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Project summary
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Sea and ocean basins increasingly attract historians interested in broadening their spatial frameworks of analysis beyond the borders of the nation-state. The ocean figures as a space of connection in these studies, a pathway rather than a barrier. Maritime optics have shed productive light on processes of political, commercial and cultural exchange across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans and the Mediterranean Sea. To date, the 'oceanic turn' in the humanities has had less impact in the South Pacific basin. These maritime realities were taken for granted by indigenous islanders in the pre-colonial period. The first Europeans who entered these waters brought their own maritime traditions with them. Yet we have found it somewhat harder to conceive of the centrality of the ocean and inter-island connectivity in the 'settled' colonial period, despite the burgeoning literature on the mobile, spatial practices of empire. In ‘Oceania in the Age of Steam’ I have cast a more critical, nuanced eye on maritime cultures over the decades 1870s-1910s.
I examine the ways steamship routes enrolled, defined and organised Pacific places and the flows between them. I bridge the maritime sites of the steamer and port town as a way to reconnect ocean and land as sites of history, and to explore the regional impact of transport technologies. In this context, the Union Steam Ship Company of New Zealand is a key player. Founded in Dunedin in 1875, 'The Southern Octopus' (so dubbed by its critics) had a tentacle-like hold over shipping trades in the Southern Hemisphere. Its steamer routes facilitated the regular and routine passage of people and goods throughout the Pacific, whilst providing employment opportunities for white colonials in tropical places and for indigenous men at the wharves and, occasionally, on board steamships. Such varied encounters with new sites of labour revealed colonial anxieties. These circulated around intertwined ideas about environment, race, gender and labour, and were complicated by the attempt to manage mobile men at a distance.
Processes related to trade, transportation and urbanisation converged at ports as colonial powers reoriented local economic, political, social and cultural patterns of life. I investigate these reorientations in the late nineteenth century, focusing in particular on the port town of Suva, the capital of Fiji from 1882, and its links to New Zealand and Australian ports, notably Auckland, the northernmost centre of New Zealand. I am further concerned to locate these ports in a broader imperial context, looking to the uneven and shifting ways they were linked up in webs of empire both within the Pacific and beyond.
The contradictory and contested values placed on mobility and passage, the intimacy of men as they laboured together across racial groups in the close confines of the steamer or in the often stifling commercial community of a Pacific port town, the enmeshed nature of local, regional and global space: these are central themes throughout my study of Oceania in the Age of Steam.
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