“Colonial Landscapes and Seascapes: the center of Pacific World history”
Brown Bag Lecture
Speaker: Gregory T. Cushman, Associate Professor of International Environmental History, University of Kansas
Moderated by: Paul Kreitman, Assistant Professor of Japanese History, Columbia University
Speaker Bio: Gregory T. Cushman teaches courses on Latin America, science and technology studies, and the global environment, often in close collaboration with other faculty in the environmental sciences and humanities. His first book Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World: A Global Ecological History (Cambridge University Press, 2013) received the Turku Book Prize from the European Society of Environmental History and the RCC, the inaugural Jerry Bentley Prize in World History from the American Historical Association, and awards from the Agricultural History Society and the Southern Historical Association. He has published a number of articles on climate history and the history of climate science, and several of his students were core participants in an NSF-funded IGERT program on the human dimensions of climate change. The environmental engagement of indigenous peoples in the Andean and Pacific worlds is another important focus of his work, particularly their interaction with the El Niño phenomenon.
Summary: With a whole library of books written on the subject, the Atlantic World concept works best for understanding early modern entanglements between Europe, Africa, and the Americas, with African and indigenous slavery at the center of Atlantic World history. This presentation will argue that human entanglements with Pacific environments occupy the emerging center of the Pacific World as a historical concept.
This story of environmental colonization begins with the rising seas of the early Holocene, which drowned Sahul, Beringia, and a host of other land bridges, turning the Pacific Ocean into a veritable sea of islands. The seaborne voyagers who branched out from Taiwan to settle these shores created colonial landscapes of their own, initiating a still-ongoing avian holocaust. European-derived colonizers introduced transoceanic landscapes of extraction, starting with the silver, slave, and luxury trades supported by the Manila galleon trade between Mexico, the Philippines and China. These were succeeded by the great hunt for whales, fur- and feather-bearing marine animals, guano and phosphate, sea cucumbers and sandalwood, and a series of gold rushes, when the Pacific Basin became a vast resource frontier for the Canton trade and USA. This phase has its echoes in the industrial fisheries of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From Japan, Taiwan, Hawaii, and California in the North to Australia, Rapa Nui, and Chile in the South, these hunting landscapes and seascapes quickly gave way to pastures and plantations dedicated to supplying foodstuffs and fats to consumers living far from Pacific shores. Ports and forts sprang up all over the region to harbor and protect these practices, followed by roving Japanese and American naval fleets and nuclear bombs stored in Okinawa and tested on Micronesia. Surfers and sunbathers from as far afield as Tokyo, Toronto and Trondheim have now replaced the beachcombers of old on many of these shores, but it is increasingly certain that they and the region’s coral reefs will soon be replaced by the ocean itself, thanks to rising temperatures and ocean acidification caused by industrial activities—the ultimate example of a colonial history.