The Pacific is a constantly shifting domain of cultures, encounters, and natural phenomena. As such, histories of the Pacific are marked by transits, circuits, and displacements, both intentional and unintentional. By sketching out examples from the sailing voyages of the open-ocean canoe Hokule‘a, to the enslavement of a South Asian woman transported on the Spanish galleons, to the Australian government’s contested policy for dealing with seaborne refugees, to the challenges posed to low-lying islands by rising sea levels, we see how peoples in motion underscore so much of global history.
Matt Matsuda is a professor of history at Rutgers University, where he teaches Modern European and Asia-Pacific/Global-Comparative histories. He is the series co-editor of the multivolume Palgrave Studies in Pacific History with Bronwen Douglas of the Australian National University and is currently studying the ways that microhistorical approaches to scholarship can be integrated with world and global histories. E-mail: matt.matsuda@rutgers.edu