Empire of Culture: U.S. Entertainers and the Making of the Pacific Circuit, 1850-1890.

Abstract

During the mid-nineteenth century, the ongoing development of a robust and expansive U.S. culture industry dovetailed with the emergence of a recognizable Pacific world shaped by the integrative forces of colonialism and capitalism. In the wake of the California Gold Rush, these seemingly disparate developments intersected as U.S. entertainers flocked to San Francisco and began to tour around the Pacific, giving birth to a vibrant entertainment circuit that fomented interactions and mediated exchanges between the United States and the diverse peoples and cultures of the Pacific world. This dissertation is a transnational cultural history of this Pacific circuit that focuses on the experiences of the U.S. entertainers that moved through it and their reciprocal interactions with the people and places that they encountered along the way.

While the Pacific circuit generated a range of responses and served a variety of ends, within its capacious framework I seek to develop three broad and related themes. The first centers on the workings and transnational trajectory of the U.S. culture industry, which ensured that U.S. entertainers assumed a prominent and profitable position on the developing circuit. The second theme looks at how the performances of U.S. entertainers in transnational contexts were dynamic interactions imbued with cross-cultural meaning and long-term impacts. Lastly, the dissertation explores the complex relationship between the evolving Pacific circuit and an expanding U.S. empire.

The analysis proceeds from the first circuses and minstrel troupes that embarked on transpacific tours in the early 1850s through the emergence of an increasingly integrated and expansive entertainment circuit in the 1870s. Noteworthy figures covered include General Tom Thumb, Harry Kellar, James Bailey, and the Georgia Minstrels, amongst many others. The Pacific circuit linked together an ever-increasing and shifting set of cultural markets and while Australia was the most significant, U.S. entertainers also visited Hawai’i, New Zealand, Japan, and major colonial ports like Singapore, Hong Kong, and Batavia. Ultimately, this study of the making of the Pacific circuit, and the entertainers that enlivened it, argues that the U.S. culture industry fabricated an “Empire of Culture” in the nineteenth-century Pacific world.