Infectious Intruders, Helpless Hawaiians: Public Health and Race-Making in Colonial Hawai‘i, 1887-1917

This dissertation explores the relationship between public health and race-making in Hawaiian Islands, from the last years of the independent Kingdom of Hawai‘i through the first two decades of American rule. During this period, it was a commonplace among white colonists that Native Hawaiians were a “dying race.” Going beyond the black/white binary implicit in most scholarship on race in the United States, this work traces how fears of Asian immigrants intertwined with ideas about Native vulnerability to disease. It argues that public health practices helped to position white colonizers as the natural benefactors of Native Hawaiians, while casting persons of Chinese and Japanese heritage as foreign, subversive, and dangerous to public health.