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Traditionally, Germany has been considered a minor player in Pacific history: its presence there was more limited than that of other European nations, and whereas its European rivals established themselves as imperial forces beginning in the early modern era, Germany did not seriously pursue colonialism until the nineteenth century. Yet thanks to recent advances in the field emphasizing transoceanic networks and cultural encounters, it is now possible to develop a more nuanced understanding of the history of Germans in the Pacific. The studies gathered here offer fascinating research into German missionary, commercial, scientific, and imperial activity against the backdrop of the Pacific's overlapping cultural circuits and complex oceanic transits.
List of contents
List of Figures and Tables
Acknowledgments
Introduction: German Histories and Pacific Histories
Ulrike Strasser, Frank Biess, and Hartmut Berghoff
PART I: MISSIONARIES, EXPLORERS, AND KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER
Chapter 1. German Apothecaries and Botanists in Early Modern Indonesia, the Philippines and Japan
Raquel A. G. Reyes
Chapter 2. A Bohemian Mapmaker in Manila: Travels, Transfers, and Traces between the Pacific Ocean and Germans Lands
Ulrike Strasser
Chapter 3. German Naturalists in the Pacific Around 1800: Entanglement, Autonomy, and a Transnational Culture of Expertise
Andreas W. Daum
Chapter 4. Georg Wilhelm Steller and Carl Heinrich Merck: German Scientists in Russian Service as Explorers in the North Pacific in the Eighteenth Century
Kristina Küntzel-Witt
Chapter 5. Johann Reinhold Forster and the Ship Resolution as a Space of Knowledge Production
Anne Mariss
Chapter 6. Engineering Empire: German Influence on Chinese Industrialization, 1880–1925
Shellen Wu
PART II: EXPANSION, ENTANGLEMENTS, AND COLONIALISM IN THE LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY
Chapter 7. Expanding the Frontier(s): The Spreckels Family and the German-American Penetration of the Pacific, 1870–1920
Uwe Spiekermann
Chapter 8. Work and Non-Work in the “Paradise of the South Sea”: Samoa, cA. 1890–1914
Jürgen Schmidt
Chapter 9. German Women in the South Sea Colonies, 1884–1919
Livia Maria Rigotti
Chapter 10. Sacrifice, Heroism, Professionalization and Empowerment: Colonial New Guinea in the Lives of German Religious Women, 1899–1919
Katharina Stornig
Chapter 11. Rape, Indenture, and the Colonial Courts in German New Guinea
Emma Thomas
Chapter 12. The Trans-Pacific "Ghadar" Movement: The Role of the Pacific in the Indo-German Plot to Overthrow the British Empire during World War I
Douglas T. McGetchin
Chapter 13. The Vava’u Germans: History and Identity Construction of a Transcultural Community with Tongan and Pomeranian Roots
Reinhard Wendt
Epilogue: German Histories and Pacific Histories: New Directions
Matt Matsuda
Index
About the author
Hartmut Berghoff is Director of the Institute of Economic and Social History at the University of Göttingen in Germany. From 2008 to 2015, he was the director of the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC. He specializes in the histories of consumption, business, immigration, and modern Germany.
Frank Biess is Professor of Modern European History at the University of California-San Diego. His main areas of expertise are twentieth-century German history, the history of emotions, the history of wars and violence and their aftermaths, and transnational history.
Ulrike Strasser is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of California-San Diego. Her research focuses on early modern Central European history, religious history, gender and sexuality, early modern world history, and history and theory.
Summary
Traditionally, Germany has been considered a minor player in Pacific history: its presence there was more limited than that of other European nations, and whereas its European rivals established themselves as imperial forces beginning in the early modern era, Germany did not seriously pursue colonialism until the nineteenth century. Yet thanks to recent advances in the field emphasizing transoceanic networks and cultural encounters, it is now possible to develop a more nuanced understanding of the history of Germans in the Pacific. The studies gathered here offer fascinating research into German missionary, commercial, scientific, and imperial activity against the backdrop of the Pacific’s overlapping cultural circuits and complex oceanic transits.
Additional text
“Given the numerous and diverse case studies that the individual chapters examine, it is to the credit of the volume’s authors and editors that discrete themes are nonetheless clearly traceable throughout the work, the most interesting of these being the myriad and sometimes surprising ways in which Germany’s status as a relative ‘latecomer’ to nationhood and imperial expansion actually served not as a liability but rather as an advantage for German agents and interests.” • German History
“The book contains a wealth of detailed microstudies in defined social and spatial Pacific settings... The strength of the book lies in each and every author‘s meticulous analysis of sources along a strong actor-centered approach. This allows to show local and intercultural, but also global network entanglements which make a strong base for historical reasoning… this is an excellent, well-researched book which can be unreservedly recommended.” • Connections
“This volume represents a bold intervention in Pacific and German historiographies, one that encourages us to rethink central concepts and assumptions. All of its contributions are interesting, well-substantiated, and conversant with transnational developments in both fields.” • Rainer Buschmann, California State University Channel Islands
