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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Colonial Genocide has been seen increasingly as a stepping-stone to the European genocides of the twentieth century, yet it remains an under-researched phenomenon. This volume reconstructs instances of Australian genocide and for the first time places them in a global context. Beginning with the arrival of the British in 1788 and extending to the 1960s, the authors identify the moments of radicalization and the escalation of British violence and ethnic engineering aimed at the Indigenous populations, while carefully distinguishing between local massacres, cultural genocide, and genocide itself. These essays reflect a growing concern with the nature of settler society in Australia and in particular with the fate of the tens of thousands of children who were forcibly taken away from their Aboriginal families by state agencies. Long considered a relatively peaceful settlement, Australian society contained many of the pathologies that led to the exterminatory and eugenic policies of twentieth century Europe.

A book about the past and present Pacific Islands, wide-ranging in time and space spanning the centuries from the first settlement of the islands until the present day.

The Indian Ocean Rim Association for Regional Cooperation was formally established in 1997 under the leadership of South Africa, India and Australia. The demise of Apartheid, the fall of the Soviet empire, and the rapid advance of globalization altered the geopolitics of the Indian Ocean region in the early 1990s and served as a catalyst in the creation of the IOR. This book contextualizes the founding of the IOR by outlining the historical aspects of economic ties across the Indian Ocean and previous attempts to promote regional cooperation. The contributors to this volume analyse the post-colonial ideological legacy, the political and economic constraints caused by Apartheid and communism, the end of protectionism and the problem of globalization. These major themes in the history of the IOR are applied to what the future holds for Southern Africa within this economic grouping, and whether or not regional cooperation will manage to compete with globalization. This volume will be of interest to scholars of development studies, international relations, Third World studies, and regional development.

Spanning the late 18th century to the present, this volume explores new directions in imperial and postcolonial histories of conciliation, performance, and conflict between European colonizers and Indigenous peoples in Australia and the Pacific Rim, including Aotearoa New Zealand, Hawaii and the Northwest Pacific Coast. It examines cultural "rituals" and objects; the re-enactments of various events and encounters of exchange, conciliation and diplomacy that occurred on colonial frontiers between non-Indigenous and Indigenous peoples; commemorations of historic events; and how the histories of colonial conflict and conciliation are politicized in nation-building and national identities.

In 1938, the anthropologist Norman Tindale gave a classroom of young Aboriginal children a set of crayons and asked them to draw. The children, residents of the government-run Aboriginal station Cummeragunja, mostly drew pictures of aspects of white civilization boats, houses and flowers. What now to make of their artwork? Were the children encouraged or pressured to draw non-Aboriginal scenes, or did they draw freely, appropriating the white culture they now lived within? Did their Aboriginality change the meaning of their art, as they sketched out this ubiquitous colonial imagery? Australian Settler Colonialism and the Cummeragunja Aboriginal Station traces Cummeragunja's history from its establishment in the 1880s to its mass walk-off in 1939 and finally, to the 1960s, when its residents regained greater control over the land. Taking in oral history traditions, the author reveals the competing interests of settler governments, scientific and religious organizations, and nearby settler communities. The nature of these interests has broad and important implications for understanding settler colonial history. This history shows white people set boundaries on Aboriginal behaviour and movement, through direct legislation and the provision of opportunities and acceptance. But Aboriginal people had agency within and, at times, beyond these limits. Aboriginal people appropriated aspects of white culture including the houses, the flowers and the boats that their children drew for Tindale - reshaping them into new tools for Aboriginal society, tools with which to build lives and futures in a changed environment.

This book contributes to the global turn in First World War studies by exploring Australians' engagements with the conflict across varied boundaries and by situating Australian voices and perspectives within broader, more complex contexts. This diverse and multifaceted collection includes chapters on the composition and contribution of the Australian Imperial Force, the experiences of prisoners of war, nurses and Red Cross workers, the resonances of overseas events for Australians at home, and the cultural legacies of the war through remembrance and representation. The local-global framework provides a fresh lens through which to view Australian connections with the Great War, demonstrating that there is still much to be said about this cataclysmic event in modern history.

Through a literary lens, Neoliberalism and Cultural Transition in New Zealand Literature, 1984-2008: Market Fictions examines the ways in which the reprise of market-based economics has impacted the forms of social exchange and cultural life in a settler-colonial context. Jennifer Lawn proposes that postcolonial literary studies needs to take more account of the way in which the new configuration of dominance-increasingly gathered under the umbrella term of neoliberalism-works in concert with, rather than against, assertions of cultural identity on the part of historically subordinated groups. The pre-eminence of new right economics over the past three decades has raised a conundrum for writers on the left: while neoliberalism has tended to undermine collective social action, it has also fostered expressions of identity in the form of "cultural capital" which minority communities can exploit for economic gain. Neoliberalism and Cultural Transition in New Zealand Literature, 1984-2008 advocates for reading practices that balance the appeals of culture against the structuring forces of social class and the commodification of identity, while not losing sight of the specific aesthetic qualities of literary fiction. Jennifer Lawn demonstrates the value of this approach in a wide-ranging account of New Zealand literature. Movements towards decolonization in a bicultural society are read within the context of a marginal post-industrial economy that was, in many ways, a test case for radical free market reforms. Through a study of politically-engaged writing across a range of genres by both Maori and non-Maori authors, the New Zealand experience shows in high relief the twinned dynamics of a decline in the ideal of social egalitarianism and the corresponding rise of the idea of culture as a transformative force in economic and civic life, tending ultimately to blur the distinction between these spheres altogether. This work includes well-recognized authors such as Alan Duff, Patricia Grace, Witi Ihimaera, Eleanor Catton and Maurice Gee, but also introduces a number of non-canonical or emergent writers whose work is discussed in detail for the first time in this volume. The result is a distinctive literary history of a turbulent period of social and economic change.

Germans in Tonga is the culmination of an eight-year research project in which the author and his team of researchers gathered biographical material on Germans in Tonga. There are four main sources: the British Consul Tonga files, held in the Western Pacific Archives of the University of Auckland Library Special Collections; the Defence Department Enemy Aliens files and Aliens Records held at Archives New Zealand in Wellington; the Archives of the German Foreign Office (Auswartiges Amt) in Berlin; and the Ministry of Justice Archives in Nuku'alofa, Tonga. The volume contains short biographies of over 350 Germans in Tonga born over a 110-year period between 1822 and 1932 and features an introduction by the author on the historical background to the German connection with Tonga.

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. -- .

The Australian Army from Whitlam to Howard is the first critical examination of Australia's post-Vietnam military operations, spanning the 35 years between the election of Gough Whitlam and the defeat of John Howard. John Blaxland explores the 'casualty cringe' felt by political leaders following the war and how this impacted subsequent operations. He contends that the Australian Army's rehabilitation involved common individual and collective training and reaffirmation of the Army's regimental and corps identities. He shows how the Army regained its confidence to play leading roles in East Timor, Bougainville and the Solomon Islands, and to contribute to combat operations further afield. At a time when the Australian Army's future strategic role are the subject of much debate, and as the 'Asian Century' gathers pace and commitment in Afghanistan draws to an end, this work is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the modern context of Australia's military land force.

The Chinese Hsinhai Revolution explores and explains for the first time the important role of G. E. Morrison in great power diplomacy in China from the end of the Russo-Japanese War to the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty. The work is based on a wide range of multinational scholarly sources and in order to develop the context in which Morrison carried out his personal diplomacy and to delineate the many-sided story into which Morrison has to be placed, Woodhouse has in addition to mining the very rich Morrison collection, drawn upon British, Japanese and American personal and official materials.

Australians have been making pilgrimages to the battlefields and cemeteries of World War Two since the 1940s, from the jungles of New Guinea and South-East Asia to the mountains of Greece and the deserts of North Africa. They travel in search of the stories of lost loved ones, to mourn the dead and to come to grips with the past. With characteristic empathy, Bruce Scates charts the history of pilgrimages to Crete, Kokoda, Sandakan and Hellfire Pass. He explores the emotional resonance that these sites have for those who served and those who remember. Based on surveys, interviews, extensive fieldwork and archival research, Anzac Journeys offers insights into the culture of loss and commemoration and the hunger for meaning so pivotal to the experience of pilgrimage. Richly illustrated with full-colour maps and photographs from the 1940s to today, Anzac Journeys makes an important and moving contribution to Australian military history.

Baby booms have a long history. In 1870, colonial Melbourne was 'perspiring juvenile humanity' with an astonishing 42 per cent of the city's inhabitants aged 14 and under - a demographic anomaly resulting from the gold rushes of the 1850s. Within this context, Simon Sleight enters the heated debate concerning the future prospects of 'Young Australia' and the place of the colonial child within the incipient Australian nation. Looking beyond those institutional sites so often assessed by historians of childhood, he ranges across the outdoor city to chart the relationship between a discourse about youth, youthful experience and the shaping of new urban spaces. Play, street work, consumerism, courtship, gang-related activities and public parades are examined using a plethora of historical sources to reveal a hitherto hidden layer of city life. Capturing the voices of young people as well as those of their parents, Sleight alerts us to the ways in which young people shaped the emergent metropolis by appropriating space and attempting to impress upon the city their own desires. Here a dynamic youth culture flourished well before the discovery of the 'teenager' in the mid-twentieth century; here young people and the city grew up together.

In 1945 a joint committee of the US Senate and House of Representatives was appointed to investigate and hear testimony from a variety of military and civilian leaders about the attack on Pearl Harbor. Brought together here is a cross-section of the relevant testimony from the Congressional committee's 39-volume report. Witnesses recount events leading up to the war, American espionage efforts, the failure of radar, the penetration of the Japanese diplomatic codes, and the performance of the military.

The Napoleonic era was a period of major transition. During this time, the explorer Nicolas Baudin made a voyage to Australia and made an unscheduled stop in Sydney where he restructured the expedition. Starbuck examines Baudin's captainship, life on board the ship, the details of the stop in Port Jackson, and the 'new voyage' that followed.

Why should anyone outside New Zealand be interested in Maori history? Because it is rich in documents that recapitulate five hundred years of European imperial expansion and the responses to it by indigenous peoples. British humanitarians tried to avoid in New Zealand the tragic mistakes the Crown made in Australia, where aboriginal tribes were nearly exterminated in some cases and severely marginalized in others.

The Maori "history of struggle" is unique only in its relative success. The British enterprise of colonization and Christianization stimulated the formation of Maori renewal movements to hold fast to their threatened land. The study of these movements elucidates how human beings in general use the sacred to bridge the abyss between old and new worlds during the trauma of invasion and why people turn to religion as a paramount means of salvation from despair.

The Island Broken in Two Halves examines three related prophet movements within a framework that examines their fundamentally religious features. The King Movement envisioned a Maori polity governed by "religion, law, and love." It fueled the drive for unity that animates the twentieth-century Maori sovereignty movement. The Pai Marire cult sprang up in the wake of the first mid-nineteenth-century land war and swept rapidly across the North Island, igniting fears of a native rebellion. Out of the ashes of Pai Marire rose the Ringatu church, founded by a charismatic prophet who was marked by a "sign of discord." After his death, a Ringatu messiah predicted that a millennial king would return confiscated land to the impoverished tribes. Together, these movements formed a "Spirit tradition" with a unique hermeneutics that challenged the hegemony of European settlers.

Using Australian history as a case study, this collection explores the ways national identities still resonate in historical scholarship and reexamines key moments in Australian history through a transnational lens, raising important questions about the unique context of Australia's national narrative. The book examines the tension between national and transnational perspectives, attempting to internationalize the often parochial nation-based narratives that characterize national history. Moving from the local and personal to the global, encompassing comparative and international research and drawing on the experiences of researchers working across nations and communities, this collection brings together diverging national and transnational approaches and asks several critical research questions: What is transnational history? How do new transnational readings of the past challenge conventional national narratives and approaches? What are implications of transnational and international approaches on Australian history? What possibilities do they bring to the discipline? What are their limitations? And finally, how do we understand the nation in this transnational moment?

This book traces the history of working people who helped established the foundation of the American empire in the Pacific from its origins after the American Revolution to its coming of age in the 1840s and 1850s. Beginning with the expeditions of the Columbia and the Lady Washington, Lampe argues that the early American Pacific can best be considered through the interaction of four major locations, connected through the networks of trade: the merchant ship, the Northwest Coast, Honolulu, and Canton (Guangzhou). In each of these locations, the labors of a diverse population of working people was harnessed in the critical labors of empire building, including the transportation of goods. The central question that the consideration of working people in the Pacific economy during this period is, Lampe argues, the role of power applied on these laborers by an international capitalist class, emerging alongside the Pacific commercial empires. Lampe also finds that this power was not uncontested and emerged in response to the activities of labor. Working people, on the ship and in the port cities, found ways to secure their piece of the profitable trade, often through illicit means.