1. What caused instability in the Pacific?
The instability in the Pacific was caused by the systematic intrusion of peoples and power from elsewhere, or the globalizing currents of modern Pacific history. While few parts of the Pacific were truly isolated from the wider world before the late eighteenth century, the connections between Pacific communities and one another, and between Pacific communities and the rest of the planet, intensified dramatically and disruptively in the last two hundred fifty years. Dramatic disruptions brought by tighter links to the wider world are a routine experience in world history, as people have long found their lives recast almost overnight by new ideas, diseases, crops, technologies, weapons, products, and market links. This instability is evident in the environmental history of the Pacific, which originated not with historians but with historical anthropologists and archaeologists working exclusively on the islands and usually on periods before contact with the wider world. The concept of a Pacific Rim took hold in the wider public arena in the 1980s and 1990s, leading environmental historians to frame work on places such as California, Peru, and Japan as Pacific, rather than exclusively American, Latin American, or East Asian. Attention to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, rarely the concern of archaeologists or historical anthropologists working on the Pacific, helped environmental historians to see the connections that united the Rim and the Islands, in forms such as fishing and whaling, mining and agriculture, biological invasions and anti-nuclear protests, and much else. This book advances that process by focusing mainly on recent centuries and collectively.
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