Pacific Centuries
If, in scholarly terms, the Atlantic world is both a region and a period (c. 1500-1800), the Pacific world also has a temporal dimension. ‘The Pacific century’ was used in the late twentieth century as a forecasting signifier - the twenty-first century was going to be the Pacific century, in the light of rising Japanese and later Thai, Malaysian, Korean and Chinese economies.
But by that century’s end - 1999 - international relations scholars were already asking: ‘whatever happened to the Pacific Century?’[269] To some extent the idea of a Pacific century became outmoded because it was linked so specifically to Japan. Yet it prompted economic historians to rethink the Pacific, and to nominate any number of previous ‘Pacific centuries’: not one, but at least five centuries, as Dennis O. Flynn, Lionel Frost and A. J. H. Latham indicated in their edited collection on the Pacific rim since the sixteenth century.[270]In retrospect, however, the twentieth century might still best qualify as the Pacific century. If China dominated economically, and in the long view, Japan dominated Pacific history geopolitically in the twentieth century. That century began with a complete rearrangement of the region, as Japan asserted itself over Russia, and then allied itself with Britain and France in World War I, the Japanese Imperial Navy taking Germany’s Micronesian colonies. And yet the end of the war signalled a marked shift in international relations across the Pacific, as Japanese governments pressed hard against the race-based immigration laws that so many Pacific rim countries continued to implement. Indeed the flurry of ‘panPacific’ associations in the period was a precise response to Japanese dissatisfaction turned foreign policy. It is with good reason that the relatively new field of ‘international relations’ focused on the Pacific region.
It was the Pacific War that globalised the second ‘world’ war, and historians are increasingly dating it not from 1939 to 1945, but from 1937 at the Japanese invasion of China to September 1945, at the surrender of Japan, the strange seaborne ritual on USS Missouri.[271] It was a war fought through and in the Pacific. Islands were conquered (Guam), divided (Samoa) and bombed (Hawai’i). All of the ocean, land and people that had become part of the Japanese Empire, having been part of the Spanish, American, British and Australian empires, after the war had to decolonise again from their liberators and administrators.The Cold War played out in the Pacific as well, not least with nuclear testing. The Marshall Islands was the so-called Pacific Proving Ground for early US testing, the apparent emptiness of the Pacific later inviting the French to experiment on Pacific atolls. The Pacific has also been a site of major anti-nuclear politics, both unofficial and, in the case of New Zealand, official. The mid-1980s Lange government declared New Zealand and its waters a ‘nuclear free zone’, banning nuclear-armed or nuclear-powered ships. The sinking of the Greenpeace protest vessel, the Rainbow Warrior, by French intelligence agents in 1985, entrenched a Pacific-based political stand-off.
The Rainbow Warrior sinking was an unlikely maritime affair in a jet-fuelled age. And yet, as with all oceans, containerisation has maintained - indeed increased - Pacific ocean traffic. The infrastructure of globalisation remains, in very large part maritime, as historians of global capitalism have shown. And the great volume of containerised cargo now transported across the ocean is the latest Pacific chapter for ‘worldsystems’ theorists, always inclined to think historically.[272] It is this traffic, criss-crossing old Polynesian, galleon, whaling and naval routes, that daily connects the Pacific to world history as well as the world ocean.