The North Pacific in the mid-nineteenth century was an oceanic borderland zone shaped by whaling and other extractive industries, and characterised by the rapid circulation of animals, people, commodities and capital. It was also a thoroughly imperial space: while Japanese, Pacific Islanders and white ‘beachcombers’ all worked aboard whalers, only the latter could leverage their citizenship to secure extraterritorial protection from imperial powers.

The history of the Bonin (J: Ogasawara) Islands illustrates this well. Until 1830 the islands had only the most fleeting history of human habitation, yet by 1863 they had emerged as a vital provisioning hub for the whaling fleet, populated by Native Hawaiians, Pacific Islanders and Anglo beachcombers. When the Tokugawa government began colonising the islands, the beachcombers pointedly refused to naturalise as Japanese citizens, and secured diplomatic backing from their respective consulates in Tokyo. In doing so they frustrated Japanese attempts to assert territorial sovereignty over the Bonins for a generation.

Even before the war there were signs that many remote island settlements were struggling, but the outbreak of the Pacific War heaped death and devastation upon those few remote island communities that remained. By the end of 1942 it had become clear that the conflict would be fought on an island-by-island basis across the Pacific, as US forces scrabbled to gain a purchase on any scrap of land from which they might launch aerial bombing raids on the Japanese mainland. Many islands were transformed into military garrisons and one, Iwo Jima, became the site one of the most brutal battles of the war. After 1945, Japan was stripped of the vast majority of its island possessions, with Okinawa, the Bonins and Micronesia placed under indefinite US occupation. Those islands that remained under Japanese rule were transformed from stepping stones of colonial expansion to sites of anxiety about territorial loss, demographic decline and the vanishing of tradition. It was within this context that new ways of thinking about deserted islands began to emerge – not only as sites for economic development but also for the conservation of valuable but threatened nature.

The tale of English spreading around the world, killing off other languages as it goes, is a spectacular and sad story, but it is not the whole story. There have been a few cases, such as the Labrador Inuit-Métis, where English first of all established a presence on the territory of a particular indigenous language only to be replaced in the long term by that indigenous language as native anglophones abandoned their mother tongue.