Americans don’t usually think of the United States as a Pacific country. California is where the country seems to stop, Hawaii floats in a little box somewhere off the coast, Alaska gets moved into another box, and Guam might not appear on the map at all. Look at enough maps like this and the Pacific begins to resemble the enormous empty space beside the United States rather than part of the geography of the United States.

Put the Atlantic in the middle of the map and America’s relationship with the world looks fairly obvious. Britain is across the ocean. France and Germany are behind it. Two world wars happened over there. NATO eventually connected North America with Europe, while the Cold War placed the United States and Soviet Union on opposite sides of the European continent. The map reinforces the history most Americans already know.

Move the map west and something different happens. Suddenly California, Alaska and Hawaii form one side of an enormous American relationship with the Pacific. Guam appears much farther west. Japan, China and the Philippines stop looking like distant countries at the edge of somebody else’s map. The Pacific becomes the center of the picture and more than two centuries of American history start rearranging themselves around it.

The strange part is how early the story begins. America was trading with the other side of the Pacific before America actually reached the Pacific by land.

America Goes to China Before It Goes West

In 1784, the Empress of China sailed from New York for Canton, opening direct trade between the newly independent United States and China. Two years later, Congress appointed Samuel Shaw, who had sailed aboard the ship as its supercargo, as American consul at Canton. The United States was still operating under the Articles of Confederation. George Washington wasn’t president, the Constitution hadn’t been adopted, and the country didn’t possess California or any other Pacific coastline.

Yet, American merchants were already participating in the Canton trade. Independence had freed them from relying on Britain’s commercial system, allowing American ships to trade directly for Chinese tea, silk, porcelain and other goods. The relationship immediately produced a problem that would become familiar to anyone studying international trade: Americans wanted considerably more from China than Chinese merchants wanted from the United States.

American traders consequently began experimenting. Ginseng could be sold in China. Furs could be obtained elsewhere and carried to Canton. Metals and other commodities found buyers, while Spanish silver dollars could settle whatever imbalance remained. The question was no longer simply what the United States could sell to China. American merchants increasingly asked what they could find somewhere else that China wanted.

That turned a trade route into a network.

Hawaii Happens to Be in the Middle

Crossing an ocean created another problem because ships couldn’t simply sail indefinitely. They needed food, fresh water, repairs, sailors and places to stop. Hawaii happened to be sitting in an extraordinarily useful position in the middle of the developing Pacific network.

Captain James Cook reached the Hawaiian Islands in 1778 while searching for a Northwest Passage and was killed during a confrontation with Hawaiians the following year. His death didn’t stop the maritime traffic his voyages helped encourage. Ships involved in the Pacific Northwest and China trades increasingly used Hawaii for provisions, while Britain developed its own relationship with Kamehameha I.

The Pacific Northwest provided another piece of the commercial puzzle. Sea-otter pelts obtained along the northwest coast of North America could command much higher prices in China, giving merchants another commodity capable of financing purchases at Canton. Hawaii provided a useful stopping point between them.

The geography was beginning to connect before the United States controlled most of it. American merchants could operate between the Atlantic seaboard, South America, the Pacific Northwest, Hawaii and Canton without the American government possessing California, Alaska, Hawaii, Guam or the Philippines.

Hawaii didn’t move. The network around Hawaii did.

Then the War of 1812 Interrupts Everything

The War of 1812 severely disrupted American overseas commerce. British naval power made long-distance American shipping dangerous, and the China trade contracted with the rest of American maritime commerce.

When the war ended, however, Americans didn’t abandon Canton. They went back.

About 30 American vessels reached Canton during the 1815–16 trading season, followed by 38 the next season, 39 the season after that and 47 during 1818–19. By the latter season, American exports to Canton and imports from Canton were each valued at roughly $9 million, exceeding the best years before the war. By around 1820, the United States had become one of the largest Western participants in the China trade, behind Britain.

Something else had changed during the process. The adventurous individual voyages of the eighteenth century were becoming part of a more organized commercial system.

Ships became larger, merchant houses became more powerful, and capital accumulated. Experienced traders developed relationships with Canton merchants, while American commercial networks learned how to move commodities and money through several markets before the ship ever returned home.

The simple line from New York to Canton was becoming a web.

America Builds a Supply Chain

The underlying economic problem remained. China produced goods Americans wanted in enormous quantities, particularly tea, but ordinary American manufactured goods still weren’t sufficient to pay for everything Americans wanted to purchase.

One solution was silver and another was to acquire something somewhere else.

American merchants could obtain ginseng in North America, furs along the Pacific coast, sandalwood in Pacific islands, metals from other markets, or commodities from South America and Europe. Those goods could be carried into Asian markets, exchanged or sold, and the proceeds used to purchase Chinese products. Tea could then be transported back across the world and sold to American or European consumers.

The ship wasn’t merely carrying cargo anymore. It was carrying value from market to market.

This created something surprisingly recognizable to modern eyes. American capital financed ships. Ships connected commodity producers with distant markets. Merchants searched for price differences between regions. Credit allowed transactions to occur across long distances and periods of time. Insurance distributed some of the risks of losing ships and cargo. International currencies allowed merchants to settle transactions when barter wasn’t practical.

By the 1820s, a relatively small group of American merchant houses increasingly dominated the Far Eastern trade. The romantic image of an adventurous captain sailing off toward China was giving way to firms managing multinational commercial networks.

There was also a darker part of this system. British merchants possessed access to Indian opium through Britain’s imperial networks, while some American merchants entered the illegal Chinese opium trade using supplies obtained from the Ottoman Empire, particularly around Smyrna. American firms never approached the scale of Britain’s opium business, but the trade became significant enough that it can’t be separated entirely from the history of American commerce with China.

The early Pacific economy wasn’t a clean story of adventurous merchants spreading peaceful commerce. It contained fortunes, speculation, exploitation, smuggling and imperial competition alongside legitimate trade. What matters for the geography is that American commercial interests were becoming increasingly embedded in a system stretching across an ocean the United States still barely touched territorially.

Eventually America Reaches the Pacific

American territory eventually caught up with American commerce. California became part of the United States following the Mexican-American War, giving the country a substantial Pacific coastline. The purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867 extended American territory across the northern Pacific and placed the United States remarkably close to Asia.

Then came 1898.

The Spanish-American War is usually remembered through Cuba, the USS Maine, Theodore Roosevelt and the Rough Riders. Yet one of the first major American victories occurred thousands of miles away at Manila Bay. When the war ended, Spain ceded Guam and the Philippines to the United States, while the United States annexed Hawaii during the same year. The State Department’s historical account describes the result plainly: the war secured the position of the United States as a “Pacific power.”

That phrase can make 1898 sound like the beginning of something. In another sense, it was the culmination of something that had been developing for more than a century.

American merchants had already learned the Pacific. American ships had already crossed it. American businesses had already financed commerce across it. American diplomats had already negotiated over access to China. American sailors had already used Hawaii. Commercial networks had already connected North America with Asian markets.

Now the American government began putting territorial and military infrastructure onto the commercial geography. America hadn’t suddenly discovered the Pacific. The state was catching up with the network.

Now Draw the Infrastructure

Once those territories appear on the map, some otherwise strange pieces of American history begin making more sense. Guam wasn’t simply a little island the United States happened to acquire from Spain. It occupied a useful position between the American West Coast and the Philippines, while its harbor made it valuable to steamships crossing the Pacific.

Hawaii had become even more useful as steam replaced sail and naval logistics became increasingly sophisticated. The Philippines placed American territory beside East and Southeast Asia, while Alaska reached toward the northern Pacific. California contained the ports and growing industrial economy connecting the continental United States with the ocean.

Then came the cables.

Submarine telegraph lines transformed communications across the same geography. Guam became part of the American trans-Pacific cable system, which helps explain why the United States could become interested in a tiny island like Yap when cables connected Yap to Guam. What looked like scattered islands on an ordinary map could become nodes in a communications network once somebody drew the wires between them.

China also looks different from this perspective. American commercial interest there stretched back to the eighteenth century. The Open Door policy, American involvement during the Boxer Rebellion, and later negotiations over China at the Washington Naval Conference weren’t isolated episodes in which the United States suddenly became interested in a distant Asian country. They belonged to a much older Pacific commercial and diplomatic relationship.

By the Washington Naval Conference of 1921–22, the Pacific was crowded with overlapping systems. Britain, Japan, the United States and European colonial powers possessed islands, naval bases, cables, commercial routes and territorial interests throughout the region. Even Yap had become important enough for governments to argue over which country controlled the cables attached to it.

Draw the infrastructure onto the map and the supposedly empty Pacific fills up very quickly.

America Doesn’t Leave

World War II transformed the Pacific again, but the United States didn’t finish the war and retreat back across the ocean. American territories including Hawaii, Guam and the Philippines became part of the conflict, while General Douglas MacArthur eventually presided over the Allied occupation of Japan. Japan was demilitarized and politically reconstructed before becoming one of America’s most important postwar partners.

The relationship with Japan changed dramatically, but Japan’s location didn’t. It still sat beside China, Korea, the Soviet Far East and the maritime routes connecting Northeast and Southeast Asia. American policymakers therefore began constructing a postwar security system around much of the same Pacific geography.

The diplomatic documents from 1951 are remarkably explicit about this. President Harry Truman instructed John Foster Dulles that the United States intended to commit substantial forces to defending the island chain of which Japan formed a part. American officials were simultaneously considering security arrangements involving Japan, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand and the United States.

The resulting architecture remains recognizable. The San Francisco Peace Treaty restored Japanese sovereignty, while a separate security treaty allowed American forces to remain in and around Japan. The United States also signed a mutual defense treaty with the Philippines and entered the ANZUS security arrangement with Australia and New Zealand.

America didn’t win the Pacific War and leave the Pacific. It reorganized the Pacific.

They’re Still Saying It

More than a century after the United States was already being described as a Pacific power, American political figures are still reminding people of the same geography.

Steve Bannon made the argument explicitly while discussing China and the future direction of American foreign policy. In a 2020 interview, Bannon recalled his experience serving with the Navy in the Pacific and argued that the center of geopolitical gravity was increasingly shifting toward Asia. His formulation was simple: “America is a Pacific power.”

Pete Hegseth recently made essentially the same geographic argument from the Pentagon. Speaking at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore in May 2026, he described America as a “Pacific nation” while discussing deterrence, the First Island Chain and the continuing American military presence in the region.

Bannon’s prediction that the twenty-first century would increasingly focus on the Pacific is impossible to settle this early in the century, but the economic map explains why people keep making the prediction. APEC’s 21 economies account for approximately 61 percent of global GDP and 47 percent of global trade. In 2024, 60.2 percent of American goods exports went to APEC economies, while 69 percent of American goods imports came from them. Total U.S. goods-and-services trade with APEC economies reached approximately $4.1 trillion.

The cargo has changed considerably since the Empress of China arrived at Canton. Tea, porcelain, furs and silver have been joined by container ships, petroleum, semiconductors, critical minerals, digital communications and enormously complicated international supply chains. American policy in the Pacific now concerns not only military alliances and naval bases but semiconductor production, energy security, undersea cables and the resilience of supply chains.

The technology changed, but the Pacific network remained.

Maybe the Map Is the Problem

Americans don’t forget that California borders the Pacific or that Hawaii exists. Most know that Guam is American territory, even if they couldn’t immediately locate it on a blank map. They know America has longstanding relationships with Japan, South Korea, Australia and the Philippines.

The strange part is that these facts often remain separate.

Put the Pacific in the center and they connect. The Empress of China sails toward Canton before George Washington becomes president. American merchants build increasingly complicated commercial networks across the ocean. Hawaii becomes a useful provisioning point. The United States reaches California and acquires Alaska. Hawaii, Guam and the Philippines extend American territory thousands of miles across the Pacific. Telegraph cables and naval bases connect the network. The Washington Naval Conference tries to manage parts of it. MacArthur occupies Japan, and American diplomats subsequently construct alliances across much of the same geography.

Then look at the map today. Alaska is still there. Hawaii is still there. Guam is still American territory. Japan, South Korea, Australia and the Philippines remain American treaty allies, while an enormous portion of American trade crosses the Pacific and some of the world’s most important technological supply chains run through the region.

None of this means the United States isn’t an Atlantic power. The more interesting characteristic of American geography is that the country became powerful enough to operate across both oceans simultaneously.

Put Europe in the center and the twentieth century becomes a story about America’s relationship with the Atlantic world. Put the Pacific in the center and another continuous history appears, running through Canton, Hawaii, California, Alaska, Guam, the Philippines, China, Japan and all the infrastructure built between them.

The history was there the entire time. We just kept putting it at the edge of the map.