World History and the Tasman Sea

Abstract

Abstract Tracking and analyzing connection and mobility are now conventional in oceanic and world historiography and in many Indigenous historiographies. This article offers a counterargument and counterinstance. On both sides of the Tasman Sea lie human histories of almost incommensurably different temporal orders, separate for several centuries and suddenly connected in 1770, when Polynesians and Aboriginal people met. The Tasman Sea turns out to be one of the more fascinating fault lines for world historians who seek to fold ancient and modern, so-called prehistory and history, together into new periodizations of deep time and shallow time. It suggests the need seriously to consider a Tasman Divide as much as a connected Tasman World. This article recasts James Cook’s crossing of the Tasman Sea in 1770 less as a significant first contact between Englishmen and Indigenous Australians on that coast and more as a meeting of three peoples who occupied radically different temporalities: (1) the Polynesian Tupaia, (2) the Englishman James Cook, and (3) Aboriginal people whose names we do not know.