ABSTRACT
In the nineteenth century the Americans reached out into the Pacific. They bought Alaska from the Russians (1867), took the Philippines and Guam from Spain (1898), and annexed Hawaii, Midway, Wake and eastern Samoa. Between 1904 and 1914 they built the Panama Canal, giving ships a far shorter route between Atlantic and Pacific than the ones through the Magellan strait or round Cape Horn (6, 70). In Japan, whose rulers had long rebuffed all foreign contacts, the Americans’ opening up of the country to trade in 1854 had fateful consequences; later they became alarmed by Japan’s ambitions, which, in due time, led to its 1941 attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, on Oahu island in the Hawaiian group. Japan then seized the Philippines, Guam, Wake and the westernmost Aleutians (57).
