Islanders

Thomas (director, Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology, Cambridge Univ.; Discoveries: The Voyages of Captain Cook) focuses on the late 18th century to the beginning of the 20th, when Europeans were not simply visiting the Pacific Islands but, in fact, drawing them into their empires. But Thomas wants to emphasize Islanders' active roles in these meetings of cultures. "By the end of the eighteenth century," he writes, "dozens certainly and maybe hundreds of Islanders had joined traders, whalers, and other ships." Thomas studies "Islanders' voyages, social and conceptual as well as strictly geographic [and]…voyages and projects of Europeans in the Pacific." He assesses the three voyages of Capt. James Cook, noting that his voyages, the first to be exploratory in nature rather than military or commercial, resulted in both Islanders and Europeans gaining firsthand knowledge of each other. Thomas emphasizes the late 18th-century increase in cross-cultural contacts in the Pacific and the resulting "cosmopolitanism" among native people.