From Continental Empire to Oceanic Hegemony

One perspective holds that the genesis of the modern corporation, a core instrument of global power, finds its origins within the state apparatus. While traditional business history often credits the railroad industry of the mid-nineteenth-century United States with pioneering modern management, evidence points to a different source. The bureaucratic systems, staff and line hierarchies, and methods of surveillance that typify the large firm were in fact developed by the U.S. military decades earlier, according to Kimberly Kracman. The Department of War, tasked with managing tens of thousands of personnel and millions in assets across a large continent, created a management philosophy from 1817 onward. The U.S. military was refining its capacity to produce violence as an intermediary service for economic processes. The purpose of this organized force was to enable a form of "continental colonialism", which involved the forceful acquisition of land from Indigenous Nations and the enforcement of the enslavement of Black workers. The management technology was designed to control labor, creating a "calculable" workforce in "calculable spaces". This model, honed for imperial violence, was subsequently transferred to the private sector. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, for instance, received substantial aid from U.S. Army engineers and served as a prototype for later rail companies.

A second perspective follows this lineage of power into the contemporary era, viewing it through the lens of racial capitalism. This view suggests that capitalism and racialization are systems that are one and the same. Capital accumulates by producing and moving through relations of extreme inequality among human groups. For Pacific Island nations, this is a particularly poignant reality. They have historically been used as "sacrifice zones", suffering nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands and phosphate mining in Nauru. The consequences of fossil fuel consumption, generated largely in the Global North, are visited upon racialized states in the Global South. These same states are then subjected to solutions, such as climate finance, which perpetuate the cycle of extraction. Climate finance is a tool whose roots are in histories of neo-colonialism and development. The paper "Scratches on the wall" by Kirsty Anantharajah argues that debt and an over-reliance on financial intermediaries serve as rationales for continuing this racializing and materially destructive process. The systems erect "walls" and "borders" that delineate who has access to resources. The Marshallese poet Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner speaks to the material effects, describing water "rising, flooding our cemeteries, gushing over our sea walls". The disconnection from central climate resources has devastating effects.

A third perspective considers the state itself as a foreign import to Pacific societies. This view holds that the introduction of "foreign-style political institutions" has raised questions about their appropriateness. Issues like the coups in Fiji and the attempt of Bougainville to secede from Papua New Guinea have brought these questions to the fore. The idea of the modern state is a recent one in the region, with many Melanesian societies historically being "stateless". The colonial state that was imposed was distinct from its metropolitan counterparts. It was more reliant on coercion than on consent and was primarily concerned with economic extraction. This has carried forward and created a post-colonial state compromised by its past (Larmour). The tension between state functions and traditional values is often evident. In Papua New Guinea, for example, questions of corruption partly stem from the conflict between the obligations of public service and the pre-existing values of kinship. The space between the state and society is occupied by a "civil society" which in the Pacific includes groups like clans and churches that provide a basis for resistance and protection for individuals at the local level.

A fourth perspective focuses on the discourse used to maintain such supremacy, introducing the idea of "blue hegemonies." This view posits that international relations are governed by geocultural power in addition to geopolitical and economic concerns. Global powers use "blue" environmental discourses, such as "blue economy", "blue partnership", and "blue competition", as conceptual frames for their geopolitical and geoeconomic engagements in the Pacific. These discourses function as a form of co-option, enveloping Indigenous Pacific ways of relating to the ocean into an imperialist narrative. A development framework like the "blue economy" has roots in "green economy" discourses, which masked a form of "green colonialism" (Padgett). These rhetorical strategies present a veneer of cooperative action while obscuring the ongoing militarization, land grabbing, and extraction that continue to happen in Pacific waters and lands. The paper suggests that states use these "geocultural" narratives to produce national narratives and regional identities. The discourse is not one-sided. The Pacific Islands Forum, a multinational diplomatic body, has advanced a counter-narrative of the "Blue Pacific Continent" to assert regional concerns. The intellectual work lies in understanding the linguistic and cultural subtleties that make such discourses possible. A company such as ours, which works with translation and linguistic analysis, sees these differences everyday.

The central question becomes whether the "spatial fix", or the imposition of an external logic on the Pacific, can be subverted by returning to the specific locales and discrete conjunctions of events that give places their own power.

The progression from the military's development of organizational power, to the application of racial capitalism, to the imposition of foreign state structures, and finally to the use of a "blue" geocultural discourse shows a common thread. The systems of power build upon one another like lego bricks. Modern corporate bureaucracy has its roots in imperial violence and expansion. That same imperial logic persists in the financial systems of climate finance. The discourse used to justify and extend these systems becomes its own tool of power. The walls of racial capitalism and the rhetoric of blue hegemony are two faces of the same coin, each working to rationalize the unequal distribution of resources and futures. The question is whether these walls can be broken, and whether the language of liberation can gain traction against the deeply entrenched vernaculars of supremacy.