Places matter. We are shaped by them, and in turn we shape them physically and imaginatively. They connect us to time and locality, perhaps even to life and death itself. This is a book about places and how our engagement with them--complex, changing, and varied--forms and transforms our understanding of them, of ourselves, of the human condition itself. Pacific Places, Pacific Histories brings together leading Pacific Islands studies scholars and invites them to talk about the places they have inhabited and to contemplate the meaning of that experience. The result is a veritable collage of reflections, distinct and different from each other but moving in their collective impact. Our engagement with places becomes daily more complicated with the transnational movement of peoples, ideas, technologies, and cultures. Global capitalism relentlessly alters established ethnographic assumptions about the meaning and importance of where we are and have been. The essays presented here are about letting go, learning and un-learning, transgressing physical, emotional, and intellectual boundaries. They are about personal quests, narrated in distinctive voices, raising particular concerns. Together they contribute significantly to our understanding of how small islands in a vast ocean enable us to see ourselves and the world around us.

The first comprehensive account to place the Pacific Islands, the Pacific Rim and the Pacific Ocean into the perspective of world history. A distinguished international team of historians provides a multidimensional account of the Pacific, its inhabitants and the lands within and around it over 50,000 years, with special attention to the peoples of Oceania. It providing chronological coverage along with analyses of themes such as the environment, migration and the economy; religion, law and science; race, gender and politics.

"Dr. Campbell's awareness of the importance of the active roles which Pacific islanders played in the shaping of the histories of their own countries is evident throughout: he has examined, whenever he could, historical events and processes from the point of view and interests of the islanders concerned. No other work has done this, and that in itself makes Dr. Campbell's book an important contribution to Pacific history."--Dr. Malama Meleisea, Director of the Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, University of Canterbury "Dr. Campbell's awareness of the importance of the active roles which Pacific islanders played in the shaping of the histories of their own countries is evident throughout: he has examined, whenever he could, historical events and processes from the point of view and interests of the islanders concerned. No other work has done this, and that in itself makes Dr. Campbell's book an important contribution to Pacific history."--Dr. Malama Meleisea, Director of the Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, University of Canterbury

Over the last fifty years Pacific history has become a vast and complex multi-disciplinary subject for analysis practiced by a great range of the professionally interested noting all changes.

Presenting the history of the inhabitants of the Pacific Islands from first colonization until the spread of European colonial rule in the later 19th century, this volume focuses specifically on Pacific Islander-European interactions from the perspective of Pacific Islanders themselves. A number of recorded traditions are reproduced as well as articles by Pacific Island scholars working within the academy. The nature of Pacific History as a sub-discipline is presented through a sample of key articles from the 1890s until the present that represent the historical evolution of the field and its multidisciplinary nature. The volume reflects on how the indigenous inhabitants of the Pacific Islands have a history as dynamic and complex as that of literate societies, and one that is more retrievable through multidisciplinary approaches than often realized.

"Deryck Scarr examines the Pacific Islands' indigenous social, economic and political systems and then places in context the post-sixteenth-century European 'discovery' of the Pacific. Cultural, political, trading, social and personal exchanges in Island worlds are described and analysed, from 1767 to the year 2000. Throughout the book, the Island world and its people on land and on the sea are held firmly in the foreground." -- from the dust jacket.

Volume I of The Cambridge History of the Pacific Ocean provides a wide-ranging survey of Pacific history to 1800. It focuses on varied concepts of the Pacific environment and its impact on human history, as well as tracing the early exploration and colonization of the Pacific, the evolution of Indigenous maritime cultures after colonization, and the disruptive arrival of Europeans. Bringing together a diversity of subjects and viewpoints, this volume introduces a broad variety of topics, engaging fully with emerging environmental and political conflicts over Pacific Ocean spaces. These essays emphasize the impact of the deep history of interactions on and across the Pacific to the present day.