Description: Essential single-volume history of the Pacific region and the global interactions which define it.
Brief description: Matt Matsuda is Professor of History at Rutgers University where he teaches Modern European and Asia-Pacific comparative histories. His previous publications include Empire of Love: Histories of France and the Pacific (2003).
Review Quotes: "Many in the huge surrounding landmasses of South-East Asia, East Asia, the Americas and Australia see "the Pacific" as being the countries bordering the Pacific Ocean. Matt Matsuda's splendid history shatters the basin and, with it, the rim... For those most interested in the Pacific Islands, this book addresses and contextualizes the substantial contacts of south Asia and China with the western Pacific, especially northern Australia and New Guinea, a prolonged relationship that some notable Pacific historians have largely ignored to privilege later English and French interactions on Tahiti in the late eighteenth century." - Judith A. Bennet, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, Pacific Affairs