In 1999, Jerry H. Bentley published his instructive essay, “Sea and Ocean Basins as Frameworks of Historical Analysis.”Footnote ¹ Bentley saw the possibilities in thinking about bodies of water, but he also sensed the problems of this intellectual project. Recognizing these two ends, he explained the “challenge for studies of sea and ocean basins is to probe the connections and dynamics fueling processes of integration in individual maritime regions without losing sight either of local experiences or of the global interactions that sometimes conditioned the experiences of the regions themselves.”Footnote ² From the Indian and Pacific Oceans to the Sulu and Arafura Seas, Bentley's intervention marked a turning point in how scholars would come to think about bodies of water and work through them as flexible frames. For Bentley, sea and ocean basins were no more historically stable than nation-states or world regions, but he saw promise in how their dynamic natures—their ebbs and flows, as it were—provided a critical mobility for making sense of history across scales of inquiry and interaction.

Matt Matsuda's Pacific Worlds and Julia Martinez and Adrian Vickers's The Pearl Frontier—the two books under review—work to realize this promise of sea and ocean basins in striking and complementary ways. Both books bring together histories that have long been crafted as separate historiographies built around distinct world areas. Through individual lives, collective experiences, and the material and spatial dimensions of sea and ocean basins, they operate in multi-scalar terms, unmapping the postwar cartographies that have come to define and demarcate Asia and the Pacific in the past as well as the present. Echoing Bentley, they masterly “probe the connections and dynamics” that shaped processes of entanglement and enclosure within maritime regions without obscuring the ways in which transoceanic currents informed these very regions as well.Footnote ³ Whether by way of a global ocean or a circuit of local seas, both books show how regional areas interacted in transregional ways. In doing so, they demonstrate how thinking with bodies of water can bring into focus not only bodies in motion and boundaries in the making, but also, and more importantly, a richer sense of how the movements of people, ideas, capital, and technologies shaped the lives and legacies of human societies.

Casting the widest net between the two works, Matsuda's Pacific Worlds begins with the idea of imagination. That is, from what vantage or vista are we to see and make sense of the ocean and its pasts? For Matsuda, historicizing the notion of multiple Pacifics—“Asian” or “European,” for example—compels us to imagine the ocean not as a singular or bounded space, but rather as an “historical assemblage of … interlocking navigations, migrations, and settlements within regions linked intermittently from the Philippines and the South China Sea, Sulawesi and the Sunda Islands, and the Banda and Tasman seas” (Matsuda, p. 2). By imagining the Pacific as plural place, Matsuda takes seriously the ocean's ebbs and flows over the longue durée, and traces how these literal and metaphoric currents shaped the histories and societies of this inherently transregional environment.

It is precisely Matsuda's reading of the ocean as a storied archive of Pacific histories and Asian pasts, and the interconnectedness between the two, that renders his work so rich and informative. For example, Matsuda draws on a wealth of scholars and sources to narrate the endless interplay between Southeast Asia and the Pacific, and how these interactions forged networks, built cities, changed landscapes, and produced forms of knowledge. Whereas other historians might work within the lines of area-scripted regions, partializing their stories if they drift out of bounds, Matsuda sees the ocean as a way to cast the Pacific in waters that are translocal and circulatory, with specific histories gaining clarity and complexity when tied to other pasts and places. Through the lens of Southeast Asia, in particular, he locates an arc of entrepôts from Malacca and Singapore to Manila and Makassar, and reveals how these ports and their trading cultures figured in the production of “connectedness” (Matsuda, p. 6).

For scholars of Asia, Matsuda's Pacific Worlds also provides a method for thinking about bodies of water, writing across regions, and getting at the contingencies of connectedness. It is a method that configures the plural Pacific through a “multiplicity of locally connected histories” and, in the process, reconfigures the spatial imaginaries that have come to anchor and govern our notions of the ocean (Matsuda, p. 3). Indeed, spanning twenty-two chapters, from “ancient voyagers” to “poisoned seas,” Matsuda grounds the ocean's transits and transitions in a shifting yet specific world of stories and sites (Matsuda, pp. 2, 376).

In the first half of the book, we follow the routes of seed crops, Lapita pottery, stranger-kings, and belief systems, and the influences these currents had on the natural world, material culture, political organization, and kin networks. Drawing on oral traditions, linguistic analyses, and archeological records, Matsuda shows how these multiple currents created geographies of exchange that were shaped by oceanic circulations of people, ideas, biota, and faiths. He locates these movements in the lives and linkages of both familiar and forgotten translocals, such as European empire-builders, Iberian priests, Chinese pirates, “Polynesian erudites,” and Sulawesi seafarers (Matsuda, p. 7).

In the second half of the book, Matsuda examines how technological change, imperial ambition, and commercial expansion shaped the processes and dynamics of human interaction across space and time. He charts, for example, the wider radials and inner rhythms of Canton: a port that “was a raucous world of Portuguese, Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese, pidgin English, Malay, and Indian languages, peppered with words from all of Europe and Oceania” (Matsuda, p. 178). In mapping the world that Canton built, Matsuda registers the central role played by Chinese compradors and the cultural, commercial, and familial networks these polyglot cosmopolitans maintained as they worked for and with foreign merchant houses. Compradors secured tea from growers in Fujian and Guangdong, and supplied this prized product to British traders who purchased it with Indian opium (Matsuda, p. 192). Like he does with Canton, Matsuda also traces the rise of Singapore through the ebb and flow of translocals, commodities, and rivalries. Within the regional orbit of this colonial port city, we follow the arcs of Malay sultans, Javanese princes, Dayak chiefs, and Vietnamese emperors, and their experiences navigating the treaties and gunboats that accompanied the expansion of European empires in Southeast Asia. It is also in the second half of the book that Matsuda tracks the modern rise of nationalism and its transoceanic movements, the geographical reach of Japanese imperialism and American empire, and the Cold War currents of decolonization and reoccupation.

But whereas Matsuda's sweeping history charts the making of Pacific worlds through bodies of water and bodies in motion, Martinez and Vickers's The Pearl Frontier tells the forgotten story of a single maritime zone and its ebb and flow of human currents. It is a connected history of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, meticulously anchored in the archival sources, social networks, and resource-rich waters that conjoin Indonesia and Australia. By working this maritime zone from multiple sides, Martinez and Vickers are able to trace not only the rise of Australia's northern pearling industry, but also the ways in which this extractive industry shaped the lives of territorial borders, port towns, indentured laborers, and ship masters. Spanning a century (1870s–1970s), the authors document how the movements and settlements of this pearling industry opened up spaces and created opportunities for Aboriginal-Indonesian interactions, and how these encounters fostered the formation of intercultural families in Broome and Darwin and facilitated their postwar struggle for Australian citizenship. Martinez and Vickers's history of the pearl frontier assembles an innovative perspective on the modern Asian past by showing how interconnected seas can reveal interlocked stories of social, cultural, economic, and political change.

It is in narrating these changes and connections that The Pearl Frontier makes three important contributions to the fields of Asian studies and Southeast Asian history. First, Martinez and Vickers disrupt conventional renderings of Indonesia and Australia as separate area histories. Through the lens of mobility and its evolving politics, the authors excavate a shared past that, while built on earlier voyages of “Makassan fishermen” to Australia's northern waters for trepang (sea cucumbers), deepened during the rise of the pearl frontier from the 1870s to the 1940s (Matsuda, p. 172). They use the colonial-era pearl trade as a way not only to navigate between and across academic boundaries of regional space and historical knowledge, but also to surface a lived, intraregional geography borne from the frontier's surrounding sites of resource extraction, labor recruitment, and indentured settlement. As a result, The Pearl Frontier provides both a fuller sense of Indonesian-Australian relations and a wider history of how these relations shaped the circulation of people, ideas, and capital within Southeast Asia and the Pacific.

And as Martinez and Vickers explain, people circulated in and out of the pearl frontier because of work and the opportunity to earn money. By focusing on the lives and stories of those Indonesians who worked the marine environment, the authors add an invaluable dimension to our understandings of Asian labor in the modern period. While perhaps somewhat surprising given the historical importance of Asian waters as sites of commodity production, much of the literature on the histories of work in Southeast Asia has centered on making a living in the city, surviving on the plantation, or laboring in the field. In the case of The Pearl Frontier, however, Martinez and Vickers shift our attention to the sea and the shore. In doing so, they draw on a range of documentary sources and oral histories to situate their narrative not only in the social conditions and physical dangers of pearling work, but also the places these indentured laborers called home, the ports from which they were recruited, and the reasons driving them to Australia's northern pearling industry in the first instance. We learn, for example, about how Kupang became the principal port from which people from Alor, Rote, Savu, Solor, and Flores were recruited. And because of their association with Kupang, these “pearling indents” were called Koepangers (Martinez and Vickers, p. 4). Martinez and Vickers also explain why young Koepangers sought work beyond their island worlds. Culturally, the authors contend, these young men were expected to participate in complex systems of symbolic exchange that not only connected islands and families through marriage and procurement, but also circulated within these systems ritual objects such as bronze drums, elephant tusks, and ikat cloths. Finding the money to purchase these symbolic goods and maintain these exchange networks “would surely have been a major incentive to join the Australian recruiters” (Martinez and Vickers, p. 47).

But who were these Koepangers; who employed them in Aru, Broome, and Darwin; and what was the nature of their family life in Australia? It is in providing answers to these questions that The Pearl Frontier makes one of its most important contributions to Asian studies and Southeast Asian history. The authors use a range of biographical data to render visible the actions, decisions, struggles, and movements of Koepangers over time and space—from leaving Kupang on pearl luggers in the 1920s to applying for Australian citizenship in the 1950s and 1960s. For Martinez and Vickers, one of the most central figures in their history of the pearl frontier is Abdoel Gafoer (who is pictured on the cover of the book). Born on Alor in 1897, Gafoer arrived in Australia in 1921, worked out of Broome in the 1930s, formed a family with a Yaruwu woman, and applied for permanent residency in 1961. In making use of Gafoer's past, the authors show how archival fragments can play an important role in building rich, compelling stories that bring to life people, places, and connections, which may otherwise remain out of focus and out of history. In this regard, The Pearl Frontier enriches and brilliantly expands the fields of Asian studies and Southeast Asian history by threading together the lives of Gafoer, Thomas Kato, Ahmat bin Fadal, and The Soen Hin, among other pearling indents, with the stories of Aru, Thursday Island, the White Australian policy, and pearl masters such as Sech Said bin Abdullah Baadilla, Victor John Clark, and Robin Hilliard.

Taken together, both books exemplify how sea and ocean basins can open up new histories and complicate old geographies. Through the lens of mobility, in particular, they each “probe the connections and dynamics” that shaped the processes of expansion, interaction, and enclosure, and examine too the legacies and consequences of these developments.Footnote ⁴ For Matsuda, Asian waters and the cultures, ports, and polities that bound them were integral to the making of Pacific worlds. By locating Southeast Asia in the histories of the Pacific, for example, Matsuda reveals transregional linkages that not only extend deep in the past, but also animate the present. In the age of high colonialism, these connections included the export of Javanese laborers to New Caledonia and Indochinese exiles to French Polynesia.Footnote ⁵ For Martinez and Vickers, their history of the pearl frontier explains not only why people moved around, but also how their movements linked together Indonesia and Australia in a shared history anchored in a connected zone. Indeed, both books offer compelling examples of how to think about bodies of water, and how to work through them for purposes of writing the Asian past from places and processes that exceed the nation, colony, empire, or region. They remind us that history is diasporic.