Science, Voyages, and Encounters in Oceania, 1511-1850

Spanning four centuries and vast space, this book combines the global history of ideas with particular histories of encounters between European voyagers and Indigenous people in Oceania (Island Southeast Asia, New Guinea, Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands). Douglas shows how prevailing concepts of human difference, or race, influenced travellers' approaches to encounters. Yet their presuppositions were often challenged or transformed by the appearance, conduct, and lifestyle of local inhabitants. The book's original theory and method reveal traces of Indigenous agency in voyagers' representations which in turn provided key evidence for the natural history of man and the science of race. In keeping with recent trends in colonial historiography, Douglas diverts historical attention from imperial centres to so-called peripheries, discredits the outmoded stereotype that Europeans necessarily dominated non-Europeans, and takes local agency seriously.

Bronwen Douglas was Senior Fellow at The Australian National University for 16 years and is an adjunct fellow in retirement. An historian of the interplay of ideas of human difference or race and practical encounters in Oceania, she is author of Across the Great Divide (1998) and co-editor with Chris Ballard of Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race 1750-1940 (2008).

Introduction:Indigenous Presence to the Science of Race
PART I:'INDIANS', 'NEGROES', AND 'SAVAGES' IN TERRA AUSTRALIS
1.Before Races: Barbarity, Civility, and Salvation in the Mar del Sur
2.Towards Races: Ambivalent Encounters in the South Seas
3.Seeing Races: Confronting 'Savages' in Terra Australis
PART II: RACE, CLASSIFICATION, AND ENCOUNTERS IN OCÉANIE
4.Meeting Agency: Islanders, Voyagers, and Races in the Mer du Sud
5.Races in the Field: Encounters and Taxonomy in the Grand Océan
6.Raciology in Action: Phrenology, Polygenism, and Agency in Océanie
Conclusion: Race in 1850/Oceania in 1850