Introduction, Abstracts, and Bios:

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Introduction

          Organized by the American Historical Association, the World History Association, the Middle East Studies Association, the African Studies Association, the Latin American Studies Association, the Conference on Latin American History, the Association for Asian Studies, the Institute of European Studies at Columbia University, the Harriman Institute of Russian Studies at Columbia University, the Community College Humanities Association, and the Library of Congress, this conference aims to go beyond area studies and to cross the usual national , geographical, and cultural boundary lines of scholarship by examining the role of oceans and sea basins as highways of exchanges between world areas as well as social and cultural sites in their own right.  National historiographies are challenged by seascapes that wash the shores of multiple global areas and that create littoral social relations with dynamics of their own.  Studying the historiography of trans-oceanic exchanges promises to break new ground in the study of human linkages along several lines.

Each of the three conference days will focus on a particular rubric:

Day 1:  Social and political organization.

Day 2:  Economic implications.

Day 3:  Cultural, environmental, and scientific issues.

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Abstracts and Bios

POLITICAL AND IMPERIAL ORGANIZATION

Keynote

The Organization of Oceanic Empires: The Iberian World in the Habsburg Period (and a Bit Beyond)
Carla Rahn Phillips, University of Minnesota

One could argue that globalization began, not with the voyages of Columbus, but with the treaties that claimed to divide the non-European world into Portuguese and Spanish spheres of influence. In the early sixteenth century, both Iberian powers established commercial and governmental outposts in the Americas and reached agreement regarding spheres of influence in Asia. Their rivalry continued, however, and the rulers of both Portugal and Spain saw their interests as spanning the whole globe. By the late sixteenth century, various other European powers challenged the monopolies claimed by the Iberian states, which were ruled by the same Habsburg monarchs from 1580 to 1640. Although each country and its empire officially remained separate during the joint monarchy, royal officials made policies for defense, trade, and shipping in both global empires.

The "Seascapes" conference provides an ideal venue to consider some of the questions suggested by the Habsburgs' joint rule of Iberia's two global empires, which modern scholars rarely consider together. How did government officials in Lisbon and Madrid organize military expeditions and merchant fleets to Asia and America during the Habsburg period? How did communities in Portugal, Spain, and their empires think of themselves during the Habsburg period? By examining such issues, and by treating Portugal, Spain and their overseas empires together during the Habsburg period, we can gain a clearer sense of what early globalization meant to Europeans who lived it.

Carla Rahn Phillips, Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, earned her B.A. from Pomona College, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in History from New York University. Her research focuses on the social, economic, and maritime history of Early Modern Europe, especially Spain and its empire. Her publications include Ciudad Real, 1500-1750 (Harvard, 1979); Six Galleons For The King Of Spain (Johns Hopkins, 1986); and (co-authored with William D. Phillips), The Worlds of Christopher Columbus (Cambridge, 1992) and Spain's Golden Fleece (Johns Hopkins, 1997). Current projects include a shipwreck in 1708 and the tuna fishing industry in southwestern Spain.

Oceans and Empires

Defining the Coastline: Eyewitness Testimony and the Mapping of Spain's First American Possessions, 1492-1536
William D. Phillips, Jr., University of Minnesota

During the first four decades of Spain's exploration and conquest in the Americas, hundreds of mariners, most of them coastal dwellers in Andalusia, investigated the coastlines in Central and South America. Many of those mariners left valuable imprints on the historical record, for they gave depositions in the long series of lawsuits pitting the successors of Christopher Columbus against the Spanish crown. Collectively, the depositions reveal the gradual opening of the American coasts to European knowledge and the eventual linking of the American littorals to the Mediterranean and the other seas of the world.

Nonetheless, as late as the mid-1530s, the details of the coastlines were not at all clear, and the lawyers of the Columbus family could argue that they had claims to all the mainland because Columbus had discovered one part of it. Crown attorneys had to counter that Columbus had ventured to the mainland only in limited places.
The testimonies also provide accounts of relations with the native inhabitants of the islands and mainland, as well as descriptions of initial contacts when the Europeans sailed into new regions and the development of trade in some places and violent indigenous resistance in others. The depositions of the eyewitnesses provide a multifaceted view of the first phases of European actions in the coastal regions of the Americas and the responses of the peoples who met them.

William D. Phillips, Jr., is Professor of History and Director of the Center for Early Modern History at the University of Minnesota. Among his publications are Enrique IV and the Crisis of Fifteenth-Century Castile, 1425-1480 (Medieval Academy of America, 1978); Slavery from Roman Times to the Early Transatlantic Trade (University of Minnesota Press, 1985); and the edited volume Testimonies from The Columbian Lawsuits (Brepols, 2000). With Carla Rahn Phillips he has published The Worlds of Christopher Columbus (Cambridge University Press, 1992) and Spain's Golden Fleece (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

Oceans, Migrants, and the Character of Empires: English Colonial Schemes in the Seventeenth Century
Alison Games, Georgetown University

This paper explores the ways in which experiences and models derived in one ocean basin shaped interactions elsewhere in the seventeenth century. The historiography of English overseas activities has generally severed commercial and colonial enterprises within different oceans (thus the Atlantic and Indian oceans have customarily served to tell separate tales of colonization and commerce). Yet the actual experiences of participants in overseas enterprises, from ministers to merchants to mariners, challenge these conventions by virtue of their repeated and successive participation in a range of global ventures. In their travels they knit together different oceanic cultures of trade and cultural exchange, bringing models that dominated in one region to other parts of the world. I argue here that it is impossible to understand the patterns of cultural interaction within any single ocean basin without appreciating the experiences that men brought with them from other global ventures. This paper offers two examples: it draws on two English efforts to settle colonies on Madagascar between 1644 and 1650 in order to illustrate the impact Atlantic colonization schemes had in the Indian Ocean, and it examines the influence of American models in the Mediterranean through a proposal for the English colonization of Tangier in 1661.

Alison Games received her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. She is the author of Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999) in addition to several articles on different aspects of English colonization in the seventeenth century. She has also published on the subject of teaching Atlantic history. Her current project, Agents of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560-1660, explores English commercial and colonial ventures around the globe. She is currently Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University.

Affinities and Empires: Tales from the Pacific
Matt K. Matsuda, Rutgers University

Framed around a Pacific journey, I draw on the landscapes and seascapes of French Pacific territories-particularly New Caledonia and Tahiti-to examine the political constitution of Oceanic empire in registers of affinity, affection, and two centuries of struggle, accommodation, and contested claims. By narrating tales of love in the history of French empire in the Pacific-a shifting series of strategic and sentimental geographies ranging from Southeast Asia to the Society Islands--we see endless variations in proclamations of Christ's brotherly passion in Futuna, military writings on native resistance in Tahiti, the organizing familial principle for administrators in New Caledonia, the conjugal narratives of Indochina's history, debates over the possibility of Japanese affection. Missionaries regularly employed "love" as well as novelists, patriots as well as traders and adventurers. These narrations lead to a reconsideration of the ties between colonial histories and contemporary ports, seascapes, and "marine tenure" disputes, drawing on juridical theory to suggest how the notion of "-scape" follows the evocation of "-ship," critical to adjudicating such notions as "friendship," and "citizenship," the expression of political and social notions of community and memory attempting to address unresolved claims on the past and historical practice.

Matt K Matsuda is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University, and former director of the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis (RCHA) project "Global Visions and Local Histories." He teaches European and Asia-Pacific comparative histories and publishes on cultural and intellectual history. He is the author of The Memory of the Modern (Oxford, 1996), a study of memory locations and practices and historical consciousness in nineteenth-century Europe, and the forthcoming Until the End of the World: Love, Empire, and History in the Pacific (Oxford, 2002).

Laws, Oceans, and Laws of Oceans

Oceans of Law: The Legal Geography of the Seventeenth-Century Seas
Lauren Benton, New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University

From its beginnings in the seventeenth-century perception of the ocean as an interconnected space, "globalism" was inextricably linked to new images and forces of insularity. This paper examines the interrelation between European mariners' global practices in the seventeenth century and the simultaneous emergence of separate regulatory orders for the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. In the Indian Ocean, late-seventeenth century piracy forced greater Mughal attention to maritime politics and brought the qualified recognition by Mughal officials of European maritime claims. The pressure brought to bear on the East India Company in turn accelerated efforts to reform legal administration and curb "lawlessness" in the Atlantic. Rather than emerging from regionally diverse ways of understanding ocean sovereignty, these trends reflected the pervasiveness of the view that the ocean was not a site of either free trade or "territorial" control but a matrix of "islands of law." This understanding imagined international law as the insertion of municipal law into ocean space. It matched mariners' routine strategies of positioning themselves in relation to various legal authorities and forums, even when, as pirates, they engaged in open raiding. And the view fit well with Mughal understandings of jurisdictional complexity. Thus the seas were not divided between zones of law and lawlessness but were constructed, in both practice and theory, as spheres of fragmented and fluid legality.

Lauren Benton received an AB from Harvard University and Ph.D. in Anthropology and History from Johns Hopkins University. Her areas of interest include comparative colonial history, legal studies, and world history, with special emphasis on the Atlantic world. Benton's most recent book is Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400-1900 (Cambridge University Press, 2002). Her current research focuses on European sojourners' perceptions of ocean space in the early modern world. Benton is currently Professor of History at NJIT and Rutgers University.

Lines of Plunder or Crucible of Modernity? Toward a Legal History of the English-Speaking Atlantic, 1660-1825
Eliga H. Gould, University of New Hampshire

As Max Weber wrote in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the essence of commercial capitalism is its commitment to quotidian regularity, gradual accumulation, and the rule of law; but for these qualities, the ethos of the modern capitalist would be indistinguishable from that of the pre-modern brigand. Eliga Gould examines the implications of Weber's distinction for the legal history of the English-speaking Atlantic during the long eighteenth century. The trend of late has been to emphasize the fundamental "modernity" of Britain's expansion, with the colonies supplying what Robin Blackburn calls the "forced draught" that changed behavior in areas as varied as market discipline, social and racial hierarchies, and popular sovereignty and national identity. However, both English common law and the European law of nations treated the western and southern Atlantic as a zone of impunity, where Britons (metropolitan as well as creole) were free to engage in violence of the sort that Weber believed antithetical to both capitalism and, ultimately, modernity. Drawing on material relating to cultural contacts between Europeans and Native Americans, slavery and the slave trade, and the Anglo-American debate over the post-1776 creation of the Atlantic state system, Gould's paper suggests that the theoretically distinct categories of legal accumulation and lawless aggression were explicitly intertwined in the outer Atlantic, and that the "modern" ethos of both the British Empire and (after 1776) the United States depended heavily on their situation in a region where acts of impunity remained the norm.

Eliga Gould teaches early American and Atlantic history at the University of New Hampshire, where he holds The Class of 1940 Professorship. His publications include The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (2000), which won the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture's Jamestown Prize. He is currently writing a book on the legal geography of the English-speaking Atlantic between 1750 and 1825.

Transgressive Exchange: Rewriting Atlantic Law in the Eighteenth-Century Caribbean
Alan L. Karras, University of California at Berkeley

This paper connects Adam Smith's criticism of the mercantile economy and its laws with the largely transgressive behavior that took place in Atlantic American port cities. It begins with a brief exploration of Smith's ideas about the human "propensity to truck, barter, and exchange" as they might be applied to intercontinental oceanic commerce. The results indicate not only that Smith assumed legal compliance but also that problematic commercial policy could easily be overcome without resorting to legislation or other official measures.

The paper uses, as its principal case study, the Spanish port of Monte Christi, on the north coast of Hispaniola in the 1760s. It details the mechanism of trade between French, British, and Spanish subjects as it operated in this "de facto" free port. Using archival evidence, the paper then explores regional repercussions to the illicit activity. It considers a Jamaican and Bahamian case, where residents from around the Atlantic world clashed with legal and other officials in their quests to circumvent offensive statutes. As a result, it becomes clear that the American populations found ways to "truck, barter, and exchange" even when laws prohibited them from doing so. And because many, if not most, of them escaped punishment (and/or detection), the Atlantic's imperial laws had been effectively rewritten by those who should have been subjected to them. In this way, Atlantic America increasingly came to control its residents' ability to consume as they desired.

Alan Karras teaches world history, Caribbean History, and classical political economy for the International and Area Studies Teaching Program at the University of California at Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in 1988 at the University of Pennsylvania, after receiving his BA and MA degrees from the Johns Hopkins University. He has authored a monograph, Sojourners in the Sun: Scots Migrants in Jamaica and the Chesapeake, 1740-1800, and with John McNeill, co-edited a reader entitled Atlantic American Societies. He is currently at work on a history of smuggling in the eighteenth and nineteenth-century Caribbean. Several early sections from this book have already appeared in journals.

Questions of Ideology and Political Economy

Maritime Ideologies and Ethnic Anomalies: Sea Space and the Structure of Subalternity in the Southeast Asian Littoral
Jennifer L. Gaynor, University of Michigan

This paper looks at maritime ideologies concerning Southeast Asia, from the early modern period to the present. I examine the relation of maritime ideologies to the political-economic contexts from which they emerge, and ask how they can inform our understanding of changes in the structures of social difference in the region, especially in the Southeast Asian littoral.

While in other parts of the world, national ideologies were often articulated in relation to a homeland, for Indonesia and the Dutch Indies before it, geopolitical notions of place included the seas in increasingly explicit and more territorialized ways. Among the maritime ideologies I consider is the Mare Liberum of Grotius, which popularized the Dutch capture of a Portuguese carrack in 1603. At the other end of the temporal spectrum, during Indonesia's post-independence period of regional rebellions, the state articulated a national ideology, "Nusantara," which eventually bolstered its position in new international legal agreements from which it gained an enormous territorial sea.

This analysis of maritime ideologies in Southeast Asia helps to elucidate how the people of its littoral came to be viewed as more, or perhaps less, than just another ethnic group. Romanticized as "sea gypsies," their putative origins as a group not traced to any particular land, "sea people" elide the impetus to found historical identity on place. Like "gypsies" elsewhere, they reveal a dominant structure of equivalent ethnic oppositions through their implicit placement outside of it - a kind of anomaly to that structure, despite increasingly territorialized seas.

Jennifer L. Gaynor is completing her dissertation on coastal Sama people in Sulawesi, Indonesia. Her project explores how certain contemporary practices of dealing with social subordination are produced historically in relations between groups. Drawing on indigenous manuscripts, oral traditions, memories and archives, she investigates how these practices relate to discourses about the past, and to inter-group dynamics of status recognition and reproduction. In addition to teaching about Southeast Asia, her courses revolve around the intersections of history and anthropology. Her research interests include the reproduction of social inequality, the formation of popular histories, and the historical generation of subordinated knowledges and practices.

The Ottoman "Discovery" of the Indian Ocean in the Sixteenth Century: The Age of Exploration from an Islamic Perspective
Giancarlo Casale, Harvard University

Vasco da Gama's successful voyage around the Cape of Good Hope in 1497 and the foundation of the Portuguese Estado da India in the following decades have long been identified as developments of enormous global significance. Much less well known to modern scholarship, by contrast, is the rival and contemporaneous expansion of the Ottoman Empire into the lands of the Indian Ocean littoral, a process which began with Sultan Selim I's conquest of Egypt in 1517, and which would continue throughout the rest of the sixteenth century. Because the Ottoman state and the merchant communities of the Indian Ocean shared the same religion, most modern scholars have simply assume that they enjoyed a kind of de facto familiarity with one another as well. In reality, the early sixteenth century Ottomans were in many ways even less aware of the geography, history and civilization of the Indian Ocean than were their contemporary Portuguese rivals. The subsequent development of direct contact between the Ottoman Empire and the Muslim principalities and trading communities of the Indian Ocean thus represents a kind of Ottoman 'discovery' of an entirely new part of the globe, and one which corresponds in many ways to the much better documented European discoveries of the same period. Focusing specifically on the cultural and intellectual characteristics of Ottoman expansion, the present paper argues that the growth of Ottoman intellectual interest in the Indian Ocean during the course of the sixteenth century closely mirrored, both qualitatively and chronologically, similar developments in Europe.

Originally from Madison, WI, Giancarlo Casale is currently a PhD candidate in History at Harvard University's Center for Middle Eastern Studies, where he has been affiliated since beginning his graduate work in the fall of 1997. He is spending this year overseas as a Fulbright-Hays scholar, splitting his time between the archives of Istanbul and Lisbon, where he is engaged in field research for his doctoral dissertation, a study of Ottoman expansion in the Indian Ocean during the sixteenth century. At this conference, he is presenting preliminary results of this research for the very first time.

OCEANIC SOCIOLOGIES

Keynote

Littoral Society: The Concept and the Problems
Michael N. Pearson, University of New South Wales

In any study of seascapes an investigation of the littoral must be central, for it is here that land and sea meet. My paper will be tentative and problem-oriented. Most basically, is there such a thing as littoral society, that is can we go around the shores of an ocean, or a sea, or indeed the whole world, and identify societies which have more in common with other littoral societies than they do with their inland neighbors? If there is, do these societies draw more on their forelands, that is maritime connections, than on their hinterlands? As an example of the difficulties of identification, fisherfolk, ostensibly quintessentially littoral people, draw their livelihood from the sea, or so it seems, yet their women engage in processing and marketing on land, and the whole fishing community is dependent on land economic forces. Many fisher communities engage in agriculture as well as piscatorial activities.

We need to be sensitive to gradations along the strand, from the arguably wholly aquatic (but does this mean they are littoral?) Marsh Arabs (now a vanishing society) and peddlers at the floating markets in Bangkok, through to peasants who happen to live on the coast. Three criteria need to be specified: location, occupation, and culture.

Michael N. Pearson is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. I have also taught at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Minnesota and Brown University. I have in press a 180,000 word MS called "The Indian Ocean," a book commissioned by Routledge in London as part of their Seas in History series Previous books include Merchants and Rulers in Gujarat (1976), The Portuguese in India (1987), with Ashin Das Gupta, India and the Indian Ocean (1987, 1999) and Port Cities and Intruders (1998).

The Port City Environment

"Tavern of the Seas"? The Cape of Good Hope as an Oceanic Crossroads during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
Kerry Ward, Rice University

The settlement at Cape of Good Hope on the tip of Southern Africa was established as a refreshment post in1652 by the Dutch East India Company to service ships traveling to and fro across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The colonial society forged at the Cape as a product of this trans-oceanic trading network was based on the movement of people from Africa, Asia and Europe. Whereas migrations across the Atlantic Ocean were dominated by European sailors, settlers and sojourners, the movement of people across the Indian Ocean took place in various forms of free and forced migration. European sailors, soldiers and convicts arrived alongside African and Asian slaves, and Asian convicts and political prisoners. This paper examines the Cape in the context of the growth of other port cities in the Indian and Atlantic oceans. Together with the invasion of the Cape, interactions of indigenous Africans in the region and these various migrations formed the basis of a racially divided society in South Africa. This focus on trans-oceanic migrations shifts the emphasis of early colonial society exclusively from "European colonization" to a complex web of migrations. Remembering these African, Asian and European migrations is a dynamic part of the way that South Africans are re-visiting their own history through the development of diasporic consciousness in the post-apartheid era. The Dutch East India Company period at the Cape has become a crucial part of this process of searching for the origins of the "rainbow nation" in its complex colonial origins.

Kerry Ward is assistant professor of global history at Rice University. Her areas of research include Indian Ocean, South African and Indonesian history; early modern Dutch colonialism; comparative slavery and forced migration; and the memory of history, particularly in post-apartheid South Africa. She is presently working on her first book The Bounds of Bondage: Forced migration from Batavia to the Cape of Good Hope under the Dutch East India Company empire.

A West African Cosmopolis: Elmina (Ghana) in the Nineteenth-Century
Larry W. Yarak, Texas A&M University

The ports of the West African Gold Coast (today's Ghana) were important sites for the exchange of goods and ideas between peoples of Africa, Europe and the Americas from the late fifteenth century. In 1482 the Portuguese constructed a fortified post at the West African port that became known as "Elmina." In 1637 the Dutch wrested control of the fort from the Portuguese. From the early 17th century Elmina was one of the many Akan and Ga ports involved in the export slave trade. Beginning in the 1790s Elmina gradually relinquished its role in the slave trade. By the 1820s the Dutch were relegated to a minor role in the Atlantic economy, and their power and influence at Elmina itself waned. The inland Asante Empire that had dominated the entire Gold Coast littoral since 1807 formally gave up control over its southern provinces by treaty in 1831.

Existing historiography has not adequately come to grips with the history of littoral society in the period following the retreat of Asante and before the advent of British colonial rule in the 1870s. It is the argument of this paper that Elmina (and the entire Gold Coast) became a kind of "middle ground" during 1831 to 1868, a place of accommodation and "creative misunderstanding" for peoples connected with four continents. No single group held exclusive power. Traders and officials were dispatched by the rulers of the Asante Empire to the port that became one of Asante's principal trading outlets. A small number of Dutch officials and traders resided in the fort and town and married the daughters of prominent Euro-African merchant families. From the Americas and Europe a steady stream of trading ships arrived to purchase West African produce. Ship captains and their supercargoes interacted with Elmina's European, Euro-African, and African merchants. A wealthy and influential community of western-educated, largely Christian Euro-African families emerged and staked out an autonomous position in Elmina's complex social and political organization. In the 1830s and again in the 1850s and 1860s the Dutch "recruited" young West African men for military service in the Dutch East Indies, thus establishing contact between Elmina and the growing Dutch empire in Asia. Scores of ex-soldiers returned to settle and receive their pensions in Elmina. In 1873 the British destruction of Elmina in the wake of the imposition of British overrule brought this remarkable multiethnic littoral culture to an abrupt end. This paper explores some of the social and cultural characteristics of Elmina in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, which allow us to construct a new interpretation of precolonial Gold Coast history

Larry W. Yarak is Associate Professor of History at Texas A&M University. His research currently focuses on the nineteenth century social history of the coastal Akan peoples of today's Ghana and their economic and cultural interaction with the Europeans who resided among them. He is the author of Asante and the Dutch, 1744-1872 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990) and a number of articles and book chapters. He is the editor of Ghana Studies, the journal of the Ghana Studies Council.

Societies of the Sea

The Business of the Hajj: Seaborne Commerce and the Movement of Peoples
Michael B. Miller, Syracuse University

This paper concentrates on the business of transporting pilgrims to Mecca by European shipping companies from the late nineteenth century until approximately 1970 when air transport largely replaced travel by sea. It argues that migration in modern times has always been a business, and that the business history of the Hajj must be placed within this perspective. Europeans introduced the same business logic to moving pilgrims, with comparable consequences, as they did to transporting other populations, or even freight. For the Hajj the consequences were twofold. First, European steamships increased access to the Hajj, especially for the more distant populations of Southeast Asia. Second, by applying the organizational skills and networks they had worked out for their larger business, European shipping companies made possible the sea transport of tens of thousands in any given year to Mecca.

The second argument of the paper is that a European-run pilgrim business evolved out of colonial investment and practice and in fact mirrored wider imperial business patterns, from the deployment and incorporation of indigenous networks to the business consequences of decolonization. When Europeans departed the scene, the business logic they introduced largely remained. The business of the Hajj thus passed through three periods with two transformations: the business before European entry; the business under the Europeans; and the business following the Second World War and colonial disengagement.

Michael Miller was educated at Northwestern (BA, 1967) and the University of Pennsylvania (PhD, 1976). He has taught at Rice University (1977-1980) and, since then, at Syracuse University. He is the author of The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869-1920 (Princeton: 1981) and Shanghai on the Métro: Spies, Intrigue, and the French Between the Wars (Berkeley: 1994). He is currently writing a book on Europe and the maritime world in the twentieth century. He has received Guggenheim, NEH, Harvard-Newcomen, DAAD, ACLS (currently) and German Marshall Fund (2003-2004) fellowships.

A Work of Compassion? Dutch Slavery and slave trade in the Indian Ocean in the Seventeenth Century
Markus P. Vink, State University of New York at Fredonia

For most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Dutch were active participants in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades. Whereas the Atlantic slave trade has been mapped out in relatively great detail in numerous studies, its Indian Ocean counterpart has remained largely uncharted territory and overlooked in Asian colonial historiography. This paper is a first step to correct the historiographical imbalance by looking at the arguments surrounding Dutch slavery and slave trade in the Indian Ocean in the seventeenth century. Though a real debate over slavery and the slave trade did not begin until after 1750, the seventeenth century did witness a heated controversy between ultra-orthodox and moderate Calvinists in which the "peculiar institution" played a small, albeit not insignificant, role. The polemics between majority apologists and minority opponents occurred in two geographically separate spheres. In Europe, the intellectual, theoretical argument, involving Calvinist ministers or "pulpit predikanten," theologians and jurists, was couched in Christian humanist terms, reflecting the "tension between various forms of liberation and bondage" pervading the Bible and, to a lesser extent, classical texts. In Asia, slavery found virtually universal acceptance among self-righteous religious, military, and civil officials of the Dutch East India Company using various reasons of state or pragmatic politics to defend the trade.

Markus Vink is an Assistant Professor of history at SUNY-Fredonia, Book Review Editor of Itinerario, Co-Editor of the World History Bulletin, and Secretary Treasurer of F.E.E.G.I. His publications include: "'The world oldest trade:' The Dutch Indian Ocean slave trade in the seventeenth century," Journal of World History 14:2 (2003): forthcoming; "Church and state in seventeenth-century colonial Asia: Dutch-Parava relations in Southeast India in a comparative perspective," Journal of Early Modern History 4:1 (2000), and (with G.D.Winius), The merchant-warrior pacified: The VOC (The Dutch East India Company) and its changing political economy in India (Delhi: 1991, reprinted by Oxford University Press as paperback in 1994).

South Asian Seafarers and Their Worlds, c. 1870s to 1930s
Gopalan Balachandran, Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva
Delhi School of Economics

The world of seafaring in the period covered by this paper was a harsh and unequal one thrice over: shipowners were tyrannical employers; ships were oppressive workplaces and officers oppressive bosses; lastly ships employed a vast underclass of low-paid colonial labour. Colonial seamen had not only to endure oppressive conditions at their workplace, they also had to suffer the indignity of being an underclass of 'coolies' denied the sympathy and support, let alone admission to their community, of workers. Indian seamen were especially vulnerable in this respect because the state and employers preferred means of regulating and controlling them, including through intermediaries and imposing various restrictions on their movements, engagements, and discharges, that affirmed their image as coolies standing in the penumbra of freedom.

This paper attempts to understand how Indian seamen attempted to make some sense of their experiences and of the exotic and the unfamiliar that they encountered, and develop collective and individual strategies of survival. Their very neglect by the state and their rather fraught relations with the British trade union movement paradoxically enabled Indian seamen to evade their disciplines practically until World War II. It also endowed them with a degree of autonomy that helped them negotiate and adapt in interesting ways the congeries of ideas, political and social beliefs, and modes of action that they encountered or accumulated in the various worlds which they inhabited or through which they passed.

Gopalan Balachandran has a Ph.D. in Economic History from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. He currently teaches economic history at the Delhi School of Economics and international history at the Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva. His publications include John Bullion's Empire: Britain's Gold Problem and India between the Wars (1996), The Reserve Bank of India, 1951-1961 (1998), and an edited volume, India and the World Economy (forthcoming, 2003). He has also published papers on maritime labour history and Indian social history. Other research interests include the history of the social sciences.

Pirates

Marking Water: Piracy and Property in the Pre-Modern West
Emily Sohmer Tai, Queensborough Community College

From antiquity, attempts to define, and thus, limit, the practice of maritime theft, or piracy, have contributed crucially to quests undertaken by political units, or polities, to assert claims of overriding authority, or sovereignty, over bodies of water, as over bodies of land. In this paper, I explore tensions between commercial and political imperatives arising from this project of "territorialization" in the Mediterranean basin between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. During this period, western Europeans articulated a legal distinction between unlicensed pirates and corsairs or admirals. The latter practiced selective maritime seizure with the sanction of nascent western European polities, interrupting commercial shipping subject to rival states. Selective maritime seizure effectively sought to territorialize maritime traffic, supporting the efforts of evolving polities to regulate commerce between allies and belligerents.

Records that document this practice suggest that much of what western Europeans called "piracy" occurred as the result of attempts to transgress these boundaries. Disputes over individual incidents of maritime theft can moreover be seen as struggles what might be termed political capital, generated by the assertion and negotiation of grievance. The closing portion of the paper refers to scholarship on world piracy, to indicate that precedents established in the adjudication of these disputes were sustained as western Europeans moved beyond the Mediterranean basin into East Asian waters after 1500.

Emily Sohmer Tai is an associate professor in the Department of History at Queensborough Community College of the City University of New York, 222-05 56th Avenue, Bayside, New York 11364. She earned her doctorate in western European medieval history from Harvard University in 1996. She has been the recipient of numerous grants to support archival research on the history of medieval Mediterranean piracy, and is currently working on a book, Honor Among Thieves: Merchants and Pirates in Medieval Europe, 1200-1500.

The Pirate and the Gallows: An Atlantic Theater of Terror and Resistance
Marcus Rediker, University of Pittsburgh

This essay concerns two kinds of terror that met and clashed in the frequent hangings of pirates in the early eighteenth century. One kind was practiced by ministers, royal officials, wealthy men - in short, rulers - as they sought to eliminate piracy as a crime against mercantile property. The other kind was practiced by common seamen who chose to sail beneath the Jolly Roger, which was designed to terrify the captains of merchant ships and persuade them to surrender their cargo. This dialectic of terror was summarized in raising of the Jolly Roger above the gallows when pirates were hanged: one terror trumps the other. By arguing that the origin of this dialectic lay in the violent social relations of the deep-sea sailing ship, the essay continues and amplifies a theme Peter Linebaugh and I developed in The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic: the making of the so-called "Atlantic world" in the early modern era depended profoundly on disciplinary violence and terror of many kinds, enacted from above, and often these were resisted in kind, from below. The Atlantic gallows drama thus concerned one of the fundamental issues of the age: not exchange, but rather the trans-oceanic terror that made exchange possible.

Marcus Rediker is Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh. He is author of Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750 (Cambridge University Press, 1987) and (with Peter Linebaugh), The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Beacon Press/Verso, 2000). He is currently working on "Villains of All Nation: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age, 1716-1726," to be published in 2004 by Beacon Press in the U.S., Verso in the U.K.

Japanese Pirates and Sea Tenure in the Seto Inland Sea of the Sixteenth Century: A Case Study of the Murakami Kaizoku
Peter David Shapinsky, University of Michigan

Pirates dominated the shipping lanes in Japan's Seto Inland Sea in the sixteenth century. With elite warrior status, they ruled over littoral communities and intercepted passing ships to charge protection-money. They also took advantage of the endemic decentralization to manipulate patronage networks as mercenaries, playing off various competing sides against the other. Negotiating the continuums of patronage and brigandage, the three Murakami pirate families--known by the islands upon which they based themselves, Innoshima, Kurushima and Noshima-created domains on the sea-lanes at the heart of the archipelago. Focusing on the history of three branches of the Murakami family of pirates, I will explore piratical sea tenure in three categories: administration of seaboard territories, management of maritime labor organizations, and operation of toll barriers and the closely related performance of protection-duty.

Piratical sea-tenure in medieval Japan had both a formal and an informal component. As local elite warriors, kaizoku incorporated less powerful pirate bands and fishing villages into their realm and administered them by dispatching agents, issuing law codes, levying taxes, and managing commercial interactions. Pirates administered shipping organizations, harbormasters, and other maritime labor, coming to control much of the shipping of the Inland Sea. The informal domain represented the extent of a pirate band's authority over the shipping lanes and the force of their reputation. Through operation of toll barriers, charging protection-money, and providing protection-duty both autonomously and for patrons, the range of activity and influence of pirate bands extended well beyond the formal domain.

Peter Shapinsky is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Michigan in Medieval Japanese History currently writing his dissertation on pirates (kaizoku) and the maritime systems of the Seto Inland Sea in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. His research interests include the maritime history of premodern Japan, especially the social history of pirates and other peoples of the sea, as well as Japanese premodern overseas relations with other maritime systems of East Asia and the rest of the world.

CULTURAL, ENVIRONMENTAL, AND SCIENTIFIC ISSUES

Keynote

Islands in the Making of an Atlantic Oceania, 1400-1800
John R. Gillis, Rutgers University

Modern historiography usually begins and ends at the shores of continents. As far as most historians are concerned, the sea is a timeless void and islands are at best peripheral to their enterprise. Yet in the period 1400-1800 islands played a leading role in the development of the Atlantic world. Building on experience with Mediterranean isles in the Middle Ages, Europeans used African and near Atlantic islands as the starting points for exploration and the development of planatation economies based on slavery. They initially envisioned the New World as vast archipelago of opportunities; and until the nineteenth century it was the coasts and islands rather than the continental interiors that proved the more valuable dimension of their seaborne empires. During the early modern period, the Atlantic can best be described as a sea of islands stretching from the outports of Newfoundland to the salt producing isles of the South Atlantic, from Goree Island to Barbardos, from Nantucket to the Azores, an Atlantic Oceania characterized by hybrid identities and cosmopolitan cultures.

For a time it seemed that the future belonged to oceans, coasts, and islands, but by the nineteenth century Atlantic Oceania was being displaced by continental based industrial and political revolutions that moved history onshore. Islands that had once been the center of economic development came to be seen as remote and insular, a view that continues to obscure their importance still today. Now, in a new era of globalization, when islands have regained a measure of importance, a historical reassessment seems in order.

John Gillis is a Professor at Rutgers University. He has written extensively on European social history, but is now turning his attention offshore. His paper is a part of a book entitled Islands of the Mind: The Shaping of the Atlantic World which will explore the ways the western world has thought about islands from the Greeks to the present and how islands have been vital to its economic, political, scientific, and social/cultural development.

Oceans and Other Geographical Constructions

The Maritime Logic of Vietnamese History? Hoi An's Trading World, c. 1550-1830
Charles Wheeler, University of California at Irvine

The maritime has received little or no attention from historians of Vietnam, surprising considering Vietnam's geography. In their discussion of Vietnam's geography, and its effect on history, historians tend to emphasize the isolating effect of Vietnam's [add adverb here to give a bit more character to mountains…like rugged, insurmountable, something like that] mountains. They allege that Vietnamese lack the kind of unifying element that a great river provides, and that Vietnamese economies, polities and societies somehow prevailed in maintaining unity across regions despite their geographical separation, and despite living in "the least coherent territory in the world," a characterization dating to colonial times. But what mountains divide, water unites. I argue that we can in fact detect that unifying element if we recognize the centrality of the maritime in Vietnamese history. We have missed this because our regional and nationalist frameworks erase its signs. Vietnamese typify a littoral society, and constitute a part of a greater maritime region defined by human movement over open sea, along coasts, through rivers and along roads that configure a South China Sea region. In this paper, I will outline the basic contours of Hoi An's trading system, and provide some illustrations of coastal inhabitants who were deeply invested in Hoi An's sea trade, in ways characteristic of a littoral culture. In conclusion, I will argue that their activities exemplify a maritime orientation common to all Vietnam's coastal inhabitants.

Charles Wheeler is an assistant professor of history at the University of California, Irvine. His current projects include a book about the influence of the maritime through trade on the development of a Vietnamese state and society in what is now central and southern Vietnam. His other projects also address pre-colonial or early modern themes, including the role of Buddhist monasteries in the maritime Chinese trade networks, and the reorientation of socio-political identities from Cham to Vietnamese in what is today central Vietnam.

Transformations of East Asian Politics in Maritime East Asia: A Comparison of the Ryukyu Kingdom, Taiwan, and Korea, 1600-2000
R. Bin Wong, University of California at Irvine

The Ryukyu Islands, Taiwan and Korea have had very distinctive political trajectories since 1600, but each of them has been part of an East Asian political system that moved from a tributary system centered on the agrarian empire to a regional network within a global system dominated by European and subsequently American political and economic power. This paper compares these political trajectories of change and seeks to identify the times and places when regionally specific and shared features shape political possibilities and when outside forces play more important roles. The first section examines these three areas between 1600 and 1850; in different ways each of them was politically oriented toward the agrarian empire as their economic connections to outsiders varied. The second section considers the century after 1850 when the growth and then cutting back of Japanese power reshaped the relations among political actors in maritime East Asia. The third section reviews the past fifty years to note the uncertainties of political futures in each case, uncertainties that rest upon factors that have long histories as well as other factors of the more recent past. The conclusion considers the ways in which state transformations in East Asia have resulted from interdependent dynamics within a regional political system that itself was reframed by the activities of outside actors.

R. Bin Wong teaches in the History and Economics departments at the University of California, Irvine where he is a Chancellor's Professor. He is author of China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Cornell University Press). Recent articles include "Entre monde et nation :Les régions Braudelienne en Asie" in Annales HSS, 56.1 and "The Search for European Differences and Domination in the Early Modern World:A View from Asia," American Historical Review, 107.2. His current research includes studies of Chinese political economy since 1650 and selected features of political and social change in China under and after empire. He has collaborative projects with an economist comparing Chinese and European patterns of economic change and with two sociologists on patterns of political transformation in China, Japan and the Ottoman empire.

Democratization, 1789-92 and 1989-92: Global Social Movements and Their Oceanic Connections
Patrick Manning, Northeastern University

The social movements of the late-eighteenth-century Atlantic and the late-twentieth-century globe, in their remarkable parallel, demonstrate the occasional coalescence of underlying social tensions into massive movements of contestation and change. From 1789 to 1792 the French monarchy was shaken and overthrown, the British almost abolished slave trade, Haitian slaves threw off their shackles, the American public insisted on a Bill of Rights, and movements invoking the rights of man shook Poland, Brazil, and elsewhere. From 1989 to 1992 Chinese students clamored for democratic rights, popular outbursts brought down regimes in South Africa and Eastern Europe, national conferences took place throughout Africa, and the Soviet Union collapsed.

The first stage of the analysis is to confirm the parallels of the two periods. The study traces the tight social and chronological connections among social movements in each of the two periods, with particular attention to the spread and evolution of the key terms of each, the "rights of man" and "democracy."

The second stage of the analysis considers the place of oceanic basins in linking these movements. For the late eighteenth century, shipping was the principal means of travel and communication, so the role of the oceans in making connections is rather evident, though attention to the role of maritime workers, for instance, brings additional insights. For the late twentieth century, most travel and communication were by air and electronic media, and shipping remained significant mainly for trade in bulky goods. The comparison requires one to be specific about the various types of oceanic links among localities, as some of these have changed more than others. While the influence of commercial shipping and naval power has declined, it is argued that each of the main bodies of water continues to structure social interactions around its edges.

Patrick Manning is Professor of History, African-American Studies, and Education at Northeastern University. At Northeastern University, Manning served for three years as acting chair of the Department of African-American Studies, and served a three-year term as College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor. He also led in the development of a major center in the study of world history. The Department of History now grants a doctorate in world history; it has granted six degrees and has fifteen Ph.D. candidates.

The World History Center, directed by Manning, has been in existence since 1994 and was granted formal recognition by the university as a Research and Curriculum Center in April of 1998. Total Center funding exceeds $1.9 million since 1995.

Major Publications include: Navigating World History: A Guide for Researchers and Teachers (forthcoming from Palgrave, 2003); Migration in Modern World History, 1500-2000, CD-ROM (Wadsworth, 2000); Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa 1880-1995, 2nd ed. (Cambridge U.P., 1998); Slave Trades, 1500-1800: Globalization of Forced Labour (Variorum, 1996); Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental and African Slave Trades (Cambridge University Press, 1990); Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa 1880-1985 (Cambridge University Press, 1988); Slavery, Colonialism and Economic Growth in Dahomey, 1640-1960 (Cambridge University Press, 1982).

Oceans and Identities

The Jews of Nineteenth Century Charleston: Ethnicity in a Port City
Gemma Louise Romain, University of Southampton

From the sixteenth century onwards Sephardic Jews migrated to various ports within Europe and the 'New World' because they were employed in among other things the mercantile trade. Jews were generally given more freedom in these ports, partly due to the perceived economic benefits they would bring. These Jews have been characterised by Lois Dubin and David Sorkin as 'Port Jews.' Within this paper I put forward the argument that the concept of ethnicity needs to be included in any assessment of the Port Jew.

This paper, which represents my work in progress, seeks to explore the ethnicity and identity of the 'Port Jews' of Charleston. Firstly I investigate the historiography pertinent to an exploration of Charlestonian Jews and show the way in which American Jewish historiography has previously represented aspects of their identity. I argue that features of the Jewish experience in Charleston have been ignored or explored uncritically due to the problematic place they have in the traditional depiction of modern Jewish history. I then analyse some of the ways in which Jews interacted with others in Charleston and explore the way in which Jews negotiated their identity within a region based on plantation slavery. I then argue that Charlestonian Jews generally considered themselves white and involved themselves in most aspects of Charleston life, including slavery. However, the ethnicity of the Jews in Charleston was multiple and the 'Port Jewish diaspora' was as significant a factor in Jewish constructions of ethnicity as feelings of local identity.

I am currently carrying out a two-year post-doctoral fellowship at the AHRB Parkes Centre for the Study of Jewish/ non-Jewish Relations, University of Southampton, UK. My work is contributing to a larger project entitled Port Jews: Jews and non-Jews in cosmopolitan maritime trading centres, 1650-1914. This project is run under the direction of Professor David Cesarani and in collaboration with Professor Milton Shain, University of Cape Town. My research explores the identity, history and memory of the 'Port Jews' of the Caribbean, Charleston and London from the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries.

Previous to this post I completed a Ph.D. in October 2001. My thesis was entitled Autobiographical Acts, Ethnic Memory and History of African-Caribbean and Jewish communities in Twentieth century Britain. This work is a comparative assessment of the historical memories of African-Caribbean and Jewish communities in Britain. The communities' memories are explored through the 'autobiographical act' - primarily autobiography but also oral history narrative and Internet sites.

Lascar Sailors and English Converts: The Imperial Port and Islam in late 19th Century England
Diane Liga Robinson-Dunn, University of Detroit

In this paper I examine how imperial spaces, characterized by a close association with the shipping industry and maritime world, such as dockyards, seaport towns, and areas inhabited by the migratory, laboring poor allowed a place for Islam in England, while simultaneously containing its influence in that country. I focus on two groups of Muslims, lascar sailors who arrived via East India Company ships and a community of English converts to Islam led by W.H. Quilliam, a native of Liverpool.

Muslim lascar sailors were able to represent themselves, their faith, and their place in English society through public ceremony, individual relationships, and the formation of new communities. However, like the unChristianized poor, they were considered part of an "alien nation" of "uncivilized heathens," who threatened the social structure and existed outside of it. W.H. Quilliam, an English sailor who converted to Islam, worked to present his faith as respectable and even elevating by associating it with the temperance movement. Despite his efforts to spread his beliefs in the smaller towns and countryside, he only succeeded in establishing a community of English converts in the imperial port city of Liverpool, where trade, immigration, and rapid growth helped to blur the distinction between the foreign and the familiar and fostered tolerance of Islam.

The paper that I am presenting for this conference is from my book in-progress The Harem, Slavery, and Anglo-Muslim Encounters in the British Empire, 1870-1900. It is based on my dissertation defended at SUNY Stony Brook in 2000. In addition to focusing on the book, I have been working on related articles, presenting at conferences, continuing my archival research abroad, and participating in the intellectual life at the University of Detroit where I am an assistant professor.

That Turbulent Soil: Seafarers, the "Black Atlantic," and the Shaping of Afro-Caribbean Identity
Alan Gregor Cobley, University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus

For much of their history, from the dawn of human settlement to recent times, the islands of the West Indian Archipelago have been peopled by the product of seaborne diasporas. Historically, the relationship between Caribbean people and the sea has been profound. The sea was a source of livelihood and of food, a route for commerce and communication, a bringer of danger and of opportunity. Politically, the Caribbean sea both unites and divides the people of the region, by turns tantalizing with the sense of shared space and frustrating with the reality of physical separation. Little wonder then that `that turbulent soil' is central to Caribbean culture, consciousness and identity.

Given the complex, multi-layered relationship between Caribbean peoples and the sea, it is not surprising that seafarers and seafaring have played a critical role in shaping modern Caribbean society. This paper will seek to explain, not only the importance of seafaring in Caribbean society, but also the role of Afro-Caribbean seafarers as harbingers of, and key agents in the emergence of the 'Black Atlantic' as a conceptual space from the eighteenth century onwards. It will argue that the place of the sea in Afro-Caribbean consciousness and sensibilities was critical to this role, symbolizing not only the journey into captivity but also the hope of freedom and of return to the motherland.

Cobley is a graduate of the Universities of Manchester and York, and completed his doctorate in South African history at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. He has worked at the University of the West Indies in Barbados since 1987, and served as Head of the History Department before being appointed Dean in 1998. He has published widely on aspects of South African and Caribbean history.

Material Culture: Technological, Cultural, and Biological Exhanges

Vessels of Exchange: The Global Shipwright in the Pacific
Hans Konrad van Tilburg, University of Hawai'i at Manoa

This paper is based on the presumption that the ship, the tool central to transoceanic exchange, can itself be interpreted as a complex cultural artifact, one which is traded, modified, renamed, accepted or rejected for a variety of reasons. These exchanges, though, are not always permanent.

Two case studies from the Pacific region provide examples of this type of analysis: the Chinese junks built in California, and the Japanese "sampans" built in Hawai`i. The Chinese junks built in California between the 1850's and the 1890's remained consistent to original designs. They were acquired by Americans during the period of Chinese exclusion and, the designs not being replicated, the junks disappeared from the maritime scene. Only now are researchers discovering the extent of the Chinese fishery on the West Coast.
Traditional vessels from Japan were brought to Hawai`i in 1899. Over time these vessels were modified, renamed, and finally requisitioned by the U.S. Navy, classified in the late 1930's as a potential threat to security at Pearl Harbor. Sampans ultimately found acceptance by the local maritime community as the informal state vessel, celebrated in movies and museums.

Vessels can change ownership and yet retain cultural features from the original society; or not, as the case may be. Ethnographic issues including the meaning and ownership of material culture, and the question of commensurability, address this type of exchange. For both junks and sampans, the question of identity as applied to the vessels themselves played an important role in the control maritime immigrants.

This short paper introduces two examples of a larger maritime theme and examines a few possible issues regarding vessel design and cultural exchange. Spanish galleons from the colonial Philippines, British opium "country" ships from India, Portuguese/Asian lorchas in China, steamships in Meiji Japan, modern catamarans in the Pacific, and kayaks almost everywhere in the world also present opportunities of transoceanic exchanges.

Hans Van Tilburg is a lecturer at the History Department of the University of Hawai`i at Manoa, as well as a maritime archaeologist. He has taught world history, maritime history, and graduate courses in maritime archaeology. He received his Ph.D. in history from the UH in 2002, his M.A. in maritime history and underwater archaeology from East Carolina University in 1995, and his B.A. in geography from the University of California Berkeley in 1985. He has published a number of articles in maritime journals and co-edited an academic reader in the field. For the past several years Van Tilburg has run a Maritime Archaeology and History graduate program and coordinated its annual symposium. He is currently working to complete a historical/material inventory of submerged naval properties in Hawaiian waters.

Patrons, Travelers, and Scientific World Voyages, 1750-1850
Harry Liebersohn, University of Illinois

Between the mid-eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth century, scientific travelers systematically mapped the earth and inventoried its contents. Building on a recent revival of interest in scientific travel, this paper focuses on the relationship between the travelers and their patrons.

The patrons included heads of state in Britain, France, Russia, and Austria as well as Jefferson in the United States. Powerful ministers in these countries were directly involved in planning these voyages; they collaborated with scientific entrepreneurs such as Linnaeus, Joseph Banks, Alexander von Humboldt, and Adam von Krusenstern. Ministerial motives were strategic: to dominate the race for control of global waterways after 1763, to control the fur trade from the 1780s, and, with renewed intensity after 1815, to colonize. Also appealing to statesmen was the prestige of scientific voyages.

In an age of revolution and Enlightenment, patronage was a powerful but contested institution, offensive to travelers' sense of intellectual autonomy. They were materially dependent on patrons for money, jobs and reputation. A crusty personality such as J.R. Forster could find himself abandoned with little recompense. His son George Forster felt the opposite pulls of radical republicanism and loyalty to his royal sponsor.

The patronage relationship was a family bond of parent and child which provoked resentment and the search for an alternative: friendship with Pacific islanders as a different kind of family connection with a resonance in revolutionary politics, the ideal of fraternité.

Harry Liebersohn teaches modern European history at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). His most recent monograph is Aristocratic Encounters: European Travelers and North American Indians (Cambridge University Press, 1998). His article, "Discovering Indigenous Nobility: Tocqueville, Chamisso, and Romantic Travel Writing" (American Historical Review, June 1994) was awarded the 1995 Koren Prize of the Society for French Historical Studies. Currently he is completing a book on scientific world travelers.

Traffick According to Their Own Caprice: Trade and Biological Exchange in the Making of the Pacific World, 1766-1825
Wade Graham, University of California at Los Angeles

Discovered by Europeans in the 16th century, it was not until 1760s that Europe took an active interest in the Pacific Ocean. Building the Pacific World was different from previous New Worlds, with fewer colonizations and plantations and more reliance on trade. Britain foremost planned and encouraged biological traffic as part of its mercantile strategies, gathering seeds and stock for transplantation within the empire and seeding the islands with European organisms. Pacific peoples, especially the Polynesians, history's greatest seaborne colonizers, expert managers of a "portmanteau biota," understood and engaged this traffic on their own terms. Hawaii quickly became the hub of a huge wheel of trade linking the vast Pacific and the rest of the world. Flows of organisms and trade threaded them all together, at once furthering the imperial designs of Europeans and, because of their control of resources, strengthening the power of native elites to resist them. The full panoply and energy of Pacific trade in the period was in great part the result of unregulated competition keeping the monopolist powers sidelined. The Pacific world in this period provides an example of the "borderland" or "middle ground" condition characterized by multiple-sided rivalries between national claimants that allowed natives significant agency and produced extreme fluidity of alliances and trade relations between groups. This first Pacific world gave way after the 1840s, in large part due to the destabilizing assault of species introductions and diseases, to be replaced by a more aggressive imperialism.

Wade Graham is a Ph.D. candidate in U.S. history at UCLA. He has written on environment and urbanism for Harper's, The New Yorker, Outside, the Los Angeles Times Magazine and other publications. He is a Trustee of Glen Canyon Institute and is editor of the Institute's journal, Hidden Passage.