How Honolulu Almost Burned and Why Sailors Matter to Early American Foreign Relations

This article argues that in ignoring the exploits of American sailors overseas, diplomatic historians have missed a very important facet of the early republic’s foreign relations. It claims that 1898 did not represent any decisive turn to the international, but rather, a moment in which primary control over the nation’s foreign relations shifted from maritime nonstate actors to the state itself. To make this case, the essay discusses the form and substance of violent altercations between American seafarers and those they encountered abroad. It reads barroom brawling and harborside tumult as “diplomatic fisticuffs,” that is, as sites for the enactment of a distinct, working-class and masculine foreign relations agenda. Politicians, diplomats, and missionaries, however, saw the mighty influence seafaring men exerted overseas as deeply problematic. But even as the American state worked to control rambunctious sailors, late nineteenth-century policy makers discovered that appropriating the violent words and deeds of the nation’s nautical class could prove useful in justifying imperial adventure abroad. Thus even as the nation’s mariners receded from view overseas, they continued to influence events around the globe.

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