Download `ISLANDS AND BEACHES`: THE PACIFIC AND INDIAN OCEANS IN

‘ISLANDS AND BEACHES’: THE PACIFIC AND INDIAN OCEANS IN THE LONG
NINETEENTH CENTURY
Convenor: Dr. Sujit Sivasundaram, Gonville and Caius College, [email protected]
Sailing Chart of the Marshall Islands, donated to the Royal Colonial Institute, 1875, now in the Royal Commonwealth Society Collection
at Cambridge University Library.
‘Oceania is vast. Oceania is expanding. Oceania is hospitable and generous. Oceania is humanity rising
from the depths of brine and regions of fire deeper still. Oceania is us. We are the sea, we are the oceans,
we must wake up to this ancient truth and together use it to overturn all hegemonic views that aim
ultimately to confine us again, physically and psychologically, in the tiny spaces which we have resisted
accepting as our sole appointed place, and from which we have recently liberated ourselves. We must not
allow anyone to belittle us again, and take away our freedom.’
From ‘Our Sea of Islands’ in Contemporary Pacific, 1994, by Epeli Hau’ofa (1939-2009), Tongan writer and
anthropologist.
Islands were critical in birthing our modern world, and yet they have often been
forgotten in our accounts of world history. Because of their rigid boundaries and small
territories, islands were subject to intensive processes of cultural encounter, political
annexation and settlement, making them particularly revealing and tragic places to
observe the impact of colonialism and globalisation. This paper returns to the history of
the Pacific and Indian Oceans in the long nineteenth century, by viewing these large
expanses of water as constellations of islands. In these seas, islands served amongst
other things as garrison states, laboratories of science, sites for the exclusion of the
diseased and penal colonies. They were violent spaces: connected to regimes of labour
servitude and with narratives of depopulation and extinction.
The teaching for this paper starts with the age of exploration at the end of the
eighteenth century, which was characterised by an obsession with island cultures and
peoples, because of prevalent notions of romanticism, noble savagery, utopianism and
scientific inquiry. It picks up on the impact of the global age of revolutions on these
islands and seas, where islands were staging points for discourses of rights and
freedom, and republican protest as much as imperial rivalry. At the mid-point of its
chronology, the paper will construct a connected history of anti-colonial rebellions at
the mid nineteenth-century between far flung islands. Along the way, students will
study the impact of the law, war, religion, and trade in zoning these oceans and defining
island spaces. They will also turn to literary accounts and consider why islands were
peculiarly interesting to novelists and artists. The paper will study how islands were
important as environmental laboratories and for the origins of ideas of nature
consciousness. The narrative of labour, indenture and slavery is critical here, as new
systems of plantation labour emerged in these spaces after the abolition of Atlantic
slavery. From the perspective of a maritime and technological history, islands were
critical nodes in a world of increasing globalisation; these were the points of access to
landmasses, via ships and telegraphs, which allowed global forces to do their work,
while erasing the islands’ place in the map as the century proceeded. The paper will end
with the years before the first World War, when new notions of cosmopolitan
nationalism, heritage and attachment emerged on these islands. This marked the
demise of the age of the island colony, as Europeans took over the interior of continents,
for instance in the Scramble, and as geo-political power was theorised as linked to land
routes, rather than sea-lanes. The analytical arc of the paper therefore marks the rise
and fall of islands as colonies in world history.
Why look at islands to study world history? In historiographical terms, world history is
now awash with a rich literature on oceanic histories which maps connections across
water and traces transnational and transregional relations. At the same time, world
history is characterised by a highly distinguished tradition of work in area studies,
evident in other offerings in the Specified Papers at the Faculty in Indian history, Middle
Eastern history, African history and Latin American history. The current paper is an
attempt to find a middle plane of analysis, between the globe and the region. It takes the
importance of locality firmly into view whilst avoiding the grand generalisations that
sometimes characterise world history. It also begins with a commitment to the fact that
tiny places have had significant impacts on the broader contours of world history. For
students, it provides an innovative method of understanding how extra-European
peoples were caught in the middle of global forces, whilst making them their own.
Focusing on islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans also offers a way of thinking in
comparative terms about empires. Yet it is important to underscore that the island
histories considered here will open up broader themes, rather than allowing students
‘to island’ their own knowledge. In other words and in summary, this is an attempt to
see the world in an island, to see seas as islands, and to see islands as worlds in worlds.
The teaching of this paper will be structured into two parts. In Part A, which will involve
a course of 10 core lectures, students will be introduced to themes in nineteenthcentury oceanic history which touch on islands. In Part B students will attend 10 1.5
hour Faculty classes devoted to particular islands, and some of these classes will be held
alongside primary materials in the Archaeology and Anthropology Museum (on Fiji), in
the Royal Commonwealth Society Collections (on Sri Lanka) and the Darwin
Correspondence Project (on Tierra del Fuego). The examination paper will have c. 24
questions which take on board broader themes as well as individual case studies. A
model exam is attached at the end of this reading list. Supervisions for this paper will be
arranged by Sujit Sivasundaram. Students will be advised to divide up their supervision
topics across Part A and Part B, ensuring coverage and an integrated understanding of
the whole paper.
There will be a total of five or six supervisions for this Paper, and students will be asked
to choose their supervision topics in advance, so that the right arrangements for
teaching can be put in place. A student’s supervision pattern for this paper will include
single, paired and grouped supervision, and students will be able to chose from within
the wide menu of topics on offer below.
Indicative general bibliography:
C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World (2004).
Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in an Age of Global Empire (2006).
Megan Vaughan, Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-century Mauritius
(2005).
Clare Anderson, Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean (2012).
Abdul Sheriff and Engseng Ho (ed.) The Indian Ocean: Oceanic Connections and the
Creation of New Societies (2014).
David Igler, The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush (2013).
David Armitage and Alison Bashford (eds.) Pacific Histories: Ocean , Land, People (2014).
John Gascoigne, Encountering the Pacific in the Age of Enlightenment (2014).
Gregory T. Cushman, Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World (2013).
Matt K Matsuda, Pacific Worlds (2012).
Greg Dening, Islands and Beaches: Discourses on a Silent Land, Marquesas, 1774-1880
(1980).
Donald Freedman, The Pacific (2009).
Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the
Origins of Environmentalism (1995).
Sunil Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of
Migrants (2013).
Sujit Sivasundaram, Islanded: Britain, Sri Lanka and the Bounds of an Indian Ocean
Colony (2013).
Pier Larson, Ocean of Letters: Language and Creolization in the Indian Ocean Diaspora
(2009).
Thomas Metcalf, Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860-1920
(2008).
Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean (2003).
Marshall Sahlins, Islands of history (1995).
Anne Salmond, Aphrodite’s Island: The European Discovery of Tahiti (2010).
Bernard Smith, Imagining the Pacific: In the Wake of the Cook Voyages (1992).
Vanessa Smith and Rod Edmond eds. Islands in history and representation (2003).
Nicholas Thomas, Islanders: The Pacific in an Age of Empire (2010).
Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean
(2006).
E. Alpers, The Indian Ocean in World History (2014).
Reference
Students will find the seventeen-volume series edited by Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo
Giraldez, The Pacific World: Lands, Peoples and History of the Pacific, 1500-1900 (Ashgate
Press) of use. They may also wish to consult the Oxford History of the British Empire and
its Companion Series. The following journals will be directly relevant to this course, and
students are encouraged to keep an eye on recent articles: The Journal of Pacific History;
The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History; Itinerario; Journal of Global History;
Comparative Studies in Society and History; Comparative Studies of South Asia, the Middle
East and Africa; Modern Asian Studies; Modern Intellectual History; South Asia; Journal for
Maritime Research.
Novels and travel literature:
Lady Isabelle Burton, Arabia, Egypt, India: A Narrative of Travel (1879)
J L Buckhardt Travels in Arabia, (1829)
Joseph Conrad, Typhoon and other Tales (1902).
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1714).
George Windsor Earl, The Eastern Seas, or Voyages and Adventures in the Indian
Archipelago in 1832-4 (1837)
Frederick Marryat, The Naval Officer (1829).
Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago (1869).
Robert Fitzroy, The Narrative of the ‘Beagle’ Voyage, 1831-6 edited by Katharine
Anderson (2011).
Mark Twain, The Great Revolution in Pitcairn (1879) or Following the Equator: A Journey
Around the World (1897).
Mizar Abu Taleb Khan, Travels in Asia, Africa and Europe during the years 1799 to 1803
(first published 1814, republished 1972).
Herman Melville, Typee: A Peek at Polynesian Life (1846); Moby Dick (1851).
Jehangeer Nowrojee and Hirjeebhoy Merwanjee, Journal of a residence of two years and
a half in Great Britain (1841), authors are Parsi naval engineers.
Fanny Parks, Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque (1850)
Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (1887).
G. L. Sullivan, Dhow chasing in Zanzibar waters and on the Eastern coast of Africa:
narrative of five years suppression of the slave trade (1873).
H. G. Wells, The island of Doctor Moreau (1924).
Amitav Gosh, The Hungry Tide (2005); Glass Palace (2000).
PART A
THEMES, linked to core lectures
1. THEORETICAL VIEWS ON OCEANIC HISTORIES
a. What is attractive about the ocean as a framework for historical study?
b. What differences have appeared thus far in the writing of the histories of the
Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans?
c. Why have imperial historians turned to the study of the oceans?
d. Why has oceanic historiography thus far been concerned primarily with the period
before 1750?
*The American Historical Review 111.3 (2006). Forum on ‘Oceans of History’,
Introduction by Karen Wigen and essays by Alison Games and Matt K Matsuda.
Indian Ocean general reading:
*Markus P.M. Vink, ‘Indian Ocean Studies and the new thalassology’ in Journal of
Global History (2007) 2, pp. 41–62
Sugata Bose, ‘Space and Time on the Indian Ocean Rim: Theory and History’, in
Leila Tarazi Fawaz & C. A. Bayly (eds.), Modernity & Culture: From the
Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean (2002),365-388
K. N. Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from
the Rise of Islam to 1750 (1990).
J.de V. Allen, ‘A Proposal for Indian Ocean Studies’ in Historical Relations across the
Indian Ocean (Paris, 1980), pp.137-151.
*Michael Pearson, ‘Littoral Society: The Concept and the Problems’ Journal of World
History, Volume 17, no. 4 (December 2006).
Special issue, Journal of Social History (2011), ‘Marginal Centres: Writing Life histories
in the Indian Ocean World’, especially introduction.
Special issue, History Compass (2013), ‘Tracks and Trails: Indian Ocean Worlds as
Method.’
Isabel Hofmeyr, ‘The Complicating Sea: The Indian Ocean as Method’ in Comparative
Studies of South Asia, the Middle East and Africa (2012).
Nile Green, ‘Maritime Worlds and Global History: Comparing the Mediterranean and
Indian Ocean through Barcelona and Bombay’, History Compass (2013).
Anne Bang, ‘Reflections on the history of the Indian ocean’, Transforming Cultures
eJournal (2009).
Pacific ocean general reading:
*Greg Dening, Islands and beaches: Discourses on a silent land, Marquesas 17741880 (University of Hawaii Press, 1990)
*Epeli Hau’ofa, ‘Our Sea of Islands’ in Contemporary Pacific, 1994
Alison Bashford and David Armitage eds. Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land, People (2013).
Nicholas Thomas, Islanders: The Pacific in an Age of Empire (2010).
Matt K Matsuda, Pacific Worlds (2012)
Brij Lal ed. Pacific islands history: journeys and transformations (1992).
Doug Munro, ed., Reflections on Pacific Island Historiography, Special Issue, Journal
of Pacific Studies 20 (1996).
*Damon Salesa, ‘The Pacific in Indigenous Time’, in Armitage and Bashford, (eds.) Pacific
Histories: Ocean, Land, People (2014); also introduction by Armitage and Bashford.
* Margaret Jolly, ‘Imagining Oceania: Indigenous and Foreign Representations of a Sea
of Islands’, The Contemporary Pacific (2007).
On oceanic histories and imperial histories:
David Armitage, ‘The elephant and the whale: empires of land and sea’ in Journal of
Maritime Research, July 2007.
Peter N. Miller, ed. The Sea: Thalassography and Historiography (2013).
Tony Ballantyne, ‘Mobility, empire, colonisation’ in
*David Cannadine, ed. Empire, the Sea and Global History: Britain’s Maritime
World, c.1760-c.1840 (2007), Introduction by Cannadine and
chapter by Drayton.
Special issue on the ‘Historical geographies of the sea’ Journal of Historical Geography 32
(2006), edited by David Lambert, Luciana Martins and Miles Ogborn.
Martin Lewis and Karen Wigen, The myth of continents: a critique of metageography
(1997).
Atlantic ocean general reading:
*David Armitage, ‘Three Concepts of the Atlantic’ in David Armitage and Michael J.
Braddick eds. The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (2009).
*Bernard Bailyn Atlantic History: Concepts and Contours (2005).
Joce C. Moya, ‘Modernization, Modernity, and the Transformation of the Atlantic
World in the Nineteenth Century’ in Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Erik Seeman eds.
The Atlantic in Global History, 1500-2000 (2007).
Mediterranean history:
Ferdnand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip
II 2vols.
David Abulafia, ‘What is the Mediterranean?’, in Abulafia (ed), The Mediterranean in
History (k, 2003), and ‘Mediterraneans’ in W Harris (ed), Rethinking the Mediterranean
(2005); also David Abulafia, The Great Sea (2012).
Cyprian Broodbank, The Making of the Middle Sea (2013)
Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A study of Mediterranean
History (2000).
2. PACIFIC ISLANDERS AND HISTORIES OF NAVIGATION AND EXPLORATION AFTER
1750
a. How did Pacific islanders define the Pacific ocean before Europeans?
b. To what extent was there a meeting of traditions of navigation and exploration in
the Pacific?
c. How did European voyagers come to terms with the accounts of the migration of
islanders?
On Pacific islanders’ traditions of navigation:
*David Turnbull, Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers. (Taylor and Francis, 2000).
Chapter 4 on Pacific navigation.
*Nicholas Thomas, Islanders: The Pacific in an Age of Empire (2011)
David Turnbull, Mapping The World in the Mind: An Investigation of the Unwritten
Knowledge of the Micronesian Navigators (Deakin University Press, 1990)
D. Lewis, We, the Navigators: The Ancient Art of Landfinding in the Pacific, (2nd
ed., Univ. of Hawaii Press, 1994).
*Damon Salesa, ‘The Pacific in Indigenous Time’ in Armitage and Bashford eds. Pacific
Histories: Ocean, Land, People (2014).
On European voyagers in the Pacific ocean after 1750:
Matt K. Matsuda, Empire of Love: Histories of France and the Pacific (Oxford,
2005).
John West-Sooby ed. Discovery and Empire: The French in the South Seas (2013).
*Nicholas Thomas, Islanders: The Pacific in an Age of Empire (2011).
Simon Werrett, 'Russian Responses to the Voyages of Captain Cook' in Captain
Cook: Explorations and Reassessments, Glyn Williams, ed. New York: Boydell &
Brewer Press, November 2000).
John Gascoigne, Encountering the Pacific in the Age of Enlightenment (2014).
*Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific 1768–1850: A Study in the
History of Art and Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969 [1960]).
Bernard Smith, Imagining the Pacific: in the Wake of the Cook Voyages (New Haven,
Yale University Press, 1992)
Glyndwr Williams, ‘Pacific: Exploitation and Exploration’ in P.J. Marshall, ed.
Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol.2
Jane Samson, Imperial Benevolence: Making British Authority in the Pacific Islands
(Honolulu, 1998)
*Greg Dening, Mr. Bligh's Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty
(Cambridge: Canto, 1994).
Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay (Chicago, 1987)
European views of Pacific migration and race:
*B. Douglas and C. Ballard (eds.), Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race
1750–1940 (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2008). Especially chapters 3 and 6.
Jane Samson, ‘Ethnology and Theology: Nineteenth-Century Mission Dilemmas in
the South Pacific’ in Brian Stanley, ed., Christian Missions and the Enlightenment
(London: Curzon Press, 2001), pp. 99-122
Sujit Sivasundaram, ‘Ideas of the ‘Native’ in the Rise of British imperial heritage’ in Peter
Mandler and Astrid Swenson eds. From Plunder to Preservation: Britain and the Heritage
of Empire. c.1800-1940 (2013).
On the meeting of epistemologies ‘across the beach’:
*Anne Salmond, 'Tute: The Impact of Polynesia on Captain Cook', in G. Williams
(ed.), Captain Cook: Explorations and Reassessments (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell
Press, 2004), 77–93. You might also read her highly readable biography: Anne
*Gananath Obeyesekere, ‘British Cannibals’: Contemplation of an Event in the Death and
Resurrection of James Cook, Explorer.’ Critical Inquiry 18, 630-55
Marshall Sahlins, 'Cosmologies of capitalism: the trans-Pacific sector of the world
system', Proceedings of the British Academy 74 (1988), 1-51, online at
www.proc.britac.ac.uk
A. Salmond, The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: The Remarkable Story of Captain Cook’s
Encounters in the South Seas
Bronwen Douglas, ‘Voyages, Encounters, and Agency in Oceania: Captain Cook and
Indigenous People’ in History Compass, Vol.6, June 2008 or ‘In the Event: Indigenous
Countersigns and Ethnohistory of Voyaging’ in Margaret Jolly, Serge Tcherkezoff, Darrell
Tyron eds. Oceanic Encounters: Exchange, Desire, Violence (2009).
L. Russell, 'The singular transcultural space': Networks of ships, mariners, voyagers and
'native' men at sea, 1790-1870’, in Jane Carey and Jane Lydon eds. Indigenous Networks:
Mobility, Connections and Exchange (2014), pp. 97-113.
3. THE TRADING WORLD OF THE INDIAN OCEAN BEFORE AND AFTER 1800
Which groups dominated the trade of the Indian Ocean world until 1800 and how far
was this domination changed by 1850?
General overviews:
K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the
Rise of Islam to 1750 (1985) and Asia before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the
Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (1990).
*Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia did not: Global economic
divergence 1600-1850 (2011); read with Prasannan Parthasarathi and Giorgio Riello
‘The Indian Ocean in the Long Eighteenth Century’ in Eighteenth Century Studies (2014).
*Tom Metcalf, Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860-1920
*Sugata Bose, A hundred horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire
(2006).
MN Pearson, The Indian Ocean, 1500-1800 (2003).
*Pedro Machado, Ocean of Trade: South Asian Merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean
(2014).
A. Das Gupta, The World of the Indian Ocean Merchant, 1500–1800: Collected Essays of
Ashin Das Gupta (2001).
A Das Gupta and M.N. Pearson eds. India and the Indian Ocean (1987), in particular
essay by Das Gupta on maritime trade of Indonesia.
Claude Markovits, The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750-1947, Traders from Sind
from Bukhara to Panama (2000).
*E. Tagliocozzo, ‘Trade, Production, and Incorporation: The Indian Ocean in Flux, 16001900’ in Itinerario (2002).
Mark Frost, ‘Emporium in imperio: Nanyang networks and the Straits Chinese in
Singapore, 1819-1914’ in Journal of South East Asian Studies (2005).
Raja Kanta Ray, ‘Asian capital in the age of European expansion: The rise of the bazaar,
1800-1914’, Modern Asian Studies, 29, 3 (1995): 449-554.
Om Prakash and D. Lombard eds. Commerce and Culture in the Bay of Bengal 1500-1800
(1999).
Om Prakash, European Commercial Enterprise in pre-colonial India (1998).
Jos Gommans, ‘Trade and Civilisation around the Bay of Bengal, 1650-1800’ in Itinerario
(1995).
*Special issue of South Asia (1996), ‘Asia and Europe: Commerce, Colonialism and
Culture: essays in honour of Sinnapah Arasaratnam. In particular essay by Anthony Reid
and Radin Fernando.
Janet J Ewald, ‘Crossers of the Sea: Slaves, Freedmen and other migrants in the northwest Indian ocean, c.1750-1914’ in American Historical Review 2000.
Sanjay Subrahmanyam ed. Merchant networks in the early modern world (1996).
John Middleton, A History of Swahili, an African mercantile civilisation (1992).
Niels Steensgaard, ‘The Indian Ocean network and the emerging world economy c.15001750’ in Satish Chandra eds. The Indian Ocean: Explorations in History, Commerce and
Politics (1987).
E. A. Alpers and H P Ray eds. Cross-Currents and Community Networks: The
History of the Indian Ocean World (2007)
Ashin Dasgupta, Malabar in Asian Trade, 1750-1800 (1967).
Christine Dobbin, Asian entrepreneurial minorities: Conjoint communities in the making
of the World-Economy, 1570-1940 (1996).
4. THE UTOPIAN ISLAND
a. Why was the island a ground of intensive cultural encounter in c.1760-1840?
b. How was the island mythologised and imagined, and did this representation change
after 1840?
c. How was the Pacific imagined in the Cook voyages?
Theoretical work on tropicality and utopianism:
Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804 Ch2 esp
Michael D. Gordin, Hellen Tilley and Gyan Prakash, Utopia/Dystopia: Conditions of
Historical Possibility (2010).
Traditions of travel c.1760-1840: the picturesque, romanticism, utopianism
Tim Fulford et al eds. Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era (2004)
Felix Driver and Luciana Martins eds. Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire (2005) esp.
Ch5 by Peter Hulme and also chapter by Leonard Bell, ‘Eyeing Samoa.’
Elizabeth Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992).
Nigel Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770-1840 (2002).
David Arnold, The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape and Science, 18001856 (2006).
Islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans and Britain as an island
Anne Salmond, Aphrodite’s Island: The European Discovery of Tahiti (2010).
Harry Liebersohn, The Travelers World: Europe to the Pacific (2006).
Rod Edmond, ‘Abject Bodies/abject sites: Leper islands in the high imperial era,’ in Rod
Edmond and Vanessa Smith, eds. Islands in History and Representation (New York:
Routledge, 2006), 133-145. See other chapters in this book.
Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the
Origins of Environmentalism (1995).
Pamila Gupta, ‘Islandedness in the Indian Ocean’ in Michael Pearson, Isobel Hofmeyr
and Pamila Gupta eds. Eyes across the Water (2010).
Roxani Margariti, ‘An Ocean of Islands, Insularity and Historiography of the Indian
Ocean’ in Miller ed. The Sea: Thalassography and Historiography (2013).
Sujit Sivasundaram, Islanded: Britain, Sri Lanka and the Bounds of an Indian Ocean
Colony (2013).
Sujit Sivasundaram, ‘Science’ in Armitage and Bashford eds. Pacific Histories (2014).
Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty (2010), sections on islands.
Captain Cook in the Pacific:
Captain James Cook The Journals of Captain Cook, abridged edition, Penguin Classics
(2003).
Johann Reinhold Forster (1778 / 1996) Observations made during a voyage round the
world. Ed. N. Thomas, H.Guest, M. Dettelbach (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press).
Nicholas Thomas Discoveries: the voyages of Captain Cook (London: Penguin)
Gananath Obeyesekere, ‘British Cannibals’: Contemplation of an Event in the Death and
Resurrection of James Cook, Explorer’ in Critical Inquiry 1992
B. Douglas, ‘Voyages, Encounters and Agency: Captain Cook in Oceania’ in History
Compass 2008.
Vanessa Smith, Intimate Strangers: Friendship, Exchange and Pacific Encounters (2010).
Anne Salmond, Two Worlds: First Meetings between Maori and Europeans. Auckland:
Viking (1991) and also her Trial of the Cannibal Dog: The remarkable story of Captain
Cook’s encounters in the South Seas (2008).
Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific. London: Yale UP (1985).
Glyndwr Williams eds. Captain Cook; Exploration and Reassessments (2004).
Kate Fullagar, The Atlantic World in the Antipodes: Effects and Transformations since the
Eighteenth Century (2012).
John Gascoigne, Encountering the Pacific in the Age of Enlightenment (2014).
Comparative Atlantic material and Britain as island:
Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race; Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth
Century (2003).
John Gillis, ‘Islands in the Making of an Atlantic Oceania, 1500-1800’, in Jerry Bentley,
Renate Bridenthal, and Kären Wigen, eds. Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures
and Transoceanic Exchanges (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007). See also
Karen Wigen’s introduction to this volume.
Peter Hulme, Remnants of Conquest: The Island Caribs and Their Visitors, 1877-1998
(2000).
5. THE OCEANIC AGE OF REVOLUTIONS
a. What does it mean to speak of an age of revolutions in the Indian and Pacific oceans?
b. Was the legacy of the age of revolutions in these seas: authority or liberty,
enlightenment or parochialism?
*David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam eds. The Age of Revolutions in Global
Context, c.1760-1840 (2010).
The global age of revolutions:
C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780-1914 (2004) Chapter 3.
John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empire (2007) Chapter 4.
Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of a Modern
World Economy (2000).
Nicholas Guyatt and Jane Rendall eds. War, Empire and Slavery, 1770-1830 (2011),
especially chapter by Bayly on camtools.
V. T. Harlow, The Founding of the Second British Empire, 1763-1793 (2 vols. 1952-3).
P. Linebaugh and M. Rediker, The many-headed hydra: sailors, slaves, commoners and the
hidden history of the revolutionary Atlantic. (2000), for comparison.
Pacific and Indian ocean histories:
Richard B. Allen, ‘Creating Undiminished Confidence: Free Population of Color and
Identity Formation in Mauritius, 1767-1835’ in Slavery And Abolition (2011).
Adrian Carton, ‘Shades of Fraternity: Creolization and the Making of Citizenship in
French India, 1790-1792’ in French Historical Studies, (2008).
Special Issue in International Review of Social History (2013) on ‘Mutiny and Maritime
Radicalism in the Age of Revolution.’ Chapters 4, 6, 8, 9 and 11.
Alan Frost, The Global Reach of Empire: Britain’s Maritime Expansion in the Indian and
Pacific Oceans (2003).
Kate Brittlebank, ‘Curiosities, conspicuous piety and the maker of time’ in South Asia:
Journal of South Asian Studies, (2007).
P.J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires (2005).
M.C. Ricklefs, Mystic Synthesis in Java: A History of Islamization from the fourteenth to the
early nineteenth centuries (2006).
Peter Carey, The Power of Prophecy: Prince Dipanagara and the end of an Old Order in
Java, 1785-1830 (1989).
Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850 (2006).
Lynn Hunt et. al. eds. French Revolution in Global Perspective, (2013), Introduction.
6. PIRACY AND LEGALITY IN THE INDIAN AND PACIFIC OCEANS
a.
Who counted as a ‘pirate’ in the Indian ocean and why?
b.
Which description best serves the status of mutineers and beachcombers in the
island world of the Pacific: nativised interlopers or colonial brokers?
How did the exercise of the law create zones of control in the Indian and Pacific
c.
oceans?
Piracy in the Indian Ocean:
J.L. Anderson, ‘Piracy and World History: An Economic Perspective on Maritime
Predation,’ in Journal of World History 6, no. 2 (1995), 175-199.
Simon Layton, ‘Discourses of Piracy in an Age of Revolution’ in Itinerario, 25, 2011 and
‘Hydras and Leviathans in the Indian ocean world’ in International Journal of Maritime
History (2013).
Nicholas Tarling, Piracy and politics in the Malay World: A study of British imperialism in
the Nineteenth Century (1963)
Eric Tagliacozzo, Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and states along a Southeast
Asian Frontier, 1865-1915 (2005)
James Francis Warren. The Sulu Zone 1768-1898: The Dynamics of External Trade,
Slavery, and Ethnicity in the Transformation of a Southeast Asian Maritime State (1981).
Muhammad al-Qasimi,. The Myth of Arab Piracy in the Gulf. (1988).
Charles E. Davies, The Blood Red Arab Flag: An Investigation into Qasimi Piracy 17971820 (1997).
Carl Trocki, Prince of pirates: the Temenggongs and the development of Johor (2007)
Joseph N.F.M. à Campo, ‘Discourse without Discussion: Representations of Piracy in
Colonial Indonesia 1816-25,’ Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 34, no. 2 (June 2003),
199-214.
Ota Atsushi, ‘Pirates or Entrepreneurs? Migration and Trade of Sea People in Southwest
Kalimantan, c. 1770-1820,’ Indonesia 90 (2010), 67-96.
Anne Pérotin-Dumon, ‘The Pirate and the Emperor, Power and the Law on the Seas,
1450-1850,’ in The Political Economy of Merchant Empires: State Power and World Trade
1350-1750, ed. James D. Tracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 196227.
Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and
the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750. (1987).
L Subramanian, ‘Of Pirates and Potentates: Maritime Jurisdiction and the Construction
of Piracy in the Indian Ocean,’ in UTS Review: The Indian Ocean 6, no. 2, ed. Devleen
Ghosh and Stephen Muecke (2000), 14-23.
Legality and Legal regimes
*Lauren Benton, ‘Legal Spaces of Empire: Piracy and the Origins of Ocean
Regionalism,’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 47, no. 4 (2005), 700-24.
Lauren Benton, Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400
1900. Cambridge University Press (2010) and Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes
in World History,1400-1900. Cambridge University Press (2002).
J. Kelly, ‘Gaze and Grasp: Plantations, Desires, Indentured Indians and Colonial Law in
Fiji,’ in Lenore Manderson and Margaret Jolly (eds), Sites of Desire, Economies of
Pleasure: Sexualities in Asia and the Pacific (Chiacago, 1997), pp. 72-98.
Charlotte Macdonald, ‘Crime and punishment in New Zealand, 1840-1915,’ New Zealand
Journal of History, XXIII (1989), 5-21.
P. Howell, 'Prostitution and the place of empire: regulation and repeal in Hong Kong and
the British imperial network', in Lindsay J. Proudfoot and Michael M. Roche (eds),
(Dis)placing Empire: Renegotiating British Colonial Geographies (Aldershot: Ashgate,
2005), pp.175-197.
Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the Rule of Law
(2009).
Lisa Ford, ‘Law’ in Armitage and Bashford, eds. Pacific Histories (2014).
Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and
Australia, 1788-1836 (2010).
Tracy Banivanua Mar, ‘Frontier Space and the Reification of the Rule of Law: Colonial
Negotiation in the Western Pacific, 1870-74’, Australian Feminist Law Journal, (2009).
Beachcombers, buccaneers and Europeans ‘gone native’
Glyndwr Williams, Buccaneers, Explorers and Settlers: British enterprise and encounters
in the Pacific, 1670-1800 (Burlington, VT, 2005)
HE Maude, ‘Beachcombers and Castaways’ in Journal of Polynesian Society 1964
Nicholas Thomas, Islanders: The Pacific in an Age of Empire (2011)
Greg Dening, Mr. Bligh’s Bad language: Passion, power and theatre on the Bounty (1992).
Susanne Williams Milcairns, Native Strangers: beachcombers, renegades and castaways
in the South Seas (2006)
Vanessa Smith, Literary culture and the South Pacific: nineteenth-century textual
encounters (1989).
Rod Edmond, Representing the South Pacific: Colonial Discourse from Cook to Gauguin
(1997).
Michael Ellary, ‘Crossing the Beach: A Victorian Tale Adrift in the Pacific’ in Victorian
Studies 2005.
Richard Ewes, ‘Going Troppo: Images of White Savagery, Degeneration and Race in Turn
of the Century Colonial Fictions of the Pacific’ in History and Anthropology 1999, pp.351385
Alex Calder, ‘The Temptations of William Pascoe Crook: An Experience of Cultural
Difference in the Marquesas, 1796-98’ in Journal of Pacific History, 31, (1996), pp.144161.
I.C. Campbell, ‘Gone Native’ in Polynesia: Captivity Narratives and Experiences from the
South Pacific, (1998).
Angela Wanhalla, In/visible sight: The mixed descent families of Southern New Zealand
(2013).
L. Russell, Roving Mariners: Australian Aboriginal Whalers and Sealers in the Southern
Oceans, 1790-1870 (2012).
7. ANGLO-FRENCH RIVALRIES IN THE PACIFIC AND INDIAN OCEANS
a. If Britain dominated the Indian Ocean World by 1815, how did France begin a new
programme of colonisation in the later nineteenth century?
a. How did Anglo-French rivalries accelerate the formal colonisation of the Pacific
islands?
b. What was the difference between French and British modes of engagement with the
Pacific in the latter half of the nineteenth century?
The Indian Ocean
David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam eds. The Age of Revolutions in Global Context,
c.1760-1840 (2010).
C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World; see also David Todd, ‘A
French Imperial Meridian’ in Past and Present (2011).
Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850 (2005).
Alan Frost, The Global Reach of Empire: Britain’s Maritime Expansion in the Indian and
Pacific Oceans, 1764-1815 (2003).
R. Aldrich, Greater France: A History of French Overseas Expansion (1996).
Nicola Cooper, France in Indochina (2000).
S. Bayly, ‘French Anthropology and the Durkheimians in Colonial Indochina’, Modern
Asian Studies, Vol. 34, No. 3 (2000), pp. 581-622.
The Pacific
Jane Samson, Imperial Benevolence: Making British Authority in the Pacific Islands
(1998).
Robert Aldrich, The French Presence in the South Pacific, 1842-1940 (1990).
Matt Matsuda, Pacific Worlds (2012).
Nicholas Thomas, Islanders: The Pacific in an Age of Empire (2011).
John West-Sooby ed. Discovery and Empire: The French in the South Seas (2013).
Jane Samson ed. British Imperial Strategies in the Pacific 1750-1900
Fracois Peron, French Designs on Colonial New South Wales (2014). Introduction.
John Connell, New Caledonia or Kanaky? The Political History of a French Colony (1987).
Donald Denoon, The Cambridge History of the Pacific Islanders (1997).
W. P. Morrell, Britain in the Pacific Islands (1960).
Matt K. Matsuda, Empire of Love: Histories of France and the Pacific (2005).
A.Foucrier, (ed.), The French and the Pacific world, 17th-19th centuries: explorations,
migrations and cultural exchanges (2005).
J. D. Legge, Britain in Fiji, 1858-1880 (1958).
Nic Maclellan and Jean Chesneaux, After Moruroa: France in the South Pacific (1998).
Martyn Lyons, The Totem and the Tricolour: A Short History of New Caledonia since 1774
(1986).
Colin Newbury, Tahiti Nui: Change and Survival in French Polynesia, 1767–1945 (1980).
R. Aldrich and Isabelle Merle, eds., France Abroad: Indochina, New Caledonia, Wallis and
Futuna (1997).
Dorothy Shineburg, They Came for Sandalwood: A Study of the Sandalwood Trade in the
South-West Pacific, 1830-1865 (1967).
S. Firth. New Guinea under the Germans (1983).
8. THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY DUTCH EMPIRE STRADDLING OCEANS
How far did the Dutch empire retain its status as a maritime empire in the nineteenth
century?
F. Gaastra, The Dutch East India Company: Expansion and Decline (2003).
J. van Goor, eds. Prelude to colonialism: The Dutch in Asia (2004).
Nigel Worden eds. Contingent Lives: Social Identity and Material Culture in the VOC
World (2007).
N. Tarling ed. The Cambridge History of South-East Asia, Vol.2 19th and 20th centuries
K. Ward, Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company (2009).
J.H. Bentley, R. Bridenthal and K. Wigen eds. Seascapes: Maritime histories, littoral
cultures and trans-oceanic exchanges Chapters by Gaynor and Ward
Eric Tagliocozzo, ‘Hydrography, technology, coercion: Mapping the sea in South-east
Asian imperialism, 1850-1900’ in Rigby, Lincoln, Killingray eds. Maritime empires
Eric Tagliocozzo, ‘Kettle on a slow boil: Batavia’s threat perception in the Indies’ Outer
islands, 1870-1910’ in Journal of South-east Asian Studies, 2000.
P. Carey, The Power of Prophecy: Prince Dipanagara and the end of an Old order in Java
L. Blusse, Visible Cities: Canton, Nagasaki and Batavia and the Coming of the Americans
R Betts and R. Ross eds. Colonial Cities: Essays on Urbanism in a Colonial Context essay by
Blusse on Batavia and Ross on Cape Town.
N H Schulte, The Spell of Power: A history of Balinese Politics, 1650-1940 (1996).
A. Schrikker, Dutch and British Colonial Intervention in Sri Lanka, 1780-1815
A Singh, Fort Cochin in Kerala, 1750-1830: The Social Conditions of a Dutch Community in
an Indian Mileu (2010).
R Ross, Status and Respectability in the Cape Colony, A Tragedy of Manners (1999).
U Bosma and R. Raben, Being Dutch in the Indies: A history of creolisation and empire
(2008).
J G Taylor, The Social World of Batavia
L. Blusse and W. Remmelink, I Smits, eds. Bridging the Divide: 400 years of NetherlandsJapan (2000).
N Tarling, Anglo-Dutch rivalry in the Malay World 1780-1824 (1962).
J van Lohuizen, The Dutch East India Company and Mysore 1762-1790 (1961).
9. ‘SLAVERY’ IN THE INDIAN AND PACIFIC OCEANS
a.
How far did unfree labour continue -- and even come to a new peak -- in the
nineteenth-century Indian and Pacific oceans?
b.
What were the main types of ‘slavery’ practiced in the Indian and Pacific Oceans
in this era?
Pacific islanders as indentured labourers
Tracey Banivanua-Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue: The Australian-Pacific
Indentured Labour Trade. (2007).
H. E. Maude, Slavers in Paradise: The Peruvian Labor Trade in Polynesia 1862-1864
(1981).
Peter Corris, Passage, Port and Plantation: A History of Solomon Islands Labour Migration
1870-1914 (1973).
D. Munro, ‘The Labor Trade in Melanesians to Queensland’ Journal of Social History,
(1995).
A. Curthoys, ‘Working for the white people: An historiographical essay on aboriginal and
Torres Strait islander labor’ Labour History, (1995).
O W. Parnaby, Britain and the Labour Trade in the Southwest Pacific, (1964).
J. Siegel, ‘Origins of Pacific Islands Labourers in Fiji’, Journal of Pacific History (1985).
J. Harris and W. Harris, ‘The struggle against Pacific island labour’ Labour History,
(1968).
L. Russell, ‘Procuring passage: Southern Australian aboriginal women and the early
maritime industry of sealing’, in Carol Williams ed. Indigenous Women and Work: From
Labor to Activism (2012), pp. 60-72.
Indian Ocean slavery
Gwyn Campbell, ‘Introduction: Slavery and other forms of unfree labour in the Indian
Ocean World’ in Slavery and Abolition 24, 2, 2003, pp.ix-xxxii
Marina Carter, ‘Slavery and unfree labor in the Indian Ocean’ History Compass 2006.
Patrick Manning, ‘The Slave Trade: A Formal Demography of a Global System’ Social
Science History, 1990.
Megan Vaughan, ‘Slavery and Colonial Identity in Eighteenth-century Mauritius’ in
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 1998.
Patrick Harries, ‘Slavery, indenture and Migrant labour: Maritime immigration from
Mozambique to the Cape, c.1780-1880’ in African Studies (2014).
Megan Vaughan, Creating the Creole Island (2005).
Janet J. Ewald, ‘Crossers of the Sea: Slaves, Freedmen and other migrants in the
northwestern Indian Ocean’ in American Historical Review, 2000.
J. Watson, ed. Asian and African Systems of Slavery (1980).
Richard B. Allen, Slaves, Freedmen and Indentured Labourers in Colonial Mauritius
(1999).
Edward A. Alpers, ‘Flight to Freedom: Escape from Slavery among bonded Africans in
the Indian Ocean World c.1750-1962’ in Slavery and Abolition 24,2,2003.
Edward Alpers and H.P. Ray, Cross currents and community networks: The history of the
Indian Ocean World (2007).
Pedro Machado, ‘A Forgotten Corner of the Western Indian Ocean: Gujarati Merchants,
Portuguese India and the Mozambique Slave Trade, c.1730-1830,’ in Gwyn Campbell
(ed.), The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia (London: Routledge)
Richard B. Allen, ‘The Mascarene Slave-Trade and Labour Migration in the Indian Ocean
during the 18th and 19thC’ Slavery and Abolition 24,2 2003.
Richard B. Allen, ‘Licentious and Unbridled Proceedings: The illegal slave trade to
Mauritius and the Seychells during the nineteenth century’ Journal of African History,
2001.
William Gervase Clarence-Smith, The Economics of the Indian Ocean slave trade in the
nineteenth-century
Indentured labour in the Indian and Pacific Oceans and beyond
Brij Lal, ‘Kunti’s Cry: Indentured women on Fiji’s plantations’ Indian Economic and
Social History Review 1985.
John D. Kelly, ‘Coolie’ as a Labour Commodity: race, Sex and European dignity in colonial
Fiji’ in Journal of Peasant Studies, 19.3
Carol A. Trocki, Opium and Empire: Chinese society in colonial Singapore 1800-1910
(1992).
James Warren, Ricksham Coolie: A people’s history of Singapore (1986)
Marina Carter, ‘The transition from slave to indentured labour in Mauritius’ in Slavery
and Abolition 1993.
Marina Carter, Voices from Indenture (1996).
D. Northrup, Indentured labour in the age of imperialism 1834-1922
Hugh Tinker, A new system of slavery: The export of Indian labor overseas 1830-1920
(1974).
Madhavi Kale, Fragments of empire: Capital, Slavery and Indian indentured labor
migration to the British Caribbean (1998).
Clare Anderson, ‘Convicts and Coolies: Rethinking Indentured Labour in the Nineteenth
Century’ in Slavery and Abolition 2009.
Brij Lal, ‘Approaches to the study of Indian indentured labour with special reference to
Fiji’ in The Journal of Pacific History, Volume 15, Issue 1, 1980.
Brij Lal, ‘Understanding the Indian indenture experience’ in South Asia: Journal of South
Asian Studies, Volume 21, Issue 1, Supplement 1, 1998, Pages 215 – 237
M. Carter, ‘Indian Indentured Migration and the Forced Labour Debate’, Itinerario 21,
1997.
Adam McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change 1900-1936
Sunil Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal (2013).
10. CONNECTIVITY IN MID-NINEENTEENTH CENTURY REBELLIONS AND WARS AT
THE OCEAN RIM
‘An opening for the extension of colonialism and the colonial state in particular.’
a.
Discuss this view of mid-nineteenth rebellions and wars at the rim of the Indian and
Pacific oceans.
b.
What was the connection – if any – between rebellions and wars at the edge of
the Pacific and Indian oceans?
C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World Chapter 4.
J. Glassman, Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili
Coast 1856-1888 (1995).
The Java War, 1825-30
Peter Carey, ‘Waiting for the ratu adil: the Javanese community on the eve of the Java
War’ in Modern Asian Studies 1986.
Peter Carey, ‘Changing Javanese perceptions of the Chinese communities in Central Java,
1755-1825’ in Indonesia 1984.
Peter Carey, Peter Carey, The Power of Prophecy: Prince Dipanagara and the end of an
Old Order in Java, 1785-1830 (1989).
C. A. Bayly, ‘Two colonial revolts: The Java War and the Indian Revolt of 1857’ in C Bayly
& DHA Kolff (eds), Two Colonial Empires
The New Zealand Wars, 1845-72
*James Belich, The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict
(1990).
Judith Binney, Stories without end (2010).
*Tony Ballantyne, Webs of Empire: Locating New Zealand’s Colonial Past (2012), chapter
on ‘War, knowledge and the crisis of empire.’
P.M Smith, A concise history of New Zealand (2005) Ch5
T. Ryan, The colonial New Zealand Wars (2002).
J. Cowan, The New Zealand Wars (2 vols, 1922).
The Ceylon Rebellion of 1848 and other uprisings in 1848
Miles Taylor, ‘The 1848 rebellions in the British Empire’ Past and Present 2000.
Sujit Sivasundaram, Islanded: Britain, Sri Lanka and the Bounds of an Indian Ocean
Colony (2013).
K. M. De Silva, ed. Letters on Ceylon, 1846-50: The Administration of Viscount Torrington
and the ‘rebellion’ of 1848 (1965).
Taiping Rebellion
J. Spence Search for Modern China
Philip Kuhn and Susan Mann-Jones, 'Dynastic decline and the roots of rebellion,' in
Fairbank (ed.), Cambridge History of China, vol. 10, pp. 107-62
R. Wagner, Reenacting the heavenly vision: The role of religion in the Taiping Rebellion
(1982).
R. Smith, Mercenaries and Mandarins: The Ever Victorious Army of Nineteenth-century
China (1978).
Jen Yu-wen The Taiping Revolutionary Movement (1973).
Franz Michael and Chang Chung-li, The Taiping Rebellion: History and Documents
(Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1966— 1971, 3 vols).
The global/regional history of the Indian rebellion of 1857-8
C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information : Intelligence gathering and social communication in
India
Marina Carter and Crispin Bates, ‘Empire and locality: A Global Dimension of the 1857
Indian Uprising’ in Journal of Global History, (2010).
Marina Carter and Crispin Bates eds. Mutiny at the Margins: New Perspectives on the
Indian Uprising of 1857: Volume 3, Global Perspectives (2013).
Eric Stokes The Peasant and the Raj
Thomas Metcalf Aftermath of the Revolt.
Clare Anderson, Subaltern Lives (2012).
11. RACE IN THE OCEANIC REPUBLIC OF LETTERS
a. Was the idea of race created across oceans?
b. What was distinctive about the imagination of race in the Indian and Pacific oceans?
Please read across on ‘Slavery’
Sujit Sivasundaram and Marwa Elshakry eds. Science, Race and Imperialism (2012), for
primary sources.
The Indian ocean circuit:
Tony Ballantyne, Race and orientalism: Aryanism in the British Empire (2002)
Shruti Kapila, “Race Matters: Orientalism and Religion, India and Beyond, c. 1770–
1880,” Modern Asian Studies (2007) 41: 471–513.
Ann L Stoler, ‘Making empire respectable: the politics of race and sexual morality in
twentieth-century colonial cultures’ in American Ethnologist 1989
Ann L Stoler, Carnal knowledge and imperial power: race and the intimate in colonial rule
(2002).
Harriet Deacon, ‘Racial categories and psychiatry in Africa: the asylum on Robben island
in the nineteenth century’ in Ernst and Harris eds. Race, science and medicine, 17001960
Thomas Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1997).
Mark Harrison, “The Tender Frame of Man’: Disease, Climate, and Racial Difference
in India and the West Indies, 1760–1860,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine (1996)
70: 68–93.
P. Scully, ‘Rape, Race and Colonial Culture: The sexual politics of identity in the
nineteenth-century Cape Colony’ in American Historical Review 1995.
R. Roque, Headhunting and colonialism: Anthropology and the circulation of skulls in the
Portuguese Empire (2010).
R. Buschmann, Anthropology’s global histories: the ethnographic frontier in German New
Guinea 2009
Sujit Sivasundaram, ‘Race, empire and biology before Darwin’ in Ron Numbers and
Denis Alexander eds. Biology and ideology (Chicago, 2010).
The Pacific ocean circuit:
Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, 1768–1850, A Study in the
History of Art and Ideas (Oxford: Clarendo Press, 1960).
Roy MacLeod and Philip F. Rehbock, eds., Darwin’s Laboratory: Evolutionary
Theory and Natural History in the Pacific (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,
1994).
B. Douglas eds. Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race (2008)
W. Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American tropical medicine, race and hygiene in the
Philippines
Damon Salesa, Racial Crossings (2011).
Damon Salesa, ‘The Power of the Physician: Doctors and the Dying Maori in early
colonial New Zealand’ in Australia and New Zealand Society for the History of Medicine
(2001).
R. Eves, ‘Black and white, a significant contrast: race, humanism and missionary
photography in the Pacific’ in Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2006
P. Levine, ‘States of undress: Nakedness and the Colonial Imagination’ in Victorian
Studies 2008.
Harry Liebersohn, The Travelers’ World: Europe to the Pacific (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), 30.
Nicholas Thomas, “The Force of Ethnology: Origins and Significance of the
Melanesia/Polynesia Division,” Current Anthropology (1989) 30: 27–41.
Sujit Sivasundaram, Nature and the Godly Empire: Science and Evangelical Mission
in the Pacific, 1795-1850 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Matt K. Matsuda, Empire of Love: Histories of France and the Pacific (2005).
Warwick Anderson, ‘Racial Conceptions in the Global South’ in Isis (2014).
12. SCIENCE’S MOST EXPANSIVE LABORATORIES
‘The expansive laboratories which gave birth to modern science.’ Discuss this view of
the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
Simon Schaffer et. al eds. The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence,
1770-1820
Sujit Sivasundaram, ‘Science’ in Armitage and Bashford eds. Pacific Histories (2014).
Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the construction of knowledge in
South Asia and Europe (2007)
John Gascoigne, Encountering the Pacific in the Age of Enlightenment (2014).
Miranda Hughes, ‘Philosophical Travellers at the ends of the earth: Baudin, Péron and
the Tasmanians’ in Rod Home (editor) Australian Science in the Making, (Cambridge,
1988).
Ralph Kingston, ‘A not so Pacific voyage: The floating laboratory of Nicholas Baudin’ in
Endeavour (2007).
Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: science, imperial Britain and the Improvement of
the world (2000).
Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the
Origins of Environmentaism, 1600-1860 (1995).
Elizabeth Green Musselman, Plant Knowledge at the Cape: A Study in African and
European Collaboration,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 36 (2003):
367-392
Sujit Sivasundaram, Nature and the Godly Empire: science and Evangelical Mission in the
Pacific (2005).
Saul Dubow, A Commonwealth of Knowledge. Science, Sensibility and White South Africa ,
1820-2000 (Oxford University Press, 2006)
Andreas Webber, ‘Encountering the Netherland Indies: Caspar G.C. Reinwardt's Field
Trip to the East (1816–1822)’ in Intinerario (2009), also the entire issue, esp.
Introduction by Lissa Roberts,‘Situating Science in Global History.’
Simon Werrett, ‘Transit and Transition: Astronomy, Topography and Politics in Russian
expeditions to view the transit of Venus, 1874’ in Cahiers Francois Viete, 2006, 147-176.
C. Skott, ‘The VOC and Swedish natural history: The transmission of scientific
knowledge in the eighteenth century’ in The Dutch trading companies as knowledge
networks, (2010)
Vinita Damodaran and Anna Winterbottom eds. The East India Company and the Natural
World (2014).
Jane Samson, ‘An empire of science’ in Samson and Frost ed. Pacific empires: essays in
honour of Glyn Williams (1999)
Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific
R. Sorrenson, ‘The ship as scientific instrument’ in Osiris (1996).
Alder, ‘The ship as laboratory: Making Space for Field Science at Sea’ in Journal of the
History of Biology (2013).
Margaret Lincoln eds. Science and Exploration in the Pacific (2001).
Tony Ballantyne eds. Science, Empire and the European Exploration of the Pacific (2004)
P. F. Rehbock, Nature in its greatest extent: Western science in the Pacific (1998)
P.F. Rehbock and R. Macleod eds. Darwin’s laboratory: Evolutionary theory and natural
history in the Pacific
Ron Numbers and John Stenhouse eds. Disseminating Darwinism (2001), chapter by
Stenhouse on New Zealand.
B. Dougalas, Foreign Bodies in Oceania (2008).
Roy Macleod eds. Nature and Empire : Science and the Colonial Enterprise in Osiris
(2000).
Rochelle Pinto, ‘A Travelling Science: Anthropometry and Colonialism in the Indian
Ocean’ in S. Moorthy and A. Jamal eds. Indian Ocean Studies (2010).
Neil Chambers ed. The Indian and Pacific correspondence of Joseph Banks, 1768-1820
(4vols).
13. MARINE TECHNOLOGIES AND THE CHALLENGE OF THE GREAT SEAS
a. How far did new technologies make the seas disappear in the long nineteenth
century?
b. With what consequences did Indian ocean peoples continue to work on the ships in
their seas through the course of the nineteenth century?
Read across on ‘Science’
P. F. Rehbock, Nature in its greatest extent: Western science in the Pacific (1998)
Helen Rozwadowski, "Technology and Ocean-scape: Defining the deep sea in the mid
nineteenth century," History and Technology 17(2001): 217-247 and her book,
Fathoming the Ocean (Cambridge, 2008)
Frances Steel, Oceania under Steam: Sea Transport and the Cultures of Colonialism,
c.1870-1914 (2011).
David Arnold, ‘Europe, Technology and Colonialism in the 20th Century’, History and
Technology, 21, 1 (Mar. 2005): 85-106 and David Arnold, Everyday Technology:
Machines and the Making of India’s Modernity (2013).
D G Burnett, 'Hydrographic discipline', in J Ackerman (ed.) The imperial map (Chicago,
2009)
Margaret Lincoln eds. Science and Exploration in the Pacific (2001).
R. Sorrenson, ‘The ship as scientific instrument’ in Osiris (1996).
Roland Wenzlhuemer and Michael Offermann, ‘Ship Newspapers and Passenger Life
Aboard Transoceanic Steamships in the Late Ninteenth Century’ in Transcultural Studies
(2012).
Jane Samson, ‘An empire of science’ in Samson and Frost eds. Pacific empires: essays in
honour of Glyn Williams (1999).
D. Parkin and R. Barnes, eds Ships and the Development of Marine Technology in the
Indian Ocean (2002).
MN Pearson, The Indian Ocean, Chapter 7
Eric Tagliocozzo, ‘Hydrography, Technology, Coercion: Mapping the Sea in Southeast
Asian Imperialism, 1850-1900’ in Rigby, Lincoln, Killingray eds. Maritime empires
F. Harcourt, Flagships of imperialism: The P&O Company and the politics of empire
R. Mzarek, Engineers of Happy Land: technology and nationalism in a colony (2002).
PM Kennedy, 'Imperial cable communications and strategy, 1870-1914' in English
Historical Review, 1971, pp. 728-752.
Daniel Headrick, Tentacles of Progress: Technology transfer in the age of
imperialism, 1850-1940 (1988);
Daniel Headrick, Tools of empire: Technology and European imperialism in the
nineteenth century (1981).
B. Marsden and C. Smith, Engineering Empires: A Cultural History of Technology
in Nineteenth-century Britain (1999), Chapters on telegraph.
Deep Kanta Lahiri Choudhury, 'India's First Virtual Community and the Telegraph
General Strike of 1908.' International Review of Social History 48 (Supplement):
2003, pp. 45-71.
Bruce Hunt, 'The Ohm is where the art is: British Telegraph Engineers and the
development of electrical standards' in Osiris, 2nd series, 1994, pp.48-63.
Ralph Kingston, ‘A not so Pacific voyage: the ‘floating laboratory’ of Nicolas Baudin’ in
Endeavour 2007 online.
D. Cannadine, eds Empire, the sea and Global History, (2007).
Mio Wakita, ‘Sites of Disconnectedness: The Port City of Yokohama, Souvenir
Photography and its Audience’ in Transcultural Studies, (2013).
Indian ocean seamen
‘Cultures of protest in transnational contexts: Indian seamen abroad’ in Transforming
Cultures ejournal, 2008 special issue, available online
J. Hyslop, ‘Steamship Empire: Asian, African and British Sailors in the merchant marine’
in African Studies, 2009.
E. Gilbert, Dhows and the Colonial Economy of Zanzibar (2004).
Abdul Sheriff, Dhow cultures of the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism, Commerce and Islam
(2010)
G. Balachandran, ‘Conflicts in the International Maritime Labour Market: British and
Indian Seamen, Employers, and the State, 1890-1939', in Indian Economic and Social
History Review (2002).
G Balachandran (2003) "Circulation through Seafaring: Indian Seamen 1890 - 1945,"
in Society and Circulation: Mobile Peoples and Itinerant Cultures in South Asia, 1750-1950,
ed. Claude Markovits, Jacques Pouchepadass, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, (2003).
Janet Ewald, ‘Crossers of the Sea: Slaves, Freedmen, and Other Migrants in the
Northwestern Indian Ocean, C. 1750 - 1914.’ American Historical Review 105, no. 1-42,
2000.
Ravi Ahuja (2006) ‘Mobility and Containment: the voyages of South Asian seamen,
c.1900 – 1960’,
International Review of Social History 51, Supplement, pp. 111–141
Rozina Visram Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: Indians in Britain 1700-1947, (1986)
A Jan Qaisar, ‘From Port to Port: Life on Indian ships in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries’ in A Das Gupta and MN Pearson eds. India and the Indian Ocean 1500-1800
Mariam Dossal, ‘Indian Maritime Historiography: West Coast Merchants in a Globalizing
Economy’ in F. Broeze eds. Maritime History at the Cross-roads.
14. CHRISTIANITY ACROSS WATERS
a.
How and why did Pacific islanders accelerate the process of Christian
evangelism?
b.
Did conversion give rise to particularly ‘hybrid Christianities’ in locations close
to the sea?
*Piers Larson, Ocean of Letters: Language and Creolization in the Indian Ocean
Diaspora (2009)
*Tony Ballantyne, Entanglements of Empire: Missionaries, Maori and the Question of the
Body (2014).
Susan Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings (2004)
E Elbourne, Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions and the contest for Christianity in the
Cape Colony and Britain
R. Elphick, R & R. Davenport, Christianity in South Africa (1997)
J and J Comaroff, Of revelation and revolution 2vols
Neil Gunson, Messengers of Grace: Evangelical Missionaries in the South Seas
(Oxford, 1978)
J Blanco, Frontier Constitutions: Christianity and colonial empire in the nineteenthcentury Philippines (2009)
Anna Johnston, Missionary writing and empire (2003), Chapters on the Pacific
*Sujit Sivasundaram, Nature and the Godly Empire: Science and Evangelical Mission in the
Pacific (Cambridge, 2005).
Doug Munro and A Thornley eds. The Covenant Makers: Islander Missionaries in the
Pacific (1996)
Jane Samson, ‘Ethnology and Theology: Nineteenth-Century Mission Dilemmas in
the South Pacific’ in Brian Stanley, ed., Christian Missions and the Enlightenment
(London: Curzon Press, 2001), pp. 99-122
Helen Gardner, Gathering for God: George Brown in Oceania (2006).
Christine Wier, The Work of Missions: Race, Labour and Christian humanitarianism in the
south-west Pacific 1870-1930
Vanessa Smith, Literary Culture and the Pacific (Cambridge, 1998)
Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects (1991)
R. Eves, ‘Black and white, a significant contrast’: Race, humanism and missionary
photography in the Pacific’ in Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2006.
Rod Edmond, Representing the South Pacific: Colonial Discourse from Cook to
Gauguin (1997)
Jane Samson, Imperial Benevolence: Making British Authority in the South Pacific
(1998)
J. Garrett, Footsteps in the sea: Christianity in Oceania to World War II (1992)
15. PILGRIMAGE AND RELIGIOUS MODERNITY IN THE INDIAN OCEAN
a. What was the impact of being separated by the sea on the emergence of religious
modernity for Muslims and Buddhists in the Indian Ocean world?
b. What was the role of pilgrimage in sustaining religious connections?
Islam, the sea and the hajj
Edward Simpson and Kai Kresse, eds. Struggling with history: Islam and cosmopolitanism
in the western Indian Ocean (2008).
Eric Tagliacozzo, The Longest Journey: Southeast Asians and the Pilgrimage to Mecca
(2013).
Nile Green, Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840-1915
(2011) and ‘The Hajj as its Own Undoing: Infrastructure & Integration on the Muslim
Journey to Mecca’, Past & Present (2015).
Roundtable, ‘The Indian Ocean and other Middle Easts’ in Comparative Studies of South
Asia, Middle East and Africa (2014).
Felicitas Becker, Becoming Muslim in Mainland Tanzania (2008) Chapters 6,7,8
K Kresse, Philosophizing in Mombasa: Knowledge, Islam and intellectual practice on the
Swahili coast (2007).
John Slight, British Imperial rule and the Hajj', in D. Motadel (ed.), Islam and the
European Empires (2014), 53-72
A Bang, Sufis and Scholars in the sea: family networks in East Africa
Engseng Ho, Graves of Tarim: geneaology and mobility across the Indian ocean
U Freitag and W. G. Clarence-Smith, eds. Hadhrami traders, scholars and statement in the
Indian ocean 1750s-1960s (1997)
Michael Miller, ‘Pilgrim’s Progress: The Business of the Hajj’ in Past and Present
May 2006.
Dale F. Eickelman and James Piscatori, Muslim Travellers: Pilgrimage, Migration,
and the Religious Imagination (Berkeley: 1990)
F.E. Peters, The Hajj: The Muslim Pilgrimage to Mecca and the Holy Places
(Princeton: 1994) Ch4 onwards.
Barbara Metcalf, ‘What happened in Mecca? Mumtaz Mufti’s ‘Labbaik’’ in Robert
Folkenflik, ed. The Culture of Autobiography (Stanford, 1993)
M N Pearson, Pilgrimage to Mecca: The Indian Experience (Princeton, 1996),
Chapters after 1750
D. Parkin and S. Headley eds. Islamic prayer across the Indian ocean (2000).
Tim Youngs ed. Travel Writing in the Nineteenth Century: Filling the Blank Spaces,
Chapter 7 on Nawab Sikander Begam’s haj pilgrimage.
Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: the Indian Ocean in the age of global empire
(Cambridge, Mass., 2006), Chapter Six, “Pilgrim’s Progress under Colonial Rules”,
pp.193-233
Saurabh Mishra, ‘Beyond the bounds of time? The Haj pilgrimage from the Indian
subcontinent, 1865-1920’, pp.31-44, in Harrison and Pati (eds.), The Social History of
Health and Medicine in Colonial India (London, 2009)
M.C. Low, ‘Empire and the Hajj: pilgrims, plagues and Pan-Islam 1865-1908’,
International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 40, 2008, 269-290
William Roff, ‘Sanitation and Security: the imperial powers and the nineteenth century
Hajj’, Arabian Studies VI, 1982, 143-61
William Ochsenwald, Religion, society, and the state in Arabia : the Hijaz under Ottoman
control, 1840-1908 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1984). (ch 2: religion, ch.
3: pilgrimage)
The Theravada Buddhist world of South and South-east Asia
Victor Lieberman, ‘Reinterpreting Burmese history’ in Comparative Studies in History
and Society, 1987.
T Myint-U, The making of modern Burma (Cambridge, 2001).
James C. Scott, The art of not being governed: An anarchist history of upland South-east
Asia (2009) Chapter 8, ‘Prophets of rebellion’
Sujit Sivasundaram, ‘Buddhist kingship, British archaeology and Historical Narratives in
Sri Lanka’ in Past and Present 2007 and ‘Ethnicity, Indigeneity and Migration in the
Advent of British rule to Sri Lanka’ in American Historical Review, 2010
Eric Tagliacozzo, ‘Ambiguous commodities, unstable frontiers: the case of Burma, Siam
and imperial Britain 1800-1900’ Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2004
David K Wyatt, Thailand: A Short History (Yale, reprinted 2002), Ch 5,6,7
S. J. Tambiah, World conqueror and world renouncer: a study of Buddhism and polity in
Thailand (1976)
Anne Blackburn, Locations of Buddhism: Colonialism and Modernity in Sri Lanka (2010)
and also Buddhist Learning and Textual Practice in 18th Lankan Monastic Culture
Mark Frost, ‘Wider opportunities’: Revival, Nationalist Awakening and the Global
Dimension in Colombo’ Modern Asian Studies, 2002.
K Malalgoda, Buddhism in Sinhalese Society, 1750-1900 (1976)
A. Hansen, How to Behave: Buddhism and Modernity in Colonial Cambodia, 1860-1930.
(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007).
C. Hallisley, ‘Roads not taken in the study of Theravada Buddhism’ in D. Lopez, ed.
Curators of the Buddha.
Alan Strathern, ‘Sri Lanka in the long early modern period’ Modern Asian Studies 2009.
16. AMERICAN EMPIRE IN THE PACIFIC
‘Another westward expansion or the origins of a new empire?’ Discuss in relation to
American engagement with the Pacific islands in the nineteenth century.
Charles Wilkes, Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition (1845)
C. S. Maier, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and its Predecessors (2006)
A. P. Dudden, The American Pacific (1992)
A. P Dudden ed. American empire in the Pacific (2004)
P. Lyons, American Pacificism: Oceania in the US imagination (2006)
B. Cumings, Dominion from sea to sea (2009)
G. Horne, The White Pacific: US Imperialism and Black Slavery in the South Seas (2007).
P A Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, empire, the United States and the Philippines
(2006).
D. E. Brody, Visualizing Empire: Orientalism and Imperialism in the Philippines (2010).
Noenoe Silva, Aloha betrayed: native Hawaiian resistance to American colonialism
G. Daws, Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian islands 1968
Sally Merry, Colonizing Hawai'i: the cultural power of law
Michael Austin, Pacific Cosmopolitans: A cultural history of Japan-US relations (2011).
P. Grimshaw, ‘Christian Woman, Pious Wife, Faithful Mother, Devoted Missionary’:
Conflicts in Roles of American Missionary Women in Nineteenth-Century Hawaii in
Feminist Studies, 1983.
Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies (2007).
I Tyrell, Reforming the World: The Creation of America’s Moral Empire (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2010).
Ronald Takaki, Pau hana: plantation life and labor in Hawaii, 1835-1920
Gary Y. Okihiro, Island world: a history of Hawai'i and the United States
J A C Gray, Amerika Samoa (1960).
J. W. Caruthers, American Pacific Ocean trade 1973
F. Gibney, The Pacific Century
17. THE PACIFIC IN THE LITERARY IMAGINATION
Why was the Pacific such a fertile field of literary production and inspiration?
a.
b.
In the midst of a redefinition of imperial priorities, how far did literature
sustain a Western interest in Pacific island communities?
Robert Louis Stevenson, In the South Seas (1889, republished 1998) ed. by Neil Rennie
Herman Melville, Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (1847, republished
2007)
Herman Melville, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846, republished 2001)
Paul Gauguin, Noa Noa: The Tahiti Journal of Paul Gauguin (1985)
Vanessa Smith, J. Lamb and Nicholas Thomas ed. Exploration and Exchange; A South sea
Anthology (2000).
Jack London, The Cruise of the Snark: Jack London's South Sea Adventure (1911,
republished 2001)
Vanessa Smith, Literary culture and the South Pacific: nineteenth-century textual
encounters (1989).
Rod Edmond, Representing the South Pacific: Colonial Discourse from Cook to Gauguin
(Cambridge, 1997).
Tim Fulford et al eds. Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era (2004)
Steven Hooper, Pacific Encounters: Art and Divinity in Polynesia 1760-1860 (2006)
Neil Rennie, Far-Fetched Facts: the Literature of Travel and the Idea of the South Seas
(1995)
Bill Pearson, Rifled Sanctuaries: Some Views of the Pacific Islands in Western Literature to
1900 (1984)
A. Grove Day, Mad About Islands: Novelists of a Vanquished Pacific (1987)
Nigel Krauth, New Guinea Images in Australian Literature (1982)
Kerry Howe, Nature, Culture and History: The ''Knowing' of Oceania (2000)
Roslyn Jolly, Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific: Travel, Empire, and the Author's
Profession (2009)
Ann C. Colley, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination (2004)
Barry Menikoff, Robert Louis Stevenson and 'the Beach of Falesa': A Study in Victorian
Publishing with the Original Text (1984)
Stephen F. Eisenman, Gauguin's Skirt (1999)
Roslyn Jolly, ‘South Sea Gothic: Pierre Loti and Robert Louis Stevenson’ in English
Literature in Transition 1880-1920 Vol.47, 2004.
Contemporary/Asian Pacific literature
Michell Keown, Pacific Islands Writing: The Postcolonial Literatures of Aotearoa/New
Zealand and Oceania (2007).
S. Naoto, Nayno-Orientalism: Japanese Representations of the Pacific (2007).
18. COSMOPOLITANISM AND NATIONALISM IN THE INDIAN OCEAN WORLD
a. What was the link between cosmopolitanism and nationalism in the Indian Ocean
World before 1914?
b. What imagined political topographies were open to the peoples of the Indian Ocean
world by 1914?
Carol A. Breckenridge et al. Eds. Cosmopolitanism (Durham: Duke University Press,
2002).
Edward Simpson and Kai Kresse, eds. Struggling with history: Islam and cosmopolitanism
in the western Indian Ocean (2008).
TN Harper, “Empire, Diaspora and the Languages of Globalism, 1850-1914’ in AG
Hopkins (ed). Globalization in World History. London: Pimlico, 2002.
Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire
L .T. Fawaz and C. A. Bayly, Modernity and Culture from the Mediterranean to the Indian
Ocean (2002).
Mark Frost, “‘Wider Opportunities’: Religious Revival, Nationalist Awakening and the
Global Dimension in Colombo, 1870-1920” in Modern Asian Studies 36 (4) 2002, 937-67.
Mark Frost, ‘To Durban via Singapore and other colonial port-cities: an historical
journey across the Indian Ocean in search of cosmopolitanism, 1869-1919,’ in Pamila
Gupta et. al. eds. Eyes across the water: Navigating the Indian Ocean, (2009).
Sugata Bose and K. Manjapra, eds. Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the
Global Circulation of Ideas (2010), esp. essay by Hofmeyr
Sunil Amrith, ‘Indians Overseas: Governing Tamil Migration to Malaya, 1870-1941’ in
Past and Present 2010.
F. Broeze (ed.), Brides of the Sea: Port Cities of Asia from the 16th to 20th Centuries
(Kensington, N.S.W.: New South Wales University Press, 1989).
Sulin Lewis, ‘Echoes of Cosmopolitanism: Colonial Penang's 'Indigenous' English Press’
in Chandrika Kaul ed. Media and the British Empire (Basingstoke and New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
Articles in Vol.57, 2007 of South African Historical Journal on ‘South Africa/India’
and in particular:
Isabel Hofmeyr, ‘The Idea of ‘Africa’in Indian Nationalism: Reporting the Diaspora
in The Modern Review 1907–1929’ in South. African Historical Journal, 57, 2007,
pp.60-81.
P.K. Datta, ‘The interlocking worlds of the Anglo-Boer War in South Africa/India’ in
South African Historical Journal 2007.
V, Padayachee, ‘Struggle, Collaboration and Democracy: The 'Indian Community' in
South Africa, 1860-1999; in Economic and Political Weekly, 1999,
Goolam Vahed, ‘Constructions of community and identity among Indians in colonial
Natal, 1860-1910: the role of the Muharram festival’ in Journal of African History,
2002, pp. 77-93.
19. THE TURN AWAY FROM THE OCEANS?
a. How had European empire moved ‘inland’ by the First World War?
b. How did the sea lose its significance in political terms?
Halford Mackinder, ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’ in The Geographical Journal,
1904.
John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World System 18301970 (2009)
John Darwin, 'Imperialism and the Victorians: The Dynamics of Territorial Expansion',
English Historical Review 112 (447), 1997: 614-642.
M. Kent (ed) The Great Powers and the End of the Ottoman Empire. (1996).
A. L. Macfie , The End of the Ottoman Empire, 1908-1923. (1998).
G. N. Sanderson and R. Oliver (eds.) Cambridge History of Africa, vol. 6, (1985) esp. chp. 2
and pp. 692-722.
C. Newbury, and A. Kanya-Forstner 'French Policy and the origins of the Scramble for
Africa, in Journal of African History 10 (2), 1969: 253-276.
Robert Holland, ‘The British Empire and the Great War’ in Oxford History of the British
Empire, Vol IV.
James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition
have failed (1998).
Daniel Headrick, Power over peoples: Technology, Environments and Western Imperialism
(2009).
Dominic Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and its Rivals
P. Satia. ‘Air Control and the British Idea of Arabia’ in Penultimate Adventures with
Britannia: Personalities, Politics and Culture in Britain, ed. Wm. Roger Louis (London,
New York, Austin: I. B. Tauris, 2007).
P. Satia, ‘The Defense of Inhumanity: Air Control in Iraq and the British Idea of Arabia,’
in American Historical Review 111 (February 2006).
Robert Holland, ‘The British Empire and the Great War’ in Oxford History of the British
Empire, Vol IV.;
Robert McCormack, ‘Airlines and Empires: Great Britain and the Scramble for
Africa,1919-1939,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 10 no. 1 (1976),
James Ryan, ‘Visualising Imperial Geography: Halford Mackinder and the Colonial Office
Visual Instruction Committee’ in Cultural Geographies, 1994.
PART B – READINGS FOR CLASSES ON ISLANDS
Students should complete a selection of these readings for the Faculty classes. The
readings have been kept short. In writing supervision essays on the topics that follow,
students should utilise the readings in Part A as well. They should ensure that their essays
in Part B focus in on particular islands.
Tahiti
How did Tahiti become the paradise island of the late eighteenth century?
R. Joppien and B. Smith eds. The art of Captain Cook’s Voyages 3vols.
Anne Salmond, Aphrodite’s Island: The European Discovery of Tahiti (2009).
Roy Porter, ‘The erotic as exotic: Captain Cook in Tahiti’ in Rousseau and Porter eds.
Exoticism in the Enlightenment
Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific
Vanessa Smith, Intimate Strangers: Friendship, Exchange and Pacific Encounters (2010).
P. O’Brien, ‘Think of me as a woman’: Queen Pomare of Tahiti and Anglo-French
Imperial Contest in the 1840s Pacific’ in Gender and History, 2006.
Bronwen Douglas, ‘Voyages, Encounters, and Agency in Oceania: Captain Cook and
Indigenous People’ in History Compass, Vol.6, June 2008.
Madagascar
Why was the history of Christianity on Madagascar so contested?
Rev. William Ellis, History of Madagascar 2vols, (1838) and also his The Martyr Church:
A Narrative of the Introduction, Progress and Triumph of Christianity in Madagascar
(1870).
Solofo Randrianja and Stephen Ellis, Madagascar: A Short History (2009).
Pier Larson, ‘Capacities and Modes of Thinking: Intellectual Engagements and Subaltern
Hegemony in the Early History of Malagasy Christianity’ in American Historical Review,
1997 and his book, Ocean of Letters (2009)
Anna Johnston, ‘The strange career of William Ellis’ in Victorian Studies, 2007.
B. Gow, Madagascar and the Protestant Impact: The Work of British Missions, 1818-95
(1979)
Sri Lanka (At the Royal Commonwealth Society Collections in the University
Library)
How and with what costs was Sri Lanka transformed into a plantation colony?
Nira Wickramasinghe, Sri Lanka in the Modern Age: A History of Contested Identities
(2008)
K M De Silva, A History of Sri Lanka (1981)
James Duncan, In the Shadow of the Tropics (2007)
Patrick Peebles, The Plantation Tamils of Ceylon (2001)
James Webb, Tropical Pioneers: Human Agency and Ecological Change in the highlands of
Sri Lanka (2002).
Sujit Sivasundaram, ‘Islanded: Natural History in the British Colonisation of Ceylon’
David N. Livingstone and Charles Withers eds. Geographies of 19thC Science (2011) and
also Islanded: Britain, Sri Lanka and the Bounds of an Indian Ocean Colony (2013).
Fiji (At the Archaeology and Anthropology Museum Collections)
Did the British administration in Fiji protect indigenous Fijian rights? If so, in what ways
and to what cost?
Peter France, The Charter of the Land: Custom and Colonization in Fiji (Melbourne: Oxford
University Press, 1969).
Nicholas Thomas, Islanders: the Age of Empire in the Pacific (London: Yale, 2010), Intro and
Chapter 9.
Nicholas Thomas, ‘Sanitation and Seeing: The Creation of State Power in Early Colonial Fiji,’
Comparative Studies in Society and History (1990).
D. Scarr, ‘A Roko Tui for Lomaiviti: The Question of Legitimacy in the Fijian Administration,
1874-1900’, in The Journal of Pacific History, Vol. 5, (1970).
Brigitte d'Ozouville 'Reading photographs in colonial History: A Case Study from Fiji, 1872'
Pacific Studies, Vol. 20. No.4 – December 1997.
Timothy Macnaught, The Fijian colonial Experience: A Study of the Neotraditional Order under
British Colonial Rule prior to World War II (Canberra: Australian National University. Pacific
Research Monograph II, 1982).
Nicholas Thomas, 'Material Culture and Colonial Power: Ethnological Collecting and the
Establishment of Colonial Rule in Fiji' Man. Vol. 24, No. 1 (Mar., 1989), pp. 41-56.
A. Herle, and L. Carreau, Chiefs & Governors: Art and Power in Fiji (Cambridge: Museum of
Archaeology and Anthropology, 2013).
Zanzibar
How did Zanzibar serve as an island node in the Western Indian Ocean?
G. L. Sullivan, Dhow chasing in Zanzibar waters and on the Eastern coast of Africa:
narrative of five years suppression of the slave trade (1873).
Gudrun Miehe, Katrin Bromber, Said Khamis, Ralf Grosserhode eds. Kala Shairi: German
East Africa in Swahili Poems (2002)
A. Sheriff, Slaves, spices and ivory in Zanzibar (1987)
A Sheriff, Zanzibar under colonial Rule (1991)
S. Bose, A Hundred Horizons (2006)
E. Gilbert, Dhows and the Colonial Economy of Zanzibar (2004).
J. Glassman, War of Words, War of Stones: Radical Thought and Violence in Colonial
Zanzibar (2011).
Java
How much was transformed in the repeated regime changes of Java?
P. Carey, ‘Revolutionary Europe and the Destruction of Java’s Old Order, 1808-1830’, in
D. Armitage and S. Subrahmanyam (eds.), The Age of Revolutions in Global Context,
c.1760-1840 (Basingstoke, 2010), pp.167-88.
U. Bosma, ‘The Cultivation System (1830-1870) and its Private Entrepreneurs on
Colonial Java’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 38 (2007), pp.275-91.
P. Carey, ‘Waiting for the ‘Just King’: The Agrarian World of South-Central Java from
Giyanti (1755) to the Java War (1825-30)’, Modern Asian Studies 20 (1986), pp.59-137.
K. Ward, ‘Blood Ties: Exile, Family, and Inheritance across the Indian Ocean in the Early
Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Social History 45 (2011), pp.436-52.
U. Bosma and R. Raben, Being “Dutch” in the Indies: A History of Creolisation and Empire,
1500-1920 (Singapore, 2008), chapter 1 (on the “Indies” world) and chapter 3 (on the
shrinkage of that world).
P. Carey, The British in Java, 1811-1816: A Javanese Account (Oxford, 1992).
W. Thorn, Memoir of the Conquest of Java with the Subsequent Operations of the British
Forces in the Oriental Archipelago (London, 1815). Preface, Part 2 Section 1, Part 3
Section 1.
J.J. Stockdale, Sketches, Civil and Military, of the Island of Java and Its Immediate
Dependencies (London, 1812). Preface, Book 3 Chapter 4, Book 3 Chapter 5.
Tasmania/New Zealand
‘A dying race, or an Aryan race?’ How were such divergent representations and realities
possible for neighbouring islanders?
Edward Tregear, The Aryan Maori (1885).
EB Tylor, ‘On the Tasmanians as representatives of Palaeolithic Man’ in Journal of the
Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (1894).
HL Roth, The Aborigines of Tasmania (1899).
Damon Salesa, ‘The Power of the Physician: Doctors and the Dying Maori in early
colonial New Zealand’ in Australia and New Zealand Society for the History of Medicine
(2001).
Damon Salesa, Racial Crossings: Race, Intermarriage and the Victorian British Empire
(2011).
Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (2002).
Lyndall Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians (1982).
Anna Johnston and Martin Rolls eds. Reading Robinson: Companion Essays to George
Augustus Robinson’s Friendly Mission (2012).
Tony Ballantyne, Webs of Empire: Locating New Zealand’s Colonial Past (2012).
Judith Binney, Stories without end (2010).
J. Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land (2008).
Tierra del Fuego (At the Darwin Correspondence Project in the University
Library)
How did the islanders of Tierra del Fuego impact on scientific thought?
Charles Darwin, 'Tierra Del Fuego', in Journal of Researches (1845 ed.), available in C.
Darwin, Evolutionary Writings (OUP 2008), pp. 15-38.
Robert Fitzroy, Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of His Majesty's Ships Adventure and
Beagle Betweem the Yars 1826 and 1836, 3 vols (1839), vol. 2, ch. 9 and 10.
W. P. Snow, 'A Few Remarks on the Wild Tribes of Tierra del Fuego from Personal
Observation', Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London (1861),
<http://www.jstor.org/stable/3014199>
F. Burkhardt et al, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 1 (1986), pp. 302-308.
Gillian Beer, 'Travelling the Other Way', in N. Jardine, J. A. Secord and E. Spary (eds),
Cultures of Natural History (1996), pp. 322-337.
Michael Bravo, 'Ethnological Encounters', in N. Jardine, J. A. Secord and E. Spary (eds),
Cultures of Natural History (1996), pp. 338-357.
Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging (1995), pp. 234-253.
Anne Chapman, European Encounters with the Yamana People of Cape Horn, Before and
After Darwin (2010).
Mauritius
What changed in Mauritius between slavery, apprenticeship and indenture?
Megan Vaughan, Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-century Mauritius
(2005).
Richard Allen, Slaves, Freedmen and indentured labourers in colonial Mauritius (1999)
Anthony Barker, Slavery and anti-slavery in Mauritius 1810-1833 (1996)
Vijaya Teelock Bitter sugar: Sugar and slavery in 19thC Mauritius (1998)
Marina Carter, Servants, sirdars and settlers: Indians in Mauritius, 1834-1874 (1995) and
‘The family under indenture: A Mauritian case study’ in Journal of Mauritian Studies
1992.
Report of the Truth and Justice Commission, Volume 1 (2011) http://www.gov.mu/portal/goc/pmo/file/TJC_Vol1.pdf
Andaman islands
Why were the Andaman islands seen to be suited as a site for prisoners?
E. H. Man, ‘On the Andaman islands and their inhabitants’ in Journal of the
Anthropological Institute of Great Britain 1885, jstor
S. Sen, Disciplining Punishment: Colonial and convict society in the Andaman islands
(2000).
S Sen, ‘Savage Bodies: MV Portman and the Adamanese’ in American Ethnologist 2009
A. Vaidik, Imperial Andamans: Colonial Encounter and Island History (2010).
C. Anderson, ‘Image, Object, Text: Representing the Andaman islands’ in History
Workshop Journal, 2009.
C Anderson, Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean (2012).
C. Anderson, ‘Colonisation, kidnap and confinement in the Andaman islands penal
colony, 1771-1864’ in Journal of Historical Geography 2010.
V. Pandya, In the Forest: Visual and Material Worlds of Andamanese History(2009).
Clare Anderson, ‘Writing Indigenous Women’s Lives in the Bay of Bengal: Cultures of
Empire in the Andaman Islands, 1789-1906’, Journal of Social History, 42, 2, (2011).
Singapore
How did Singapore became a maritime cross-road and with what effect?
Mark Frost and Yu-Mei Balasingamchow, Singapore: A Biography (Singapore, 2009),
pp.132-175.
R. F. Warren, Rikshaw Coolie: A People’s History of Singapore, 1880-1940 (Singapore,
2003).
Brenda Yeoh, Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban
Built Environment (2003)
Sunil Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of
Migrants (Cambridge, MA., 2013), Chapter 4.
C. M. Turnbull, A History of Modern Singapore, 1819-2005 (Singapore, 2009), Chapter 3.
The ship as a laboratory? --taught by Prof Simon Schaffer
‘ Floating islands.’ How revealing is this description of the European vessels that undertook
the passage across the Indian and Pacific oceans?
Simon Schaffer, ‘On seeing me write’: Inscription devices in the South Seas’
Representations 2007
Simon Schaffer, ‘Fish and Ships: Models in an age of Reason’ in S de Chadarevian and N
Hopwood eds. Models: The third dimension of science 2004
Richard Sorrenson, ‘The ship as scientific instrument’ in Osiris 1996.
Greg Dening, Mr. Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, power and theatre on the Bounty (1992).
Anne Salmond, The Trial of the Cannibal Dog (2003).
Nicholas Thomas, Islanders: The Pacific in an age of Empire (2011)
Frances Steel, Oceania under Steam: Sea Transport and the Cultures of Colonialism, 18701914 (2011).
Paper 30 –SAMPLE EXAM PAPER
‘ISLANDS AND BEACHES’: THE PACIFIC AND INDIAN OCEANS IN THE LONG
NINETEENTH CENTURY
Answer three questions
1.
Who defined the unity of the Pacific Ocean after 1750?
2.
‘Europeans never achieved complete hegemony over the Indian Ocean trading
system prior to 1914.’ Discuss.
3.
EITHER
(a) How did islands become discrete units of the colonial
imagination prior to 1840?
OR
(b) ‘It was Cook who heralded the obsession with islands.’ Discuss
3.
How far did the age of revolutions follow divergent patterns in the various
regions of the Indian and Pacific Ocean worlds?
4.
How did Europeans utilise the discourse of piracy between 1750 and 1850?
5.
EITHER (a) ‘The racialisation of the Tasmanian and the Maori should be
interpreted as resulting from divergent attempts on the part of Europeans to annex
territory.’ Discuss.
OR
(b) What did maritime peoples contribute to European racial ideas?
6.
Was the ship an ‘in-between space’, between Europe and the island societies of
the Pacific and Indian Oceans?
7.
How pluralised was the colonial project enacted on the Andaman islands?
8.
Was there a Scramble for colonies in the Pacific AND/OR Indian Oceans at any
point of the nineteenth century?
9.
EITHER (a) How far was Christianity ‘vernacularised’ in the Indian and Pacific
Oceans?
OR
(b) Why were there so many Christianities in Madagascar in the
nineteenth century?
10.
EITHER (a) What was the impact of sugar on Mauritius?
OR
(b) How multiple were the regimes of labour in the nineteenth century
Indian Ocean world?
11.
How ethnicised was the plantation system of Sri Lanka?
12.
‘The British attempt to protect Fijian culture did more harm than good to the
Fijians.’ Discuss.
13.
How far did Realism overtake the literature of the Pacific after 1850?
14.
How did the Indian Ocean allow the circulation of Islamic ideas in the nineteenth
century?
15.
EITHER (a) Why was voyaging in the Pacific and Indian Oceans critical to the
modernisation of science?
OR
16.
(b) What role did the Tierra del Fuegians play in the history of science?
Who controlled the vital node of Zanizbar in the nineteenth century?
17. Was there a cosmopolitan public sphere in the Indian and Pacific Oceans after
1870?
18. ‘The Oceans have never receded from view and have sustained their place as
terrains of globalisation.’ Discuss.