Pacific Empires

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

This new graduate seminar will explore recent research on the history of imperialism, settlement, migration, resource extraction and trade in the Pacific Ocean from the late eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. The focus will be on environmental, trans-regional and inter-cultural perspectives. Nineteenth-century topics to be examined will include how European exploration transformed indigenous island societies and natural environments; and how European and American desire for products such as whale oil and sea-bird droppings (guano), along with Chinese desire for products such as otter pelts and sandalwood, further altered the relationship between humans and the ocean. The California gold rush will be considered from the perspective of Hong Kong and Southern China. The Japanese migration eastward, which began in the 1880s, will also be examined. For the twentieth century, the focus will be particularly on the U.S. and Japan, the two empires that dominated the Pacific politically and militarily. Decades before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, there was talk of war between these two powers—not over Japan’s invasion of China but over the expansionist ambitions of both countries in the Pacific. In the years following World War II, the United States brought former Japanese territories under its control and inherited elements of the institutions and technology of Japanese imperial rule. We will examine cases such as Okinawa and Hawaii, societies that bear the strong cultural imprint of both Pacific empires.