In The French in the Pacific World Annick Foucrier has brought together an important set of studies on the French presence in the Pacific up to the start of the 20th century. The volume opens with a section on the context of the French expansion, including its rivalries with other European powers. Following studies treat patterns of trade and exchange, and settlement and migration, then look at the French image of and reaction to the worlds round the Pacific and the people of the islands, covering the period from the voyages of exploration to the era of colonization.

Centering on cases of sexual violence, this open access book illuminates the contested introduction of British and French colonial criminal justice in the Pacific Islands during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, focusing on Fiji, New Caledonia, and Vanuatu/New Hebrides. It foregrounds the experiences of Indigenous Islanders and indentured laborers in the colonial court system, a space in which marginalized voices entered the historical record. Rape and sexual assault trials reveal how hierarchies of race, gender and status all shaped the practice of colonial law in the courtroom and the gendered experiences of colonialism. Trials provided a space where men and women narrated their own story and at times challenged the operation of colonial law. Through these cases, Gender, Violence and Criminal Justice in the Colonial Pacific highlights the extent to which colonial bureaucracies engaged with and affected private lives, as well as the varied ways in which individuals and communities responded to such intrusions and themselves reshaped legal practices and institutions in the Pacific. With bureaucratic institutions unable to deal with the complex realities of colonial lives, Stevens reveals how the courtroom often became a theatrical space in which authority was performed, deliberately obscuring the more complex and violent practices that were central to both colonialism and colonial law-making. Exploring the intersections of legal pluralism and local pragmatism across British and French colonialization in the Pacific, this book shows how island communities and early colonial administrators adopted diverse and flexible approaches towards criminal justice, pursuing alternative forms of justice ranging from unofficial courts to punitive violence in order to deal with cases of sexual assault. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by University of Waikato, New Zealand.

Traditionally, Germany has been considered a minor player in Pacific history: its presence there was more limited than that of other European nations, and whereas its European rivals established themselves as imperial forces beginning in the early modern era, Germany did not seriously pursue colonialism until the nineteenth century. Yet thanks to recent advances in the field emphasizing transoceanic networks and cultural encounters, it is now possible to develop a more nuanced understanding of the history of Germans in the Pacific. The studies gathered here offer fascinating research into German missionary, commercial, scientific, and imperial activity against the backdrop of the Pacific’s overlapping cultural circuits and complex oceanic transits.

The focus of this volume is Britain's trans-Pacific empire. This began with haphazard challenges to Spanish dominion, but by the end of the 18th century, the British had established a colony in Australia and had gone to the brink of war with Spain to establish trading rights in the north Pacific. These rights led to formal colonies in Vancouver Island and British Columbia, when Britain sought to maintain a north Pacific presence despite American expansionism. In the later 19th century the international ’scramble for the Pacific’ resulted in new British colonies and protectorates in the Pacific islands. The result was a complex imperial presence, created from a variety of motives and circumstances. The essays selected here take account of the wide range of economic, political and cultural factors which prompted British expansion, creating tension in Britain's imperial identity in the Pacific, and leaving Pacific peoples with a complicated and challenging legacy. Along with the important new introduction, they provide a basis for the reassessment of British imperialism in the Pacific region.

This collection of essays assesses the interrelationship between exploration, empire-building and science in the opening up of the Pacific Ocean by Europeans between the early 16th and mid-19th century. It explores both the role of various sciences in enabling European imperial projects in the region, and how the exploration of the Pacific in turn shaped emergent scientific disciplines and their claims to authority within Europe. Drawing on a range of disciplines (from the history of science to geography, imperial history to literary criticism), this volume examines the place of science in cross-cultural encounters, the history of cartography in Oceania, shifting understandings of race and cultural difference in the Pacific, and the place of ships, books and instruments in the culture of science. It reveals the exchanges and networks that connected British, French, Spanish and Russian scientific traditions, even in the midst of imperial competition, and the ways in which findings in diverse fields, from cartography to zoology, botany to anthropology, were disseminated and crafted into an increasingly coherent image of the Pacific, its resources, peoples, and histories. This is a significant body of scholarship that offers many important insights for anthropologists and geographers, as well as for historians of science and European imperialism.

In New Zealand’s France, Dr Alistair Watts investigates the origins of the New Zealand nation state from a fresh perspective — one that moves beyond the traditional bicultural view prevalent in the current New Zealand historiography. That New Zealand became British in the 1840s owes much, Dr Watts contends, to that other great colonial power of the time, France. The rich history of British antagonism towards the French was transported to New Zealand in the 1830s and 1840s as part of the British colonists’ cultural baggage, to be used in creating an old identity in a new land. Even as the British colonists sought a new beginning, this defining anti-French characteristic caused them to override the existing Māori culture with their own constructs of time and place. Leaving their signature names in the cities of Wellington and Nelson and naming their streets after Waterloo and Collingwood, the British colonisers attempted to establish a local antithesis of France through a bucolic Little Britain in the South Pacific. It was this legacy, as much as the assumed bicultural origins of modern New Zealand, that produced a Pacific country that still relies on the symbolism of the Union Jack embedded in the national flag and the totemic constitutional presence of the British Crown to maintain its national identity. This is the story of how this came about.

Eugène Boban began life in humble circumstances in Paris, traveled to the California Gold Rush, and later became a recognized authority on pre-Columbian cultures. He also invented an entire category of archaeological artifact: the Aztec crystal skull. By his own admission, he successfully “palmed off” a number of these crystal skulls on the curators of Europe’s leading museums. How could that happen, and who was this man? Detailed are the travels, self-education, and archaeological explorations of Eugène Boban; this book also explores the circumstances that allowed him to sell fakes to museums that would remain undetected for over a century.

This book examines the connections between the British Empire and French colonialism in war, peace and the various stages of competitive cooperation between, in which the two empires were often frères ennemis. It argues that in crucial ways the British and French colonial empires influenced each other. Chapters in the volume consider the two empires' connections in North, West and Central Africa, as well as their entanglement at sea in the Mediterranean Sea, Persian Gulf and South China Sea. Also analysed are their mutual engagement with Islam in both the Hajj and various religiously inflected colonial revolts, their mutually-informed systems of administration in the New Hebrides and generally, and the interconnected ways the two empires fought World War II and decolonization. By uniting historians of France and her colonies with historians of Britain and her colonies, this volume speaks to a broad international and imperial history audience.

The essays reprinted here trace the history of Chinese emigration into the Pacific region, first as individuals, traders or exiles, moving into the 'Nanyang' (Southeast Asia), then as a mass migration across the ocean after the mid-19th century. The papers include discussions of what it meant to be Chinese, the position of the migrants vis-à-vis China itself, and their relations with indigenous peoples as well as the European powers that came to dominate the region. Together with the introduction, they constitute an important aid to understanding one of the most widespread diasporas of the modern world.

Agriculture and Rural Connections in the Pacific brings together key studies from across several disciplines to examine the history of trans-Pacific rural and agricultural connections and to show an agriculturally-oriented Pacific World in the making since the 1500s. Historical globalization is commonly understood as a process that is propelled by industry or commerce, yet the seeds of global integration - literally as well as metaphorically - were sown much earlier, when crops and plants dispersed, agricultural systems proliferated, and rural people migrated across oceans. One goal of this volume is to demonstrate that the historical processes of globalization contained an agrarian dimension in which sub-national and national spaces were shaped in part through the influence of forces that originated in distant lands. Social and economic trends emanating from outside local territories had large impacts on demographic change, choices of agrarian systems, and the cropping patterns in many domestic settings. A second goal is to encourage readers to abandon the traditional Euro-centric view of events that shaped the Pacific region. The modern history of the Pacific World was undoubtedly shaped by Western imperialism, colonialism, and European trade and migration, but the present volume seeks to balance the interpretation of those forces with an emphasis on the increasing intensity of trans-Pacific interactions through rural labor migration and agricultural production.