Maritime, Imperial and Postcolonial Histories
Pacific history has engendered some of the world’s most significant maritime history: studies of vessels, technologies, methods of navigation and maritime cultures.[227] Indigenous craft and navigation methods have fascinated maritime historians much as they did eighteenth-century European visitors.[228] The double-hulled canoe, techniques for dead reckoning, observations of westerly wind shifts in between prevailing trade winds and celestial navigation all continue as Pacific maritime knowledge, and are the subject of histories, documentaries and museum exhibits alike.
And while there are some notable studies of steam technology in the Pacific,[229] it is the ‘age of sail’ that steals attention in popular, museo- logical and maritime archaeological investigations of the Pacific, the telling and retelling of the stories that the remote geography of the Pacific engendered: HMS Bounty’s mutiny; La Perouse’s South Sea expedition that simply vanished; New England whalers far from home in the Pacific, and Polynesian whalers far from home on Nantucket; beachcombers and European captives living well or ill with indigenous island and coastal communities. Both the Polynesian and European journeys have inspired re-enactment - also a form of history - as well as historical analysis of the genre of re-enactment itself, as a realist technology latterly turned affective.[230]Pacific history has opened up a massive historiography on the comparative history of imperialism; of the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, British, German, American and Japanese intrusions into the islands and along the rim. How maritime empires became territorial empires - pastoral and plantation economies - over the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries has yielded a rich historiography on law, treaties and land-taking from the coasts inwards.
This insular and coastal geography of colonialism was quite different to the inland river and lake-oriented settlement in North America, for example. The Pacific is also a strange space of enduring, unfamiliar and remnant imperialism: Spain’s failed venture to colonise the Solomon Islands;[231] France’s last colonies (New Caledonia, the Marquesas);[232] New Zealand and Australia’s imperial ambitions (Nauru, New Guinea, Samoa, Antarctica);[233] a self-evident, though constantly questioned, American Pacific empire (Hawai’i, Guam, Samoa, the Philippines); Russian designs on the North Pacific, its fish and furs; and bizarre international redistributions of sovereignty and experimental modes of rule after World War I (the German Pacific colonies turned Japanese, Australian and New Zealand mandates). A single island - Guam, for instance - distils the history and effects of successive Spanish, American and Japanese imperialism. Benedict Anderson described a not dissimilar experience in the Philippines as ‘historical vertigo’.[234]‘First contact’ between indigenous people and Europeans is a particularly strong theme in Pacific history, from sixteenth-century Spanish- Chamorro relations through the very late contact between New Guinea highlanders and Australian goldseekers in 1930. The ‘contact’ theme in Pacific history has recently extended beyond close analysis of initial mis/ understandings, exchange and violence on beaches and ships between visitors and locals, to an interest in communication between indigenous Pacific peoples themselves, some from faraway islands and coasts, whose language and culture was often, but not always, familiar. The cosmopolitanism of Pacific maritime sojourners has become an analytic counterweight to earlier and enduring celebrations of Europeans’ global voyaging.[235]
Many, if not most Pacific histories written since the 1990s have been postcolonial revisions of eighteenth-century encounters.
This has defined scholarship on Cook, for example, not least in a major debate between Marshall Sahlins and Gananath Obeyesekere about Cook’s significance to Hawai’ians.[236] Other historians have tracked indigenous memory and oral histories about Cook, over two centuries.[237] The reinterpretation of conventional imperial histories to foreground and understand implications and viewpoints from an indigenous perspective extends to previous generations of historians as well, in part because the discipline of Pacific History was being institutionalised in the context of postwar decolonisation. The inaugural professor of the world’s first department of Pacific History, at the Australian National University, was Cambridge- trained Jim Davidson. Appointed in 1950 he was an active participant in regional decolonisation, advising Samoan chiefs on independence, drafting constitutions for the Cook Islands, Nauru and New Guinea. His Cambridge PhD might have been the classic ‘European penetration of the South Pacific, 1779-1842’, but by 1967 his book Samoa ma Samoa detailed ‘the emergence of the independent state of Western Samoa’.[238]Not colonisation but decolonisation was the important history to be told. Just as there is has been a ‘contact’ thematic in Pacific historiography, so there is particular indigenous history of decolonisation as Tracey Banivanua Mar argued,[239] and of political decolonisation that never happened, or is yet to unfold.[240]