Re-conceptualizing the Pacific’s history. A Framework for the Study of Connectivity in the Pacific world

Abstract

This study exposes the need for a revised new model for the History of the Pacific to dispel two ideas presented in the topic’s literature; the first being that the easternrim (Western Hemisphere) of the Pacific Basin had no substantial interaction with the Pacific Ocean prior to the arrival of European explorers, and the second that the onlymethod to write a history of the Pacific World is to focus on the trans-Pacific interactions in this planet’s largest body of water. Due to the complexity of this endeavor, thetheoretical foundation for this research is the classical model on Mediterranean History—the first waterbody-centered regional framework—after the historian Fernand Braudel,in The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1975), as well as the theoretical schemes of the historians Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, asfound in The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (2000).