, Germany, and Great Britain in the mid-nineteenth century. By the 1870s, colonial powers established coconut plantations that not only relied on Samoan workers, but also on indentured labor from across the Pacific—including Kiribati, the Solomon Islands, New Guinea, as well as China. Samoans themselves fought hard to preserve their own farming techniques and sometimes established coconut plantation cooperatives. By the turn of the twentieth century, Sāmoa became a critical hub for US commercial shipping lines, requiring the construction of fueling stations and new administrative buildings.
Image 03.01.07 — Workers with large piles of coconut husks and shells in Sāmoa, circa 1918. Samoan coconut farmers resisted colonial rule from the US, Germany, and Great Britain, by establishing their own cooperatives.
US Wars in the Pacific
American military presence in the Pacific resulted directly from the wars in which the United States engaged in, in the Pacific Rim. First, the Philippine-American War (1899–1902) resulted in US control of the islands. After Spain was defeated in the Spanish-American War of 1898 and ceded its control over the Philippines to the US in the 1898 Treaty of Paris, Filipino revolutionaries resisted and declared the Philippines’ independence. In response the US waged war against Filipino forces, stifling their bid for independence, and subsequently the archipelago became a US colony from 1902 to 1946.
Image 03.01.08 — US soldiers hold Filipino prisoners of war in Manila, 1899. The Philippine-American War resulted in the US occupation of the Philippines until 1946.
The US’s wars in Asia continued during and after World War II with the US allying itself with China against Japan, ultimately resulting in the dropping of atomic bombs in August 1945 on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Image 03.01.09 — The detonation of atomic bombs by the United States over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima (left) and Nagasaki (right) in August 1945 are the only times nuclear weapons have ever been used against civilian populations. Up to 250,000 were killed.
The US also played a pivotal role in the division of the Korean peninsula, which led to the Korean War (1950–1953). During this conflict, approximately three million Korean people died, making it the deadliest struggle of the Cold War. During the Vietnam War (1955–1975), the North Vietnamese defeated the US and their attempts to contain Communism, despite an estimated two million Vietnamese deaths. Both were significant “hot wars” during the broader Cold War against the Soviet Union. Consequently, the US wars in the Asia-Pacific resulted in millions being killed, wounded, or displaced, and contributed to the division of the Korean peninsula. While the Socialist Republic of Vietnam established one unified state following the fall of Saigon in 1975, the two Koreas remain technically at war, as a formal peace treaty was never signed.
Moreover, the repercussions of wartime and post-war military bases in the Philippines, Japan, Korea, Guåhan (Guam), Okinawa, and other locations resulted in intimate encounters between soldiers and locals in the military bases that served as what Mary Louise Pratt calls “contact zones.” Wartime rhetoric reinforced conventional stereotypes of Asian women as objects of desire and submission. Due to social bias and marginalization, biracial children resulting from these relationships were often adopted abroad or shunned in their local communities.
Western families adopted thousands of these biracial children and war orphans. The adoption of children orphaned by conflict, alongside those from China, Cambodia, and other Asian countries in the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries, generated an international adoption industry and global adoptee community. The growth and popularity of Asian babies adopted by Western families in Europe and the US created a multi-million dollar industry rooted in the “hot wars” of the mid-to-late twentieth century. China ultimately terminated overseas adoptions in 2024, but international adoptions continue elsewhere even today. This legacy illustrates how colonialism, war, and unequal global relations serve as pathways for the migration of laborers, merchants, students, and children—many of whom are now working as adults to reclaim their dignity by underscoring their migration stories as part of a global human rights issue.
Conclusion
The racialized forms and ideas of colonialism and their postcolonial repercussions often follow migrants moving from the colonial periphery to the metropole (the colonizing country or empire). Many of the racial stereotypes attached to Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders originate in the colonial philosophy and logic of Orientalism, framing Asian cultures as inferior and their people as servile, cunning, and exotic.
At the same time, Asian migrants brought their lived experiences as colonized subjects and war refugees in the aftermath of these geopolitical wars to the US. Given their experience, they often supported anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements in their home countries. Such experiences are part and parcel of the defining features of Asian American and Pacific Islander stories, which foreground the growth of their ethnic communities.
Glossary terms in this module
Cold War Where it’s used
Beginning at the end of World War II and ending with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, the Cold War was a period of indirect war and competition between the United States and Soviet Union (USSR), and their allies. Though there was no direct fighting between the US and USSR, their rivalry brought forth a nuclear arms race and the formation of strategic alliances that supported one or the other side (NATO, Warsaw Pact, others). Both the US and USSR pressured decolonizing nations to take sides instead of remaining neutral. The Cold War also included several “hot wars,” or proxy military conflicts, in Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere.
colonialism Where it’s used
When one country takes partial or complete control over another country economically and politically, exploiting its natural resources for profit. The colonizer forces their beliefs and way of life onto the colonized.
direct rule Where it’s used
When a colonial power imposes its own government over a colony and directly rules the colonized people.
extraterritorial rights Where it’s used
Legal privileges granted to foreign nationals, allowing them to be governed by their home country’s laws rather than the laws of the country in which they reside or are present.
geopolitical Where it’s used
The influence of geography (location, ecology, and natural resources) on the politics of foreign relations and international affairs.
indirect rule Where it’s used
When an imperial power governs a colonized land by maintaining in place the local rulers and existing institutions, but requires them to operate under the authority and supervision of the colonial administration.
Orientalism Where it’s used
Coined by Palestinian scholar Edward Said, Orientalism is a theory that describes the West’s erroneous and often stereotyped perspective of the East, or the “Orient.” Scholarship, history, art, literature, and other forms of media with an Orientalist lens typically portray the East as backward, weak, subservient, and exotic, while emphasizing and juxtaposing the West (the “Occident”) as powerful, progressive, heroic, and modern.
Pacific Rim Where it’s used
The landmasses and countries that border the Pacific Ocean.
refugee Where it’s used
Someone, or a group of people who have been forced to flee their native country due to war, violence, or persecution, and are unable to return.
Silk Road Where it’s used
A network of trade routes connecting China and Asia to the Middle East and Europe from 130 BCE to the fifteenth century CE. Spanning over four thousand miles, silk, gold, silver, ideas, religions, and other goods were transported back and forth between major civilizations.
stereotype Where it’s used
Generalized beliefs about a group of people based on one or a few characteristics, often simplistic and false. Typically, stereotypes perpetuate harmful ideas about groups of people and are rooted in incorrect, and often racist beliefs.
