Five months after uploading Chapter 1, the third chapter of my South Pacific history series has gone up on the site. Called “Pulled Into the Modern World,” it covers the history of the region from 1781 to 1914 A.D. Now that the Pacific Ocean has been mapped out, we see merchants and hunters come into the region to make a profit, and missionaries convert most of the native population to Christianity. After them came the diplomats and armed forces of Europe and and the United States, to carve up the Pacific into colonies, the way the colonial powers had already partitioned Africa and much of Asia a few years earlier. In the case of Australia, New Zealand and Hawaii, this also was a time when white immigrants colonized the land, and eventually displaced the natives. Finally at the end of this period, we see Australia and New Zealand become independent members of the British Commonwealth, the first step toward the creation of independent nations elsewhere in this region.
I must admit that once I threw in what I found from my research, this chapter grew to be much larger than I expected. I didn’t realize until I got into the writing, how many stories needed to be told about the exploration of the Australian outback, or how long the Maori resisted the white invasion of New Zealand. While this chapter isn’t as long as some of the chapters I wrote in the past few years, for North and South America, it is certainly longer than the first two chapters in the South Pacific series. Those chapters I uploaded in one piece, while I divided Chapter 3 into four parts to make it easier to manage. Therefore you now have the full story of how the Pacific islands, which had been isolated for most of history, became fully connected to the world community; except for a few spots like New Guinea, they won’t be primitive backwaters when I write about them in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
But enough talking. Click on one of the purple links labeled Parts I through IV to read the latest addition to The Xenophile Historian’s story of mankind:
Chapter 3: Pulled Into the Modern World
1781 to 1914
Part I
Botany Bay
Mutiny on the Bounty
New Holland Becomes Australia
The Impact of Western Contact
The Traders and Whalers
Unrest In the Islands
Kamehameha the Great
Australia Developing
The Last of the Tasmanians
Part II
Britain Claims New Zealand
The Tahitian Kingdom
A French Foothold on New Caledonia
The Maori Wars
The Kingdom of Hawaii
There’s Gold Down Under . . .
. . . And in New Zealand, Too
Part III
Tonga: The Restored Monarchy
Cakobau Unites and Delivers Fiji to Britain
The Unification and Division of Samoa
Taming the Outback
Part IV
Dividing What’s Left
Hawaii, USA
America’s Imperialist Adventure
Australia: Six Colonies = One Commonwealth
New Zealand Follows a Different Drummer
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