Nineteenth-Century Travels, Explorations and Empires, Part II vol 6
Nineteenth-Century Travels, Explorations and Empires, Part II vol 6

Author: Peter J Kitson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-12-16

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 1000558983

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A collection of writings on travels undertaken in the Victorian era. The texts collected in these volumes show how 19th century travel literature served the interests of empire by promoting British political and economic values that translated into manufacturing goods.

Literary Culture and the Pacific
Literary Culture and the Pacific

Author: Vanessa Smith

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1998-01-08

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 9780521573597

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This 1998 book examines a range of nineteenth-century European accounts from the Pacific, depicting Polynesian responses to imported metropolitan culture, in particular its technologies of writing and print. Texts designed to present self-affirming images of 'native' wonderment at European culture in fact betray the emergence of more complex modes of appropriation and interrogation by the Pacific peoples. Vanessa Smith argues that the Pacific islanders called into question the material basis and symbolic capacities of writing, even as they were first being framed in written representations. Examining accounts by beachcombers and missionaries, she suggests that complex modes of self-authorization informed the transmission of new cultural practices to the Pacific peoples. This shift of attention towards reception and appropriation provides the context for a detailed discussion of Robert Louis Stevenson's late Pacific writings.

The White Pacific
The White Pacific

Author: Gerald Horne

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2007-05-31

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 0824865170

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Worldwide supplies of sugar and cotton were impacted dramatically as the U.S. Civil War dragged on. New areas of production entered these lucrative markets, particularly in the South Pacific, and plantation agriculture grew substantially in disparate areas such as Australia, Fiji, and Hawaii. The increase in production required an increase in labor; in the rush to fill the vacuum, freebooters and other unsavory characters began a slave trade in Melanesians and Polynesians that continued into the twentieth century. The White Pacific ranges over the broad expanse of Oceania to reconstruct the history of "blackbirding" (slave trading) in the region. It examines the role of U.S. citizens (many of them ex-slaveholders and ex-confederates) in the trade and its roots in Civil War dislocations. What unfolds is a dramatic tale of unfree labor, conflicts between formal and informal empire, white supremacy, threats to sovereignty in Hawaii, the origins of a White Australian policy, and the rise of Japan as a Pacific power and putative protector. It also pieces together a wonderfully suggestive history of the African American presence in the Pacific. Based on deft archival research in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Hawaii, the United States, and Great Britain, The White Pacific uncovers a heretofore hidden story of race, labor, war, and intrigue that contributes significantly to the emerging intersectional histories of race and ethnicity.