Asia America?

In its January 2005 issue, the online history journal Common-place runs a set of articles which strive to write an American history of the Pacific Ocean. It's a noble goal, and collectively the pieces do offer a backdrop to that amazing Fed-Ex receipt I have somewhere, the one that shows how my iPod left Shanghai on one day, arrived in Anchorage the next, and then made it to me in Minneapolis on the third. Then, silver and silk. Now, consumer electronics.

I thought five of the essays were especially good. John Demos' "Viewpoints on the Pacific Trade" is a set of typically impressionistic and novelistic sketches on post-1792 Americans' trading ventures in the Pacific, from seal-hunting in Alaska to silk buying in China. Peter Conclanis' "Pacific Overtures" examines the idea of the Pacific as "Spanish lake" by describing the "Manila galleon," the Spanish silver ships which shuttled silver from Acapulco to Manila and brought Chinese goods like silk back. (Here's more on the largest Manila galleon and more on Spanish maritime activities.) Their fabulous wealth drew the attention of other imperial powers, including Britain, which ultimately expanded its global empire into the Pacific and Indian oceans. Paul Mapp's "Silver, Science, and Routes to the West" explains how Imperial France's Pacific policy created huge wealth but also contributed to the coming of the Seven Year's War by generating imperial competition in the Pacific and led to France's cession of Louisiana to Spain after a water passage to the Pacific eluded explorers. Two good pieces - June Namias' "First Meetings in the North Pacific" and Gwenn Miller's "Russian Routes" - describe Russia's push into the North Pacific, including present-day Alaska, British Columbia, and California. This pair of articles do the best job of showing how the the Pacific Coast is effectively continuous from China and Kamchatka to the Aleutians and California. They also tell familiarly brutal stories of contact between Europeans and natives which happened to have occurred in the Northeast Pacific, not the Northwest Atlantic.

Cumulatively, the articles approach but do not quite achieve the goal of writing American history from a Pacific perspective (thus complementing the "Atlantic World" history so en vogue right now). They do make a good start in that direction, though, and all present interesting, accessible historical narratives that, in combination, also offer good perspectives on what Coclanis calls "the West's fixation on the Pacific Rim today."