In recent times, the Asia-Pacific region has far surpassed Europe in terms of reciprocal trade with the United States, and since the 1980s immigrants from Asia entering the United States have exceeded their counterparts from Europe, reversing a longstanding historical trend and making Asian Americans the country’s fastest growing racial group. What does transpacific history look like if the arc of the story is extended to the present?

The essays in this volume offer answers to this question challenging current assumptions about transpacific relations. Many of these assumptions are expressed through fear: that the ascendance of China threatens a U.S.-led world system and undermines domestic economies; that immigrants subvert national unity; and that globalization, for all its transcending of international, cultural, and racial differences, generates its own forms of prejudice and social divisions that reproduce global and national inequalities. The contributors make clear that these fears associated with, and induced by, pacific integration are not new. Rather, they are the most recent manifestation of international, racial, and cultural conflicts that have driven transpacific relations in its premodern and especially modern iterations.