This chapter explores developments in hemispheric and transamerican studies by grounding discussions of colonialism and incommensurability in narrations of place-names. It moves from the Pacific to the Midwest, using Commodore David Porter’s Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific Ocean, from the War of 1812, as a case study. Porter is of note not only because he was an important source for Herman Melville’s Pacific writings but also because his military travel writings sought to make the Marquesas part of the US political and popular imaginary. In renaming-to-claim the islands, Porter worked to undermine Indigenous epistemologies and histories. The chapter then turns to the Midwest, examining the Latin American place-names across the region – names that offer a nineteenth-century prehistory to accounts of widespread Midwestern Latinx presence. Surprisingly, stories of Porter’s battle off the coast of Chile in Journal of a Cruise have fed an imperialist “Latin American mapping” of Indiana through the naming of the city of Valparaiso, in Porter County. Using stories of place naming from the Indigenous Pacific and Latinx Midwest, the chapter highlights the vital necessity of hemispheric and transamerican literary studies for the nineteenth century.

When refracted through California, the story of US naval expansion in the 1880s – the creation of a small but respectable force of steel cruisers and gunboats – becomes a form of naval racing against Pacific newly made navies. Californians and their national allies argued for a New Navy, citing fears of Chile, China, and eventually Japan. These fears were not only material, stemming from the technical inferiority of the US Old Navy, but also cultural, as naval programs in the Pacific threatened assumptions about US racial and civilizational superiority. Physically, advanced navies in the Pacific stoked fear in Californian cities about raids from the sea. Technologically, Pacific newly made navies (and especially the Chilean cruiser Esmeralda) served as yardsticks to measure US Navy progress. Culturally, the sophistication of Pacific navies undermined beliefs about the position of the United States as the most advanced nation in the hemisphere. These threats allowed navalists to make an effective argument for funding a small, cruiser-dominated New Navy in the 1880s that could in the near term compete with its Pacific rivals.

Four themes characterize the role of the Pacific’s newly made navies in the making of the US “New Navy.” Demand for new and surplus technology accelerated innovation. Testing and battlefield observation of novel weapons helped refine decisions about acquisitions and strategy. Threat perceptions of ascendant newly made navies in the Pacific made manifest the immediate need for a US New Navy. And, finally, threat perceptions were instrumentalized as political capital in order to sell the utility of navalism to a skeptical public. Appreciating these relationships textures accounts of the emergence of the US empire in the Pacific, the study of military history in the context of international society, and the advent of prototypically “modern” navies. In this the history of the nineteenth-century Pacific is a useful primer for competition in the region between the People’s Republic of China and the United States.

This chapter reviews the leading explanations for the creation of the US “New Navy” and then proposes the book’s core argument: that US naval expansion in the 1880s and 1890s was disproportionately a reaction to the Pacific’s navies and their wars. In a regional context, the US New Navy was one among many newly made, industrial fleets racing for security and prestige. The Introduction then explains the implications of this thesis for historical accounts of the “Pacific World,” US Empire, and military technological development. It concludes with a chapter outline of the book.

The War of the Pacific (1879-1884) is the war among South American states with the second highest casualty rate in the nineteenth century. This chapter provides a detailed case study of this war while offering a long-term narrative of state building in the South Pacific (i.e., Bolivia, Chile, and Peru). The comparison between Chile and Peru is illuminating, since both countries were comparable in important confounders–e.g., their armies, navy, bureaucracies, and budgets–and were impacted similarly by important economic confounders such as economic booms and crises. In this chapter I depict the evolution of war and the balance between central and peripheral elites from independence to the mid-century. Then I illustrate how preparation for war led to state formation, and looks at the details of the campaign, battle by battle. These two sections already serve the purpose of debunking some myths in this literature, like the idea that Peru did not mobilize for the war, and that the war did not lead to extraction in Chile Finally, I discuss how war transformed state institutions, and determined diverging, long-terms trends in state capacity.

After close examination of the Allied campaigns of the SWPA, the importance of the Australian infantry brigade as a key combat formation is without question. An examination of the infantry brigade group (jungle) as an intermediate formation commanding infantry battalions and numerous attached units demonstrates the role of an infantry brigade as crucial to the victories in New Guinea and Borneo. The complex terrain of the SWPA islands, which sometimes constrained and at times isolated the brigades, offered these formations the opportunity to evolve.

The DOHaD field provides critical evidence for investment in early life, linking environmental exposures during preconception, pregnancy, and infancy with later non-communicable disease risk. Despite the potential of this evidence to positively impact some of our most vulnerable communities, instances where communities are engaged in participatory DOHaD research and knowledge translation processes are limited. This chapter explores the benefits of community-based participatory research approaches and outlines current examples within the DOHaD field. In particular, it focuses on ongoing work within the Cook Islands where DOHaD has informed community-partnered research, scientific and health literacy programmes in schools, and the development of early-life nutrition resources for mothers and families.

At the turn of the century as the western frontier came to a close, America expanded its reach across the Pacific and in so doing solidified a burgeoning modern gay identity steeped in imaginations of the “Orient.” Pacific Islanders and Asian immigrants themselves in fact played a crucial role by illustrating a different way of being to western writers such as Joaquin Miller and Charles Warren Stoddard, even as they were appropriated in bohemians’ explorations of their own same-sex sexuality.

Australia and New Zealand have long constituted a “pluralist security community”– an association containing such ingredients as mutual compatability of major values, unbroken links of social communication affecting all levels of society, a multiplicity of transactions and mutual predictability of behaviour among decision-makers. It is an association comparable with, but perhaps even stronger than, the partnership of three Scandinavian states, that between the United States and Canada or the special relationship between Britain and Ireland.

“Instead of living in a tranquil corner of the globe, we are now on the verge of the most unsettled region of the world.” In these words the Minister for External Affairs, Mr. R. G. Casey, neatly summarised both the main problem of Australian foreign affairs and the changed situation in which any policy framed by an Australian Government must now function. It may also, perhaps, be thought that the Minister’s words convey a hint of that wistful regret for a more simple, clearly defined, situation which is still prominent in the attitude of most Australians towards the complex problems of the New Asia. It all used to be so easy: there was Britain, controlling the seas, ruling in her Indian Empire the main land mass of southern Asia. Holland occupied the regions immediately adjacent to Australia; peaceful, civilised Holland. The French in Indo-China removed that area from any need for consideration. China was weak, divided, and dominated by the foreign powers. There was only Japan, a real but distant menace.

Australian interest in New Guinea, which first became significant in the 1870’s, was abundantly justified from the point of view of national security by the events of the war against Japan. New Guinea became plainly the last rampart protecting the Australian mainland from invasion and the recognition of this, heightened by the personal experience of the island gained by thousands of servicemen, persisted in Australian minds after the war. There is now a very much wider awareness of New Guinea as an element in the national situation and some New Guinea matters have unprecedently become national political issues in the postwar period: the question of the use of Manus as an American base, the Bulolo timber inquiry, the retirement by the Commonwealth Government of the first post-war Administrator, and the proposed use by the United States Navy of Japanese technicians in a survey of New Guinea waters.

Australia’s foreign policy has always been determined more by her relations with the great powers than by her relations with the middle and small states in her neighbourhood. It is by great powers, with one possible exception, that Australia has felt threatened, and to other great powers that she has chiefly looked for protection against them. In the years 1966–70 Australia’s foreign policy was dominated by the Vietnam war. In April 1965 Australia committed combat troops to Vietnam formally in response to a request from the government of the Republic of Vietnam, for assistance against what it claimed was aggression from North Vietnam. But what primarily accounted for this decision was the belief that Australia should support her great power ally, the United States, in the stand it was making against communist expansion in Asia, emanating from China and, to a lesser extent, the Soviet Union.

During the decade here under review, basic circumstances conditioning relations between Indonesia and Australia have undergone an important change. This has been primarily the result of the major political upheaval in Indonesia following the abortive coup of September–October 1965. Until the coup, Indonesia tended to be seen as, at best, a source of serious embarrassment to Australia, particularly in relation to Australian policy in New Guinea and Asia, and, at worst, as a positive threat to the security of ’Free Asia’, Papua New Guinea and Australia. Since 1965, Indonesia has come increasingly to be seen as a potential ally, worthy of Australian assistance, although the culmination of this apparent transformation was not reached until President Suharto’s visit to Australia in 1972. During that visit, press headlines provided dramatic evidence of the extent to which Indonesia was seen to have changed: ’Suharto—a seeker of security’, ’New defence link with Suharto’, ’President Suharto meets Aust. Govt, military links with Indonesia discussed’.

For the first time in its history, the Indian Ocean became an area of major international concern during the five years under review. This was due to the combination of a greatly reduced British defence presence, and a Soviet initiative to expand its political and economic interests in the region concurrent with a modest display of naval activity. The United States showed little inclination to match the Soviet presence, so that Australia’s western maritime environment – across which roughly half its trade was carried – seemed less secure than at any time since the First Fleet arrived in New South Wales in 1788.

At 5.15 p.m. on 15 September 1975, the Australian flag was finally lowered in Papua New Guinea. Sir John Guise, the inaugural Governor-General, a former Burns Philp delivery boy and police-sergeant, who in his youth had been gaoled twice, not for political dissidence, but for stealing a bowl of rice and for illegal drinking, declared: It is important that the people of Papua New Guinea and the rest of the world realise the spirit in which we are lowering the flag of our colonies. We are lowering it not tearing it down.

In the five years to 1970 a few Papuans and New Guineans began to share some of the anxieties of informed Australians about their country’s future place in world affairs; but in general the attention of political leaders, both indigenous and Australian, remained overwhelmingly concentrated on questions of internal development. Some basic uncertainties about Papua New Guinea’s future political status were resolved but greater uncertainties replaced them.

Australia has been interested in the South-West Pacific and its many islands ever since the first settlement on the east coast. Their geographical proximity and economic resources particularly attracted Australian attention; the moves of other nations reminded Australia of her defence interests in the area. The determination to protect Australians from the island peoples and the missionary desire to convert the island peoples to Christianity reinforced the pressure on the colonial governments to extend Australian control. Australian interests were maintained after an expanding Europe partitioned the islands. In the 1950’s Australian interests necessitated watching both international and local developments with much the same apprehension as in 1883 when the colonial governments declared what amounted to an Australian Monroe Doctrine for the area.