How Colonialism and WW2 Reshaped The Pacific

The European conquest of Pacific peoples did not occur until a century after Cook’s death and required another combination of military and transport technologies, as well as other revolutions in communications. These innovations effectively reduced the vast distances and other barriers posed by the Pacific to Western/imperial interests seeking to control them. Although the imperial era massively transformed the terrestrial environments of colonial territories in the Pacific, colonial priorities and the preceding decimation of marine species served to provide an intergenerational respite for most Pacific marine ecosystems as authorities sought to control their maritime spaces by restricting indigenous and foreign activity. The main transformation of the Pacific in this imperial era was conceptual rather than physical, as Western scientists delved into the hidden underwater world as never before. Western administrators and scientists divided and reconstructed maritime spaces to conform to their own perspectives.

Mid-nineteenth-century surveying and mapping of the ocean reduced the chances of shipwreck by making the sea more familiar and its more constant nonmeteorological elements more predictable. The voyage of the Challenger marked the greatest advance in European understanding of the ocean depths. Late nineteenth-century scientific endeavors led to a partial conquest of the twin tyrannies of ocean distances and depths with the development of steam-powered vessels free of reliance on seasonal winds, metal hulls to increase resilience in storms and stave off deterioration in the face of seas and organisms that continued to plague and weaken wooden vessels, and undersea cables to facilitate long-distance communication.

The imposition of European rule required little military activity. European discomfort with tropical conditions, such as malaria restricted European populations in the Pacific Islands. European residents largely supported themselves through plantation economies supplying European markets with copra and, to a lesser extent, sugar. The labor force needed to supply these plantations was largely indentured laborers from Japan for Hawai‘i, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu (then New Hebrides) for Queensland, Indians for Fiji, and New Guineans within German New Guinea. Colonial authorities sought to control and restrict indigenous interisland travel on canoes, especially between the arbitrary colonial boundaries they drew upon the map to differentiate colonial authorities. For example, centuries of exchange between Cook Islanders and Tahitians were partly disrupted by Britain taking control over the former and the French forcibly incorporating the latter into their empire.

Limited pockets of islander seafaring survived the colonial era on small, isolated islands. Traditional canoe building and navigation were still practiced on Micronesian coral islands in the 1970s, for example. Beyond these enclaves, regular Western shipping services and the peace imposed by colonial authorities also provided new opportunities to travel, albeit ones that islanders had no control over in terms of timing and direction. They traveled according to the demands of an increasingly global market economy and steam-driven timetables that defied the seasonal and tidal rhythms that had previously governed islanders” travel, alongside cultural priorities and values.

The First World War largely bypassed the Pacific, with the few German colonies soon succumbing to much stronger British imperial forces. Japan fought as an ally of Britain and its empire against Germany and its allies. Australian and New Zealand forces soon secured German New Guinea and Samoa, while Japanese forces occupied Germany’s colonies in China and Micronesia. Large-scale Japanese immigration into Micronesia followed, especially in the Mariana Islands, which were converted into large-scale sugar plantations by the Japanese.

The final phase of the colonial era in the Pacific began when the most destructive war in human history, the Second World War, spread across the globe. The Pacific Islands undeveloped nature and separation by vast stretches of ocean created unprecedented logistical and technological problems for modern armies and navies. The industrial power of the United States rose to the challenge and realized its true potential in the Pacific, whereas Japan’s less developed industrial capacity and overreliance on imported raw materials made it unable to compete with American logistical escalation into modern, total war. Japanese resistance persuaded the Americans to resort to super-weapons. The last significant acts of the war were the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which changed the world forever and ushered in a toxic nuclear era in the Pacific.

The Pacific was always a minor front for the Japanese, who directed most of their war effort on the Asian mainland. The Pacific campaigns largely served to create a buffer to protect Japan and its empire from any American entry into the war. More troops were stationed on the largely inactive border of the Soviet Union than served in the Pacific, only seeing action in the dying months of the war when the Soviets had turned the tide against the German invasion. Only four of the Japanese army’s sixty divisions were based in the Pacific Islands. The oceanic environment, the vast distances involved, and the ferocity of

Japanese resistance led to many Japanese garrisons simply being bypassed and isolated through American aerial dominance. Japanese resistance was eventually broken by the use of a new super-weapon of unprecedented killing power—the atomic bomb. The Pacific War was ultimately a war of technology, production, and attrition between the United States and Japan. Battles were still brutal contests of will on the ground, but in many ways were already won or lost before they took place in the munitions factories, farms, and transport lines conveying them to the front. American submarine warfare and aerial dominance were especially effective in disrupting Japan’s reliance on seaborne imports of metals and oil from Southeast Asia needed to pursue modern machine-based warfare. Noncombatants, including women in the absence of most adult males in the armed services, thus played a huge role in the war effort, and in so doing, became targets for that war effort.