10 HISTORY

TLS DECEMBER 6 2013

poised to reclaim his inheritance on the farshore of the Red Sea.

This time religion was the pretext. The Ak-sumite kings had converted to Christianityduring the fourth century. Around the sametime, in one of history’s more unexpected con-versions, the Himyarites of south-west Arabiaadopted Judaism as their official state religion.In 523, the Jewish King of Himyar, a certainYusuf, launched a series of pogroms againstthe Christian communities of south Arabia.These persecutions sent shockwaves acrossChristendom: the Byzantine Emperor, Justin I,begged Kaleb “to go forth, by land or sea,against the abominable and criminal Jew”.

As Bowersock shows, the two Adulisinscriptions, with their stirring narratives oflong-distant African conquests across the sea,gave Kaleb all the precedents that he neededfor his crusade against the Himyarites. It iseven possible that Kaleb made a still more po-tent claim to the kingship of south-west Ara-bia. The Aksumite Christians saw themselvesas the distant descendants of Solomon and theQueen of Sheba. The biblical kingdom of She-ba was located in southern Arabia, and so Ka-leb may well have seen his war against Himyaras a reconquest of the traditional Ethiopianhomeland.

The Aksumite invasion of Himyar was a tri-umph. In the summer of 525, 120,000 men as-sembled at Adulis for a huge seaborne invasionof Arabia. Yusuf was killed, and a ChristianAksumite client king installed in his place. Noless important, Kaleb’s crusade led to a short-lived alliance between the two Christian em-pires of the East, Orthodox Byzantium andMonophysite Aksum. Yusuf had enjoyed theprotection of the other great imperial power ofthe late antique Near East, the Sasanian Per-sians of western Iran. The new Byzantine em-peror, Justinian I (527–565), hence had goodreason to be thrilled at the prospect of a friendlyAksumite client state in south Arabia. For afleeting moment, a united crescent of Christianallies stretched from Armenia in the north toYemen and Ethiopia in the south.

The story is a gripping one, and Bowersockhas brilliantly illuminated the clash of twomonotheisms in south Arabia in the early sixthcentury. Yet despite his heroic efforts, the lastpiece in this jigsaw remains missing. The Ethi-opians were finally expelled from the Arabianpeninsula by the Sasanian Persians in around570. At this point, all our sources fail us, andfor a crucial half century the deserts of westernArabia are engulfed in darkness. Uncharacter-istically, Bowersock resorts to metaphor tobridge the gap:

The dissolution of the nexus that bound Ethiopiato Arabia created a volatile situation, for whicha reckoning of some kind was bound to follow. . . Without strong kings in Ethiopia and Himyarthe international arena was left to the strugglebetween Byzantium and Persia. Yet in the verymidst of this arena the embers of the old confla-gration between Jews and Christians, which hadbeen ignited by the Jews in Arabia and fannedby the Ethiopians who attacked them, were stillburning. Out of these embers a new religion wasborn.The very vagueness of the language (“em-

bers of the old conflagration”) reminds usquite how little we still know about those yearswhen, amid a great stillness, the forty-year-oldMuhammad knelt in a cave on the Mountain ofLight, and heard a voice as clear as the ringingof a bell.

Eyes burned outThe Pacific has long been the hole at the

heart of world history. For two centu-ries, global historians from the First

World have hardly known what to make of the“fifth part of the world”. There’s just “so muchocean, too many islands”, the late Australianhistorian Greg Dening lamented ironically:over 25,000 islands in an ocean covering morethan a third of the Earth’s surface and spanningfrom the Arctic to the Antarctic and fromSoutheast Asia to Central America. In the agesof paddle and sail, steam and propeller, everytraveller could feel the connections betweenland and sea, the continents and the islands.The jet age seemingly rendered the Pacific Ba-sin a kind of intellectual flyover territory – “theearth’s empty quarter” – for outsiders to Ocea-nia and Australasia. The upshot, as the i-Kiri-bati scholar Teresa Teaiwa noted in 2002, wasthat “the dialogue between studies of humani-ty and studies of the Pacific” broke down. Onlylately has the conversation resumed amonghistorians. It now includes fish, mammals andbirds. It takes place amid metaphorical moun-tains of fur, blubber and faeces. And it has les-sons, even warnings, for the rest of the world.

The Pacific is at once a latecomer and a for-gotten ancestor amid a host of newly emergentoceanic histories. Ever since Fernand Braudelconceived of the Mediterranean and its shoresas a “world” in La Méditerranée et le mondeméditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II(1949), his successors have sought new worldsin other maritime arenas, large and small.There are now histories of the Baltic world andthe Caribbean world, the “Red Sea world” andthe “Black Sea world”, inspired by studies ofthe Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean and espe-cially of the Atlantic. Atlantic history has beenthe most entrepreneurial of these fields. Itsspectacular rise in the past generation exposeda certain resistance by historians of the Pacificto the geographical holism and somewhatwhiggish narratives – from “discovery” viaexploitation and enslavement to emancipationand independence – that characterized histo-ries of the world’s second largest ocean. Only

recently have pan-Pacific histories, coveringthe entire basin and all its peoples, begun toappear.

Historians in the Pacific have been writingtheir own accounts of the peoples of Polynesia,Melanesia and Micronesia for over fifty years.Much of that work anticipated other oceanichistories in focusing on links between sea andland, in treating indigenous and settler peopleswithin the same frame, and in upsetting con-ventional notions of temporality and territori-ality. The work of Islander historians rarelyintersected with that of students of the Asia-Pacific (a field driven by economic history inthe wake of the Japanese miracle of the 1980s)or those who studied the American West as thePacific-facing aspect of US history. All threegroups called themselves Pacific historians,but they imagined different populations withindistinct boundaries. Intellectual divisions oflabour worked against Pacific histories writtenfrom an albatross’s (let alone a whale’s) eye-view. The Pacific remained mostly invisible tooutsiders, just as it was incomprehensiblefrom maps centred along the Greenwich Me-ridian rather than the International Date Line.

David Igler’s The Great Ocean and GregoryT. Cushman’s Guano and the Opening of thePacific World are some of the first waves of agathering tsunami of scholarship on the Pacif-

ic world. “Whole libraries have been writtenabout the Atlantic World,” Cushman notes,“but readers will be hard pressed to find a sin-gle historical monograph with ‘Pacific World’in its title.” Igler argues similarly that “theocean world concept appears ripe for the Pa-cific, particularly because of its increasing in-terconnectedness with the Atlantic and IndianOceans”. They each describe processes devel-oping along the eastern continental edge of thePacific, stretching outwards into Oceania andunfolding over the longue durée. The GreatOcean runs from Alaska and Hawaii to Peruand concludes at a highpoint of integration inthe mid-nineteenth century, when Ishmael inMoby-Dick (1851) hymned “the mysterious,divine Pacific” as “the tide-beating heart ofearth”. Guano and the Opening of the PacificWorld carries the story forward from thisMelvillean moment to the near-present, andsouthward to Peru and Chile. Neither bookencompasses the entire Pacific basin, but bothdemonstrate the centrality of the Pacific notjust to the world, but also to world history.

In The Birth of the Modern World,1780–1914 (2004), C. A. Bayly described thelong nineteenth century as an age of increasinguniformity between nations and deepening di-versity within them. Even Bayly’s globe-spanning tour de force spared little space forthe Pacific, but Igler and Cushman confirm thestrength of his thesis. Igler shows how greatercommercial integration in the eastern Pacificshattered indigenous communities. Likewise,Cushman argues that the exploitation of guanobound the Pacific more tightly into transoce-anic, and ultimately global, circuits of labour,resource extraction and capitalist enterprise.These links brought political instability andnatural disaster to Peru, the Gilbert Islands,Nauru and other points around the Pacific. Thedamage to their local economies and ecologieswill last long into the future. Seen from the Pa-cific, then, the birth of the modern world ap-pears particularly violent and disruptive, thevery inverse of the myths of island innocencepeddled by Europeans in the mid eighteenth

DAVID ARMITAGE

D a v i d I g l e r

T H E G R E A T O C E A NPacific worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold

Rush255pp. Oxford University Press. £18.99

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A global ecological history392pp. Cambridge University Press. £60 (US $99).

978 1 107 00413 9

HISTORY 11

TLS DECEMBER 6 2013

century before “modernity” had been usheredin.

The Great Ocean calculates the high priceof proto-globalization in the Pacific. Eachchapter begins with a well-turned vignettefrom a Pacific voyage and then treats a majortheme: commerce, disease and sex, captivity,the hunting of animals, the exploits of natural-ists, and the quest for the geological unity ofthe Pacific. Igler’s topical approach can makethe chronology of Pacific history hard to fol-low, but the pivotal periods are tolerably clear:the 1780s, the years after 1812, and the 1840s.The first two sprang from events in the Atlan-tic world. American independence freedformer British colonists from the East IndiaCompany’s monopoly and opened Canton, thegateway to China, to American merchants forthe first time. Three decades later, Napoleon’sinvasion of Spain triggered an Atlantic crisisin the Spanish Empire that opened new ports toall comers on the coast of South America.

Spanish galleons had carried Mexican silverfrom Acapulco to Manila to feed the Chinesemarket since the 1570s, and they limped on un-til after independence. The explosion of freetrade further fuelled the great Chinese enginefor Pacific luxuries like sea-slugs, sandalwoodand the “soft gold” of sea-otter skins. Russiantraders joined Britons and Americans in scout-ing for furs from Okhotsk to Baja California;the Northwest coast of North America rapidlybecame “a resource-rich suburb of Boston”(and Salem); and Hawaii developed into a“Great Exchange” for trans-oceanic com-merce. The stage was set for the migratory ex-plosion that erupted on news of the gold strikeat Sutter’s Mill, California, in 1848. Theslightly later gold rushes in New South Walesand Victoria lie beyond Igler’s chronology,just as Australia – an appendix to Asia for mostof his timespan – is not within his geography.

Prolonged contact between indigenes andincomers brought sickness, death, captivityand abuse to the human inhabitants, and all thatplus extinction to many animal populations.Pacific peoples fell victim to all the world’smicrobes: “I am shippy” (Kua paî au), ailingCook Islanders complained, knowing full wellwhere their illnesses originated. Alien peoplesof the ship took prisoners to acquire knowl-edge, make political bargains, or simply satis-fy sexual desire: unequal encounters causedestrangement, conflict and the scars that camefrom sexually transmitted diseases, smallpoxand other invasive pathogens.

These human horrors occurred against thebackdrop of the increasingly frantic “GreatHunt” for marine mammals, including sea ot-ters, fur seals and great whales, all slaughteredin droves to satisfy Chinese merchants, Mas-sachusetts mill-owners and other consumersaround the globe. “It seems to me that our paththrough the Pacific is to be marked in blood”,wrote a shaken midshipman on the US Explor-ing Expedition of 1838–42, and blood stainsmuch of The Great Ocean. When Melville’smasterpiece appeared, Igler writes, “theocean’s people, markets, and natural resourceswere thoroughly entwined with the surround-ing world” – for good but also, in the experi-ence of many Pacific populations, for ill.

The Great Ocean pictures the mid nine-teenth-century Pacific as both a graveyard anda seedbed. Peak oil – the exhaustion of sperm-oil – had almost been reached, much asalarmed naturalists had observed the declineand destruction of fur-bearing mammal popu-

lations – peak fur? – in preceding decades.Those same naturalists and their successorsalso looked to the future of the geophysicalsciences in the Pacific. More than a dozenscientific expeditions between 1816 and 1830laid tracks in the ocean that The Beagle and theUS Exploring Expedition followed. Amongthe “scientifics” aboard the American expedi-tion was James Dwight Dana, who first piecedtogether Pacific geology and demonstrated its“evident connexion with a system that per-vades the whole world”. Dana anticipated themuch later hot-spot theory for the formation ofthe Hawaiian chain but, as Igler also shows, inthis regard Western cosmology was onlycatching up with the origin stories native Ha-waiians had told for generations. For Dana, theadvance was short-lived: his all-embracing vi-sion of the volcanic Ring of Fire, circling thePacific basin and driving its seismic activity,quickly collided with the imperatives of Mani-fest Destiny. By the time he had written up hisextensive investigations in the 1840s, Ameri-can sovereignty covered the continent fromsea to shining sea and a “vast stretch of theeastern Pacific coastline” was gradually de-globalizing to become “the American FarWest”.

At around the same time that a largechunk of the eastern Pacific was turn-ing into the western United States, the

Peruvian guano trade was taking off in the1840s. This is the flashpoint for Guano and theOpening of the Pacific World, which aims toprove that “marine bird excrement is at theroot of modern existence and fundamental tothe incorporation of the Pacific Ocean intoglobal history”. By turns illuminating and ob-sessive, Cushman’s book traces every threadin the modern history of nitrates and phos-phates from their origins in Peru, Chile and thePacific islands outwards to Australasia, Brit-ain and beyond. His work is more sprawlingand less elegant than Igler’s, but it covers con-siderably more ground, even at some cost tocoherence. Cushman follows his leads wher-ever they take him. This Shandean strategygenerates hosts of incidental insights – for ex-ample, into the impact of El Niño oscillationson the First World War, the discovery of an aq-uacultural “Blue Revolution” alongside thepost-war agricultural Green Revolution, or thenomination of the Law of the Sea Convention(1982) as the largest ever global redistributionof property rights – but guano can disappearfor pages, nearly whole chapters, at a stretch.All scepticism, even sniggering, aside, Cush-man does make his case for the place of birddroppings in the making of the modern world.His book can stand alongside that other curi-ous classic about a world-historical productwith a Quechua name, Redcliffe Salaman’sThe History and Social Influence of the Potato(1949).

Guano birds have been producing their ni-trogen-abundant waste for 11 million years,but only in the nineteenth century did harvest-ing it become an industrial process. Cushmancalls the decades between the first chemicalanalysis of guano and the first appearance ofartificial fertilizers “the world’s guano age”(1802–84). More bluntly, this was “the age ofshit” when Peru dominated the world marketfor phosphates and suffered disastrous effectson its political and ecological stability. By themid-1850s, more than 60 per cent of Peru’sstate revenues came from exports of guano –

enough to bankroll the abolition of slavery andof the poll tax levied on indigenous peoples.Twenty years later, “peak guano” had beenreached, and the global fight for fertilizer – inthis case, the nitrates of the Atacama Desert –ignited the War of the Pacific (1879–84) be-tween Peru and Bolivia on one side, and Chileon the other. This was the century’s secondmost destructive war per capita, after the Taip-ing Rebellion and ahead of the American CivilWar. It was also an early foretaste of the con-flicts over natural resources to come in thetwentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The fortunes of Peruvian guano fluctuatedwildly for the next century, often in sync withthe rhythms of El Niño events that periodicallywiped out stocks of anchoveta, the mainsource of food for guano birds on Peru’s coast-al islands. (Cushman follows Mike Davis,Richard Grove and other historians in makingexcellent use of El Niño–Southern Oscillationrecords to reveal climatological coincidenceswith modern famines, revolutions and otherupheavals.) To manage the vulnerable birdpopulation, the Compañia Administradora delGuano (CAG), “the greatest of all industriesbased upon the conservation of wild animalsthe world has ever seen”, was founded in 1909.Cushman traces the roots of contemporaryconservation to this event, implicitly rejectingrecent claims for other sites around the world– Mauritius, the Scottish Highlands or Thirl-mere near Manchester, for instance – as thematrix of modern conservation. That theCAG’s management was a disaster is part ofhis point. By 2000, after 2,500 years of har-vesting, Peru produced no more guano. It nowimported all its fertilizer, after a failed effort tocreate export-led fisheries caused more dam-age than El Niño ever could. Peru’s “world-fa-mous guano industry died in full public view”;even Prince Philip called for emergency actionto help the beleaguered birds.

What makes Guano and the Opening of thePacific World a particularly Pacific history isthe ocean-wide scramble for guano islands,the local labour to exploit them and the mar-kets for their fertilizer, notably the farms ofAustralia and New Zealand. The European im-perial land-grab of the late nineteenth centuryis well known; less familiar is the mid-centuryisland-grab by the Pacific Great Powers, thekingdom of Hawaii, Japan, Mexico, Ecuador,Chile and Australia. Most aggressive of allwas the US, which used the 1856 Guano Is-lands Act to extend American property,though rarely American sovereignty, acrossthe Pacific and occasionally in the Caribbeanand the Gulf of Mexico. (There should be astudy of all these anomalous spaces in theAmerican empire, from guano to Guantána-mo.) The Act also helped acquire stopping-points for Pan Am’s trans-Pacific route as lateas 1936. Britain’s parallel quest for phos-phates continued until a year later, whenMcKean Island, an uninhabited frigate-birdcolony now part of Kiribati, became the verylast territory claimed for the British Empire inOctober 1937.

The ancient guano deposits on the islands ofOceania lay much deeper than those off thePeruvian coast; the back-breaking, lung-choking work of extraction fell mostly toPacific Islanders and Chinese migrants.Cushman’s most painful pages relate thehorrors on Banaba and Nauru, islandsthoroughly stripped of their resources bylabourers whose leading cause of death was

dysentery. Workers on the Lever Brothers’island copra plantations, source of the coconutoil in Lifebuoy soap, suffered the same rackingillnesses as those in the British PhosphateCompany’s guano diggings. Cushman pullsno punches about their fate: “tens of thousandsshit their lives away” so that whites could staywhite and their fields become fertile.

“Where is fresh land to turn up? where is thedressing to improve that which is already incultivation?” Thomas Malthus had asked in1798. Peru and Oceania were not his answers,but his heirs in the mid twentieth century werewell aware of the links among phosphates, soiland population in the Pacific world. Theseconservationists join capitalists and empire-builders in Cushman’s black book of guano.Primal figures in the history of modern Ameri-can environmentalism – the ecologist AldoLeopold, the ornithologist William Vogt andthe biologist-bureaucrat Fairfield Osborn –appear here as well-intentioned but maladroitmanipulators of markets and ecosystems inLatin America. They promoted an “oceanicpath to development” through fisheries andaquaculture, but as Peru became the world’slargest producer of fish in the 1960s, domesticconsumption fell: “an astounding case of eco-logical injustice for the nation’s poor”. Guanobirds starved as trawlers scooped up their foodsupply to feed foreign consumers. This was notragedy of the commons, Cushman insists,caused by over-exploitation of an unmanagedresource. Instead, it was a technocratic tragedycreated by credentialled experts attempting toyoke conservation to profit in their “ecologicallaboratory”.

In 1944, one of those technocrats, FairfieldOsborn, had edited the first, and for decadesthe only, book entitled The Pacific World .Thiswas a handbook for US servicemen in the Pa-cific theatre, covering the history, flora, faunaand human inhabitants of Oceania and thelands of the Pacific Rim, compiled because“we Americans need to know more of the Pa-cific”. This “Pacific world” was shot throughwith racism, romanticism and neo-imperialoptimism (“all of our epic movements havebeen westward”). The destructiveness of thewar in the Pacific soon inclined Osborntowards the much bleaker view informingthe neo-Malthusian works for which he isbest known, Our Plundered Planet (1948)and The Crowded Earth (1953). The later riseof nuclear testing – another dire developmentfor local sea birds, who died on Kiribati “withtheir eyes burned out of their pointed heads” –only confirmed this pessimism about thePacific and its future.

The Great Ocean and Guano and the Open-ing of the Pacific World build on generationsof scholarship by historians in, and of, thePacific. By drawing on ethnohistory, environ-mental history and the history of science, theymake great strides towards bringing the Amer-icas into Pacific history and broadening worldhistory to incorporate the Pacific. One-third ofthe world can no longer play second fiddleto histories centred on the Atlantic. Yet theirachievement is almost as much allegorical asit is historical. When read in tandem, thesestriking books tell a grim story of unbridledhubris, confident consumption, environmen-tal degradation and the collapse of vulnerablepopulations. Seen in this cold light, thepast two centuries of Pacific history standproxy for humanity’s global impact in theAnthropocene.