The Pacific World

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

The Pacific Ocean has historically been regarded as a vast and prohibitive void rather than an avenue for integration. Yet over the past five centuries motions of people, commodities, and capital have created important relationships between the diverse societies in and around the "Pacific Rim". This course examines the history of trans-Pacific interactions from 1500 to the present. It draws together the histories of peoples in eight distinct cultural zones: Island Pacific, Southeast Asia, East Asia, Siberia, Australia & New Zealand, Europe, North America, and Central/South America. It takes the ocean itself as the principal framework of analysis in order to bring into focus large-scale historical processes that served to connect, and in some cases destroy, widely variant cultures in the region. These processes--mass migration, campaigns of imperial expansion, the destruction and reconfiguration of indigenous societies, cross-cultural trade, biological exchange, transfers of technology, cultural and religious exchange, and warfare and diplomacy--have deeply influenced both the experiences of individual societies and the world as a whole. Rather than trace these important transnational and global developments throughout all of modern world history, we will study the Pacific as a large but nonetheless delimited zone of interaction. This "oceans connect" approach to world history will bring these global processes into sharp relief while also allowing for continued attention to the extraordinary diversity and specificity of different cultures and societies located within and around the Pacific.