Economy and Ecology

Economic historians have drawn China - in particular Guangzhao - into Pacific historiography, tracking the significance of ‘Canton’ trade, the word romanised and then internationalised from an original Portuguese transliteration of Guangdong.

Another set of commodities was produced and extracted from insular and coastal land.^[244] The sandalwood trade was especially significant over the nineteenth century connecting islands where it was grown and pro­cessed (Fiji, the New Hebrides, New Caledonia and Hawai’i) and Pacific rim ports where it was traded, Sydney, Manila, Valparaiso and Canton, the major end market. Settler colonial societies created entirely new markets from the late eighteenth century. Salted pork, for example, was exported from New Zealand and Tahiti to feed the growing population of British and Irish in southeast Australia, from the late eighteenth century. The extraction and production as well as trade of these commodities involved increasingly complex negotiations between Europeans - both those who lived on the islands and intermittent traders - and locals.

Commercial exchange, extraction economies and invasion ecologies went hand-in-hand in the Pacific. There have been many costs. But one of the dividends has been a thriving tradition of Pacific ecological history. The Pacific is perhaps the major oceanic region in which eco­logical history, and environmental history more generally, has been thor­oughly applied, from Alfred Crosby’s focus on New Zealand in Ecological Imperialism onwards. The history of inter- and intra-species battles and exterminations, the concepts of resilience, invasion devastation or oppor­tunistic flourishing, have each been thoroughly developed within Pacific­based history of science. In part this has been because the vastness of the ocean created island and coastal populations of non-human organisms if not entirely isolated, then certainly separated for many generations. In some instances, this isolation has been significant in evolutionary terms; the Wallace line, for example, marks the separation of Tasmania, Australia and New Guinea from Asia. And for humans, notwithstanding the historical and historiographical focus on connection across waters, distance and isolation have shaped history: contact with Europeans usu­ally meant the devastating introduction of multiple unfamiliar micro­organisms. These raised levels of infertility, morbidity and mortality, and introduced plant and animal species that changed seascapes and landscapes in some instances very quickly. In the Pacific region, inva­sion ecology has long offered a rich conceptual, metaphorical as well as substantive mode through which to develop a demonstrably linked environmental and colonial history.^[246]