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.

This volume seeks to capture the rich array of images that define Japan's encounters with the Pacific Ocean. Contemporary Japanese most readily associate 'Pacific' with the devastating war that their country fought over a half century ago. The ensuing occupation realized a situation that this people had striven to avoid ever since the Portuguese first arrived in 1543 - their subjugation by a foreign power. But the Pacific Ocean also extended Japan's overseas contacts. From antiquity Japanese and their neighbours crossed it to trade ideas and products. From the mid-16th century it carried people from more distant lands, Europe and America, and thus expanded and diversified Japan's cultural and economic exchange networks. From the late 19th century it provided the highway to transport Japanese imperial expansion in Northeast Asia and later to encourage overseas migration into the Pacific and the Americas. The studies selected for inclusion in this volume, along with the introduction, explain how the Pacific Ocean thus nurtured images of both threat and opportunity to the island nation that it surrounds.

Textiles in the Pacific, 1500-1900 brings together 13 articles which include both classics and lesser-known but important works related to the trade and production of textiles in the Pacific region, extending from the tip of Northeast Asia to the other end of South America and Australia. Collectively these articles bring out two central themes, as highlighted in the introduction. First, there is the leading role of textiles in linking up the economies across the Pacific in the era before the 19th-century rise of steam-engine-powered global integration. Second is the crucial role of textile manufacturing and trade in the early stage of industrialization for most of the developing Pacific economies after the 19th century. The volume also reflects both revolutionary shifts in paradigms and revisions of traditional consensus, and seeks to present a more balanced account of global trade and market integration in the early modern period.

The essays selected for this volume show how the Pacific rapidly became part of an industrializing world. Its raw materials (notably rubber and copper) were critical, some of its handicraft industries were devastated by mechanized competition, others survived and adapted, contributing to distinctive patterns of industrialization that made Japan a new center of power, and also laid the groundwork for later growth in Taiwan, Korea, and coastal China. The Pacific coast of the Americas was also first drawn into an industrial world largely as an exporter of raw materials, but North and South diverged rapidly, portending futures even more different than those of Northeast and Southeast Asia. By the 1930s - when the uneven effects of industrialization would have much to do with plunging the Pacific into war - one can already glimpse in outline the structural bases for many of the region's contemporary characteristics. All this is set in context in the important introduction by Kenneth Pomeranz.

This volume takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of religious cultural exchanges around the Pacific in the period 1500-1900, relating these to economic and political developments and to the expansion of communication across the area. It brings together twenty-two pieces, from diaries of religious exiles and missionary field observations, to studies from a variety of academic disciplines, so enabling a multitude of voices to be heard. The articles are grouped in sections dealing with the Islamic period, the Iberian Catholic period, the Jewish diaspora, the Russian Orthodox church, the epoch of Protestant culture and finally Asian immigrant religions in the West; a substantial introduction contextualizes these chapters in terms of both historical and contemporary approaches.

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.