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Shortly after the California Gold Rush, the first commercial abalone fishery sprang to life along the central and southern Californian coast, an industry founded and developed by Chinese immigrants. By shipping dried black abalone (Haliotis cracherodii) to Chinese communities in the American West, and exporting the product to a ready market in China, Chinese merchants assembled an elaborate trade network that reached from Santa Barbara, California, to China. Here, we offer the first synthesis of archaeological and historical data that describes the elements of Chinese export activities interpreted through a trading diaspora framework. Our results reveal details about an international trade network supported by the formation of self-governing business associations, relationships with trading partners, and interactions with European Americans. This study fills a critical gap in our understanding of the broader context of California’s historical fisheries and contextualizes the strategies of Chinese merchants who took advantage of new opportunities presented by a changing Pacific economy.

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Chinese immigrants, like many other fortune seekers from around the world, arrived in California in search of economic opportunities. Enterprising Chinese fishers and merchants soon built the first commercial, trans-Pacific fisheries in the American West by expertly honing time-honored skills and technology, leveraging diverse partnerships, and tapping into international trade networks. Rather than isolated communities living on the economic and cultural fringes of American society, nineteenth-century Chinese immigrants were successful entrepreneurs who helped build the foundations of the West Coast commercial fishing economy. Catch tallies, tax documents, census records, immigration files, and other documents, along with archaeological investigations, contextualize the massive scale of harvest and demonstrate the ingenious ways Chinese fishers built their global fishery.

Spanish arrival to Alta and Baja California in AD 1542 marked the beginning of widespread ecological changes for California Island ecosystems. Over several centuries, Native peoples were removed to mainland towns and missions, intensive commercial fisheries and ranching operations developed, and numerous exotic plants and animals were introduced. The ecological fallout was swift and extensive, with extinctions and extirpations, devegetation, severe soil erosion, damaged hydrology, collapsed fisheries, and other ecological impacts. Archaeologists have long recognized some of the effects of these historical impacts, but only after decades of restoration biology on the islands have we come to appreciate how dramatically ecological baselines have shifted since Spanish arrival. As a result, many of California's islands now appear to have been optimal rather than marginal for human occupation.