Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire

Title: Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire
Author: Nicholas Thomas
ISBN: 9780300180565
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2012
Binding: Paperback
Language: English
Condition: Used: Near Fine
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F 1498844

Publisher Description:

An incisive, evocative history of the experience of empire in the Oceanic world

This compelling book explores the lived experience of empire in the Pacific, the last region to be contacted and colonized by Europeans following the great voyages of Captain Cook. Unlike conventional accounts that emphasize confrontation and the destruction of indigenous cultures, Islanders reveals there was gain as well as loss, survival as well as suffering, and invention as well as exploitation.

Empowered by imaginative research in obscure archives and collections, Thomas rediscovers a rich and surprising history of encounters, not only between Islanders and Europeans, but among Islanders, brought together in new ways by explorers, missionaries, and colonists. He tells the story of the making of empire, not through an impersonal survey, but through vivid stories of the lives of men and women--some visionary, some vicious, and some just eccentric--and through sensuous evocation of seascapes and landscapes of the Pacific. A fascinating re-creation of an Oceanic world, Islanders offers a new paradigm, not only for histories of the Pacific, but for understandings of cultural contact everywhere.