Introduction

From the early 1500s to the first decades of the twentieth century, Europe expanded its influence over most of the earth’s surface. As this drama unfolded, Western empires emerged in many and diverse locales.

Rather than being a timeless, frozen wilderness, the Arctic was a crossroads in a polyglot Pacific world. Annaliese Jacobs demonstrates how the history of this region and its people became a profoundly imperial one across the course of the nineteenth century. Exploiting the natural resources presented by seals and whales structured encounters between expanding European interests (particularly Russian and North American ones) and the diverse indigenous peoples of the greater Bering Sea region.

Clive Moore’s study of the Coral Sea, in the south-west Pacific Ocean, shows a surpris­ingly large number of European imperial players—German, British, French and later Australian—involved in a region of small and scattered landfalls, large oceanic expanses and only intermittent strategic value. Labour rather than raw materials became the key focus for European interests, with the Pacific Islander indentured labour trade sustaining plantation agriculture that in turn stimulated imperial economies far from the Coral Sea itself.

The hypersaline Dead ‘Sea’, the lowest point on the planet, presents one of the world’s most extreme natural settings. Jacob Norris reveals how it came to be viewed as an eco­nomic resource that could be harnessed to the interests of imperial economies. Nineteenth­century scientific and religious investigations worked together to provided the platform for expanding colonial influence in the region through twentieth-century efforts to make the lake commercially profitable as a colonial resource.