The Pacific Historian

Pacific History presents to New Zealand students significant events and issues in Pacific history. Each context includes contested events that have impacted on the people in the Pacific and shaped their place in the modern world. These issues stimulate inquiry and enable students to achieve excellence. Pacific History contains engaging primary sources, a wide range of activities to engage all learners and historiography.

"Dr. Campbell's awareness of the importance of the active roles which Pacific islanders played in the shaping of the histories of their own countries is evident throughout: he has examined, whenever he could, historical events and processes from the point of view and interests of the islanders concerned. No other work has done this, and that in itself makes Dr. Campbell's book an important contribution to Pacific history."--Dr. Malama Meleisea, Director of the Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, University of Canterbury "Dr. Campbell's awareness of the importance of the active roles which Pacific islanders played in the shaping of the histories of their own countries is evident throughout: he has examined, whenever he could, historical events and processes from the point of view and interests of the islanders concerned. No other work has done this, and that in itself makes Dr. Campbell's book an important contribution to Pacific history."--Dr. Malama Meleisea, Director of the Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, University of Canterbury

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

"The five historians in this book were all, to varying degrees, participant historians, whose life within the ivory tower was complemented by an engagement with public affairs. Conversely, their activism and civil engagement fed back into the history they wrote. J.C. Beaglehole was the renowned editor of "Captain Cook's Journals" and a public intellectual and critical conscience in his native New Zealand. His student J.W. Davidson founded a distinctive school of Pacific Islands history and went on to be a constitutional adviser to Pacific territories on the threshold of independence. He bequeathed a tradition of the engaged scholar which he, in turn, inherited from Beaglehole. For Richard Gilson the cause was less political than a sometimes obsessive devotion to establishing the place of Samoans in their historical encounter with Europeans. Harry Maude started as a colonial official and made a long-awaited mid-career change to studying the people he had once administered. Brij V. Lal has deliberately lived at the interface of scholarship and action, particularly as one of the makers of Fiji's 1997 Constitution. "The Ivory Tower and Beyond" takes a biographical approach and more. It is also an excursion into intellectual and institutional history. It interweaves the subjects' interests and activities within and beyond the ivory tower and shows that these seemingly discrete activities are not disassociated from each other. In each case the public figure and the man of letters is inseparable. "The Ivory Tower and Beyond" also demonstrates that a proper appreciation of a historian's writings requires an understanding of the backgrounds and the structures within which the texts were created - upbringing, academic training, institutional pressures and the vagaries of patronage and preferment. Private lives and professional formations intertwine and are refracted by an institutional prism." --Publisher.

In this fascinating and exciting overview, Donald B. Freeman explores the role of the Pacific Ocean in human history. Covering over one third of the globe, the Pacific Ocean plays a vital role in the lives and fortunes of more than two billion people who live on its rim-lands and islands. It has played a crucial part in shaping the histories of the different Pacific cultures, towards which it has appeared in a variety of different guises. Exploring the ocean’s place in human history, this wide ranging book draws together the long and varied physical, economic, cultural and political history of the Pacific, from Prehistory through to the present day. It takes an interdisciplinary approach to show the changing viewpoints of those who explored, exploited and settled the Pacific, including the inhabitants of its Asian and American rim-lands. The book draws on new research in a variety of areas, such as early Pacific migrations, impacts of European colonization, the effects of climate change, and current economic and political developments. It provides a uniquely broad overview that will be of vital interest to students and to all those with an interest in World History.

Volume II of The Cambridge History of the Pacific Ocean focuses on the latest era of Pacific history, examining the period from 1800 to the present day. This volume discusses advances and emerging trends in the historiography of the colonial era, before outlining the main themes of the twentieth century when the idea of a Pacific-centred century emerged. It concludes by exploring how history and the past inform preparations for the emerging challenges of the future. These essays emphasise the importance of understanding how the postcolonial period shaped the modern Pacific and its historians.

Written by a senior scholar and master mariner, Sailors and Traders is the first comprehensive account of the maritime peoples of the Pacific. It focuses on the sailors who led the exploration and settlement of the islands and New Zealand and their seagoing descendants, providing along the way new material and unique observations on traditional and commercial seagoing against the background of major periods in Pacific history. The book begins by detailing the traditions of sailors, a group whose way of life sets them apart. Like all others who live and work at sea, Pacific mariners face the challenges of an often harsh environment, endure separation from their families for months at a time, revere their vessels, and share a singular attitude to risk and death. The period of prehistoric seafaring is discussed using archaeological data, interpretations from interisland exchanges, experimental voyaging, and recent DNA analysis. Sections on the arrival of foreign exploring ships centuries later concentrate on relations between visiting sailors and maritime communities. The more intrusive influx of commercial trading and whaling ships brought new technology, weapons, and differences in the ethics of trade. The successes and failures of Polynesian chiefs who entered trading with European-type ships are recounted as neglected aspects of Pacific history. As foreign-owned commercial ships expanded in the region so did colonialism, which was accompanied by an increase in the number of sailors from metropolitan countries and a decrease in the employment of Pacific islanders on foreign ships. Eventually small-scale island entrepreneurs expanded interisland shipping, and in 1978 the regional Pacific Forum Line was created by newly independent states. This was welcomed as a symbolic return to indigenous Pacific ocean linkages. The book’s final sections detail the life of the modern Pacific seafarer. Most Pacific sailors in the global maritime labor market return home after many months at sea, bringing money, goods, a wider perspective of the world, and sometimes new diseases. Each of these impacts is analyzed, particularly in the case of Kiribati, a major supplier of labor to foreign ships.