If you centre a globe on Kiritimati (Christmas Island), all you see around it is a vast expanse of ocean. Islands of various sizes float in view while glimpses of continents encroach on the fringes, but this is a view dominated by water. The immense stretch of the Pacific Ocean is inhabited by a diverse array of peoples and cultures bound by a common thread: their relationship with the sea. The rich history of the Pacific is explored through specific objects, each one beautifully illustrated, from the earliest human engagement with the Pacific through to the modern day. With entries covering mapping, trade, whaling, flora and fauna, and the myriad vessels used to traverse the ocean, Pacific builds on recent interest in the voyages of James Cook to tell a broader history. This visually stunning publication highlights the importance of an ocean that covers very nearly a third of the surface of the globe, and which has dramatically shaped the world and people around it.

'Invasion Rabaul' is a gut-wrenching account of courage and sacrifice, folly and disaster, as seen through the eyes of the Allied defenders who survived the Japanese assault on Britain during the opening days of World War II.

Military author Rob Morris spent three years tracking down and interviewing veterans of the war in the Pacific, focusing on men who had undergone extreme combat, imprisonment, and/or or sinking. Each stand-alone chapter tells the reader, through the eyes of one to three survivors, what is was like to live through some of the greatest challenges of the Pacific War. From Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima, from Bataan to the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, each chapter of untold valour and against-the-odds survival tells an intensely personal tale of young Americans fighting for survival. The book is certain to interest anyone with interest in the Second World War, told with the intensely personal style and attention to background research that has become Morris's trademark.

The international bestselling author returns with an exploration of one of the grandest obsessions of the twentieth century

'The Bomber Mafia is a case study in how dreams go awry. When some shiny new idea drops from the heavens, it does not land softly in our laps. It lands hard, on the ground, and shatters.'

In the years before the Second World War, in a sleepy air force base in central Alabama, a small group of renegade pilots put forth a radical idea. What if we made bombing so accurate that wars could be fought entirely from the air? What if we could make the brutal clashes between armies on the ground a thing of the past?

This book tells the story of what happened when that dream was put to the test. The Bomber Mafia follows the stories of a reclusive Dutch genius and his homemade computer, Winston Churchill's forbidding best friend, a team of pyromaniacal chemists at Harvard, a brilliant pilot who sang vaudeville tunes to his crew, and the bomber commander, Curtis Emerson LeMay, who would order the bloodiest attack of the Second World War.

In this tale of innovation and obsession, Gladwell asks: what happens when technology and best intentions collide in the heat of war? And what is the price of progress?

First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In this book, historical narratives chart how people created forms of agriculture in the highlands of New Guinea and how these practices were transformed through time. The intention is twofold: to clearly establish New Guinea as a region of early agricultural development and plant domestication; and, to develop a contingent, practice-based interpretation of early agriculture that has broader application to other regions of the world. The multi-disciplinary record from the highlands has the potential to challenge and change long held assumptions regarding early agriculture globally, which are usually based on domestication. Early agriculture in the highlands is charted by an exposition of the practices of plant exploitation and cultivation. Practices are ontologically prior because they ultimately produce the phenotypic and genotypic changes in plant species characterised as domestication, as well as the social and environmental transformations associated with agriculture. They are also methodologically prior because they emplace plants in specific historico-geographic contexts.

Covering the life of Josephus Henry Barsden from his birth in 1799 through his childhood to 16 years of age, the Barsden memoirs describe events from a Sussex smugglers' inn, a convict ship to the colony of New South Wales, sealing and whaling expeditions to Van Diemen's Land, and Barsden's participation in a Tahitian civil war. The author assesses the value of memoirs, and of these memoirs in particular to students of history in respect to the transnational paradigm. He tests the historicity and veracity of their contents, and provides an engaging exegesis and graphical supplement of its contents. Of central importance is Barsden's account of the Battle of Fe'i Pi, which was in many respects the Pacific's equivalent to the contemporaneous Battle of Waterloo, such was its lasting impact on Pacific geopolitics. This was no ordinary childhood, and poses many questions about a transnational adolescent's impact on major events. A fascinating read for scholars and students of Australian, Pacific, and British Colonial History, written with academic rigour but accessible to non-specialists.

While inquiries into early encounters between East Asia and the West have traditionally focused on successful interactions, this collection inquires into the many forms of failure, experienced on all sides, in the period before 1850. Countering a tendency in scholarship to overlook unsuccessful encounters, it starts from the assumption that failures can prove highly illuminating and provide valuable insights into both the specific shapes and limitations of East Asian and Western imaginations of the Other, as well as of the nature of East-West interaction. Interdisciplinary in outlook, this collection brings together the perspectives of sinology, Japanese and Korean studies, historical studies, literary studies, art history, religious studies, and performance studies. The subjects discussed are manifold and range from missionary accounts, travel reports, letters and trade documents to fictional texts as well as material objects (such as tea, chinaware, or nautical instruments) exchanged between East and West. In order to avoid a Eurocentric perspective, the collection balances approaches from the fields of English literature, Spanish studies, Neo-Latin studies, and art history with those of sinology, Japanese studies, and Korean studies. It includes an introduction mapping out the field of failures in early modern encounters between East Asia and Europe, as well as a theoretically minded essay on the lessons of failure and the ethics of cross-cultural understanding.

Although most people associate the term D-Day with the Normandy invasion on June 6, 1944, it is military code for the beginning of any offensive operation. In the Pacific theater during World War II there were more than one hundred D-Days. The largest -- and last -- was the invasion of Okinawa on April 1, 1945, which brought together the biggest invasion fleet ever assembled, far larger than that engaged in the Normandy invasion.
"D-Days in the Pacific" tells the epic story of the campaign waged by American forces to win back the Pacific islands from Japan. Based on eyewitness accounts by the combatants, it covers the entire Pacific struggle from the attack on Pearl Harbor to the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Pacific war was largely a seaborne offensive fought over immense distances. Many of the amphibious assaults on Japanese-held islands were among the most savagely fought battles in American history: Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Saipan, New Guinea, Peleliu, Leyte Gulf, Iwo Jima, Okinawa.
Generously illustrated with photographs and maps, "D-Days in the Pacific" is the finest one-volume account of this titanic struggle.

History has portrayed Australia’s First Peoples, the Aboriginals, as hunter-gatherers who lived on an empty, uncultivated land. History is wrong.

In this seminal book, Bruce Pascoe uncovers evidence that long before the arrival of white men, Aboriginal people across the continent were building dams and wells; planting, irrigating, and harvesting seeds, and then preserving the surplus and storing it in houses, sheds, or secure vessels; and creating elaborate cemeteries and manipulating the landscape. All of these behaviours were inconsistent with the hunter-gatherer tag, which turns out to have been a convenient lie that worked to justify dispossession.

Using compelling evidence from the records and diaries of early Australian explorers and colonists, he reveals that Aboriginal systems of food production and land management have been blatantly understated in modern retellings of early Aboriginal history, and that a new look at Australia’s past is required ― for the benefit of us all.

Dark Emu, a bestseller in Australia, won both the Book of the Year Award and the Indigenous Writer’s Prize in the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards.

Australian deserts remain dotted with the ruins of old mosques. Beginning with a Bengali poetry collection discovered in a nineteenth-century mosque in the town of Broken Hill, Samia Khatun weaves together the stories of various peoples colonised by the British Empire to chart a history of South Asian diaspora. Australia has long been an outpost of Anglo empires in the Indian Ocean world, today the site of military infrastructure central to the surveillance of `Muslim-majority' countries across the region. Imperial knowledges from Australian territories contribute significantly to the Islamic-Western binary of the post- Cold War era. In narrating a history of Indian Ocean connections from the perspectives of those colonised by the British, Khatun highlights alternative contexts against which to consider accounts of non-white people. Australianama challenges a central idea that powerfully shapes history books across the Anglophone world: the colonial myth that European knowledge traditions are superior to the epistemologies of the colonised. Arguing that Aboriginal and South Asian language sources are keys to the vast, complex libraries that belie colonised geographies, Khatun shows that stories in colonised tongues can transform the very ground from which we view past, present and future.

Published to mark 100 years since the establishment of the famous Alexander Turnbull Library, one of New Zealand's great storehouses, this energetic, comprehensive book approaches the history of Aotearoa New Zealand through 101 remarkable objects. Each tells a story, be it of discovery, courage, dispossession, conflict, invention, creation, or conservation. The objects range from letters and paintings to journals, photographs, posters, banners and books. The place each has in the patchwork of the narrative creates a vivid overall view of the people of this place and the unique histories they have made together. An invaluable resource for schools and the home, and a great way to dive into our history, Te Kupenga takes us deep inside the remarkable ATL collection and sheds light on who we are.

First published in 2006. A traveller's tale set in the islands of Samoa with the legendary traveller Robert Louis Stevenson as guide, this book is valuable not only for its enjoyment as a tale of adventure, but also for its record of Stevenson himself - a literacy figure more commonly seen as author and not subject.

This is a collection of essays by one of the leading scholars of Chinese history, Patricia Buckley. In the essays she has selected for this fascinating volume, Professor Ebrey explores features of the Chinese family, gender and kinship systems as practices and ideas intimately connected to history and therefore subject to change over time. The essays cover topics ranging from dowries and the sale of women into forced concubinary, to the excesses of the imperial harem, excruciating pain of footbinding, and Confucian ideas of womanly virtue.
Patricia Ebrey places these sociological analyses of women within the family in an historical context, analysing the development of the wider kinship system. Her work provides an overview of the early modern period, with a specific focus on the Song period (920-1276), a time of marked social and cultural change, and considered to be the beginning of the modern period in Chinese history.
With its wide-ranging examination of issues relating to women and the family, this book will be essential reading to scholars of Chinese history and gender studies.

The Institute of Pacific Relations was a pioneering intellectual-political organization that shaped public knowledge and both elite and popular discourse throughout the Asia-Pacific region and beyond during the inter-war years. Inspired by Wilsonian internationalism after the 1919 formation of the League of Nations, it grew to become an international and national non-governmental think-tank providing expertise on Asia and the Pacific. This book investigates post-League Wilsonian internationalism with respect to two critical issues: the nation state and the conception of the Asia-Pacific region; both issues broach a range of contentious subjects including colonialism, orientalism, racism and war. Akami's study of the Institute of Pacific Relations offers insight into the formation of the dominant ideologies and institutions of regional and international politics in the Pacific during the inter-war years, and provides an interesting perspective on Japan's relations with countries including the USA and Australia.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203165535

Stories and yarns about my favourite bits of Down Under Paul Hogan's ancestors were a couple of Irish blow-ins who arrived in the colony of New South Wales by boat, with a little assistance from the judges of the Old Bailey. Blow-ins from everywhere have been coming ever since, and while it hasn't always been a walk in the park, Hoges reckons this mixed-up mob of old and new inhabitants works most of the time. In fact, according to Hoges, Australia may well be the best country on earth. In Australia, According to Hoges, the comedy legend explores some of the highways and byways of his country's past and present to map out all that is strange, marvellous and majestic about his homeland and why Australia qualifies as the Eighth Wonder of the World. From the rich and ancient culture of the island continent's Original human inhabitants to its prison-farm phase, from a baptism by fire through wars and depression to a passion for sport, gambling and outdoor cookery, and from the influence of Marlon Brando on a teenager from Sydney's western suburbs to the culinary wonders brought by new arrivals from all around the world, Hoges portrays a nation that believes in a fair go for all and never takes itself too seriously. Full of laugh-out-loud yarns from Hoges' and the nation's past, Australia, According to Hoges is a love letter to Down Under. As Hoges says, 'We're not perfect, but we're working on it.'

50 years ago, Japan attacked Pearl Harbour and brought a reluctant America into World War II. Armed with fresh materials, which have become available only in the last decade, Renzi and Roehrs take a critical look at the decisive Japanese-American episodes in "The Great Pacific War". Unlike standard histories of World War II, "Never Look Back" includes the Japanese perspective, bringing to light challenging facts: in "Operation Flying Elephant" the Japanese attempted to cause forest fires in the American West by releasing hydrogen-filled balloons. When Americans of Japanese ancestry were interned during the conflict, word reached Japan of their plight and resulted in even greater mistreatment of American POWs in Japan. It is argued that Japan did not surrender because of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki or because of the conventional firebombing or because of the US submarine campaign, but because the USSR entered the war.

First Published in 1973. Forming part of a collection on general African studies, this text presents records of the Gold Coast Settlements from 1750 to 1874, by the Colonial Secretary of Sierra Leone, Major Crooks. It covers the period from the formation of the last African Company of Merchants in 1750 until the conclusion of the third Ashantee War in 1874.

First published in 1969. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book analyses the use and abuse of social welfare as a means of border control for asylum seekers and refugees in Australia. Offering an unparalleled critique of the regulation and deterrence of protection seekers via the denial or depletion of social welfare supports, the book includes contributions from legal scholars, social scientists, behavioural scientists, and philosophers, in tandem with the critical insights and knowledge supplied by refugees. It is organised in three parts, each framed by a commentary that serves as an introduction, as well as offering pertinent comparative perspectives from Europe. Part One comprises three chapters: a rights-based analysis of Australia's 'hostile environment' for protection seekers; a searing critique of welfare policing of asylum seekers as 'necropolitics'; and a unique philosophical perspective that grounds scrutiny of Australia's policing of asylum seekers. Part Two contains five chapters that uncover and explore the lived experiences and adverse impacts of different social welfare restrictions for refugee protection seekers. Finally, the chapters in Part Three offer distinct views on human rights advocacy movements and methods, and the scope for resistance and change to the status quo. This book will appeal to an international, as well as an Australian, readership with interests in the areas of human rights, immigration and refugee law, social welfare law/policy, social work, and public health.

'What joy to be at sea again, adrift on the vast Pacific, in the clutches of a gifted storyteller. Harrison Christian and the mutineers of Men Without Country held me happily captive to the very last page.' - Dava Sobel, author of Longitude 'Men Without Country shows what a writer can produce when he has real skin in the game... Harrison Christian sets the record straight on the Bounty mutiny with forensic fervour, including the before, the during - and the after.' - Adam Courtenay, author of The Ship that Never Was Full of misadventure and mystery, Men Without Country is a sweeping history of exploration and rebellion in the South Seas - told by a direct descendant of Fletcher Christian, the man who led the infamous mutiny on the Bounty A mission to collect breadfruit from Tahiti becomes the most famous mutiny in history when the crew rise up against Captain William Bligh, with accusations of food restrictions and unfair punishments. Bligh's remarkable journey back to safety is well documented, but the fates of the mutinous men remain shrouded in mystery. Some settled in Tahiti only to face capture and court martial, others sailed on to form a secret colony on Pitcairn Island, the most remote inhabited island on earth, avoiding detection for twenty years. When an American captain stumbled across the island in 1808, only one of the Bounty mutineers was left alive. Told by a direct descendant of Fletcher Christian, Men Without Country details the journey of the Bounty, and the lives of the men aboard. Lives dominated by a punishing regime of hard work and scarce rations, and deeply divided by the hierarchy of class. It is a tale of adventure and exploration punctuated by moments of extreme violence - towards each other and the people of the South Pacific. For the first time, Christian provides a comprehensive and compelling account of the whole story - from the history of trade and exploration in the South Seas to Pitcairn Island, which provided the mutineers' salvation, and then became their grave.

Until 1939 the Maori people remained an almost wholly rural community, but during and after the second world war increasing numbers of them migrated in search of work to the cities, and urban groups of Maori were established. This development has significantly affected relationships, both between Maori and Europeans, and within the Maori people as a whole. The importance of Dr Metge's book lies in its presentation of a carefully documentd comparative study of two Maori communities, one in a traditional rural area and the other in Aukland, New Zealand's largest industrial centre. Housing and domestic organization, marriage patterns, kinship structure, voluntary associations and leadership in both types of community are discussed. The author's survey and conclusions make a valuable practical contribution to Maori social studies, and also have a bearing on the world-wide problem of the urbanisation of cultural minorities.

Music and World-Building in the Colonial City investigates how nineteenth-century migrants to Australia used music as a resource for world-building, focusing on coalmining regions of New South Wales. It explores how music-making helped British migrants to create communities in unfamiliar country, often with little to no infrastructure. Its key themes are as follows: people's relationships to music within specific contexts; how music-making intersects with class, gender and ethnic background; identity through music. Situated within a wider discourse on music and identity, music and well-being and music and emotions, this is an authoritative study of historical communities and their relationship with music. It will be of particular interest to scholars and researchers working in the fields of sociomusicology, colonial studies and cultural studies.

The war in the Middle East was a struggle between the Ottoman Turks, British, French and Russians for control of the lands and peoples held by the Ottoman Empire since the 1400s. Although known as the 'Sick Man of Europe', the empire still controlled significant parts of the Middle East. Intense diplomatic pressure from Germany culminated in a decision to join the Central Powers in October 1914. Russia had long coveted Ottoman territory, and the two empires clashed in the Caucasus. The Turks suffered a major defeat at Sarakamis, and their lack of success continued into 1916. However the Russian revolutions of 1917 led to the Russian forces in the area dissipating, and the following year the new Muslim-only 'Army of Islam' was sent to claim oil-rich Baku for the Turks, ousting the British-led defenders. In Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) the Ottoman defenders were at first defeated by the British, but General Townshend's decision to stay in Kut-al-Amara resulted in his eventual surrender in April 1916, a huge blow to Allied morale. The loss prompted the despatch of a much larger British force, and the subsequent capture of Baghdad and Mosul by the war's end. The persistent Ottoman threat to the Suez Canal led to the British offensive in Palestine. The capture of Jerusalem by General Allenby in 1917 was a welcome Christmas present for the Allies, while his subsequent victory at Megiddo, combined with the Arab Revolt inspired by Lawrence of Arabia, resulted in the capture of Damascus. However the defining struggle in this theatre was Gallipoli, the first time in over 200 years that Ottoman forces stood toe-to-toe with European troops and prevailed. The Gallipoli campaign had a profound effect not only on the Turks, but on the British, Australian and New Zealand troops who fought there, and marked the beginning of the end of European military supremacy in the region. With the aid of over 300 photographs, complemented by full-colour maps, Gallipoli and the Middle East provides a detailed guide to the background and conduct of World War I in all the theatres in which Ottoman forces were engaged.