A History of the Pacific Islands: Passages through Tropical Time

"At any rate, this is a book scholars should, and will, appreciate; for is Passages Through Tropical Time is eclectic, it is also complex and rich, a welcome addition to the literature of, as Scarr puts it, the "ocean and its islands". - T. Damon Salesa, University of Michigan

1: Sea of Uprearing Billows; 1: Sea-Lanes; 2: Defining an Ocean; 2: ‘Big Waqa, Great Labour'; 3: Darkness from the Sea; 4: The Way to Atuona; 5: Destinies Ashore; 3: Vaka from Tangaroa; 6: Unpacific Seas, Ultimate Landfalls; 7: Oceania Charted, Humankind Redefined 1767–1793; 4: Schooner on the Reef; 8: Mirrors and Mobility; 9: Money, Rim Ports, Shipowners and Time; 10: Literature, Death, Marriage, Dependence and Island Mind; 5: Ages of Passing Innocence; 11: Credit and Copra Kings; 12: Power, Labour, Production, Outport and Identity; 13: Not from Mountain but Canoe; 14: Ports, Passage-Making, Mortality and Moderated Morality in the Labour Traffic; 6: 'Bout Ship and Try Again; 15: Ironic Gestures, Senses of Self and Survival; 16: Romance and Realities; 17: Visions and Contradictions: The Early Twentieth Century; 18: Shipping Companies, Competition and Japan's Dull Steel 1900–1940; 19: Islands in Wartime: Like Destroyers in Line Ahead; Finale 1945–2000; 20: Postwar Worlds, Retrospectively

A book about the past and present Pacific Islands, wide-ranging in time and space spanning the centuries from the first settlement of the islands until the present day.