Tears of Rangi: Experiments Across Worlds by Anne Salmond, and: The Oxford Handbook of Prehistoric Oceania ed. by Ethan E. Cochrane and Terry L. Hunt

The Pacific Ocean remains something of a blind spot in world history syntheses despite the wealth of field-specific scholarship on islands, indigenous groups, transoceanic connections, and the environment. A notable exception to this blind spot is J. R. McNeill and Erin Stewart Mauldin's edited volume A Companion to Global Environmental History (2012), which offers a range of essays situated in or directly related to the Pacific. One explanation for the Pacific's relative absence in world history has to do with the intentional localism of some Pacific scholarship, while another explanation is that many outside scholars view the great ocean as anomalous to the historical patterns of the Atlantic and Indian oceans or the Mediterranean Sea. Two recent books, Anne Salmond's Tears of Rangi: Experiments Across Worlds, and Hunt and Cochrane's The Oxford Handbook of Prehistoric Oceania, offer new perspectives on Pacific prehistory, New Zealand, and indigenous and colonial worldviews. While neither book consciously attempts to place the Pacific in a global historical framework, both are worthy of attention by world historians.

Anne Salmond's work in anthropology, history, Maori, and Pacific studies has led the past two generations of scholars to seek deeper meanings and alternative perspectives on both the past and the present. From her research on Maori communities and cosmos in the 1970s to her more recent accounts of Pacific navigators (including James Cook, William Bligh, and Tupaia), Salmond's scholarship combines archival mastery with a stylistic grace rarely found in academic prose. She narrates multiple pasts with compassion for her subjects, both indigenous and European, with the ultimate goal of understanding human actions and worldviews. Salmond has the ability to explain complex worlds crashing together through a singular and exceedingly local episode—a moment in time when possibilities existed for many different outcomes.

Tears of Rangi: Experiments Across Worlds shows this ability for bridging disparate worlds of understanding. While focused specifically on the different realities and ontologies of Maori and Europeans in Aotearoa New Zealand from 1769 to the present, Salmond's study also contains broader meanings for the clash of cultures in colonial settings around the world. The first part of the book explores the encounters between Maori and Europeans (primarily British) up to the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, which attempted to settle questions of sovereignty in New Zealand. The second part of the book examines the different perspectives on the subjects of waterways, land, the sea, and people—the essential aspects of life that have been recently debated in New Zealand in conjunction with questions of Maori sovereignty.

In New Zealand as elsewhere around the world, starkly different worldviews shaped the encounters between indigenous groups and would-be colonizers. For Maori, Salmond argues, knowledge and understanding derive from taonga (ancestral treasure) animated by the vital force of hau, "the wind of life that activates human and non-human networks alike" (p. 3). Hau flows through all things in a space-time spiral or vortex, suggesting a complex universe as well as a "way of being that patterns the world" (p. 14). This ontology stood in stark contrast to the Enlightenmentperspectiveof British explorers, missionaries, and settlers, who viewed the world through a lens of Cartesian dualism. The gulf between these two worldviews may seem unbridgeable, but interestingly, Salmond goes to great lengths to spotlight those individuals who sought not just compromise but mutual understanding. The possibility she offers is that "cosmo-diversity" alongside bio-diversity "may be a force for adaptation and survival" in the future (p. 2).

Thus, the first part of Tears of Rangi moves forward in time from 1769 with chapters devoted to the Ra'iatean navigator and priest Tupaia, the first missionaries' meetings with rangatira (chiefs) Ruatara and Hongi Hika, visits to England by rangatira, acts of violence and warfare between Maori groups, the missionary Thomas Kendall's fall into Maori cosmology, the works of good missionaries like Henry Williams and struggling bureaucrats like James Busby, and the dueling interpretations of "sovereignty" as expressed in English and Maori versions of Declaration of Independence (1835) and the Treaty of Waitangi (1840). The Treaty itself frames much of Salmond's narrative in the same way it frames current discussions of sovereignty and redress, for "[a]cross the pae (threshold) between Maori and the Crown, it seems, space is being left for constitutional innovation" (p. 286). Such innovation, she suggests, demands an acceptance of and bridging of two competing cosmologies.

Anne Salmond remains cautiously hopeful for the necessary innovation, as demonstrated in the final four chapters. She points to the successful recognition of legal rights for the Whanganui River—not claimants' rights to the river, but the waterway's own independent right to existence. The chapter on property ("Whenua/Land") seems less conclusive due less to what "selling" land actually meant in the mid-nineteenth century than to modern notions of real estate (largely shared by Maori), while the following chapter on oceanic waters ("Moana/Sea") suggests the significance of global stakeholders such as Greenpeace in the battle to protect Maori relationships to the sea. As for the Maori today ("Tangata/People"), Salmond recounts both the renewed appreciation for ancestral concepts as well as the adverse social and economic conditions that continue to plague the people. The "predicament" of present-day Maori is a result of modernist practices in New Zealand stretching back two hundred years, but it is also a predicament shared by indigenous groups throughout the Pacific and elsewhere (p. 409). Salmond's decades-long work in the public and political sphere for Maori rights complements her scholarly and philosophical call in this book for "relational thinking" and "new ways of living" (pp. 414–415).

Unlike Salmond's focus on one recently settled place in the Pacific (New Zealand), The Archaeology of Prehistoric Oceania moves across many millennia of island colonization from New Guinea and Palau in the earliest period to the more recent colonizations of Hawai'i and Rapa Nui (Easter Island) by Pacific voyagers. For historians, this represents one of the greatest migrations of humankind and arguably the most intriguing dispersal of people across oceanic space. Even if the level of field-specialization in these twenty-one essays seems daunting to nonspecialists, world historians can certainly appreciate the central themes examined by the scholars: migration and colonization, ecological change, cultural dispersal, political complexity, material culture, voyaging, and subsistence patterns (to list only a few). For modern historians who may find themselves baffled by the necessity of lecturing about (or even referencing) the prehistoric period, The Archaeology of Prehistoric Oceania offers a wealth of mostly accessible essays on the deep Pacific past.

The editors Ethan Cochrane and Terry Hunt organize the volume primarily by region and the chapters move in a spatial-chronological direction from the earliest island colonization to the more recent. They follow the centuries-long tradition of internally dividing Oceania into Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia, while acknowledging the "racist generalizations" that accompanied these terms in the nineteenth century; for instance, Europeans viewed Polynesian groups as the most "advanced," followed by Micronesians and then Melanesians (p. 2). But regardless of these geographic generalizations, the essays reveal Oceania's prehistoric cultures in all their complexity and diversity. While many scholars outside the Pacific have ignored Oceania or promoted essentialist notions of the people based on the seeming isolation of Pacific islands, these archaeological case studies suggest broad patterns of universal human conditions as well as quite specific adaptations and innovations to the local environments.

A subset of these essays speaks directly (and accessibly) to World historians' concerns. Tim Denham's essay "The 'Austronesian' Dispersal in Island Southeast Asia" counters a generalized migration of voyager-farmers from Asia (about 4,000 to 4,500 years ago) with a more nuanced picture of indigenous agricultural transformations accompanied by the arrival of domesticated animals from the mainland. Like elsewhere around the world, a complex of biota (as well as language) moved fairly rapidly in an eastward direction in settlers' watercraft and the resulting agriculture would sustain island populations into the modern period. Similarly, material culture migrated from island to island along with the colonizers, as John Terrell demonstrates in his essay "Understanding Lapita as History." Whereas Lapita refers directly to the pottery made and traded by islanders several thousand years ago, some scholars posit that a Lapita "complex" of technology, social relations, and spiritual beliefs circulated with the material itself. Terrell, however, argues that Lapita "can be seen as material witness to an ancient community of practice" that enhanced "already established inter-community social networks" in western Oceania (pp. 112–113). People on different islands were well connected and they "probably saw themselves as a community" through mutual lifeways, according to archaeologist Katherine Szabó (p. 125).

The stability and structure of island societies receives sustained attention in separate essays on the eastern Caroline Islands, Rapa Nui, and Hawai'i. The settlers of the Caroline Islands, according to J. Stephen Athens, constructed impressive monuments at Pohnpei and Kosrae due in large part to a stratified society. Rapa Nui, by contrast, exhibited its famous moai (statue of ancestors) without clear evidence of severe social stratification. Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo's essay "The Archaeology of Rapa Nui (Easter Island)" echoes their other published findings on the island, especially in rejecting Jared Diamond's well-known "collapse" theory: "There was no 'ecocide,' but a historically well-documented near-genocide following, and as a consequence of, European contacts" (p. 432). Patrick Kirch's chapter "The Prehistory of Hawai'i" offers a stunningly brief survey of his lifelong research on the northernmost Polynesian island chain, including coverage of the islanders' arrivals, agricultural innovations, material culture, and state formation. As argued elsewhere, Kirch sees an "archaic state" emerging from an earlier island chiefdom in the century prior to contact, concluding that "in Hawai'i the course of Polynesian cultural evolution entered uncharted realms" (p. 390). He admits that new research may ultimately reject his conclusion about the islands' state formation, and if so, he points to the promising work of young scholars "of Native Hawaiian ancestry" (p. 391). Indeed, at least one other author in the volume notes the "ethical and intellectual imperative" to train indigenous scholars and promote their work (p. 103).

These two volumes present world historians with a clear opportunity for comparative thinking in relation to the prehistory and colonial experiences of Pacific island societies. To the extent that Pacific islands seem geographically isolated and historically peripheral to the main currents of world history, they both confirm this should no longer be the case.