This article aims to open the discussion of U.S. imperialism and Chinese comprador intermediaries in the Pacific to an enlarged historical analysis of inherited empires. Beginning with the formation of trans-Pacific Spanish commerce and the specialized role of Chinese intermediary commercial brokers, I introduce the notion of the comprador Pacific as a historical framework to understand the succession of imperial states, overlapping racializations, and the maintenance of a territorial assemblage bridging Asia and the Americas. The figure of the Chinese comprador is centered as a social and cultural icon of the enduring material circuits of Pacific empires. The article combines a commodity history of silver with a social history of the Chinese middleman occupation, along with exemplary biographical vignettes of key figures involved in imperial succession in the comprador Pacific.

There is a profound lack of awareness among younger generations about Japan’s prewar engagement with the Pacific Islands, let alone other colonial sites, yet arguably, this amnesia is not a spontaneous phenomenon. Forgetting about Micronesia and erasing it from the Japanese mass consciousness was a project in which both Japanese and American postwar forces were complicit. Focusing on stories of Japanese amnesia and selective memory in the Marshall Islands, I explore the Marshallese notion of “closing the sea,” how U.S. power has long been a mediating factor in why Japanese forget their Pacific past, and also why Marshall Islanders remember it.