Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. xii, 436 pp. (Maps, Illus.) US$25.99, paper. ISBN 978-0-521-71566-9.
Many of us living in southern Oceania consider “the Pacific” to be the islands or states of the geographic regions known as Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia. 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. His analysis harnesses two forces: centripetal and centrifugal. The first sees the fringing continents being drawn into the island Pacific and the second sees the island Pacific being flung to the periphery of these lands. But it offers even more, for we see how Europe, half a world away, became a part of the globalization process from at least the sixteenth century, as it impinged on these continents and islands.
Matsuda starts with a big question, “What stories from Asia to Oceania to the Americas make up Pacific history?” (1). To answer, he draws primarily on the domain of history but also anthropology, economics, meteorology, oceanography and politics to construct a vivid and, above all, dynamic and often breathtaking regional meta-history, wide in temporal and locational Book Reviews 695 compass. This is an account of continuous movement of peoples and ideas from ancient times to the present across and around the Pacific and adjacent seas. Boundaries are porous and permeable, people adaptable, acquisitive, and inquisitive, distances great, yet shrinking with changing technologies. The book focuses on “multiple sites of trans-localism” (5), not nicely sequential of eras or civilizations. Major processes are understood via the lens of local episodes and the connections beyond.
Pacific Worlds shows that incoming patterns of commerce, exploration and religion across several centuries did not always result in territorial colonization. But such processes resulted in hubs and enclaves of intercultural and intellectual interactions dotting the region. Depending on their role in transforming and transmitting resources, some enclaves prospered long term, some until the resource was worked out or a better route to the markets developed. Commerce in the region ranges from Arab traders infiltrating South East Asia as early as the tenth century to contemporary Chinese deals with independent island governments for fishing and mining in the southwest Pacific.
Matsuda’s pellucid prose is succinct. One sentence can summarize a major process for an entire ocean: “Remembrances of labouring in foreign lands haunted almost all Pacific societies in the second half of the nineteenth century, even the most singular, like Easter Island” (226). Matsuda reveals the essential humanity of the actors and includes women as part of that humanity. Pacific Worlds details the impacts of colonialism but also reveals how the neat categories of colonizer and colonized are continually subverted by both parties. 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.
Matsuda also skilfully distils the essence of place and people by connecting ancient oral traditions with more recent events, showing change but also demonstrating certain continuities. Great culture heroes, revolutionaries as well as saints, such as Rizal and Catarina de San Juan, epitomize indigenous values, attachment to place, and identity. Gifted writers of the present like Hau’ofa, Subramani and Grace have continued to do the same, telling truth through fiction and poetry.
The politics of the Western ideal state saw the political and criminal rejects of Britain and France transported as convicts to serve prison terms in distant Australia and New Caledonia in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today, refugees, a.k.a. possible terrorists from the Middle East, risk long voyages in leaking vessels, not unlike the ships of the original convicts, but end up in crowded detention camps in Indonesia or, worse, sent by the Australian government to the hot, scoured atoll of Nauru to await protracted “processing.” Pacific Worlds presents all sides of such difficult contemporary issues yet allows us to make the moral judgement, a judgement more measured once we understand the complexity.
When Pacific Worlds is reprinted I, as a teacher, hope the author will add a table of places and dates as an appendix because this kaleidoscope of stories of people and places can lose the novice reader. Being able to see at a glance relative events across a time span would add to what is already an extraordinary history.
The book ends with a thoughtful Afterword. In relation to the rest of Oceania and certainly the continents whose littorals are washed by that great sea, the small islands of Kiribati may seem “remote,” and “vulnerable” but, as Matsuda shows, they too were and are sites of trans-localism. Many paths, peoples, politics and processes have touched them. Of course to the i-Kiribati, the atolls are home and never remote. With global warming Kiribati has become to many an emblem of the apparently inescapable fate of all such low-lying atolls. Those in high places may well expect these people to fade away or be absorbed by other countries. But the i-Kiribati are resilient. In 2008 they set up the world’s largest maritime reserve in their waters. To them, conservation means more than development through selling the fishery. Since this book’s publication the Cook Islands have much done the same, with 1.065 million square kilometres (411,000 square miles) of maritime reserve with a large core area where no fishing will be permitted. Prime Minister Puna captured Oceania’s essence: “We are not small Pacific island states. We are large ocean island states.” These states show their belief in themselves and the rest of the world. All they ask is global responsibility to reduce greenhouse emissions. So, as he has done throughout this book, Matt Matsuda makes us think right to the last page. Not a bad result for any historian.
Judith A. Bennett
University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand
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