A Concise History of the Greatest Ocean

The Pacific is not an ocean, it is a universe. One can fly 13,000 miles from the tip of the Chukchi Peninsula, Russia’s Land’s End, to Tierra del Fuego and not see any land, barring the Aleutians, along the way. One also may journey from Saipan (Northern Marianas) along the Fifteenth Parallel North eight thousand miles due east and, again, not spot landfall until reaching Guatemala.

Jeremy Black’s narrative entwines the reader with impelling factual accounts, deliberately under-stated argumentation, and inventive conceptualization that move one along with energy and anticipation. Not once does the immensity of the task challenge, much less overwhelm, his ability to garner daunting amounts of data and organize them simply. He masters distance—potentially the most imposing blockade for such a mammoth undertaking—with aplomb and delivers the history of it all. The locomotive behind this endeavor is his characteristic, unquenchable thirst ??? ????? (to know all), as the Russians say.

The Pacific’s organizational axes are geography; topography; climates; peoples; movements guaranteeing trade, co-operation, and conflict; environments and their exploitation. Contemporaries’ curiosity and perceptions, discoverers of various molds, and opportunism are the glue and spice that bind these categories together. The monograph’s immersive discussions are pervasive, not including early navigational devices, indigenous weaponry, and foodstuffs. Black’s frequent utilization of text windows, which include capsuled descriptions of related topics and tidbits, is a boon and tantalizing; his disciplinary continuum is broad, encompassing inter alia genetics, radiocarbon dating, meteorology, and epidemiology.

Power is projected inwardly, not outwardly in the Pacific universe. Core-periphery argumentation is inverted in The Pacific, because the island chains and archipelagos, with their peopling and prehistoric livelihoods and interchanges and later domination, play the leading roles as subject and object. Black details the existences and attendant complexities of these often sub-optimal land masses over the millennia, and the list of them is imposing: New Hebrides; Solomons; New Guinea; eastern Indonesia; Philippines; Taiwan; Ryukyus; Bonins; Japan; Kuriles; Aleutians; and the Canadian, Californian, Mexican, and South American ones from the Galapagos on downwards to the Juan Fernández Islands. His ethnography is on spot, and he pinpoints languages, material culture, cultic practices, and mores. For example, he navigates well in pulling together the backgrounds to the Maoris and the Aleuts. The author targets also “interior” island chains in the Central and South Pacific, namely the Hawaiian, Marshall, Caroline, and Mariana Islands and Samoa and French Polynesia. He shows how the Pacific peoples disparate in their customs and languages cooperated but often fought with one another, a pattern continuing to the present day within and between the various Central and Southern Pacific island polities.

He convincingly—and foresightedly—brings in adjacent oceans and seas for discussion on linkages to the Pacific. Thus, we grasp how the Arctic Ocean sub-seas, the Indian Ocean and its eastern sub-seas, and the Southern and Antarctic Oceans figure in Pacific history, and underscore the international context of the Pacific Ocean. This reviewer, who spent his earlier years on the West Coast, always felt, while gazing at the sunsets there, that the “West” was Japan and China, and the East was the Atlantic and Europe. Black redirects our comprehension of l'orient, the misleading French word which encouraged the monikers (from a non-Eurocentric perspective) “the Near East,” “the Middle East,” and “the Far East.” In fact the terms “East” and “West” are superfluous in the Pacific context, and inspiringly he does not wield them at all.

The Pacific Basin tends to draw people in as opposed to pushing them out. At various times the Spaniards, Dutch, English, French, Chinese, Japanese, Russians, Americans, and Germans were sucked into the many vortices of opportunity bringing the Pacific into increasing geo-political focus and strategizing. But this took a while. The European powers demurred for some time to commit themselves concertedly as they were engulfed in the Atlantic and Caribbean arenas and above all with themselves, hence the delayed “take-off” for the Pacific. Part of the problem was the sheer distances between potential trading ports, coaling stations, and weapon supply depots. Trail-broken creatures of the Atlantic, the Europeans were incapable of visualizing an ocean in any other way for the longest time. Only with James Cook’s explorations does a unified vision of the Pacific emerge, stitching together the extreme Northern Pacific, the extreme Southern Pacific, and everything in between. Refreshingly, Black hoists the long-overdue banner of “the Pacific System.” He jousts a little with existing Atlantic System dogma, though this reviewer wishes he would have locked horns for a knock-down-drag-out battle with that school.

In dealing with material more familiar to most readers, Black takes us through Magellan, the Manilla Galleon voyages, Vitus Bering, the nineteenth-century geographical competitions, the twentieth-century wars and commercial rebirths, up to COVID. His repositioning how the American West Coast cities reacted to COVID through comparisons to circum-Pacific countries is intriguing. He might have mentioned the baneful role of Ring of Fire cities in polluting the Pacific Ocean, ergo Lima and the Los Angeles Basin. There, the Los Angeles River (“Ganges East”), the Southern Californian Cloaca Maxima, delivers its gross effluent into Long Beach Harbor and thus into the Pacific.

His final chapter, “Where Goes the Pacific World,” eschews platitudes of promises and challenges by reminding us of the complexities of the region in the past which shall remain lodged in it in future. Inponderabilia, as Bismarck proclaimed, remain. Therefore, one must hesitate and abjure premature generalizations. A Brief History of the Pacific is a splendid read for the educated non-specialist and archival junkie alike.

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Our Reviewer: Jeremy Black, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Exeter, is a Senior Fellow of the Center for the Study of America and the West at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is the author of an impressive number of works in history and international affairs, frequently demonstrating unique interactions and trends among events, including The Great War and the Making of the Modern World, Combined Operations: A Global History of Amphibious and Airborne Warfare, and The War of 1812 in the Age of Napoleon. Works he has previously reviewed here include Empireworld: How British Imperialism Shaped the Globe, Why War?, Seapower in the Post-Modern World, Mobility and Coercion in an Age of Wars and Revolutions, Augustus the Strong, Military History for the Modern Strategist, The Great Siege of Malta, Hitler’s Fatal Miscalculation, Superpower Britain, Josephine Baker’s Secret War, Captives and Companions. A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World, War and Power: Who Wins Wars—and Why, The Pacific’s New Navies, No More Napoleons, and Republic and Empire. Crisis, Revolution, and America’s Early Independence.

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Note: A Brief History of the Pacific is also available in e-editions.

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