Upper South Asia (1864–1875 CE): Colonial Consolidation, Frontier Policies, and Early Nationalist Sentiments

Mainland expansion by the United States also includes the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867.

Canada's parliament, to open the West to European immigration, also approves sponsoring the construction of three transcontinental railways (including the Canadian Pacific Railway), opening the prairies to settlement with the Dominion Lands Act, and establishing the North-West Mounted Police to assert its authority over this territory.

The Alaska Purchase of 1867 by the United States establishes the border with Canada along the Pacific coast, although there will continue to be some disputes about the exact demarcation of the Alaska-Yukon and Alaska-British Columbia border for years to come.

North Polynesia (1864 – 1875): Restoration, Reorientation, and the Shadow of Empire

Geographic and Historical Setting

North Polynesia—the Hawaiian Islands chain (except Hawai‘i Island’s southernmost reaches) together with Midway Atoll—lay at a global crossroads of empire and commerce in the mid-nineteenth century.
Anchors included O‘ahu, the administrative and diplomatic hub at Honolulu; Maui, long a royal seat at Lāhainā; Kaua‘i and Ni‘ihau, still maintaining older chiefly lineages; Moloka‘i, Lāna‘i, and Ni‘ihau, retaining rural self-sufficiency; and remote Midway, soon to be charted for coaling and telegraphic purposes.

By 1864, the Hawaiian Kingdom, under Kamehameha V, stood as one of the few recognized independent states in the Pacific. Its sovereignty was acknowledged by Britain, France, and the United States, yet increasingly constrained by their commercial and strategic ambitions. Across the broader North Polynesian arc, the tension between indigenous governance and external penetration defined the era.

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Political and Social Developments

The reign of Kamehameha V (1863–1872) marked a conservative turn after the liberal experiments of his predecessors.

• The 1864 Constitution centralized royal authority, restricted suffrage, and aimed to restore chiefly dignity amid rising settler influence.

• Honolulu became a locus of bureaucratic modernization—surveying lands, codifying laws, and fostering education—while plantations expanded under foreign capital.

• Disease and demographic collapse, still severe though slowing, left Native Hawaiians less than one-fifth of the mid-century population by the 1870s.

• Mission-educated elites debated the kingdom’s future: monarchy and identity on one hand, economic necessity and global dependency on the other.

In 1872, the king’s death without an heir triggered a succession crisis, resolved by the election of Lunalilo (1873–1874) and, after his brief rule, Kalākaua (1874–1891)—whose reign would soon usher in the Reciprocity Treaty with the United States (1875), drawing the islands ever closer to American orbit.

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Economy and Environmental Change

This decade consolidated the plantation transformation of North Polynesia.

• Sugar, driven by American investors and Chinese labor recruitment, became the dominant export.

• Rice and taro cultivation persisted in windward valleys, sustaining local markets.

• Whaling, once paramount, declined rapidly as petroleum replaced whale oil; ports like Lāhainā and Hilo quieted while Honolulu shifted to a provisioning and trans-Pacific shipping hub.

• Environmental pressures mounted: deforestation for cane and grazing accelerated erosion; stream diversions altered taro systems; introduced livestock and plants remade island ecologies.

The Hawaiian Agricultural Society and early forest advocates began to note the ecological costs of commercial agriculture—an early consciousness of environmental stewardship within a colonial framework of “improvement.”

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Cultural Life and Religion

Despite depopulation and conversion, Native Hawaiian culture experienced a revival of adaptation and resilience.

• Hula, long suppressed under missionary regimes, re-emerged in court festivals under Kalākaua’s patronage.

• Printing presses in Hawaiian and English spread literacy and debate; newspapers such as Ka Nupepa Kuokoacarried indigenous perspectives on modernization and foreign intrusion.

• Christian churches remained central, yet Hawaiian clergy increasingly led congregations.

• Oral traditions were recorded systematically by Hawaiian scholars, preserving genealogies, chants, and histories that might otherwise have vanished.

This synthesis of literacy, tradition, and political engagement gave the North Polynesian world its characteristic dual identity: cosmopolitan yet deeply local.

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Global Currents and Geopolitical Shifts

Beyond Hawai‘i, North Polynesia lay at the frontier of expanding imperial networks.

• The United States extended Pacific telegraph cables and surveyed Midway (claimed 1867) for naval purposes.

• Britain eyed coaling stations across the Central Pacific, while French influence pressed outward from Tahiti.

• The trans-Pacific steamship routes, linking San Francisco, Honolulu, and Asia, made the islands essential nodes in global communication.

Thus, even as the Hawaiian Kingdom sought to reaffirm sovereignty through diplomacy, the geography of the North Pacific was being rewritten around it.

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Environmental Adaptation and Resilience

• Indigenous land stewardship persisted within ahupua‘a (ridge-to-reef) frameworks despite privatization under the Great Māhele (1848).

• Native irrigation systems coexisted with plantation aqueducts; fishermen and farmers adapted to changing coastal and hydrological regimes.

• Bird and forest decline spurred early conservation discourse, foreshadowing twentieth-century ecological restoration.

The capacity to reintegrate old knowledge within new political economies became the defining adaptive strength of the era.

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Transition Toward the Late Nineteenth Century

By 1875, the signing of the Reciprocity Treaty with the United States symbolized both promise and peril: Hawaiian sugar gained privileged access to American markets, but at the cost of deepening economic dependence and future strategic vulnerability.

North Polynesia thus entered the modern age as a paradox—a sovereign island nation and cultural hearth standing at the crossroads of Pacific empire.
Its landscapes bore the marks of both continuity and upheaval: lo‘i terraces beside cane fields, basalt temples shadowed by missionary spires, and the voices of the oceanic past echoing through the new machinery of a globalizing world.

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Summary Insight:
Between 1864 and 1875, North Polynesia was neither isolated nor colonized in the simple sense; it was a kingdom negotiating modernity, balancing indigenous revival and external constraint.
In The Twelve Worlds, this decade represents the climactic hinge between autonomy and annexation—the last full moment when Hawai‘i and its northern oceanic neighbors still moved to their own political and cultural rhythms, even as the wider Pacific tide began to turn irrevocably.

New Caledonia becomes a penal colony in 1864, and from the 1860s until the end of the transportations in 1897, France will send about twenty-two thousand criminals and political prisoners to New Caledonia.

New Zealand's premier Alfred Domett moves a resolution to transfer the capital from Auckland to a locality near Cook Strait following concerns that the South Island might form a separate colony.

Wellington is chosen for its central location, with Parliament officially sitting there for the first time in 1865.

The coronation of Norodom of Cambodia in 1864 is an awkward affair at which both French and Thai representatives officiate.

Although the Thai attempt to thwart the expansion of French influence, their own influence over the monarch steadily dwindles.

In 1867 the French conclude a treaty with the Thai that give the latter control of Batdambang Province and of Siemreab Province in exchange for their renunciation of all claims of suzerainty over other parts of Cambodia.

Loss of the northwestern provinces deeply upsets Norodom, but he is beholden to the French for sending military aid to suppress a rebellion by a royal pretender.

A national consciousness had been growing among the Filipino emigres who had settled in Europe between 1872 and 1892.

In the freer atmosphere of Europe, these emigres—liberals exiled in 1872 and students attending European universities—had formed the Propaganda Movement.

Organized for literary and cultural purposes more than for political ends, the Propagandists, who include upper-class Filipinos from all the lowland Christian areas, strive to "awaken the sleeping intellect of the Spaniard to the needs of our country" and to create a closer, more equal association of the islands and the motherland.

Among their specific goals are representation of the Philippines in the Cortes, or Spanish parliament; secularization of the clergy; legalization of Spanish and Filipino equality; creation of a public school system independent of the friars; abolition of the polo (labor service) and vandala (forced sale of local products to the government); guarantee of basic freedoms of speech and association; and equal opportunity for Filipinos and Spanish to enter government service.

Spain's new government appoints General Carlos Maria de la Torre governor of the Philippines following the Spanish revolution of September 1868, in which the unpopular Queen Isabella II had been deposed.

An outspoken liberal, de la Torre extends to Filipinos the promise of reform.

In a break with established practice, he fraternizes with Filipinos, invites them to the governor's palace, and rides with them in official processions.

Filipinos in turn welcome de la Torre warmly, hold a "liberty parade" to celebrate the adoption of the liberal 1869 Spanish constitution, and establish a reform committee to lay the foundations of a new order.

Prominent among de la Torre's supporters in Manila are professional and business leaders of the ilustrado community and, perhaps more significantly, Filipino secular priests.

These include the learned Father Jose Burgos, a Spanish mestizo, who has published a pamphlet, Manifesto to the Noble Spanish Nation, criticizing those racially prejudiced Spanish who barred Filipinos from the priesthood and government service.

For a brief time, the tide seems to be turning against the friars.

In December 1870, the archbishop of Manila, Gregorio Meliton Martinez, writes to the Spanish regent advocating secularization and warning that discrimination against Filipino priests will encourage anti-Spanish sentiments.

According to historian of the Philippines Austin Coates, "1869 and 1870 stand distinct and apart from the whole of the rest of the period as a time when for a brief moment a real breath of the nineteenth century penetrated the Islands, which till then had been living largely in the seventeenth century."

De la Torre abolishes censorship of newspapers and legalizes the holding of public demonstrations, free speech, and assembly—rights guaranteed in the 1869 Spanish constitution.

Students at the University of Santo Tomas form an association, the Liberal Young Students (Juventud Escolar Liber-al), and in October 1869 hold demonstrations protesting the abuses of the university's Dominican friar administrators and teachers.