The ’Pacific Rim’ and the ’Pacific Century’ are now commonplace terms, but the whole Pacific region has recently been opened up as a field of historical inquiry. The aim of this series is to present the historical developments and processes involved in the multi-century ’opening of the Pacific’ and the linking together of the lands around and within this great ocean. Particular attention is paid to interactions among indigenous peoples on and within the rim, and the incoming peoples and powers of Asia, Europe, and America. Each volume reprints a set of key studies focusing on a defined topic, together with a new introduction and index, and is edited by an expert in the given subject. This series complements the successful Variorum series An Expanding World, and at the same time provides a research-based resource for this important area of historical study.
Edited
By Kenneth Pomeranz
July 15, 2009
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 ...
Edited
By Lionel Frost
March 24, 2005
Between 1500 and 1900 there was a constant growth in the numbers of large cities and networks of smaller towns throughout the Pacific world in which traders and primary producers did business. The essays in Urbanization and the Pacific World explore the increasingly complex economic relationships ...
By John E. Wills, Jr.
December 23, 2002
Among the great entrepots around the Pacific there were some which had such great advantages of location that for many centuries there always was a trade center somewhere in the vicinity. Others rose to prominence for a time when the political and economic conditions were right, but then were ...
By Fred Spier, Paul W. Blank
November 28, 2002
This volume lays the physical and conceptual groundwork for the Pacific World series, exploring both the constraints imposed and the opportunities offered to humanity by the physical environment of the Pacific region. Organized from the perspectives of "Big History" and macro-geography, the volume ...
Edited
By Juan F. Gamella
April 18, 2002
From the arrival of Europeans in the Pacific in the 16th century, introduced psychoactive drugs have played a crucial role in the history of societies from China to Peru, and from Alaska to Australia. Tobacco, followed by opium, distilled alcohol, caffeinated drinks, as well as laboratory drugs ...