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| ISBN-13: | 9780520960305 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 08/25/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 520 |
| File size: | 17 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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American History Unbound
Asians and Pacific Islanders
By Gary Y. Okihiro
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-96030-5
CHAPTER 1
OCEAN WORLDS
Many of us believe that the place of human habitation is land, and that the oceans form vast, uninhabited barriers between lands and peoples. Perhaps that belief arises from the longstanding human practice of turning to the interiors of the landmasses called continents to seek opportunities, possibilities, and even renewals. Related to this idea is U.S. history's "frontier hypothesis," whereby the inland frontier levels class distinctions and summons self-reliance, an independent spirit, rugged individualism, ingenuity in the face of adversity, and a democratic spirit. The frontier offers rebirth and the realization of the American dream.
Many of us, in addition, see continents as lands rich in resources, favoring the rise of great civilizations, whereas islands represent tiny, isolated, insignificant specks of land. Scientists apprehend enormous diversity on continents, from geological formations to plant and animal life forms, which move, interact, and change. They understand islands, in opposition, as places of isolation, like laboratories, in which geologies and organic communities are simpler and not inclined to change as much as on continents. Charles Darwin, accordingly, studied the processes of natural selection and evolution on Pacific islands unconcerned with complicating external factors, while Margaret Mead described Samoan life cycles and sexualities unperturbed by interactions with other peoples.
Islanders might offer a contrasting vision, in which the oceans are extensions of lived, worked, and imagined spaces. Land and water form continuities, not separations. Coastal peoples on larger landmasses can easily agree with that point of view. Oceans can inspire the imagination and beckon with the prospect of innovation and transformation. Pacific Islanders, as we will see, covered immense distances by island hopping, but they also saw their Oceania as encompassing places of production for sustenance, sacred spaces, homes for ancestors and divinities, and places for living and social relations.
Those representations of continents and islands involve intersecting concepts of race, gender, sexuality, class, and nation — the social formation. As inferior peoples, islanders are racialized as nonwhites; as small, confined spaces, islands signify women; as places where nature's abundance prevails, tropical islands exude unbridled, if not deviant sexualities; and as childlike peoples, islanders constitute a dependent class and conjure improbable nations. Those distinctions reveal the discursive power of continents over islands even as they exemplify how geographies, like the other elements of the social formation, are social constructs.
Continents, really, are also islands, surrounded as they are by water. The earth has but one ocean, which flows freely around the globe. Africa, Asia, and Europe form a single landmass, which the ancient Greeks called the "world island," and in the geologic past, America was a part of Africa. Islands and continents rise from the same tectonic plates. From the world's ocean emerged the Mediterranean, Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific worlds, whose waters formed conduits, not impediments, and sustained creativity, production, and systems of belief. Together, the earth's waters and lands make up a shared space on which humans map and materialize their diverse and dynamic worlds.
In this chapter, we steer a course away from land to examine the connections between land and water. Those affiliations produced ocean worlds. We consider islands as significant places and island peoples as active creators of those ocean worlds. Finally, we come to understand Asians and Pacific Islanders as historical agents working their waters and lands long before the advent of Europeans and their engulfing world-system. Pacific Islanders and Asians devised technologies that allowed them to sail the oceans; they created far-flung, long-distance trade networks and flows of goods and labor; and they spread and modified languages, religions, and cultures, producing ideological and material changes. Asian and Pacific Islander lives were never static; they were always in motion, like the waters.
ASIA
Asia is immense, diverse, and mobile. In Asia and Africa — notably Persia, Egypt, India, and China — people built societies around vast and complex systems of agriculture. Those civilizations arose in Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) and Egypt around 4000 B.C., in India around 3000 B.C., and in China around 2000 B.C. Their dominions expanded and contracted over time, and their peoples were a varied and mutable mix of indigenous folk and invaders. Their great rivers — Mesopotamia's Tigris and Euphrates, Egypt's Nile, India's Indus, and China's Yellow and Yangtze — and fertile valleys enabled the production of agricultural surpluses sufficient to feed the rise of cities and large-scale, complex social organizations.
Families were the basis of society, and social hierarchies were based on criteria such as class, gender, age, occupation, and education, which shifted from time to time. In most years, agricultural production provided sufficient food to sustain the population, though natural disasters such as floods, droughts, and plagues of locusts led to famines in which millions died. Grains like wheat (in the drier areas), rice, sorghum, and millet, along with buckwheat, beans, cabbage, eggplant, lentils, peas, peppers, squash, and taro, milk and milk products, fish, and chicken (native to Southeast Asia), supplied excellent nutrition. Spices, pickled vegetables, seaweeds, and fish sauces provided seasoning for otherwise bland staple starches, and specialists refined cuisines and devised distinctive food cultures.
Buddhism, which emerged in India at about the time of ancient Greece, linked India with Southeast Asia. Trade between the two regions also carried with it Hinduism and other aspects of Indian civilization. Conversion to Islam, which arose in modern-day Saudi Arabia in the seventh century A.D., connected diverse peoples, including Arabs, Africans, Persians, and Turks. It transformed philosophy, politics, jurisprudence, commerce, and art, which had been dominated by Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians until at least A.D. 1000. Muslim military states emerged and occupied key areas, such as the Mamluks in Egypt and Syria; the Safavids in Persia and Iraq; the Timurids in Central Asia, who later became the Mughals of India; and the Ottoman Empire in Turkey and the Balkans. Those states struggled over religious, commercial, and political power, but they also built empires, established public order, and promoted economic prosperity.
Islam was the vehicle for commerce between Muslim Arab and Indian traders and merchants, and the new religion made inroads as far east as the coast of China. Islam was especially appealing to peoples in Southeast Asia, including Indonesia and the Philippines, and many Islamic sultanates arose in that vast region of islands and seas. The people of Southeast Asia in turn influenced Islam, changing it into a religion that affirmed many of their pre-Islamic beliefs and cultures, such as greater gender equity; stressing Islam's tenet that all persons are equal before God; and modifying rules and observances governing diet, fasting, and prayer.
Centuries before the advent of Europeans, thus, Asians and Pacific Islanders created and inhabited ocean worlds in the waters later named by Europeans as the Indian and Pacific oceans. Their peoples, called "races" by Europeans, interacted and mixed without those distinctions.
THE INDIAN OCEAN WORLD
The Indian Ocean world, spanning the globe from eastern Africa to Asia, consisted of numerous coastal lands and peoples, who thrived on farming both land and sea. Because of the vagaries of the weather and agricultural production, the waters and their bounties may have provided a more reliable source of sustenance than the land.
On the western edge of the Indian Ocean world, maritime communities lined the East African coast, where a large portion of the population engaged in fishing and in trade for foods, raw materials, and articles not readily available locally. Exploitation of land and sea along those shores began between two thousand and three thousand years ago, and human activity there was noted in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea.
The Red Sea and Persian Gulf carved inroads from the Indian Ocean toward the Fertile Crescent, which stretched from Egypt through Syria to Mesopotamia. The waters of the Red Sea and Persian Gulf thereby connected the civilizations of the Indus River, the Tigris and Euphrates, and the Nile. Grains, cloth, pottery, ivory, resins, beads, and metal objects were among the commodities exchanged in maritime trade. These stimulated the growth of crafts and manufacturing, along with the development of specialists, merchants, and elites who handled and profited from the trade between Asia and Africa.
Refining their shipbuilding and navigational techniques over time, South Asian sailors navigated eastward to the sprawling network of islands in Southeast Asia and to Burma and Vietnam, introducing not only trade goods but also cultural and religious forms. In turn, Southeast Asian mariners in large outriggers journeyed westward, carrying Chinese and Southeast Asian commodities to entrepôts in southern India and the small islands of Sri Lanka. From those ports, Arabian and Persian ships took the goods to destinations in the Persian Gulf, Arabia, and the Mediterranean.
That long-distance maritime traffic helped to structure Asian and African social formations. Those material and cultural exchanges passed through port cities to reach far inland. Traders and then immigrants from Southeast Asia sailed to Madagascar, off the southeast coast of Africa, bringing important crops like yams, bananas, taro, and sugarcane, along with the chicken, while Arab and African sailors and traders settled in port cities on India's west coast. Cultures and languages remained distinct, but they also conducted transactions in a common language. Swahili, for instance, a language of the East African coast, is essentially of the African Bantu family but includes many loan words and structures from Arabic and Gujarati, a language of India.
While ancient Greece and Rome spun myths about a distant, desirable, exotic, and antagonistic Orient, for Asians Europe was not a destination of much interest. More important were the Indian Ocean and its circuits of goods, labor, and culture. The Mediterranean world, in fact, reached toward Asia as a supplicant: the Red Sea was a door to the Indian Ocean world.
By 1405, when the Ming Dynasty admiral Zhenghe left China for India, Arabia, and East Africa, the Indian Ocean trade was more than a thousand years old. Zhenghe's seven expeditions were notable for their scale and technological achievements and were probably the first systematic contacts between China and East Africa. For twenty-eight years, some sixty vessels, including the biggest ships ever built up to that time — four hundred feet long, with four decks, double hulls, and watertight compartments, and equipped with compasses and detailed sailing directions — plied the seas. They carried up to five hundred soldiers and cargoes of silk, porcelains, and other export goods, and they returned to China laden with spices, tropical hardwoods, giraffes, zebras, and ostriches. The voyages ended in 1433, perhaps because of their great expense, but they are a reminder that the Indian Ocean was alive with commerce long before the Portuguese finally rounded the Horn of Africa and entered the Indian Ocean, and then, with the help of African and Asian pilots, managed a landing in India in 1498.
THE PACIFIC OCEAN WORLD
Before the advent of humans, the Pacific was like the planet's other waters, unmarked and mingling indiscriminately with other bodies of water that were later named the Atlantic, Indian, Arctic, and Southern Oceans. In reality, Pacific waters are unbounded, flowing freely among other oceans and mixing with seas now named the Celebes, Coral, Japan, South China, Sulu, and Tasman, among others. Its major currents move in opposite directions north and south of the equator and are complicated by vertical convections. The Pacific can be mapped variously by its shrinking size — about an inch each year, due to plate tectonics — its fluctuating surface temperatures, its swirling winds, and its variant salinities, as well as its widely divergent topography of immense mountain ranges, called "chains," seamounts, and precipitously deep trenches. Its life forms, the most varied of all the planet's waters, offer another way of conceiving of the Pacific. Although plants and animals throughout the Pacific are related through recurrent migrations, they are also particular to specific habitats, such as the rich coral reefs in the ocean's tropical zone and the equally prolific kelp forests of its temperate zone.
Perhaps as long as one hundred thousand years ago, hunter-gatherers crossed the shallow seas from Southeast Asia to Indonesia, New Guinea, and Australia. As sea levels rose with the end of last glacial period, those peoples, speaking languages of the Austronesian family, developed maritime skills to travel among their island homes. (An alternative theory places the origin of Austronesian peoples on China's southern coast, associated with Hemudu culture some seven thousand years ago.)
One of those groups of Austronesian speakers, the Malayo-Polynesians, was particularly successful in migrating; some of them sailed westward about two thousand years ago to populate Madagascar and thereby people the Indian Ocean world. Others voyaged eastward into the Pacific and Oceania, which reaches from Southeast Asia to America. In that way, Austronesian speakers spanned over half the planet, bridged the worlds of the Indian and Pacific oceans, and gave rise to remarkably divergent cultures, from Malagasy in the far west to Hawaiian in the northeast.
The racial category Malay was created by the European taxonomer Blumenbach in 1795. In the 1830s, a French traveler, Jules Dumont d'Urville, created the arbitrary divisions and groupings of Pacific Islanders as Melanesians, Micronesians, and Polynesians, based on alleged skin color (Melanesians) and the size and numbers of islands (Micronesians and Polynesians). Although we retain these categories, the truth about those islanders, like that of the waters they inhabit, is far more complex, varied, and nuanced than those externally imposed classifications.
By 2000 B.C., Malayo-Polynesian single- and double-hulled sailing canoes, fitted with outriggers, were crossing the waters of Southeast Asia for trade and long-distance migration. Island hopping toward the rising sun, these Malayo-Polynesians settled in New Guinea around 1500 B.C. From there they spread into Melanesia and Micronesia, and around 1000 B.C. they arrived in western Polynesia. Throughout the Pacific, the people who came to inhabit a certain island or archipelago were not a single group of migrants but the result of multiple voyages from different directions.
Like the maritime peoples of the Indian Ocean world, the Polynesians built and improved on canoe technology and accumulated immense navigational knowledge of the sea, its currents, and the celestial bodies to steer their vessels to destinations known and unknown. From Tonga and Samoa in western Polynesia — the Polynesian homeland and center of further dispersion — they sailed eastward to the Marquesas and to Rapa Nui (Easter Island). As early as A.D. 300 they headed north to Hawai?i, crossing the equator to the Northern Hemisphere, where the location and arrangement of heavenly bodies appeared different from their familiar setting.
As they moved from island to island, they took with them linguistic, social, and religious ideas and practices, while also abandoning some and developing others. Cultures diffused but also interacted and modified in the engagement with other peoples and with different lands and seascapes.
The technologies required for this immense, global dispersal illustrate the complicated routes created and traveled by Pacific Islanders. For instance, many features of their canoes indicate an Indonesian origin, but they also exhibit local modifications and improvements. The initial groups of migrants from Indonesia, who settled in the western South Pacific, perhaps journeyed in square-sailed, double-outrigger canoes, whereas subsequent mariners, traveling in larger double canoes rigged with sails of a different design, settled in the islands of the eastern South Pacific.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from American History Unbound by Gary Y. Okihiro. Copyright © 2015 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
List of IllustrationsAcknowledgments
Introduction
PART I. WORLD HISTORY
1. Ocean Worlds
2. The World-System
3. The United States
4. Imperial Republic
PART 2. MIGRANT LABOR
5. Hawai'i
6. California
7. Northwest, Northeast, South, and North
PART 3. DEPENDENCY
8. Dependent Hawai'i
9. San Francisco
10. Seattle, New York City, Chicago
PART 4. WARS AND REALIGNMENTS
11. World War II
12. Militarized Zones
13. Global Transits
14. Regenerations
Notes
Index