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TONY BALLANTYNE (ed.), Science, Empire and the European Exploration of the Pacific. The Pacific World: Lands, Peoples and History of the Pacific, 1500-1900. Vol. 6. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Pp. xxxv+ 367. ISBN 0-7546-3562-7. £75.00 (hardback).
doi:10.1017/S0007087406239050
The Pacific region has served as an exemplary case in discussions of the links between science and empire. Cook's voyages are said to have inaugurated the empire of science, while Darwin made the vast tract of the Pacific a great laboratory of the natural sciences. This volume of reprinted essays serves as an excellent sampling of the historiography of Pacific science and its development from the late 1960s to the present. The earliest essays suggest how innovatory it was to argue that science served as a subtext for voyages of discovery in the Pacific. The more recent work takes this argument for granted and seeks instead to position Pacific science with respect to indigenous traditions, textual and pictorial practice and the global history of knowledge.
The volume begins with material on the early history of Pacific exploration. Part One analyses how the geography of the region was cast in Western consciousness. The authors discuss how the terms 'Pacific Ocean' and 'South Seas' came to be applied, why the idea of a southern continent was so widely held, and the role of a circle of geographer-cartographers centred on Herman Moll, who, from the late seventeenth century onwards, circulated a view of the region as a vast domain of diverse riches. Long-established representations of the Pacific played a part in the growing awareness of the region. W. A. R. Richardson shows how the expectation of the discovery...