A decade ago, Kären Wigen noted that increasing numbers of historians were researching maritime history in general, and distinct maritime bodies in particular.Footnote ¹ More recently, David Armitage concluded that, while the surge continues, there is a lack of scholarship on the largest and most diverse ocean, the Pacific, in comparison to that on the Mediterranean and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.Footnote ² As such, the Pacific is often viewed as something of a scholarly frontier, an area awaiting more interpretation as a distinct maritime space and, by extension, a place in discussions of global history.

In this article, I will highlight how the books under review suggest multiple new perspectives on the Pacific, particularly concerning the period c.1500–1850. First of all, they present a reconsideration and recasting of the influence of western Europeans and Americans. These books help us definitively move beyond the long-standing and stale dichotomy of energetic Westerners discovering passive Pacific Islanders and shepherding them into global networks.Footnote ³ In the same vein, the books examined here show how Western historical sources can be read against the grain to allow the voices of indigenous peoples to come to the fore. Furthermore, we gain insights on the value and limits of the term ‘world’ as applied to the history of the Pacific, and on how to approach the ocean as a distinct area of inquiry in global history.

In their co-authored monograph Navigating the Spanish lake, Rainer F. Buschmann, Edward R. Slack, Jr, and James B. Tueller present an engaging analysis of the ‘Spanish lake’, a seemingly outlandish concept often used to describe the early modern Pacific. As the mainstream interpretation once had it, the vast ocean was transformed in the sixteenth century into a ‘Spanish lake’ by annual galleon voyages that connected Spanish outposts in Latin America, Guam, and Manila. As the authors remind us, the ‘Spanish lake’ was coined by the historian O. H. K. Spate, who used that label as the title for the first volume of his rich trilogy examining the Pacific as a maritime region. Spate argued that to write a history of the Pacific (as opposed to one of Pacific peoples) involves acknowledging that Europeans were the first to conceive of the ocean as a coherent maritime area.Footnote ⁴ Similarly, Buschmann, Slack, and Tueller claim that, over the four centuries of their empire, Spaniards developed and revised both conceptual and literal understandings of the ‘Spanish lake’ (p. 17). Beginning in the sixteenth century, they present Spanish explorer-conquerors as building an often over-extended empire in keeping with their ‘internal logic’ defined by millennial hopes and a particular European confidence. Spaniards frequently approached the Pacific based upon a complex mixture of pragmatism and a ‘dream of islands’: ‘The Pacific Island groups (Mariana, Philippine, Marquesa, and Solomon) were perceived, at times, on terra firma as peripheral, isolated, burdensome, and even forgettable. Islands could equally be viewed as strategic stepping-stones, profitable ports, or millennial futures’ (pp. 31–2). Propelled by the dynamic of dream and reality, Spanish leaders, merchants, explorers, and missionaries established colonies on Pacific Islands such as Guam and the Marianas centuries before their European counterparts, and grandiosely started to perceive of the world’s largest ocean as their provincial maritime zone.

We learn in detail about the centrality of New World colonies for governing and maintaining the Spanish lake. The viceroyalty of New Spain, much more than officials in Spain, directed affairs across the ocean in Manila. The annual galleon carried officials and merchants on harrowing voyages that stopped at Guam along the way. Sailing from Acapulco with a cargo of silver, the galleon returned from Manila laden with ‘Oriental’ commodities – Chinese silks and damasks, Indian calicoes, spices, and precious stones and gems – goods for which elites and commoners alike in New Spain developed an ‘insatiable appetite’, and whose consumption aligned their ‘fashion tastes with the Far East instead of Europe’ (p. 26).

Buschmann, Slack, and Tueller also argue that scholarship on the Pacific has tended to write off the Spanish presence as British, French, and US commercial, scientific, and exploratory activities increased in the eighteenth century. They assert that Spanish navigators, notably on the expedition led by Alejandro Malaspina (1789–94), should be seen not as the last gasp of a declining maritime empire but rather as an active attempt to maintain connections between New Spain and the Pacific. Moreover, as competition between Spaniards and their British and French rivals grew in the eighteenth century, colonial authorities in the Philippines reformed military units, incorporating for the first time Chinese mestizos into previously all-Spanish units. Other chapters outline the centuries-long Spanish colonial enterprise in the Marianas, and explain how Spanish officials sought to recast and rehabilitate the idea of a Spanish lake even after Spain’s Pacific colonial territories in North and South America were lost in the early nineteenth century.

In presenting the dream–pragmatic duality of the Spanish presence in the Pacific, Navigating the Spanish lake puts to rest the idea of a Spanish Pacific empire created by ruddy and energetic Spanish explorers ‘discovering’ isolated Pacific peoples. We read instead of a more complex and interesting story of unrealistic dreams of ocean-wide influence that at once merged and conflicted with the realities of maintaining an empire composed of disparate island and continental colonies.

At a certain level, Bronwen Douglas similarly seeks to eradicate the lingering, simplistic West–Pacific duality centred on Pacific backwardness and Western science, and framed by studies on, and discourses about, race. To that end, as she puts it, her monograph Science, voyages, and encounters in Oceania is an investigation into ‘the intersections of fluctuating European ideas about human similarity and differences over four centuries with the grounded experience of European voyagers during actual encounters with Indigenous people in the “fifth part of the world”, or “Oceania” from 1511 to 1840’. Douglas presents ‘a set of interconnected episodes that bring ethnohistory into play with the history of science through focus on the interactions of travellers and local inhabitants’ (p. 3).

Through close readings of primarily French sources, she demonstrates that European travel accounts can be read ‘against the grain’ and elucidate both the views of Pacific peoples and fluid European conceptions of race. For example, she details how the posthumously published travel accounts of Antoine Bruni d’Entrecasteaux, a French naval officer who sailed across parts of the western Pacific in the late eighteenth century, show the ‘local actions and demeanour’ of indigenous peoples in relation to European visitors. Moreover, the accounts reveal Bruni d’Entrecasteaux’s attempts to reconcile what he experienced on the Pacific Islands and in Australia with his intellectual assumptions and the ‘place-specific precedents [he] derived from earlier voyage literature’. When describing native peoples, the French explorer ‘used race in its old genealogical sense’ in referring to some peoples as ‘races of pigs’. He also used it ‘metaphorically, as a synonym for class’, such as when he described most Tongan women as occupying the ‘chiefly class’ and having ‘a very agreeable physiognomy’ (pp. 102–3).

In the book’s latter chapters, Douglas examines French naval expeditions in the Pacific following the Bourbon Restoration in 1814. She seeks to offer ‘not a metanarrative on the clash of reified cultures but a patchwork of stories about the messy engagements of Indigenous and foreign persons where “beach crossings” were entwined with local or shipboard relationships’ (p. 165). She notes how French accounts of these engagements contributed to the formulation of today’s more familiar racial types relating to the Pacific – Aborigine, Malay, Micronesian, Papuan, and Polynesian – which gained prominent usage in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Douglas’s read-against-the-grain analysis is extremely effective in helping to discern the perspective of indigenous peoples in encounters with Western visitors. At times, however, one wonders if she is pushing the envelope too far, such as in the case of a French medical officer who on one occasion acquiesces to, and then later complains about, the high prices for goods charged by natives at a port in New Ireland. Douglas concludes that we can find indigenous agency – here, the market acumen of the islanders – in the officer’s differing portrayals (pp. 181–2). This seems quite plausible but we should also delve more deeply into the French officer’s perspective to understand the incidents, considering, for example, his idiosyncrasies or specific aspects of the two occasions that may have prompted his differing reactions. In other words, as we analyse an account for ‘counter-signs’ of indigenous voices, we should also consider embarking on similar interrogative process about the European writer.

Discerning in new ways the European presence in the Pacific is a theme at the heart of many chapters of Pacific histories. The editors, David Armitage and Alison Bashford, have assembled an impressive collection of essays organized around four general themes (periodization, connections, knowledges, identities) which explore the Pacific from premodern times to today. They see the book’s chapters – most with one-word, thematic titles such as ‘law’ or ‘race’ – as comprising ‘a set of mutually reinforcing Pacific histories, collected and plural, which reflect the diversity of the region and the multiplicity of approaches to it’. They wish their volume to ‘interrogate, but not artificially to integrate, the histories of the insular Pacific and the littoral Pacific – the coasts of the Americas and the Asian and Australasian continents –and to show the shifts in their relations over time and space’ (p. 21). For this reader, the book succeeds in attaining that goal. The chapters do not simply summarize their authors’ respective monographs. Rather, they are well-considered overviews of a particular theme in the context of Pacific history. Most of the authors offer apt references to other chapters, helping the reader to conceptualize the volume as a connected whole. Armitage and Bashford also usefully situate their volume in relation to previous historiography on the Pacific and include a valuable appendix that lists further reading for each chapter. Such additions, and the volume’s comprehensive approach, make it especially appropriate for upper undergraduate and graduate courses.

In the first thematic chapter, Damon Salesa embodies the volume’s multiplicity of perspectives by outlining the ways in which Pacific Islanders understood space and time before the arrival of Europeans, through, for example, their definitions of different ‘native seas’. He notes that the island of Yap formed the centre of the sawei, defined alternately as a trading zone, empire, and ‘tribute network’, that extended some 300 kilometres to the west and 1,500 kilometres to the east. Other seas included the Massim fanning out from eastern New Guinea, as well as several defined by diverse communities that populated the Sepik Coast on the island’s northern coast (pp. 46–8).

Joyce Chaplin’s chapter on European imperialism is equally engaging because of its fresh approach: seeing the Pacific as an example of European non-imperialism. With numerous examples, she details how empire was built in the Pacific ‘belatedly and brokenly’ from the early sixteenth century to the early nineteenth (p. 64). Unlike in the Atlantic, Europeans were dependent on local peoples for their knowledge of the ocean. Moreover, they could not act with as much impunity as in other parts of the world because, if nothing else, many Asian nations set the terms for maritime trade, thereby limiting European commercial advances. Chaplin concludes that Europeans can be viewed not only as ‘civic beings’ striving to achieve for their respective states or trading groups but also, in a more basic and fundamental way, ‘as natural entities, as physical bodies whose presence in and around the Pacific measured and had consequences for the natural world’ (p. 54).

Nicholas Thomas takes a similar tack. He stresses the ‘partial and insecure’ nature of empire in the Pacific as he examines exploration, commerce, conversion, labour, and sovereignty, especially before 1850. He locates empire ‘within a human and social sense of Oceania’s geography’, an approach that helps him to explore how ‘what came from elsewhere’ – namely European ideals and objects – ‘always entered into and became articulated with local geographies, even as it distorted or overrode them’ (p. 76). In the domain of commerce, nodes of multicultural exchange emerged throughout the Pacific Islands, consisting of a few individuals or households, or sometimes a larger port community composed of ‘Islander travellers-turned-immigrants, beachcombers of European, Asian or Afro-American descent, white traders, and local partners and mixed families’ (p. 83).

Stressing trends prior to 1850, Ryan Jones surveys the environment through the novel lens of energy. He provocatively describes colonial powers as ‘colluding’ with indigenous peoples to ‘mine the Pacific’s abundant energy resources’ in the period from 1741 (the date of Bering’s arrival in what is today Alaska and his band’s killing of a Steller’s sea cow) to the 1880s (when fossil fuels began to replace the use of animal fats throughout the world) (pp. 123–4). Jones interprets the harvesting of large marine animals as extraction of the ocean’s energy and identifies a pivot in the mid twentieth century when humans began instead to infuse energy into the Pacific via warfare, the expansion of modern tourism, and global warming instigated by human actions. Jones’s deployment of energy as an overarching theme is intriguing but this reader would have appreciated a clearer definition of ‘energy’ (its use is wide-ranging and at times contradictory).

The selected chapters discussed here offer a generally refreshing treatment of the European presence and influence in the Pacific over the course of several centuries. Although frequently enjoying advantages in weaponry and maritime technology, Europeans, as Thomas and Chaplin make clear (and as echoed by Buschmann, Slack, and Tueller), could not parlay those advantages to build expansive empires, which stands in contrast to other parts of the globe. Moreover, these chapters give us a sense of the very human elements within Western–Pacific Islander encounters that are glossed over when the ocean’s history is portrayed, as is so often the case, in terms of political and economic competition among states and empires. Chaplin’s emphasis on Europeans as ‘natural entities’ (as opposed to national or imperial actors) parallels what Jones seeks to capture in his exploration of humankind’s role in shaping the Pacific’s environment during the ‘great hunt’ for marine mammals in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The human element, especially the role of individual agency, is also at the heart of Douglas’s analysis of European travel accounts. Instead of a monolithic Western experience in Oceania, we see ‘messy’ individual encounters shaped by contexts specific to each event.

David Igler, too, makes individual experiences a centrepiece of his study of the eastern Pacific before 1850 in The great ocean. In this, he focuses on interactions between indigenous ‘ocean peoples’, mainland native communities, and a wide variety of foreign voyagers (p. 5). He mines the diary of an US trader, William Shaler, along with accounts penned by Abby Morrell, the wife of a captain of a US merchant ship, to present an overview of commerce along the Pacific coast from Alaska to Mexico, highlighting the previously neglected place of Alta California as a commercial hub. He adds to our understanding of the devastating impact of infectious diseases brought by US and European sailors by showing how venereal diseases severely constrained the reproduction of Pacific Islander peoples. He goes on to examine hostage- and captive-taking throughout the Pacific, detailing the experiences of Europeans and Americans imprisoned by Amerindian tribes, and of the indigenous peoples forced by US and Russian traders to hunt sea otter along the North American coast. In addition, he looks at the ‘great hunt’ for marine mammals through the eyes of US whalers and seal hunters, notably by studying the journals of Mary Brewster, who accompanied her husband, the captain of a whaling vessel, on voyages throughout the Pacific in the 1840s.

Igler’s concluding chapters map the ways in which early nineteenth-century naturalists formed something of a ‘second wave’ following men such as Joseph Banks, who sailed with Captain Cook. These successors charted and chronicled a Pacific and its peoples transformed by increased commerce, greater cross-cultural engagement, and the spread of disease. Igler also identifies the geologist James Dwight Dana, a member of a US government-sponsored mission that sailed throughout the Pacific from 1838 to 1842, as playing a significant role in cultivating a US understanding of the Pacific as a well-defined maritime region. Significantly, Dana’s views helped Americans see the North American Far West as part of the Pacific, not merely a staging ground for trade with Asia.

Overall, Igler has produced a well-researched, page-turning account of the eastern Pacific c.1770–1850, and in so doing has crafted a book accessible to general audiences. Although his narrative explores peoples from around the Pacific and from multiple European countries, individual Americans occupy leading roles. He places these men and women into Pacific contexts, avoiding the temptation to connect their stories directly to the process of US nation-state formation in the early nineteenth century.

The endpoint of Igler’s narrative is c.1850, a watershed in Pacific history, after which national agendas – and subsequently European, US, and Japanese imperial enterprises – recast the ocean in numerous ways. In their epilogue to Navigating the Spanish lake, Buschmann, Slack, and Tueller stress how a growing sense of nationalism and expanding US and German influence prompted Spanish scholars and officials to locate a Spanish national presence in the history of the Pacific. Spanish historians documented, for example, a Spanish ‘discovery’ of Hawai‘i in the sixteenth century, which some wished to employ in order to stake a national claim to the archipelago. Before the end of the century, the US victory in the Spanish–American War of 1898 ended Spain’s control of Guam and the Philippines, and the nation-state of Germany, constituted just three decades previously, officially ended the imperial Spanish presence in the Pacific when it purchased islands in the Caroline chain in 1899.

All the books reviewed here make significant contributions to the field of Pacific history. Considering them together offers an opportunity to identify challenges and opportunities for historians to delve further into the Pacific ‘frontier’ of world history. For one, the books present ways of expanding our conversation about the contributions of East Asian states and peoples to the history of the Pacific before 1850. As noted above, Buschmann, Slack, and Tueller conclude that, as early as the late sixteenth century, residents of New Spain eagerly purchased Chinese goods transported on the annual galleon from Manila. In addition, Igler and many of the authors of Pacific histories illustrate ways in which Chinese consumers profoundly influenced the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Pacific economy through their demand for specialized products, such as sea-otter pelts.Footnote ⁵ As the field develops, it is hoped that historians will explore East Asia’s role in Pacific history in realms beyond the commercial.

Elaborating such new realms will also involve confronting an inherent challenge in writing comprehensive maritime history: how to balance effectively the contributions of maritime and terrestrial participants. In the case of the Pacific c.1500–1850, this can be broadly demarcated along the lines of those who embarked on long-distance voyages – European and US mariners – and those who largely remained on land – Pacific Islanders and especially East Asians. As these books confirm, historians no longer view European voyagers as ‘explorers’ and therefore emblematic of a ‘rise of the West’ in the Pacific and the world. Douglas and Igler particularly, reinforced by the contributors to Pacific histories, offer even-handed presentations of Europeans and US voyagers, and their encounters and interactions with indigenous Pacific peoples.

But do historians of the Pacific have a ‘blind spot’ in relation to East Asia (and perhaps also Southeast Asia) because that region did not embrace long-distance ‘voyaging’ in the same ways as Europeans and Americans? Putting it another way, how do we examine the history of the Pacific before 1850 and still effectively incorporate the ‘non-voyaging’ agendas and trajectories of specifically East Asian states, not least because most of the Pacific’s population was clustered in that region?Footnote ⁶ In pondering these questions, we should also acknowledge the dominant place that the idea of exploration continues to play in popular understandings of maritime and world history. A retired British naval officer, Gavin Menzies, exploited this fact in penning a wildly speculative but commercially successful book that purportedly tells a history of Chinese exploration, which, he argues, accords Ming China its rightful place in early modern Pacific and world history.Footnote ⁷

Finally, there is the issue of the term ‘world’ in reference to the Pacific. Igler succinctly outlines some pros and cons, concluding that on the pro side the ‘Pacific world’ can be used to reveal the interconnectedness of the ocean’s regions, thereby helping to distinguish it from other major maritime bodies, especially the Atlantic. On the con side, the term at its worst ‘elides native histories and reifies imperial agendas’. Igler suggests that historians can fruitfully deploy the ‘Pacific world’ as a general term to frame an oceanic rather than a terrestrial approach, to highlight the ocean as a ‘place of movement and transits’, and, most importantly, to employ a ‘methodology that searches for the vital interplay between global, oceanic, and local scales of history’ (pp. 10–11). This seems to justify the use of ‘Pacific worlds’ in The great ocean’s subtitle, even though Igler is primarily focused on the ocean’s eastern half.

Igler’s points are well taken. Using ‘world’ as a concept is tempting because it provides a framework for readily developing comparisons with the other, better-researched oceans. Yet the recent surge in scholarly interest in the Pacific indicates that we have reached a point where the ‘world’ construct, developed in relation to other major oceans, may no longer be adequate for the Pacific. Finding new terminologies that encompass the Pacific and recapture the distinctiveness of our earth’s most expansive ocean seems the next step towards integrating still further the Pacific into our understanding of world history.