When refracted through California, the story of US naval expansion in the 1880s – the creation of a small but respectable force of steel cruisers and gunboats – becomes a form of naval racing against Pacific newly made navies. Californians and their national allies argued for a New Navy, citing fears of Chile, China, and eventually Japan. These fears were not only material, stemming from the technical inferiority of the US Old Navy, but also cultural, as naval programs in the Pacific threatened assumptions about US racial and civilizational superiority. Physically, advanced navies in the Pacific stoked fear in Californian cities about raids from the sea. Technologically, Pacific newly made navies (and especially the Chilean cruiser Esmeralda) served as yardsticks to measure US Navy progress. Culturally, the sophistication of Pacific navies undermined beliefs about the position of the United States as the most advanced nation in the hemisphere. These threats allowed navalists to make an effective argument for funding a small, cruiser-dominated New Navy in the 1880s that could in the near term compete with its Pacific rivals.

The War of the Pacific (1879–1884) and the Sino-French War (1883–1885) put the Pacific’s newly made navies to the test after a decade of naval racing. These two wars are rarely compared, despite occurring more or less contemporaneously and employing many of the same technologies. In the War of the Pacific, Chilean victory transformed the Chilean Navy into the “preponderant force in South America.” As a hemispheric matter, the Chilean newly made navy also became a credible danger to the “Old Steam Navy” and soon the US “New Navy’s” nearest pacing threat. Strategic defeat in the Sino-French War masked Chinese tactical successes that would guide the Qing Empire’s self-strengthening efforts in the coming decades. Defeat was not a refutation but rather confirmation of the need to cultivate an effective navy, spurring on the expansion of the Beiyang Fleet until it became the dominant power in Northeast Asia by the early 1890s. In an era of vicious anti-Chinese racism in the United States, the Qing’s possession of a modern navy created debate and cultural anxiety in California.

After the US Civil War, technology, expertise, and surplus materiel flowed out into the Pacific World where it was adopted by “self-strengthening” movements in Peru, Chile, China, and Japan. As leaders in the Pacific faced the threat of North Atlantic maritime power, they sought to leverage technological and tactical advances pioneered in the US Civil War. In doing so, these four states transformed in a matter of years from “navies to construct” into “newly made navies”: industrial fleets, built from little or no naval infrastructure, leveraging recent technological innovations. This chapter also explores how newly made Pacific navies performed in the War against Spain (1864–1866), the Boshin War (1868–1869), and the Japanese Expedition to Taiwan (1874). Contemporaneously, US postwar demobilization created moments of parity between the US “Old Steam Navy” and Pacific states. Most histories frame the post-Civil War period as one of US naval retrenchment and stagnation, but when framed in a transwar context, the Pacific becomes a laboratory of US-inspired innovation.

The proliferation of advanced weapons in the 1860s catalyzed intraregional naval races between Chile/Peru and Japan/China. What began as efforts to accrue defensive capabilities in China and Peru against North Atlantic power soon morphed into spiraling naval races with Japan and Chile, respectively. Though smaller in scale, these races were every bit as dynamic as their better-studied analogs like the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Anglo-French and Anglo-German naval races. For US politicians and naval leaders looking out from San Francisco, the Pacific’s naval races offered a contrast with the relative deterioration of the “Old Steam Navy.” Even as it continued to perform useful missions as a constabulary force, the US Old Navy relied on ships built in the 1850s. By maintaining a status quo, the United States was, in practice, falling behind Pacific newly made navies, stimulating calls for naval reform and investment as a result.

Confederate naval building during the US Civil War (1861–1865) was a form of “self-strengthening” that had much in common with similar efforts across the Pacific World in the 1860s and 1870s. To overcome structural limitations (a lack of industrial capacity or existing warships), Confederate navy builders relied on foreign acquisitions and local innovations such as the torpedo to compete with the materially superior United States. The US Civil War was, in this sense, a vast practical experiment for small or industrially weak states confronting North Atlantic power. Beginning in the 1860s, the template set by the Confederacy – local adaptation with cheap asymmetric weapons and the overseas acquisition of qualitatively advanced systems – found numerous adopters in Pacific newly made navies. Reciprocally, many industrial producers in Europe were stimulated by demand from the Confederacy to produce novel weapons for Pacific states.

Four themes characterize the role of the Pacific’s newly made navies in the making of the US “New Navy.” Demand for new and surplus technology accelerated innovation. Testing and battlefield observation of novel weapons helped refine decisions about acquisitions and strategy. Threat perceptions of ascendant newly made navies in the Pacific made manifest the immediate need for a US New Navy. And, finally, threat perceptions were instrumentalized as political capital in order to sell the utility of navalism to a skeptical public. Appreciating these relationships textures accounts of the emergence of the US empire in the Pacific, the study of military history in the context of international society, and the advent of prototypically “modern” navies. In this the history of the nineteenth-century Pacific is a useful primer for competition in the region between the People’s Republic of China and the United States.

The Pacific not only inspired early investments in the New Navy but the region also offered a series of crises in which the United States could deploy naval assets. As of 1890, the New Navy could muster only five modern warships into its model “Squadron of Evolution.” As a collective, it was a force that mattered little to the North Atlantic balance of power. In the Pacific, by contrast, New Navy ships were sufficient to force Chile – a longtime antagonist – into diplomatic settlements during the Chase of the Itata (1891) and the Baltimore Incident (1891–1892). These successful acts of “cruiser diplomacy” delivered political results. Naval proponents cited operations in the Pacific as evidence of the New Navy’s efficacy and necessity. By 1893, as its sailors and marines intervened in the Hawaiian Coup, the New Navy already had a record of coercion in the Pacific. Such results undergirded celebrations and naval reviews from Astoria, Oregon to New York City, as officials displayed the New Navy and its achievements to the public and the world.

The themes of technical parity and cultural insecurity endured into the 1890s as Japan replaced Chile in the role of Pacific threat to the US New Navy. As the relative power of the Chilean Navy faded after 1892, Japanese victory in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) created a new challenge to US narratives about its civilizational superiority and technological prowess. Much as California’s security was a source of anxiety during the US–Chilean naval race in the 1880s, Hawaii now served as a new site of conflict between US and Japanese imperialisms – acutely in the crises of 1893 and 1897. US policymakers and naval officers used recent experiences with Chile (and China) as a lens through which to understand Japan. The upshot: the origins of the US–Japanese competition – culminating eventually in World War II – were intimately tied to navalist politics and US–Chilean tensions in the 1880s.

This chapter reviews the leading explanations for the creation of the US “New Navy” and then proposes the book’s core argument: that US naval expansion in the 1880s and 1890s was disproportionately a reaction to the Pacific’s navies and their wars. In a regional context, the US New Navy was one among many newly made, industrial fleets racing for security and prestige. The Introduction then explains the implications of this thesis for historical accounts of the “Pacific World,” US Empire, and military technological development. It concludes with a chapter outline of the book.