In The French in the Pacific World Annick Foucrier has brought together an important set of studies on the French presence in the Pacific up to the start of the 20th century. The volume opens with a section on the context of the French expansion, including its rivalries with other European powers. Following studies treat patterns of trade and exchange, and settlement and migration, then look at the French image of and reaction to the worlds round the Pacific and the people of the islands, covering the period from the voyages of exploration to the era of colonization.

The focus of this volume is Britain's trans-Pacific empire. This began with haphazard challenges to Spanish dominion, but by the end of the 18th century, the British had established a colony in Australia and had gone to the brink of war with Spain to establish trading rights in the north Pacific. These rights led to formal colonies in Vancouver Island and British Columbia, when Britain sought to maintain a north Pacific presence despite American expansionism. In the later 19th century the international ’scramble for the Pacific’ resulted in new British colonies and protectorates in the Pacific islands. The result was a complex imperial presence, created from a variety of motives and circumstances. The essays selected here take account of the wide range of economic, political and cultural factors which prompted British expansion, creating tension in Britain's imperial identity in the Pacific, and leaving Pacific peoples with a complicated and challenging legacy. Along with the important new introduction, they provide a basis for the reassessment of British imperialism in the Pacific region.

Between 1500 and 1900 there was a constant growth in the numbers of large cities and networks of smaller towns throughout the Pacific world in which traders and primary producers did business. The essays in Urbanization and the Pacific World explore the increasingly complex economic relationships that connected cities in and around the Pacific world to each other, and pay particular attention to the impact that growing cities had on the economies of their hinterlands. The volume also contains articles that examine the problems that city growth created and the ways in which people were able to cope with them. Along with the new introduction, the essays cover all of the regions of the Pacific world in which city growth took place, and will allow the reader to consider a wide range of common and contrasting urban experiences.

This volume seeks to capture the rich array of images that define Japan's encounters with the Pacific Ocean. Contemporary Japanese most readily associate 'Pacific' with the devastating war that their country fought over a half century ago. The ensuing occupation realized a situation that this people had striven to avoid ever since the Portuguese first arrived in 1543 - their subjugation by a foreign power. But the Pacific Ocean also extended Japan's overseas contacts. From antiquity Japanese and their neighbours crossed it to trade ideas and products. From the mid-16th century it carried people from more distant lands, Europe and America, and thus expanded and diversified Japan's cultural and economic exchange networks. From the late 19th century it provided the highway to transport Japanese imperial expansion in Northeast Asia and later to encourage overseas migration into the Pacific and the Americas. The studies selected for inclusion in this volume, along with the introduction, explain how the Pacific Ocean thus nurtured images of both threat and opportunity to the island nation that it surrounds.

Textiles in the Pacific, 1500-1900 brings together 13 articles which include both classics and lesser-known but important works related to the trade and production of textiles in the Pacific region, extending from the tip of Northeast Asia to the other end of South America and Australia. Collectively these articles bring out two central themes, as highlighted in the introduction. First, there is the leading role of textiles in linking up the economies across the Pacific in the era before the 19th-century rise of steam-engine-powered global integration. Second is the crucial role of textile manufacturing and trade in the early stage of industrialization for most of the developing Pacific economies after the 19th century. The volume also reflects both revolutionary shifts in paradigms and revisions of traditional consensus, and seeks to present a more balanced account of global trade and market integration in the early modern period.

The essays selected for this volume show how the Pacific rapidly became part of an industrializing world. Its raw materials (notably rubber and copper) were critical, some of its handicraft industries were devastated by mechanized competition, others survived and adapted, contributing to distinctive patterns of industrialization that made Japan a new center of power, and also laid the groundwork for later growth in Taiwan, Korea, and coastal China. The Pacific coast of the Americas was also first drawn into an industrial world largely as an exporter of raw materials, but North and South diverged rapidly, portending futures even more different than those of Northeast and Southeast Asia. By the 1930s - when the uneven effects of industrialization would have much to do with plunging the Pacific into war - one can already glimpse in outline the structural bases for many of the region's contemporary characteristics. All this is set in context in the important introduction by Kenneth Pomeranz.

This volume takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of religious cultural exchanges around the Pacific in the period 1500-1900, relating these to economic and political developments and to the expansion of communication across the area. It brings together twenty-two pieces, from diaries of religious exiles and missionary field observations, to studies from a variety of academic disciplines, so enabling a multitude of voices to be heard. The articles are grouped in sections dealing with the Islamic period, the Iberian Catholic period, the Jewish diaspora, the Russian Orthodox church, the epoch of Protestant culture and finally Asian immigrant religions in the West; a substantial introduction contextualizes these chapters in terms of both historical and contemporary approaches.

American Empire in the Pacific explores the empire that emerged from the Oregon Treaty of 1846 with Great Britain and the outcome of the Mexican War in 1848. Together, they signalled the mastery of the United States over the continent of North America; the Pacific Ocean and the ancient civilizations of Asia at last lay within reach. England's East India Company in the 17th and 18th centuries had introduced Asian wares including tea to the American colonists, but wars against France and then the struggle for American independence held back expansion by Yankee entrepreneurs until 1783. Thereafter, from the Atlantic seaboard, American ships began regularly to reach China. Merchants, sailors and missionaries, motivated toward trade and redemption like the Europeans they met along the way, encountered the exotic peoples and cultures of the Pacific. Would-be empire builders projected a manifest destiny without limits. Russian Alaska, the native kingdom of Hawai'i, Japan, Korea, Samoa, and Spain's Philippine Islands, as well as a transcontinental railroad and an isthmian canal, acquired strategic significance in American minds, in time to outweigh both commerce and conversion.

This collection of essays assesses the interrelationship between exploration, empire-building and science in the opening up of the Pacific Ocean by Europeans between the early 16th and mid-19th century. It explores both the role of various sciences in enabling European imperial projects in the region, and how the exploration of the Pacific in turn shaped emergent scientific disciplines and their claims to authority within Europe. Drawing on a range of disciplines (from the history of science to geography, imperial history to literary criticism), this volume examines the place of science in cross-cultural encounters, the history of cartography in Oceania, shifting understandings of race and cultural difference in the Pacific, and the place of ships, books and instruments in the culture of science. It reveals the exchanges and networks that connected British, French, Spanish and Russian scientific traditions, even in the midst of imperial competition, and the ways in which findings in diverse fields, from cartography to zoology, botany to anthropology, were disseminated and crafted into an increasingly coherent image of the Pacific, its resources, peoples, and histories. This is a significant body of scholarship that offers many important insights for anthropologists and geographers, as well as for historians of science and European imperialism.

Traditionally, Germany has been considered a minor player in Pacific history: its presence there was more limited than that of other European nations, and whereas its European rivals established themselves as imperial forces beginning in the early modern era, Germany did not seriously pursue colonialism until the nineteenth century. Yet thanks to recent advances in the field emphasizing transoceanic networks and cultural encounters, it is now possible to develop a more nuanced understanding of the history of Germans in the Pacific. The studies gathered here offer fascinating research into German missionary, commercial, scientific, and imperial activity against the backdrop of the Pacific’s overlapping cultural circuits and complex oceanic transits.