Fluid Frontiers: Oceania and Asia in Historical Perspective

ABSTRACT

This article, like the special issue it introduces, presents an attempt to think systematically about the durable and complex relationship between Pacific Island and East and Southeast Asian histories. Settled by people whose languages originally took shape in East and Southeast Asia, the Oceanic Pacific has deep links with Asia. Given that the changes that have unfolded in the Pacific World since the 16th century arise from linkages between the Americas, Asia and Europe which emerged through the creation of a global economic system, it is logical to treat Asia as one of the core contexts for Pacific history. The intensified connections between Pacific Island societies in the 18th and 19th centuries were strongly influenced by Asian economic, political and cultural systems. The decades between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries were a period of complex engagement of Pacific Island worlds with Chinese, Japanese, European, British, American and Southeast Asian influences. World War II, a conflict between the United States and Japan for domination of the Pacific, was a product of these earlier structures and a break with them. Today, Pacific peoples engage with powerful political, economic and cultural influences emanating from East Asia, most notably the People’s Republic of China.

Key words:

• China
• Taiwan
• Japan
• Philippines
• Austronesian
• racial categorization
• identity
• mobility

Acknowledgements

The co-editors wish to thank the anonymous referees and journal editorial staff for their helpful comments on drafts. We also thank the contributors for their patience and support during the protracted publication of this special issue in the wake of the dismissal of one editor in 2016. That editor especially thanks his new colleagues at the Department of Pacific Affairs for their collegiality and support of academic freedom. (The co-authors of this introduction are listed in alphabetical order but share equal authorship.)

Notes

1 The original concept of Oceania embraced Island Southeast Asia as well as the Pacific Islands as noted in Bronwen Douglas, ‘Terra Australis to Oceania: Racial Geography in the “Fifth Part of the World”’, Journal of Pacific History (hereinafter JPH) 45, no. 2 (2010): 179–210. The subsequent modern academic division into the Pacific Islands and Island Southeast Asia is two-sided, as noted in the following footnote on Southeast Asian historians’ assumptions about the discontinuity of Austronesian heritage between their region and the Pacific Islands. Such a division has also been a feature of most general Pacific history texts from Kerry Howe’s Where the Waves Fall: A New South Sea Islands History from First Settlement to Colonial Rule (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1984) to Moshe Rapaport, ed., The Pacific Islands: Environment and Society (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2013). The term Oceania is used for our wider conception of this cultural region while the Pacific Islands is used in reference to islands within the modern, standard conception embracing Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia.

2 Anthony Reid, ‘Continuity and Change in the Austronesian Transition to Islam and Christianity’, in The Austronesians: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, ed. Peter Bellwood, James J. Fox and Darrell Tryon (Canberra: Department of Anthropology, ANU, 1995), 315.

3 One of the most dramatic testimonies to modern scholars and contemporary European officials’ underestimation of the expansive world of Indigenous peoples in this overlapping frontier region comes in the form of extensive interviews conducted with Ifalik drift voyagers from the Central Caroline Islands by Fr. Francisco Miedes in 1664 in North Sulawesi. Miedes was informed that the Ifalik inhabited and knew of a vast world beyond their atoll of 500 persons and beyond the usual sailing limits generally ascribed to them by modern scholars. They relied on a mix of remembered and first-hand information to name 83 individual islands spanning the entire east-to-west length of their Carolinian home archipelago, as well as reaching up to Spanish Guam, and westward to incorporate the Miangas and Talaud Islands, the Ternate area of modern Indonesia, and south to Manus, the Sepik coast and the Bismarck Archipelago. Miedes’ report is found in Rodrigue Lévesque, ed., History of Micronesia: A Collection of Source Documents, Vol. 4, Religious Conquest, 1638–1670 (Gatineau: Lévesque, 1995), 250–3.

4 R.G. Crocombe, Asia in the Pacific Islands: Replacing the West (Suva: IPS Publications, USP, 2007).

5 Bronwen Douglas and Chris Ballard, eds, Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race 1750–1940 (Canberra: ANU E-Press, 2008); Matt Matsuda, Pacific Worlds: A History of Seas, Peoples, and Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). While Douglas and Ballard largely focus on intellectual categorizations, Matsuda more fully explores the crossovers and interactions between these worlds.

6 For an overview of Pacific specialists' work on Chinese in the Pacific, see Paul D’Arcy, ‘The Chinese Pacifics: A Brief Historical Review’, JPH 49, no. 4 (2014): 396–420.

7 See Karl August Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957).

8 For clarity, the term ‘China’ is generally used for the People’s Republic of China, ‘Taiwan’ for the Republic of China and ‘Chinese’ as a collective term for all ethnic Chinese.

9 O.H.K. Spate, The Pacific since Magellan, 3 vols., in particular Vol. 1, The Spanish Lake (Canberra: ANU Press, 1979); Matsuda, Pacific Worlds. On the Spanish empire in the Pacific, see also Rainer F. Buschmann, Edward R. Slack Jr. and James B. Tueller, Navigating the Spanish Lake: The Pacific in the Iberian World, 1521–1898 (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2014).

10 The classic study is C.R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire 1600–1800 (London: Hutchinson, 1965). On the Dutch in the Pacific in the 17th century, see O.H.K. Spate, The Pacific since Magellan, Vol. II, Monopolists and Freebooters (Canberra: ANU Press, 1983).

11 For details, see the articles on Taiwan (Mayo) and the Philippines (D’Arcy) in this collection.

12 A broad sense of Japan’s involvement with the Pacific and Asia can be gleaned from the articles included in Mark Caprio and Koichiro Matsuda, eds, The Pacific World: Lands, Peoples and History of the Pacific, 1500–1900, Vol. 10, Japan and the Pacific, 1540–1920 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). See also Jonas Rüegg (this collection) on the archipelagic and oceanic nature of Japan’s culture and history.

13 For explicit use of the term ‘new Britains’, see James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 4. See chapters eight and 15 of the same work for more extended discussion of the concept.

14 Although he does not seek to detach Philippine history from its Asian context, the most famous historian to articulate the Philippine–Latin America nexus was probably Pierre Chaunu. See his two-volume work, Les Philippines et le Pacifique des Ibériques, XVIe, XVIIe, XVIIIe siècles (Paris: S.E.V.P.N., 1960). Katharine Bjork provides an excellent summary of the literature which articulates the role of Mexico in the colonization of the Philippines while simultaneously acknowledging that involvement with Asian trade made the Philippines very different from the Latin American colonies, arguing that resentment of the Mexican merchant control of the Philippine–China trade that contributed to the unwillingness of the Philippines to join the revolt against Spain in the early 19th century. See Katharine Bjork, ‘The Link That Kept the Philippines Spanish: Mexican Merchant Interests and the Manila Trade, 1571–1815’, Journal of World History 9, no. 1 (1998): 25–50.

15 At a vernacular level, the fact that a bust of José Rizal, the hero of Philippine independence, appears alongside busts of the liberation heroes of Latin America in the Plaza Ibero Americana in Sydney shows that this idea of a link between the Philippines and Latin America was still current as recently as 1986 when the Plaza was established. See City of Sydney, ‘Ibero American Plaza’, n.d., https://www.cityartsydney.com.au/projects/ibero-american-plaza/ (accessed 25 May 2021). Benedict Anderson’s Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination (London: Verso, 2005) provides a dazzling exposition of Rizal and the Philippine revolution in the context of late 19th-century Spanish Empire and in that of the late 19th century more broadly. Anderson’s characterization of Philippine nationalism as a species of creole, liberatory nationalism is set out in many parts of his Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2006).

16 Landmark studies of this process are Edward H. Schafer, The Vermilion Bird: T’ang Images of the South (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967) and Claudine Lombard-Salmon, Un exemple d’acculturation chinoise: la province du Gui Zhou au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient, 1972). More recent works, many of them focusing on the strategies of the state in frontier management, include Leo K. Shin, The Making of the Chinese State: Ethnicity and Expansion on the Ming Borderlands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); C. Patterson Giersch, Asian Borderlands: The Transformation of Qing China’s Yunnan Frontier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Jennifer Took, A Native Chieftaincy in Southwest China: Franchising a Tai Chieftaincy under the Tusi System of Late Imperial China (Leiden: Brill, 2005); Daniel McMahon, Rethinking the Decline of China’s Qing Dynasty: Imperial Activism and Borderland Management (New York: Routledge, 2015). A rich study of the religious transformations brought about in Indigenous societies by Chinese imperial expansion is David Faure and Ho Ts’ui-P’ing, eds, Chieftains into Ancestors: Imperial Expansion and Indigenous Society in Southwest China (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2013).

17 A classic study of Koxinga is Ralph C. Croizier, Koxinga and Chinese Nationalism: History, Myth, and the Hero (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977).

18 One clear example of this dialogue would be the connection between the work of Vicente M. Diaz on Spanish and Indigenous Christianity in Guam and that of Vicente L. Rafael on Spanish and Indigenous Christianity in the Philippines. See Vicente M. Diaz, Repositioning the Missionary: Rewriting the Histories of Colonialism, Native Catholicism, and Indigeneity in Guam (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2010); Vicente L. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). Diaz’s enthusiastic review of Rafael’s book appeared on pages 227–30 of the Spring 1991 issue of The Contemporary Pacific. There is extensive material on Guam–Philippines historical connections in Robert F. Rogers, Destiny’s Landfall: A History of Guam, rev. ed. (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2011).

19 There is sufficient data for an Asian-Pacific equivalent of Alfred Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange to be written. It remains both a large gap in the literature and a symptom of academic priorities that it remains largely neglected. See Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972).

20 Among other studies, see Liu Ts’ui-jung, ‘Han Migration and the Settlement of Taiwan: The Onset of Environmental Change’, in Sediments of Time: Environment and Society in Chinese History, ed. Mark Elvin and Liu Ts’ui-jung (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 165–99.

21 The definitive study of this process remains John Robert Shepherd, Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier, 1600–1800 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).

22 Tonio Andrade, How Taiwan became Chinese: Dutch, Spanish, and Han Colonization in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007) is one of several studies of this process.

23 Chen Chingho, ‘Mac Thien Tu and Phrayataksin: A Survey on Their Political Stand, Conflicts, and Background’, in Proceedings of the Seventh International Association of Historians of Asia (IAHA) Conference, Vol. 2 (Bangkok: Chulalongkoru University Press, 1979), 1534–75, reprinted in Anthony Reid, ed., The Chinese Diaspora in the Pacific (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 69–110; Leonard Blussé, ‘Chinese Century: The Eighteenth Century in the China Sea Region’, Archipel 58 (1999): 107–29; Carl A. Trocki, ‘Chinese Pioneering in Eighteenth-Century Southeast Asia’, in The Last Stand of Asian Autonomies: Responses to Modernity in the Diverse States of Southeast Asia and Korea, 1750–1900, ed. Anthony Reid (London: Palgrave and St Martin’s Press, 1997), 83–101.

24 See Matsuda, Pacific Worlds, chap. 13. The classic studies are Dorothy Shineberg, They Came for Sandalwood: A Study of the Sandalwood Trade in the South-west Pacific, 1830–1865 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1967) and R. Gerard Ward, ‘The Pacific Bêche-de-Mer Trade with Special Reference to Fiji’, in Man in the Pacific Islands: Essays on Geographical Change in the Pacific, ed. R. Gerard Ward (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 91–123.

25 On the Pacific Island Chinese, see Bill Willmott, ‘Varieties of Chinese Experience in the Pacific’, in Chinese in the Pacific: Where to Now? ed. Paul D’Arcy (Centre for the Study of the Chinese Southern Diaspora, Occasional Paper 1, 2007), 35–42; Bill Willmott, ‘Chinese Contract Labour in Oceania during the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Pacific Studies 27, no. 2 (2004): 161–76; Bill Willmott, A History of the Chinese Communities in Eastern Melanesia: Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, New Caledonia (Christchurch: Macmillan Brown Working Paper Series 12, 2005); Bessie Ng Kumlin Ali, Chinese in Fiji (Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies, USP, 2002). For a broad picture of these developments, see Adam McKeown, ‘Conceptualizing Chinese Diasporas, 1842–1949’, Journal of Asian Studies 58, no. 2 (1999): 306–37. The same author’s Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago, Hawaii, 1900–1936 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001) provides a larger context for these developments, focusing on the 20th century.

26 For a key expression of this argument, see McKeown, ‘Conceptualizing Chinese Diasporas’.

27 These zones can be seen as ‘Anglo worlds’ in James Belich’s sense, although one could also argue that he gives a name to a much more general concept in the historiography on these societies. As a great deal of scholarship on these societies deals with relationships between these Anglophone settler societies and the Indigenous populations, it can be argued that this scholarship gives less attention than it should to the fact that these societies were shaped by an ongoing relationship with Asian settlement and migration cultures.

28 Almost all studies of Chinese history in 19th-century Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States discuss these questions.

29 On the system of immigration restrictions in Taiwan, see Shepherd, Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier, chap. 6.

30 A significant number of Pacific leaders, from Anote Tong in Kiribati to Julius Chan in Papua New Guinea, are the products of intermarriage between Chinese men and Pacific Island women. There are many examples of Chinese men making advantageous marriages with Pacific women in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Such figures as Afong in Hawaiʻi, Chan Mow in Sāmoa and Ah Tam in Rabaul are typical examples of successful Chinese businessmen who had local wives.

31 On the basic form of Chinese social organizations in the Southeast Asian settlement context, see Kwee Hui Kian, ‘Pockets of Empire: Integrating the Studies on Social Organizations in Southeast China and Southeast Asia’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 27, no. 3 (2007): 618–32. A well-known study of trans-Pacific linkages involving the Chinese communities in the United States is Madeline Y. Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration between the United States and South China, 1882–1943 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).

32 See Anthony Reid, ed., Sojourners and Settlers: Histories of Southeast Asia and the Chinese in Honour of Jennifer Cushman (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1996).

33 Ideas of ‘Oriental Lethargy’ were a standard trope of 19th- and 20th-century European images of Asia. References to China as a culture that was historically asleep were pervasive, reinforced by the idea that opium smoking produced indolence and deprived the population of its vigour. These stereotypes found their way into medical thinking. See, for example, Alfred C. Reed, ‘Medical Sketches in the Orient’, The Scientific Monthly 31, no. 3 (1930): 193–216. The embrace of physical exercise as part of a project of national renewal and awakening by early 20th-century Chinese revolutionaries responded directly to this image of China as the ‘Sick Man of Asia’. See Andrew Morris, ‘“To Make the Four Hundred Million Move”: The Late Qing Dynasty Origins of Modern Chinese Sport and Physical Culture’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 42, no. 4 (2000): 876–906. For the contrasting stereotype of a Chinese population that was unshakeably devoted to work, see Arthur H. Smith, Chinese Characteristics, 5th ed. (New York: Revell, 1894), chap. 3.

34 The Australian and New Zealand variants of these ideologies are canvassed in works such as John Fitzgerald’s Big White Lie: Chinese Australians in White Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2007), the historical essays in Charles Ferrall, Paul Millar and Keren Smith, eds, East by South: China in the Australasian Imagination (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2005), and in Manying Ip, Dragons on the Long White Cloud: The Making of Chinese New Zealanders (Auckland: Tandem Press, 1996).

35 Rebecca Karl’s Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002) canvasses some of the varied geo-cultural contexts in which Chinese nationalism was constructed across the Pacific in this era.

36 The pivotal role of the loss of Taiwan to Japan in the formation of modern Chinese nationalism has been argued by several scholars. See, for example, Christopher Hughes, Taiwan and Chinese Nationalism: National Identity and Status in International Society (London: Routledge, 1997). The best concise introduction to the Japanese colonial period in Taiwan is Harry J. Lamley, ‘Taiwan under Japanese Rule, 1895–1945: The Vicissitudes of Colonialism’, in Taiwan: A New History, ed. Murray A. Rubinstein, rev. ed. (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2007), 201–60.

37 Some sense of this can be gleaned from the picture of the Pacific on the eve of World War II presented in Felix M. Keesing, The South Seas in the Modern World (New York: J. Day, 1941) where Keesing maps out a world that is essentially divided between the Anglophone sphere and that of Japan.

38 On the presence of the KMT in the Pacific, see Fitzgerald, Big White Lie, chaps 6–7.

39 There are numerous studies of this topic. Geoffrey M. White and Lamont Lindstrom, The Pacific Theater: Island Representations of World War II (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1989) was one of the first works in the recent past to explore this theme, while Christina Twomey and Ernest Koh, eds, The Pacific War: Aftermaths, Remembrance and Culture (London: Routledge, 2015) represents some of the most recent work.

40 See Greg Fry and Sandra Tarte, eds, The New Pacific Diplomacy (Canberra: ANU Press, 2015).