Preface

J. R. McNeill

Compared to the Indian Ocean over the last two millennia or the Atlantic over the past five hundred years, the Pacific lacks a coherent history. Its size and the variety of peoples living in and around it make its history seem disjointed in comparison to other ocean basins. Yet Pacific history acquires a measure of unity and coherence when it becomes Pacific environmental history.¹ Even a vast ocean that covers one-third of the globe features some commonalities. One is the ring of fire, the active volcanic zone that encircles the ocean, from New Zealand to Kamchatka to Alaska to Chile. Another is the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) pattern that scrawls its signature across nearly half of the Pacific, most powerfully at equatorial latitudes but at times as much as 35 degrees latitude North and South of the equator. A third is the mere fact of distance. For many people living in the Pacific, most voyages were long voyages, requiring—until recently—careful assembly of resources and detailed knowledge of the sea. Different peoples in and around the Pacific adjusted to these geographical realities in different ways, influenced by their religions, cultures, technologies, and much else. But almost all denizens of the region, from Rongelap and Rapa Nui to Auckland and Anchorage, have long reckoned with a distinctive set of environmental challenges and opportunities presented by the particularities of the Pacific.

This book, arising from a symposium held at Amherst College in 2015, displays some of the best new work in Pacific environmental history. It brings the islands and the rim together in a diverse array of chapters that do justice to the uniqueness of specific times and places yet also—both collectively and within some of the chapters—to the coherence of the region.

The chapters operate at every spatial scale, from the intensely local to the pan-Pacific with global reach. That variety enables readers to see how certain patterns and forces reveal themselves more clearly on smaller or larger scales. Some chapters uncover obscure connections across the wide Pacific. As readers will discover, Americans advised Japanese authorities on the colonization of Hokkaido in the late nineteenth century, and Māori hunting of sooty shearwaters in New Zealand probably reduced their populations in North America in the fifteenth century. Other chapters illuminate the ways in which the Pacific became an experimental playground, for the introduction of alien species or for testing of novel weapons, and how people responded to these experiments. Still others reveal new aspects of extractive economies in the Pacific, whether of sandalwood, tuna, pearls, or whales. Several of the chapters point to the power of unintended consequences, often a strong theme in the genre of environmental history but especially so when societies, microbes, and economies collide and so many of the protagonists are so ignorant of the peoples, cultures, and ecosystems they are encountering.

While some of the chapters reach back into time, most of them focus on the last two hundred fifty years, an era of heightened instability in the Pacific both ecologically and politically. The main reason for these twin forms of instability is the systematic intrusion into the Pacific of peoples and power from elsewhere, or, put differently, the globalizing currents of modern Pacific history.

While few parts of the Pacific were truly isolated from the wider world before the late eighteenth century, the connections between Pacific communities and one another, and between Pacific communities and the rest of the planet, intensified dramatically and disruptively in the last two hundred fifty years. In general terms, dramatic disruptions brought by tighter links to the wider world are a routine experience in world history, at least since the dawn of agriculture some eleven thousand years ago. People have long found their lives recast almost overnight by new ideas, diseases, crops, technologies, weapons, products, and market links. All these themes appear in one or more of the chapters that follow. But every instance played out differently, as the chapters also show.

Pacific environmental history originated not with historians but in the work of historical anthropologists and archaeologists working exclusively on the islands and usually on periods before contact with the wider world.² However, as the concept of a Pacific Rim took hold in the wider public arena in the 1980s and 1990s, environmental historians—like historians generally—came to frame work on places such as California, Peru, and Japan as Pacific, rather than exclusively American, Latin American, or East Asian. Additionally, attention to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, rarely the concern of archaeologists or historical anthropologists working on the Pacific, helped environmental historians to see the connections that united the Rim and the Islands, in forms such as fishing and whaling, mining and agriculture, biological invasions and anti-nuclear protests, and much else. This book advances that process, by focusing mainly on recent centuries and collectively, and in some cases individually, linking the islands and the Rim into an increasingly coherent and connected environmental Pacific—just as ecological, social, economic, and political processes have long done.