The Whaler’s Empire: Industry, Environment, and American Expansion in the Pacific Ocean

Author

• Andrew J. Hiner, Clemson UniversityFollow

Date of Award

5-2026

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

History

Committee Chair/Advisor

Camden Burd

Committee Member

Rebecca Stoil

Committee Member

Michael Silvestri

Abstract

The American whaling industry reached its peak in the mid nineteenth century, numbering over seven hundred vessels and reaching from the South Atlantic to Arctic Oceans. The rise of this maritime trade coincided with the emergence of the nation’s industrial revolution at home, a revolution which employed the product of whaling—namely whale oil—as a lubricant for machinery. Historians have often overlooked the use of this commodity in manufacturing, focusing instead on whale oil’s use as an illuminant. Examining the relation between the whaling and manufacturing industries offers new insights into how ocean environments played a role in domestic production. It also reframes discussions of America’s government expansion into the Pacific Ocean.

As the whale industry expanded as a result of depleting whale populations, a rhetorical desire to defend the whale trade through government intervention mixed with and was influenced by a commercial spirit of industrial growth, laying the groundwork for a policy of “informal” imperialism in East Asia. The rapacious demands of America’s industrial revolution resulted in unintended consequences through the whaling industry, consequences which materialized in depleted whale populations and an expansion of America’s political power into the Pacific and East Asia. I argue that an examination of the whale industry through its relationship with American manufacturing sheds new light on the interrelation between the nation’s progressive industrial vision, changing ocean ecosystems, and a nascent expansionist fervor which predated explicit ventures into colonial foreign policy in the late nineteenth century.

Recommended Citation

Hiner, Andrew J., "The Whaler’s Empire: Industry, Environment, and American Expansion in the Pacific Ocean" (2026). All Theses. 4704.
https://open.clemson.edu/all_theses/4704