Pacific World Histories

Class code HIST-UA 9830 – 001

Instructor Dr Alexander Cameron-Smith Details [email protected] Consultation by appointment Please allow at least 24 hours for your instructor to respond to your emails.

Class Details Spring 2018

Pacific World History

Wednesday 9:00am – 12:00pm January 31 to May 9 Room 202 NYU Sydney Academic Centre Science House: 157-161 Gloucester Street, The Rocks 2000

Prerequisites None

Class Does the Pacific Ocean have an integrated history? Though its waters connect places as Description diverse as Patagonia, Kamchatka, Hawai’i, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Sydney, histories of these disparate places and their societies can profitably be considered under a common rubric. This course brings together work across disciplines, from history, anthropology, geography, political economy, and cultural studies, to piece together the contours of the Pacific Ocean world, c. 1500 to c. 1850, as a historical arena of internal linkages as well as complex connections with the wider world. Central themes of the course will include cultural encounters, comparative empires, trade, and environmental change.

Desired Throughout this course, students will be expected to: Outcomes • Examine continuity and change from c.1500-1850 in the Pacific World, locating its place in world history and its social, cultural, political and economic development. • Critically analyse contemporary historical documents pertaining to the Pacific World, setting them in historical context. • Become acquainted with the different disciplinary approaches, theoretical frameworks, and methodologies used to investigate historical topics and history itself.

Page 1 of 10 Pacific World History • Develop the ability to analyse and contextualise key events, ideas and concepts, discussions and debates.

Assessment Short essay (1000 words): 20% due in Week 5 Components Essay plan (500 words): 15% due in Week 10 Long essay (2,500 words): 40% due in Week 14 In-class presentation (15-20 minutes): 15% Class Participation: 10%

Failure to submit or fulfill any required course component will result in failure of the class.

For this course your total numerical score, calculated from the components listed above, is converted to a letter grade without rounding.

Extra Credit: Site policy does not allow grading of work outside of the assignments included in the syllabus. The final grade will only be calculated from the assessment components listed here and no other work, whether additional or substituted, is permitted.

Assessment Grade A: Excellent performance showing a thorough knowledge and understanding of the Expectations topics of the course; all work includes clear, logical explanations, insight, and original thought and reasoning.

Grade B: Good performance with general knowledge and understanding of the topics; all work includes general analysis and coherent explanations showing some independent reasoning, reading and research.

Grade C: Satisfactory performance with some broad explanation and reasoning; the work will typically demonstrate an understanding of the course on a basic level.

Grade D: Passable performance showing a general and superficial understanding of the course’s topics; work lacks satisfactory insight, analysis or reasoned explanations.

Grade F: Unsatisfactory performance in all assessed criteria. Work is weak, unfinished or unsubmitted.

Grade This course uses the following scale of numerical equivalents to letter grades: Conversions A 94 to 100 A- 90 to < 94 B+ 87 to < 90 B 84 to < 87 B- 80 to < 84 C+ 77 to < 80

Page 2 of 10 Pacific World History C 74 to < 77 C- 70 to < 74 D+ 67 to < 70 D 65 to < 67 F 0 to < 65

Submission of Assignments (excluding in-class presentations and exams) must be submitted electronically via Work NYU Classes. It is the student’s responsibility to confirm that the work has been successfully been uploaded. In the unlikely event that a submission to Classes fails, students must immediately submit the work to the Academic Programs Coordinator via email before the original submission deadline accompanied by an explanation of the issue. All in-class presentations and exams must be completed during the scheduled class time. An assessment component is considered completed when the student has met all the terms for that assessment component as outlined by the instructor.

An assessment component completed after the deadline without an agreed extension receives a penalty of 2 points on the 100-point scale (for the assignment) for each day the work is late. Work completed beyond five weekdays after the due date without an agreed extension receives a mark of zero, and the student is not entitled to feedback for that piece of work. Because failure to submit or fulfil any required assessment component will result in failure of the course, it is crucial for students to complete every assignment even when it will receive a mark of zero.

Plagiarism The academic standards of New York University apply to all coursework at NYU Sydney. NYU Policy Sydney policies are in accordance with New York University’s plagiarism policy. The presentation of another person’s words, ideas, judgment, images or data as though they were your own, whether intentionally or unintentionally, constitutes an act of plagiarism.

It is a serious academic offense to use the work of others (written, printed or in any other form) without acknowledgement. Cases of plagiarism are not dealt with by your instructor. They are referred to the Director, who will determine the appropriate penalty (up to and including failure in the course as a whole) taking into account the codes of conduct and academic standards for NYU’s various schools and colleges.

Attendance Study abroad at Global Academic Centres is an academically intensive and immersive Policy experience, in which students from a wide range of backgrounds exchange ideas in discussion-based seminars. Learning in such an environment depends on the active participation of all students. And since classes typically meet once or twice a week, even a single absence can cause a student to miss a significant portion of a course. To ensure the integrity of this academic experience, class attendance at the centres is mandatory, and unexcused absences will affect students' semester grades. The class roster will be marked at

Page 3 of 10 Pacific World History the beginning of class and anyone who arrives after this time will be considered absent. Students are responsible for making up any work missed due to absence.

For courses that meet once a week, one unexcused absence will be penalised by a two percent deduction from the student’s final course grade. For courses that meet two or more times a week, the same penalty will apply to two unexcused absences. Repeated absences in a course may result in failure.

Faculty cannot excuse an absence. Requests for absences to be excused must be directed to the Academic Programs Coordinator. Students must provide appropriate documentation for their absence. In the case of illness, students must contact the Academic Programs Coordinator on the day of absence. They must provide medical documentation to Academic Programs Coordinator within three days of the absence in order to be medically excused. The note must include a medical judgement indicating that the student was unfit to attend class/work on the specific day or dates of the absence. Faculty will be informed of excused absences by the Academic Programs staff.

Classroom This is a seminar subject and requires the active participation of all students. It also requires Expectations engaged discussion, including listening to and respecting other points of view. Your behaviour in class should respect your classmates’ desire to learn. It is important for you to focus your full attention on the class, for the entire class period. • Arrive to class on time. • Once you are in class, you are expected to stay until class ends. Leaving to make or take phone calls, to meet with classmates, or to go to an interview, is not acceptable behaviour. • Phones, digital music players, and any other communications or sound devices are not to be used during class. That means no phone calls, no texting, no social media, no email, and no internet browsing at any time during class. • Laptop computers and tablets are not to be used during class except in rare instances for specific class-related activity expressly approved by your instructor. • The only material you should be reading in class is material assigned for that class. Reading anything else, such as newspapers or magazines, or doing work from another class, is not acceptable. • Class may not be recorded in any fashion – audio, video, or otherwise – without permission in writing from the instructor.

Diversity. NYU is committed to building a culture that respects and embraces diversity, inclusion, and Inclusion and equity, believing that these values – in all their facets – are, as President Andrew Hamilton Equity has said, “…not only important to cherish for their own sake, but because they are also vital for advancing knowledge, sparking innovation, and creating sustainable communities.” At NYU Sydney we are committed to creating a learning environment that:

Page 4 of 10 Pacific World History • fosters intellectual inquiry, research, and artistic practices that respectfully and rigorously take account of a wide range of opinions, perspectives, and experiences; and • promotes an inclusive community in which diversity is valued and every member feels they have a rightful place, is welcome and respected, and is supported in their endeavours.

Religious Students observing a religious holiday during regularly scheduled class time are entitled to Observance miss class without any penalty to their grade. This is for the holiday only and does not include the days of travel that may come before and/or after the holiday. Students must notify their professor and the Academic Programs Coordinator in writing via email one week in advance before being absent for this purpose.

Provisions to Students with disabilities who believe that they may need accommodations in a class are students with encouraged to contact the Moses Centre for Students with Disabilities at (212) 998-4980 as Disabilities soon as possible to better ensure that such accommodations are implemented in a timely fashion. For more information, see Study Away and Disability.

Required Texts

There is no required text but students are expected to complete required, which will be posted on NYU Classes each week.

Supplemental Texts

• David Armitage and Alison Bashford, eds., Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land, People (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) • Stuart Banner. Possessing the Pacific: Land, Settlers, and Indigenous. People from Australia to Alaska (Cambridge: Harvard. University. Press, 2007) • Greg Dening, Beach Crossings: Voyaging across Times, Cultures, and Self (Carlton, Vic: Melbourne University Press, 2004)

Week 1 An Ocean, or a “Sea of Islands” Wednesday 31 January

Required Reading: • Epeli Hau’ofa, “Our Sea of Islands” from We Are the Ocean: Selected Works (University of Hawai’i Press, 2008), pp. 27-40. • Matt K. Matsuda, Pacific Worlds: A History of Seas, Peoples, and Cultures (Cambridge University Press, 2012) pp. 1 – 48. • Martin W. Lewis, “Dividing the Ocean Sea,” Geographical Review 89:2 (Apr 1999), pp. 188-214.

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Recommended Reading: • Linnekin, Ch. 1, Cambridge History of the Pacific Islanders, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) • Margaret Jolly, "Imagining Oceania: Indigenous and Foreign Representations of a Sea of Islands", The Contemporary Pacific, 19(2), 2007, pp. 508-45.

Week 2 Considering Culture Contact: Scientific Voyagers in Tahiti as Case Study Wednesday 7 February

Required Reading: • I.C. Campbell, ‘The Culture of Culture Contact: Refractions from Polynesia’ Journal of World History, 14. 1 (2003) 63-86 • Greg Denning, ‘Possessing Tahiti’ in Performances, pp.128-167 (note that 12 of these pages are pictures)

Task: Select either the journal of Louis-Antoine de Bougainville (from p.253 ff or Part 2, Chapter II- III)(London, 1772), or Hawkesworth’s An Account of the Voyages (from p.433 ff or Chapter v) (London: Strahan and Cadell, 1773). Both of these are found in the NYU Library database at Eighteenth Century Collections Online: http://ezproxy.library.nyu.edu:2451/ecco/start.do?prodId=ECCO&userGroupName=new64731

Week 3 Navigating Paradise: Voyagers and their fates Wednesday 14 February

Required Reading: • Marshall Sahlins, “Captain James Cook; or, The Dying God” in Islands of History (University of Chicago, 1985), pp. 104-135 • Obeyesekere, Ch. 1, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific

Recommended Reading: • K. R. Howe, "The Making of Cook's Death", Journal of Pacific Studies, pp. 108-118 • David Hanlon (Review) Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific, in Pacific Studies (Vol.17 No.2 June -1994) pp.103 – 111

Task: Go to the State Library of New South Wales and find Beaglehole’s edition of the Journals of Captain Cook. Read the account of his death in his last voyage to the Pacific Ocean and in quest of a north-west passage from 1776-1779. Flick through the accounts of his death given by the other voyagers on board (David Samwell etc.) and then decide whether Sahlins or Obeyesekere is more convincing

Week 4 Considering Cultural Encounters: Botany Bay

Page 6 of 10 Pacific World History Wednesday 21 February

Required Reading: • Inga Clendinnen, Dancing with Strangers: Europeans and Australians at First Contact (Cambridge University Press, 2005), chapter 1. • Shino Konishi, “‘Wanton with plenty’: Questioning ethno-historical constructions of sexual savagery in Aboriginal societies,” Australian Historical Studies 39:3 (2008), pp. 356 – 372

Task: Go to the State Library and bring to class an excerpt from the diary of someone who was around during first contact in Australia. (Hint: mine the bibliographies of the assigned readings to find primary sources)

Week 5 Violence and Intimacy: Missionaries, Traders and Local Oceanian Elites Wednesday 28 February

Required Reading: • Alecia Simmonds, ‘Friendship, Imperial Violence and the Law of Nations: The Case of Late-Eighteenth Century British Oceania’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History Vol.42, No.4, (pp.645- 666) • Anna Johnston, ‘The Awful Depravity of Human Nature’: Violence and humanitarian narratives in New South Wales and Tahiti, 1796-99’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History Vol. 17, No.1, Spring 2016

Recommended Reading: • Vanessa Smith, ‘Ruinous friendships’ in Intimate Strangers: Friendship, Exchange and Pacific Encounters (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010) pp.226-263 • Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies’, The Journal of American History, Vol.88, No.3 (Dec 2001) pp.829-865

Assignment: Short Essay due (20%)

Week 6 Possessing the Pacific: Imperialism and law in the early nineteenth century Wednesday 7 March

Required Reading: • Saliha Belmessous, ‘The Tradition of Treaty Making in Australian History’, Empire by Treaty (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2015) pp.186-214 • Lisa Ford and Lauren Benton, 'Ordering the Oceans,' in Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800-1850, (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2016), pp. 117-47.

Recommended Reading: • Sally Engle Merry, Colonizing Hawai'i: The Cultural Power of Law, (Princeton University Press, 2000) • Peter Ward Fay, Opium War, 1840-1842: Barbarians in the Celestial Empire in the Early Part of the Nineteenth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 1998), Chatper 3.

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SPRING BREAK: 12 – 16 March (Week 7)

Week 8 Intimate Imperialism: New Zealand Wednesday 21 March

Required Reading: • Damon Salesa, “‘Pandemonium on Earth’? Intimacy and Encounter in Pre-Colonial New Zealand” in Racial Crossings: Race, Intermarriage, and the Victorian British Empire (Oxford Univ. Press, 2011), pp. 54-89 • Angela Wanhalla, ‘One White Man I like Very Much’: Intermarriage and the Cultural Encounter in Southern New Zealand, 1829-1850, Journal of Women’s History, Vol.20, No.2, Summer 2008

Recommended Reading: • Ann Stoler, Ch. 4, "Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: Cultural Competence and the Dangers of Metissage," in Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule, (Berkley: University of California Press, 2002)

Required field trip/excursion: State Library of New South Wales Pacific Collection

Week 9 Economics and Environments I Wednesday 28 March

Required Reading: • Dennis Own Flynn and Arturo Giraldez, “Cycles of Silver: Global Economic Unity Through the Mid- Eighteenth Century,” Journal of World History 13:2 (2002): 391-427. • Robert Marks, Ch. 5, "Rich Households Compete to Build Ships: Overseas Trade and Economic Recovery", Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt: Environment and Economy in Late Imperial South China, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998)

Assignment: Essay plan due (15%)

Week 10 Space/Territory Wednesday 4 April

Required Reading: • Mark C. Elliott, “The Limits of Tartary: Manchuria in Imperial and National Geographies” The Journal of Asian Studies 59:3 (August 2000), pp. 603-646. • Mark Bassin, “Inventing Siberia: Visions of the Russian East in the Early Nineteenth Century,” American Historical Review 96, no. 3 (June 1991): 763-794. • Brett Walker, “Mamiya Rinzō and the Japanese Exploration of Sakhalin Island: Cartography, Ethnography, and Empire,” Journal of Historical Geography 33, no. 2 (April 2007): 283-313.

Page 8 of 10 Pacific World History Week 11 Economics and Environments II Wednesday 11 April

Required Reading: • David Igler, ‘Seas of Commerce’, Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013, pp.17-43 • Kaoru Sighara, “The Pacific Economy since 1800,” in David Armitage and Alison Bashford, Pacific Histories (Palgrave, 2013).

Week 12: Migration Wednesday 18 April

Required Reading: • Kornel S. Chang, Ch. 1, "Brokering Empire: The Making of a Chinese Transnational Managerial Elite," Pacific Connections: the Making of the US-Canadian Borderlands, (University of California Press, 2012) • Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, (selected passages)

Week 13 Internationalism Friday 27 April (Make-up Class for ANZAC Day)

Required Reading: • Fiona Paisley, "Cultivating Modernity: Culture and Internationalism in Australian Feminism's Pacific Age," Journal of Women's History, 14(3), 2002, pp. 105-32 • Akira Iriye, “A Pacific Century?” in David Armitage and Alison Bashford, Pacific Histories (Palgrave, 2013)

Week 14 Australian Imperialism and the Pacific Islands Wednesday 2 May

Required Reading: • R.C. Thompson, Australian Imperialism in the Expansionist Era, 1820-1920 (Melbourne University Press, 1981) [excerpts] • Jini Kim Watson, ‘From Pacific Way to Pacific Solution: Sovereignty and Dependence in Oceanic Literature’ Australian Humanities Review, Issue 58, May 2015, pp. 29-51

Week 15 Contemporary Reflections Wednesday 9 May

Required Reading:

Page 9 of 10 Pacific World History • Karen Nero, “The End of Insularity,” The Cambridge History of the Pacific Islanders (1997), Denoon et. al. eds., pp. 359-396. • Margaret Jolly, "Beyond the Horizon? Nationalisms, Feminisms, and Globalization in the Pacific," Ethnohistory, 52(1), 2005, pp. 137-66.

Recommended Reading: • Margaret Jolly, "On the Edge? Deserts, Oceans, Islands", The Contemporary Pacific, 13(2), 2001, pp. 417-66.

Assignment: Long Essay due (40%)

Your Instructor

Dr. Alexander Cameron-Smith is an historian whose research explores transnational connections in public health and science across the Pacific and Asia. He is currently a Research Affiliate at the University of Sydney on the ARC Laureate Project "Race and Ethnicity in the Global South". He previously lectured at the University of Sydney and the University of New South Wales and has published research articles in Australian Historical Studies, The Journal of Australian Studies, and Canadian Bulletin of Medical History. He is currently revising a book manuscript for ANU Press.

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