Transoceanic America: Risk, Writing, and Revolution in the Global Pacific by Michelle Burnham (review)

In performing the usual function of an academic subtitle, "the global Pacific" defines the scope of Michelle Burnham's Transoceanic America, but it also raises a question that involves, as her excellent book reveals, more than a problem of definition: doesn't the globe contain the Pacific? The riddle of a Pacific that encompasses the globe, rather than the opposite, is one key to this remarkable book's strategy of inverting figure and ground. Transoceanic America identifies and critiques a major inversion in our cultural history, which is the treatment of the globe as overwhelmingly terranean, when in fact the reverse is true. Despite the rise of Atlantic Studies, our conception of literary history remains land-centric because we have ignored how eighteenth-century writers responded to the contemporary recognition of the unimaginable vastness of the Pacific. What Burnham characterizes as the "rimlands orientation" of prevailing cultural history seems to forget at once the Pacific (which lacks such rimlands) and the overwhelming wateriness of the earth. It is as though Atlantic Studies has been, despite its name, just another way to continue talking about land.

The ways in which the builders of Atlantic cities territorialized water (through river engineering, canalization, and so forth) was one way in which oceanic thinking was subsumed, even during the American colonial period, by terrestrial engineering. Other ways, perceptively explored in Burnham's book, were linguistic and literary, and involved apparent tactics for forgetting water. Though the intellectual consequence of Magellan's circumnavigation of the Pacific should have been to demonstrate that the globe is much more water than land, Europeans nonetheless clung to terrestrial ways of thinking. In related work, Peter Sloterdijk has pointed out that, despite Magellan, the old word for the firmament (the continens or "container") was transferred to giant landmasses, as though the land surrounded or contained the oceans, rather than the reverse.¹

Redrawing attention to the history of the European discovery of the Pacific, then, allows the Atlantic to be seen anew. Thus the original contribution of Transoceanic America is not simply to add Pacific contexts to Atlantic Studies. (Otherwise it might be too easy to call for a follow-up volume on the Indian Ocean.) Instead Burnham asks us to think about how framing Pacific history in global terms helps us to reexamine the eighteenth-century Atlantic, particularly its stories of democratic revolution. Instead of turning the world upside down by replacing kingdoms with nation-states, Pacific revolts appear like the turnings of the globe on its axis, cyclical and episodic.

The first half of the book explores the conceptual dimensions of the global Pacific. In eighteenth-century travel reportage, Burnham shows, Pacific journeys were so long that they imposed a new confrontation with time. In some ways this vastness could be rendered calculable by comparison with the Atlantic: the longer trip for a commercial expedition in the Pacific presented an exponentially larger risk and a correspondingly larger rate of profit. Yet distances between points were also in another sense unfathomable because Pacific landmasses were still unknown to European explorer, with terra australis becoming plottable only after many interminable repeat voyages. The prolixity of Pacific narratives seemed to protect against this incalculability by offering a reassuring tedium, which allowed the perception of violence and risk to be dulled and cancelled out (44). Numerical tables and arithmetic books, which Burnham reads with great insight, functioned as "orderly containers" within which "the dependable pleasures of proportion meet and temper the unstable excitements of profit" (56).

In the study's most eye-opening chapter, Burnham turns away from the longueurs of travel narrative to the unique narrative temporality of Pacific political history. The global Pacific once again seems to inhabit a distinctive time as well as space. It is impossible, she argues, to narrate anti-imperial violence in the Pacific world as part of a larger story culminating in the formation of autonomous nations. Such resistance (whether...