David Armitage, to whom we owe stimulating conceptualizations of the Atlantic Ocean, has edited together with Alison Bashford another important oceanic volume. In their mainly historiographic introduction, the editors ask the question why the Pacific has not been treated similarly as the Atlantic? Referring to Greg Dening’s notion that, “The Pacific is … a hard place to identify with–so much ocean, too many islands”, they answer this question by stating that the Pacific’s scale and scope challenges historians.Footnote 1 The editors also argue, together with Matt Matsuda, that the Pacific has been historically reimagined many times. However, this is a characteristic of all maritime regions, such as the Baltic, the North Sea, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic and/or the Indian Ocean. Nevertheless, Armitage and Bashford rightly point out the different traditions of Pacific historiography. While the first initiative from California, the publication of the “Pacific Historical Review” in 1932, focused almost exclusively on the Pacific Rim, an alternative vision emerged from Canberra, which produced an “island-centered” history (based on the “Journal of Pacific History” from 1966). Finally, the University of Hawaii’s ambitious “Pacific Islands Monographs” followed with a focus on Hawaii and its indigenous history. Building on these past traditions, the aim of this edited volume is to “integrate the histories of the insular Pacific and the littoral Pacific” (21).
The first part of the book (“Periodising the Pacific”) follows the Pacific’s history chronologically. In the first chapter (“The Pacific in Indigenous Time”), Damon Salesa gives a chronological overview of Pacific settlements, starting with the arrival of people in New Guinea between 40 to 50,000 years ago and ending with the settlement in Melanesia 3000 years ago. He highlights the diversity as well as the seafaring and technical skills of island societies, which were the first threatened by the diseases of European and American voyagers.
The early discovery, naming and mapping of the Pacific by the Europeans is examined by Joyce E. Chaplin (“The Pacific before Empire, c. 1500–1800”), who also mentions a famous chart that was drawn according to the notions of the islanders of Tahiti. The pilot Tupaya, a priest-navigator, worked with Captain Cook on this prototype of a map that Johann Reinhold Forster published in his travel account 1778.
Nicholas Thomas (“The Age of Empire in the Pacific”) continues the story of expeditions and explorations in the Pacific that were navigational and geographical inquiries but also inspired by a curiosity in natural history. The artifacts, plants and animals ended up in university collections and were publicised by travel accounts. Food and plants were discovered, of which sandalwood found soon commercial interest that led to the economic exploitation in the long run.
Akira Iriye (“A Pacific Century?”) focuses on the geopolitical and military struggles in the twentieth century. For the twenty-first century he asks the crucial question whether the Pacific countries would “be able to establish Pacific history on the same footing as Atlantic history or European history” (115). This question is closely linked with the question of Pacific integration, where the long European integration process could serve as a model. He recommends that, “To develop a conception of the Pacific as a community, as a region of transnational people, including transnational teachers and students ready to transcend the particular and embrace the universal” (115).
The second part of the book (“Connections”) starts with the “environment” by Ryan Tucker Jones, who addresses the tsunamis and earthquakes that threaten the islands and the Pacific Rim. In this context, the adaptation processes of the Pacific people are remarkable and he shows how people “make geographies”.
The movement of people, already explored in the chapter on the prehistoric Pacific, comes back in “Movement” by Adam McKeown. He examines the settlement of the Chinese in Manila, the ship crews manned by Chinese, Filipinos and Japanese in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as workers’ trans-Pacific migration.
The chapter “The Economy since 1800”, by Kaoru Sugihara, begins with an overview of the demography and GDP development of the Pacific Rim countries based on the estimates of Angus Maddison. In reconstructing the trade volumes, he addresses the exports of primary products that satisfied, almost exclusively, U.S. demands. Only a small part was exported to Europe. For the twentieth century, Japanese growth and industrialization as well as the rise of East Asia as producer of industrial products is also mentioned.
Part three (titled “Knowledges”) includes religion, law, and science. In the first part of the chapter “Religion”, Bronwen Douglas writes about the indigenous religious beliefs of the Pacific Islanders, which she juxtaposed with the first Spanish catholic missionary activities in the Philippines and the rise of Islam in the coastal areas. A later impact was the Christian evangelisation of the Pacific archipelagos, New Zealand and New Guinea, which led to the conversion of most Oceanic populations to either Christianity or Islam.
The chapter “Law”, by Lisa Ford, explores firstly early modern European claims on the Pacific, like when Spain successfully exerted its domination over the Philippines. Only in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did English, French and/or Russian interest in the Pacific make the Spanish claim obsolete since English, French and American traders and whalers had different legal aspirations. The first step in this process was signing treaties and establishing consulates in the Pacific Islands.
In the chapter on “Science”, Sujit Sivasundaram shows that science, especially the scientific exploration in and of the Pacific, has changed significantly throughout history. It was not only the islanders throughout the region who told accounts of their origins to themselves and outsiders. It was also missionaries and converts who recorded and transcribed these texts and, most likely, implemented Christianized versions of genealogical traditions. Although Sivasundaram treats European endeavours to explore and chart the Pacific Islands, he makes clear that the Pacific stimulated science “not in a singular site but in the range of its islands and beaches” (256).
The last part of the book, titled “Identities”, encompasses three chapters that address different themes. James Belich (in “Race”) asks the question how “important was the Pacific to racism” (263)? He explores Chinese migration and different ideas about ethnic and social groups. He maintains that the Chinese had no racial theory, whereas the Europeans developed the distinction between the “Black Savages” and the “White Savages” in the Pacific Islands.
In “Gender”, Patricia O’Brien tells the story of Trugernanna (Truganini), the last aboriginal woman of Tasmania, whose remains had been exhibited after her death 1876 against her will and how only a 100 years later her ashes were scattered into the waters off the coast of Tasmania. In “Politics”, Robert Aldrich provides an overview of colonisation and decolonisation in the Pacific and demonstrates that Pacific political history may correct simple assumptions about centers of the world (i.e., U.S. vs. China). These chapters lead to the “Afterword: Pacific Cross-currents” by Matt Matsuda, who draws attention to new dimensions in research, such as incorporating Siberian/Alaskan/Canadian indigenous peoples and to the exiting results of marine science and ichthyology.
To sum up, this volume is a stimulating new history of the Pacific but, after reading it, the Pacific seems not so “specific” as put forward in the introduction. Such ambiguities should inspire additional research through comparisons with other oceans and seas.
