This collection of essays assesses the interrelationship between exploration, empire-building and science in the opening of the Pacific Ocean by Europeans between the early 16th and mid-19th century. Editor from University of Otago, New Zealand.

This collection of essays assesses the interrelationship between exploration, empire-building and science in the opening up of the Pacific Ocean by Europeans between the early 16th and mid-19th century. It explores both the role of various sciences in enabling European imperial projects in the region and how the exploration of the Pacific in turn shaped emergent scientific disciplines and their claims to authority within Europe. Together with the introductory essay, the studies included constitute a significant body of scholarship that offers many important insights for anthropologists and geographers, as well as for historians of science and European imperialism.

'... the introduction provides a welcome synthesis...' Archives of Natural History 'This volume of reprinted essays serves as an excellent sampling of the historiography of Pacific science and its development from the late 1960s to the present... This collection holds together very successfully and is introduced excellently; it will be an important resource for all historians of science and empire.' British Journal for the History of Science