Drawing upon invasion biology and the latest archaeological, skeletal and environment evidence, From Arabia to the Pacific documents the migration of humans into Asia, and explains why we were so successful as a colonising species. The colonisation of Asia by our species was one of the most momentous events in human evolution. Starting around or before 100,000 years ago, humans began to disperse out of Africa and into the Arabian Peninsula, and then across southern Asia through India, Southeast Asia and south China. They learnt to build boats and sail to the islands of Southeast Asia, from which they reached Australia by 50,000 years ago. Around that time, humans also dispersed from the Levant through Iran, Central Asia, southern Siberia, Mongolia, the Tibetan Plateau, north China and the Japanese islands, and they also colonised Siberia as far north as the Arctic Ocean. By 30,000 years ago, humans had colonised the whole of Asia from Arabia to the Pacific, and from the Arctic to the Indian Ocean as well as the European Peninsula. In doing so, we replaced all other types of humans such as Neandertals and ended five million years of human diversity. Using interdisciplinary source material, From Arabia to the Pacific charts this process and draws conclusions as to the factors which made it possible. It will be invaluable to scholars of prehistory, and archaeologists and anthropologists interested in how the human species moved out of Africa and spread throughout Asia.

Soon after the American Revolution, ?certain of the founders began to recognize the strategic significance of Asia and the Pacific and the vast material and cultural resources at stake there. Over the coming generations, the United States continued to ask how best to expand trade with the region and whether to partner with China, at the center of the continent, or Japan, looking toward the Pacific. Where should the United States draw its defensive line, and how should it export democratic principles? In a history that spans the eighteenth century to the present, Michael J. Green follows the development of U.S. strategic thinking toward East Asia, identifying recurring themes in American statecraft that reflect the nation's political philosophy and material realities. Drawing on archives, interviews, and his own experience in the Pentagon and White House, Green finds one overarching concern driving U.S. policy toward East Asia: a fear that a rival power might use the Pacific to isolate and threaten the United States and prevent the ocean from becoming a conduit for the westward free flow of trade, values, and forward defense. By More Than Providence works through these problems from the perspective of history's major strategists and statesmen, from Thomas Jefferson to Alfred Thayer Mahan and Henry Kissinger. It records the fate of their ideas as they collided with the realities of the Far East and adds clarity to America's stakes in the region, especially when compared with those of Europe and the Middle East.

During the nineteenth century, British and American settlers acquired a vast amount of land from indigenous people throughout the Pacific, but in no two places did they acquire it the same way. Stuart Banner tells the story of colonial settlement in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Tonga, Hawaii, California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska. Today, indigenous people own much more land in some of these places than in others. And certain indigenous peoples benefit from treaty rights, while others do not. These variations are traceable to choices made more than a century ago--choices about whether indigenous people were the owners of their land and how that land was to be transferred to whites. Banner argues that these differences were not due to any deliberate land policy created in London or Washington. Rather, the decisions were made locally by settlers and colonial officials and were based on factors peculiar to each colony, such as whether the local indigenous people were agriculturalists and what level of political organization they had attained. These differences loom very large now, perhaps even larger than they did in the nineteenth century, because they continue to influence the course of litigation and political struggle between indigenous people and whites over claims to land and other resources. "Possessing the Pacific" is an original and broadly conceived study of how colonial struggles over land still shape the relations between whites and indigenous people throughout much of the world.

This book traces the history of bird guano, demonstrating how this unique commodity helped unite the Pacific Basin with the industrialized world.

This book charts the previously untold story of the mobility of Indigenous peoples across vast distances, vividly reshaping what is known about decolonisation.

This book introduces readers to the deep political tensions in the Asia-Pacific and offers classroom simulations designed to encourage students to delve deeper into the issues and dynamics of the region.

The exploration and colonisation of the Pacific is a remarkable episode of human prehistory. Early sea-going explorers had no prior knowledge of Pacific geography, no documents to record their route, no metal, no instruments for measuring time and none for exploration. Forty years of modern archaeology, experimental voyages in rafts, and computer simulations of voyages have produced an enormous range of literature on this controversial and mysterious subject. This book represents a major advance in knowledge of the settlement of the Pacific by suggesting that exploration was rapid and purposeful, undertaken systematically, and that navigation methods progressively improved. Using an innovative model to establish a detailed theory of navigation, Geoffrey Irwin claims that rather than sailing randomly downwind in search of the unknown, Pacific Islanders expanded settlement by the cautious strategy of exploring upwind, so as to ease their safe return. The author has tested this hypothesis against the chronological data from archaeological investigation, with a computer simulation of demographic and exploration patterns and by sailing throughout the region himself.