Pacific Worlds
A History of Seas, Peoples, and Cultures

Essential single-volume history of the Pacific region and the global interactions which define it.

Matt K. Matsuda (Author)

9780521887632, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 19 January 2012

454 pages, 50 b/w illus. 5 maps
23.5 x 16 x 2.5 cm, 0.84 kg

'Many in the huge surrounding landmasses of South-East Asia, East Asia, the Americas and Australia see 'the Pacific' as being the countries bordering the Pacific Ocean. Matt Matsuda's splendid history shatters the basin and, with it, the rim … For those most interested in the Pacific Islands, this book addresses and contextualizes the substantial contacts of south Asia and China with the western Pacific, especially northern Australia and New Guinea, a prolonged relationship that some notable Pacific historians have largely ignored to privilege later English and French interactions on Tahiti in the late eighteenth century.' Judith A. Bennet, Pacific Affairs

Asia, the Pacific Islands and the coasts of the Americas have long been studied separately. This essential single-volume history of the Pacific traces the global interactions and remarkable peoples that have connected these regions with each other and with Europe and the Indian Ocean, for millennia. From ancient canoe navigators, monumental civilisations, pirates and seaborne empires, to the rise of nuclear testing and global warming, Matt Matsuda ranges across the frontiers of colonial history, anthropology and Pacific Rim economics and politics, piecing together a history of the region. The book identifies and draws together the defining threads and extraordinary personal narratives which have contributed to this history, showing how localised contacts and contests have often blossomed into global struggles over colonialism, tourism and the rise of Asian economies. Drawing on Asian, Oceanian, European, American, ancient and modern narratives, the author assembles a fascinating Pacific region from a truly global perspective.

Introduction: encircling the ocean
1. Civilization without a center
2. Trading rings and tidal empires
3. Straits, sultans and treasure fleets
4. Conquered colonies and Iberian ambitions
5. Island encounters and the Spanish lake
6. Sea changes and spice islands
7. Samurai, priests and potentates
8. Pirates and raiders of the eastern seas
9. Asia, America, and the age of the galleon
10. Navigators of Polynesia and paradise
11. Gods and sky piercers
12. Extremities of the Great Southern Continent
13. The world that Canton made
14. Flags, treaties, and gunboats
15. Migrations, plantations, and the people trade
16. Imperial destinies on foreign shores
17. Traditions of engagement and ethnography
18. War stories from the Pacific theater
19. Prophets and rebels of decolonization
20. Critical mass for the earth and ocean
21. Specters of memory, agents of development
22. Repairing legacies, claiming histories
Afterword: world heritage.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC], Australasian & Pacific history [HBJM], General & world history [HBG]