This book relates the development of Anglo-Australian-New Zealand relations during and immediately after World War II to the role of the US in the Southwest Pacific. Based on the results of comprehensive multi-archival research, the book highlights the extent of American-Commonwealth rivalry in the region and following the crisis of late 1941 and early 1942 demonstrates how the reforging of imperial links was shaped by the expansion of American power in Pacific areas south of the equator. It provides an important and timely reassessment of the economic, political, and strategic factors that led Britain, Australia, and New Zealand to conclude that the postwar affairs of the Southwest Pacific should be dominated by the British Empire.

Imperial spaces takes two of the most influential minority groups of white settlers in the British Empire - the Irish and the Scots - and explores how they imagined themselves within the landscapes of its farthest reaches, the Australian colonies of Victoria and New South Wales. Using letters and diaries as well as records of collective activities such as committee meetings, parades and dinners, the book examines how the Irish and Scots built new identities as settlers in the unknown spaces of Empire. Utilizing critical geographical theories of 'place' as the site of memory and agency, it considers how Irish and Scots settlers grounded their sense of belonging in the imagined landscapes of south-east Australia. Imperial spaces is relevant to academics and students interested in the history and geography of the British Empire, Australia, Ireland and Scotland. -- .

This is a pathbreaking comparative and trans-national study of the neglected influences of nation, empire and race upon the development and electoral fortunes of the Labour Party in Britain and the Australian Labor Party from their formative years of the 1900s to the elections of 2010. Based upon extensive primary and secondary source-based research in Britain and Australia over several years, it makes a new and original contribution to the fields of labour, imperial and 'British world' history. The book offers the challenging conclusion that the forces of nation, empire and race exerted much greater influence upon Labour politics in both countries than suggested by 'traditionalists' and 'revisionists' alike. The book will appeal to undergraduates, postgraduates, scholars in history and politics and all those interested in and concerned with the past, present and future of Labour politics in Britain, Australia and more generally. -- .

This book is about Australian aircrew in Europe during World War II and draws on extensive field research, including over two hundred interviews with survivors. The fact that the Australians were spread so widely across so many squadrons has contributed to substantial oversights, both in the official histories and in the literature on the field. Flyers Far Away redresses this imbalance and accords those largely forgotten Australian airmen a rightful place in the history of the European air war. Flyers Far Away describes how so many Australian airmen ended up in Western Europe fighting an Allied cause, in one of the bloodiest and most unforgiving campaigns of the Second World War. Using first-hand accounts from the surviving airmen, it traces their path from recruitment in Australia to operations over the Third Reich and Axis territories. For the first time, the exploits of all Australian aircrew, in Fighter, Bomber, Coastal and Tactical Air Force Commands are brought together in one volume.

The term Polynesia refers to a cultural and geographical area in the Pacific Ocean, bound by what is commonly referred to as the Polynesian Triangle, which consists of Hawai'i in the north, New Zealand in the southwest, and Easter Island in the southeast. Thousands of islands are scattered throughout this area, most of which are currently included in one of the modern island states of American Samoa, Cook Islands, French Polynesia, Hawai'i, New Zealand, Samoa, Tonga, Tokelau, Tuvalu, and Wallis and Futuna. The third edition of the Historical Dictionary of Polynesia greatly expands on the previous editions through a chronology, an introductory essay, an expansive bibliography, and over 400 cross-referenced dictionary entries on significant persons, events, places, organizations, and other aspects of Polynesian history from the earliest times to the present. Appendixes of the major islands and atolls within Polynesia, the rulers and administrators of the 13 major island states, and basic demographic information of those states are also included.

Australia's Prime Minister and premier diplomat in the 1930/1940s, this new biography presents him as a consistent internationalist and places him in a global context. Stanley Melbourne Bruce was at the centre of Imperial politics for more than two decades from the early 1920s until the end of the Second World War. This new biography presents Bruce as a consistent internationalist. Educated in Melbourne and Cambridge, Bruce, as a businessman, was alive to the importance of international commerce, and particularly Anglo-Australian trade. This lay at the core of his internationalism, which took the form in the 1920s of encouraging the political and economic integration of the British Empire. Bruce's punitive treatment of militant Australian trade unionists and his upholding of constitutionalism and law and order in the 1920s was part of an effort to defend one form of internationalism, commitment to the British Empire, against the competing international ideology of communism. While continuing to support a unified British Empire acting as a progressive force in world affairs, Bruce championed stronger international collaboration through the League of Nations and the United Nations and through cooperation between the Empire and the United States.

This book examines the distinctive aspects that insiders and outsiders perceived as characteristic of Irish and Scottish ethnic identities in New Zealand. When, how, and why did Irish and Scots identify themselves and others in ethnic terms? What characteristics did the Irish and the Scots attribute to themselves and what traits did others assign to them? Did these traits change over time and if so how? Contemporary interest surrounding issues of ethnic identities is vibrant. In countries such as New Zealand, descendants of European settlers are seeking their ethnic origins, spurred on in part by factors such as an ongoing interest in indigenous genealogies, the burgeoning appeal of family history societies, and the booming financial benefits of marketing ethnicities abroad. This fascinating book will appeal to scholars and students of the history of empire and the construction of identity in settler communities, as well as those interested in the history of New Zealand. -- .

This clear and nuanced introduction explores the Philippines' ongoing and deeply charged dilemma of state-society relations through a historical treatment of state formation and the corresponding conflicts and collaboration between government leaders and social forces. Patricio N. Abinales and Donna J. Amoroso examine the long history of institutional weakness in the Philippines and the varied strategies the state has employed to overcome its structural fragility and strengthen its bond with society. The authors argue that this process reflects the country's recurring dilemma: on the one hand is the state's persistent inability to provide essential services, guarantee peace and order, and foster economic development; on the other is the Filipinos' equally enduring suspicions of a strong state. To many citizens, this powerfully evokes the repression of the 1970s and the 1980s that polarized society and cost thousands of lives in repression and resistance and billions of dollars in corruption, setting the nation back years in economic development and profoundly undermining trust in government. The book's historical sweep starts with the polities of the pre-colonial era and continues through the first year of Rodrigo Duterte's controversial presidency.

This clear and nuanced introduction explores the Philippines' ongoing and deeply charged dilemma of state-society relations through a historical treatment of state formation and the corresponding conflicts and collaboration between government leaders and social forces. Patricio N. Abinales and Donna J. Amoroso examine the long history of institutional weakness in the Philippines and the varied strategies the state has employed to overcome its structural fragility and strengthen its bond with society. The authors argue that this process reflects the country's recurring dilemma: on the one hand is the state's persistent inability to provide essential services, guarantee peace and order, and foster economic development; on the other is the Filipinos' equally enduring suspicions of a strong state. To many citizens, this powerfully evokes the repression of the 1970s and the 1980s that polarized society and cost thousands of lives in repression and resistance and billions of dollars in corruption, setting the nation back years in economic development and profoundly undermining trust in government. The book's historical sweep starts with the polities of the pre-colonial era and continues through the first year of Rodrigo Duterte's controversial presidency.

The Philippines belong to one of the most rapidly developing parts of the world, and it is impossible to understand Asia without it. This second edition, a greatly expanded and updated version of the first, is essential reading for those interested in Asia, as well as the millions of Filipinos who have made their homes abroad. The A to Z of the Philippines provides more than 400 hundred entries on important persons, places, events, and institutions, as well as salient economic, social and cultural aspects. The more than four centuries of the Philippines history covered by Guillermo, including the periods of Spanish and American dominance over the country, is neatly wrapped up in an introduction, clearly laid out in a chronology, complemented with statistical data in the appendix, and concluded with a bibliography allowing further research and study.

From 2011 to 2014, the Australian Generations Oral History Project recorded 300 interviews with Australians born between 1920 and 1989. The contributions to this book, a result of this project, reflect on the practice of oral history and how interviews can illuminate Australian social and cultural history. Three of the chapters consider oral history innovations: focusing on the potential for oral history in a digital age, the pioneering technologies that underpinned Australian Generations and the ethical issues posed by online digital oral history, and the challenges and opportunities for radio oral history. In addition, four chapters demonstrate how oral history interviews can be used as rich evidence for historical research: examining the interconnections between class, social equity, and higher education in post-war Australia; how life histories can transform understandings of mental ill-health; considering how oral history interviews with Australians of all ages confound stereotypical notions about generations; and investigating the ways in which family relationships mediate identities and how remembered places and objects provide points of anchor in a rapidly changing world. This book was originally published as a special issue of Australian Historical Studies.

In the first half of the twentieth century, a diverse community of Australians settled in Shanghai. There they forged a 'China trade', circulating goods, people and ideas across the South China Sea, from Shanghai and Hong Kong to Sydney and Melbourne. This trade has been largely forgotten in contemporary Australia, where future economic ties trump historical memory when it comes to popular perceptions of China. After the First World War, Australians turned to Chinese treaty ports, fleeing poverty and unemployment, while others sought to 'save' China through missionary work and socialist ideas. Chinese Australians, disillusioned by Australian racism under the White Australia Policy, arrived to participate in Chinese nation building and ended up forging business empires which survive to this day. This book follows the life trajectories of these Australians, providing a means by which we can address one of the pervading tensions of race, empire and nation in the twentieth century: the relationship between working-class aspirations for social mobility and the exclusionary and discriminatory practices of white settler societies.

The first Europeans to settle on the Aboriginal land that would become known as Australia arrived in 1788. From the first these colonists were accused of ineptitude when it came to feeding themselves: as legend has it they nearly starved to death because they were hopeless agriculturists and ignored indigenous foods. As the colony developed Australians developed a reputation as dreadful cooks and uncouth eaters who gorged themselves on meat and disdained vegetables. By the end of the nineteenth century the Australian diet was routinely described as one of poorly cooked mutton, damper, cabbage, potatoes and leaden puddings all washed down with an ocean of saccharine sweet tea: These stereotypes have been allowed to stand as representing Australia's colonial food history. Contemporary Australians have embraced 'exotic' European and Asian cuisines and blended elements of these to begin to shape a distinctive "Australian" style of cookery but they have tended to ignore, or ridicule, what they believe to be the terrible English cuisine of their colonial ancestors largely because of these prevailing negative stereotypes. The Colonial Kitchen: Australia 1788- 1901 challenges the notion that colonial Australians were all diabolical cooks and ill-mannered eaters through a rich and nuanced exploration of their kitchens, gardens and dining rooms; who was writing about food and what their purpose might have been; and the social and cultural factors at play on shaping what, how and when they at ate and how this was represented.

This is the first international study of maternal care and maternal mortality. Over the last two hundred years, different countries developed quite different systems of maternal care. Death in Childbirth is a meticulously researched analysis, firmly grounded in the available statistics, of the evolution of those systems between 1800 and 1950 in Britain, the USA, Australia and New Zealand, and on the continent of Europe. Irvine Loudon examines the effectiveness of various forms of maternal care by means of the measurement of maternal mortality - the number of women who died as a result of childbirth. His scholarly and comprehensive study sets out to answer a number of important questions. What was the relative risk of a home or hospital delivery, or a delivery by a midwife as opposed to a doctor? What was the safest country in which to have a baby, and what were the factors which accounted for enormous international differences? Why, against all expectations, did maternal mortality fail to decline significantly until the late 1930s? Death in Childbirth makes an invaluable contribution to medical and social history.

This book provides a rigorous and cross-disciplinary analysis of this Melanesian nation at a critical juncture in its post-colonial and post-conflict history, with contributions from leading scholars of Solomon Islands. The notion of 'transition' as used to describe the recent drawdown of the decade-long Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) provides a departure point for considering other transformations - social, political and economic -under way in the archipelagic nation. Organised around a central tension between change and continuity, two of the book's key themes are the contested narratives of changing state-society relations and the changing social relations around land and natural resources engendered by ongoing processes of globalisation and urbanisation. Drawing heuristically on RAMSI's genesis in the 'state- building moment' that dominated international relations during the first decade of this century, the book also examines the critical distinction between 'state-building' and 'state formation' in the Solomon Islands context. It engages with global scholarly and policy debates on issues such as peacebuilding, state-building, legal pluralism, hybrid governance, globalisation, urbanisation and the governance of natural resources. These themes resonate well beyond Solomon Islands and Melanesia, and the book will be of interest to a wide range of students, scholars and development practitioners. This book was previously published as a special issue of The Journal of Pacific History.

A Decent Provision is a narrative history of how and why Australia built a distinctive welfare regime in the period from the 1870s to 1949. At the beginning of this period, the Australian colonies were belligerently insisting they must not have a Poor Law, yet had reproduced many of the systems of charitable provision in Britain. By the start of the twentieth century, a combination of extended suffrage, basic wage regulation and the aged pension had led to a reputation as a 'social laboratory'. And yet half a century later, Australia was a 'welfare laggard' and the Labor Party's welfare state of the mid-1940s was a relatively modest and parsimonious construction. Models of welfare based on social insurance had been vigorously rejected, and the Australian system continued on a path of highly residual, targeted welfare payments. The book explains this curious and halting trajectory, showing how choices made in earlier decades constrained what could be done, and what could be imagined. Based on extensive new research from a variety of primary sources it makes a significant contribution to general historical debates, as well as to the field of comparative social policy.

This book examines the role of the international community in the handover of the Dutch colony of West Papua/Irian Jaya to Indonesia in the 1960s and questions whether or not the West Papuan people ever genuinely exercised the right to self-determination guaranteed to them in the UN-brokered Dutch/Indonesian agreement of 1962. Indonesian, Dutch, US, Soviet, Australian and British involvement is discussed, but particular emphasis is given to the central part played by the United Nations in the implementation of this agreement. As guarantor, the UN temporarily took over the territory's administration from the Dutch before transferring control to Indonesia in 1963. After five years of Indonesian rule, a UN team returned to West Papua to monitor and endorse a controversial act of self-determination that resulted in a unanimous vote by 1022 Papuan 'representatives' to reject independence. Despite this, the issue is still very much alive today as a crisis-hit Indonesia faces continued armed rebellion and growing calls for freedom in West Papua.

This is the first in-depth study of the sojourn in Sydney made by Nicolas Baudin's scientific expedition to Australia in 1802. Starbuck focuses on the reconstruction of the voyage during the expedition's stay in colonial Sydney and how this sheds new light on our understanding of French society, politics and science in the era of Bonaparte.

During World War II the Solomon Islands became the scene of a titanic struggle between Allied and Japanese forces. After their victory on Guadalcanal, American forces advanced into the New Georgia Group and suffered horrendous casualties. Admiral Halsey then implemented an "island hopping" strategy, by-passing Japanese strongpoints. The first occasion he used this was on an obscure island called "Vella Lavella". This book is the first detailed examination of the struggle for Vella Lavella covering the ground, air and sea battles and the involvement of American and New Zealand soldiers, the coast watchers, South Pacific Scouts and the Islanders.

This book is the first concise account of the history of the Fiji islands from the beginning of human settlement to the early years of the 21st century. Its primary focus is on the period since the advent of colonial rule in the late 19th century to the present, benefiting from the author's internationally acknowledged expertise as a scholar and writer on the Fijian past. Besides factual information, the book also offers a scholarly assessment of the people and events which have shaped Fiji's history. The Historical Dictionary of Fiji contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 300 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Fiji.

In the past decades historians have interpreted early modern Christian missions not simply as an adjunct to Western imperialism, but a privileged field for cross-cultural encounters. Placing the Jesuit missions into a global phenomenon that emphasizes economic and cultural relations between Europe and the East, this book analyzes the possibilities and limitations of the religious conversion in the Micronesian islands of Guahan (or Guam) and the Northern Marianas. Frontiers are not rigid spatial lines separating culturally different groups of people, but rather active agents in the transformation of cultures. By bringing this local dimension to the fore, the book adheres to a process of missionary "glocalization" which allowed Chamorros to enter the international community as members of Spain's regional empire and the global communion of the Roman Catholic Church.

Nineteen ninety-five is a year of celebration and remembrance of the Axis collapse that signaled the end of the Second World War. In August, the world will mark the 50th anniversary of V-J Day. Particularly important, then, is this new historical study o the Pacific phase of World War War II that coers not just the military, but also the political side of the war. Rejecting recent trends that tend to whitewash or demonize the Japanese, this book casts new light on many controversial issues from Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima. It treats the submarine campaign, the air attacks on Japan, the use of the atomic bombs, and Japan's surrender in unusual detail. Finally, it emphasizes that the war was primarily a struggle for the air and sea.