ORCID
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9515-8801
Date of Award
5-8-2025
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Type
Dissertation
Abstract
How did early Americans make sense of the vast oceanic space between Asia and the Americas? In this dissertation, I address this question by examining how Americans conceptualized the spaces now called “the Pacific Ocean” through print culture, correspondence, lived experiences, and foreign policies from the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I argue that Americans did not comprehend the Pacific as a single geographical space, but as multiple disjointed spaces connected by networks of trade, knowledge systems, and geopolitical interests. To recover the origin and development of their ideas, I focus on the role of cartographers, sailors, traders, merchants, newspaper editors, and politicians in the production of knowledge about distant spaces and unfamiliar cultures, as well as Americans’ relationship to them. The many images and debates regarding the Pacific would complicate how Americans understood the North American mainland and shape the extent and limitations of American expansionism and imperialism throughout the nineteenth century. This dissertation develops three closely related arguments. First, I argue that Americans relied on existing systems of knowledge to comprehend the Pacific. Americans actively embraced their European peers' intellectual traditions and cultural practices, especially that of their British predecessors. They consulted charts and journals produced by European explorers, embraced ideas of civilization promoted by British evangelicals, and turned to transatlantic communication networks for Pacific news. Second, the Pacific that emerged as a result was fragmented and uncertain. Americans did not cover the spaces between Asia and the Americas evenly but focused on specific trading posts, enclaves, and corridors, connecting them through commercial networks of sea lanes. As these sites were also claimed and contested by European empires and Indigenous peoples, Americans' relationships with them were unstable and subject to broader political, cultural, and social changes at a given time. Lastly, I am arguing for a corrective to the historiography of U.S. empire, which situates the Pacific in the history of the American West after 1840. Long before the United States claimed parts of the Pacific coast through diplomatic negotiations and establishing settlements, Americans were already in the Pacific and thinking about the Pacific. By focusing on their various imperial practices before the arrival of empire, this research probes the complicated relationship between imperialism and empire in the history of the early republic.
Language
English (en)
Chair and Committee
Peter Kastor
Committee Members
Abram Van Engen; Alexandre Dubé; Asheesh Kapur Siddique; Nancy Reynolds
Recommended Citation
Cho, Heesoo, "The Making of the Mental and Material Map of the Pacific Ocean in Early America, 1740-1819" (2025). Arts & Sciences Theses and Dissertations. 3558.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds/3558