Perspectives on the Global Past. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2022. xv, 298 pp. (Tables, figures, maps, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$28.00, paper. ISBN 9780824894207.
Thanks to Epeli Hau’ofa’s vision of an expansive and interconnected Oceania, originally articulated in his 1993 essay “Our Sea of Islands,” there is now at least one generation, if not two, of scholars and students well at ease with thinking about the globe’s largest body of water in terms such as an oceanic highway, an integrated ecosystem, or even a Pacific world. Whether emanating from Pacific studies or other disciplines, this near-canonical uptake of Hau’ofa’s vision in the three decades since its publication has spurred myriad further studies illustrating the varying degrees of connectedness within and across Oceania and the great range of human and non-human actors that bind it. The contributors to Migrant Ecologies and their increasingly sophisticated articulations of Hau’ofa’s original call for political empowerment are at the forefront of these efforts. By tracing the migrations of ideas and nature throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—that is, the movement of animals, people, pathogens, bacteria, resources, and commodities—the editors and authors of this volume demonstrate the utility of environmental history as a way of conceptualizing Hau’ofa’s Oceania across both space and time.
There is, however, another seminal thinker at the heart of Migrant Ecologies, another intellectual ancestor that the volume’s editors have decided to choose, and that is the environmental historian J. R. McNeill. More particularly, it is his 1994 essay, published shortly after Hau’ofa’s, titled “Of Rats and Men: A Synoptic Environmental History of the Island Pacific,” that the editors bring to the fore and use as springboard for making their collective argument about the need to understand the vast Pacific Ocean if we are to understand its more localized histories. Like Hau’ofa, McNeill is lauded for his “appetite for the big story” (4) and his even wider conception of the region’s environmental history is adopted by the editors, who have included an even spread of chapters on both the Island Pacific and sites, often Indigenous, bordering the great ocean. The proximity of the two programmatic essays in time is not lost on the editors, who deem both almost prophetic in their early diagnoses of the scale of problems facing the region. Between Hau’ofa and McNeill, and a further impressive essay by Paul D’Arcy, “Oceania: The Environmental History of One-Third of the Globe” (2012), the editors clearly suggest that scholarship on the Pacific Ocean is not as light as scholars of the Atlantic or Indian Oceans might suggest. With 15 further chapters of cutting-edge environmental history in Migrant Ecologies—not to mention the two-volume Cambridge History of the Pacific Ocean, also published in 2023—the field has thickened even more.
Editors Beattie, Jones, and Melillo are the sub-field’s leading lights, and Migrant Ecologies has been shaped by many hours of reflection on the ecological effects of migrating biota (Beattie), large ocean-going mammals (Jones), or birds, insects, and fertilizers (Melillo); or, simply, extensive teaching of Pacific-centred environmental history courses. The volume succeeds in its aims, namely connecting seemingly disparate parts of the Pacific world and doing what Morgan suggests is the field’s wider aim, “to show that all human history is environmental” (258). Nowhere is this more aptly illustrated than chapter 3, where Beattie reminds us of Hong Kong’s status as the “gateway to the Pacific,” with 6.3 million Chinese migrants or “agents of environmental change” (52) entering the Pacific from 1839 to 1939. At the other end of the scale, Melillo’s meticulously researched chapter on the history of Kona Coffee reveals that the origins of the Hawaiian coffee industry owe more to individual Hawaiian entrepreneurialism than most realize. And Jones skillfully combines human and non-human worlds to demonstrate the scale of the Fukushima disaster through the dispersion of radioactive tuna across the Pacific. Similarly, in chapter 14, Frank Zelko reminds readers that most of us now contain traces of the radioactive isotope strontium 90 thanks to nuclear testing in the Pacific.
Aside from the thematic coherence that the Pacific Ocean provides as “the medium that connects” (4), another distinctive feature of the volume is the relative brevity of the contributions. The “crisp fifty pages” (1) that constitute McNeill’s “Of Rats and Men” is rarely approached, with most chapters arriving under 15 pages of lively prose. And if one gets the impression that the field is dominated by men—a fair observation, at times—there are strong contributions by Rosenthal on framing diasporas, Wadewitz on the sentimentality and violence of whaling, Cutting-Jones on Cook Islands land tenure, Wintersteen on the tuna wars of the eastern tropical Pacific, O’Gorman on Latham’s snipe, and Morgan on the Anthropocene. There is no space to provide a summary of every chapter, but Madley, Droessler, Hirano, Cavert, and Solomon round out the volume with their respective chapters on Native American epidemics, Samoan plantation ecologies, settler colonialism on Ainu lands, pearling in the Tuamotus and colonial naming practices in Hawai’i.
A distinction might be drawn between contributors who frame their histories in the more benign terms of environmental change and others who trace declensionist narratives, adopting terms from settler colonial theory such as destruction, invasion, and genocide. While this can be explained by the simple need of different frames for different historical contexts, it might also reflect the ongoing tension within environmental—and Pacific—history about the ongoing effects of colonialism. We might all be migrants, but surely some migrants are more detrimental than others, and some agents of environmental change more destructive than their predecessors. In this regard, Madley’s critique of Crosby’s theory on “virgin soil epidemics” (69), and their inevitability, is especially revealing. The direction the field takes over the next decade or two will be telling as the scale of the Pacific’s environmental problems deepen and the political imperative for environmental justice becomes even stronger. According to Morgan, whose final line in the volume seems appropriate for this review, a continued reckoning with the colonial past means that “environmental historians can contribute to more just and equitable futures” (271).
Nicholas Hoare
The Australian National University, Canberra