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New Books in Pacific Studies

New Books in Pacific Studies

By: New Books Network
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 This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: ⁠https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/⁠ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetworkNew Books Network Art Literary History & Criticism World
Episodes
  • Ruth Mandujano López, "Steamships Across the Pacific: Maritime Journeys between Mexico, China, and Japan, 1867–1914" (U Hong Kong Press, 2025)

    Ruth Mandujano López, "Steamships Across the Pacific: Maritime Journeys between Mexico, China, and Japan, 1867–1914" (U Hong Kong Press, 2025)
    Apr 9 2026
    How did the movement of people, goods, and ships reshape connections between Latin America and Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? In Steamships Across the Pacific: Maritime Journeys between Mexico, China, and Japan, 1867–1914 (U Hong Kong Press, 2025), Ruth Mandujano López examines this question through the lens of maritime travel. Focusing on Mexico’s participation in emerging steamship networks linking it to China and Japan, the book traces how these routes facilitated new forms of mobility, exchange, and encounter across the Pacific world. Steamships Across the Pacific is organized around specific voyages. Each chapter centers on a particular steamship journey and follows the people who traveled on the ships and observed the locations around them, including scientific voyages and chartered steamers filled with would-be immigrants. This structure allows Mandujano López to foreground the lived experience of transpacific travel, showing how these journeys were shaped by — and also shaped — larger processes of imperialism, mobility, and modernization. As such, this book will appeal to readers interested in global history, Pacific worlds, and the history of migration and mobility. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 21 mins
  • Gregory Smits, "The Ryukyu Islands: A New History from the Stone Age to the Present" (U Chicago Press, 2026)

    Gregory Smits, "The Ryukyu Islands: A New History from the Stone Age to the Present" (U Chicago Press, 2026)
    Mar 30 2026
    The Ryukyu Islands between Japan and Taiwan consist of around 160 islands and are home to about 1.5 million inhabitants. Across the islands' history, sea-lanes and trade patterns have connected them to the East China Sea region, giving them a unique vantage point on the region's changes and making them a useful lens through which to view and understand those transformations. In this book, Gregory Smits marshals his expertise to canvass the environmental, political, and social history of this fascinating area, emphasizing the diversity of influences from China, Japan, and Korea that have shaped it. Smits begins by tracing the islands' early history from the time of the oldest extant human remains, through massive inflows of settlers from Japan, until the emergence of a centralized state in the sixteenth century. He then traces the development of the Ryukyu Kingdom from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, examining its major cultural formations and the interplay of local and external influences driving its evolution. Finally, Smits ushers readers to the modern era, from the end of the Ryukyu Kingdom in 1879 through World War II, the era of American military control, and on to the present. He concludes with their present-day status as a tourist destination affected by ongoing geopolitical, economic, and environmental challenges. Synthesizing decades of research, this book is an indispensable, comprehensive guide to the islands' history for scholars and nonspecialists alike. Gregory Smits is professor of history and Asian Studies at Penn State University. He is the author of several books, including, most recently, Early Ryukyuan History: A New Model. Ran Zwigenberg is a professor at Pennsylvania State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 18 mins
  • Mike Pitts, "Island at the Edge of the World: The Forgotten History of Easter Island" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

    Mike Pitts, "Island at the Edge of the World: The Forgotten History of Easter Island" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
    Mar 11 2026
    Rapa Nui, known to Western cultures as Easter Island for centuries, has long been a source of mystery. While the massive stone statues that populate the island’s landscape have loomed in the popular Western imagination since Europeans first set foot there in 1722, in recent years, the island has gained infamy as a cautionary tale of eco-destruction. The island’s history as it’s been written tells of Polynesians who carelessly farmed, plundered their natural resources, and battled each other, dooming their delicate ecosystem and becoming a warning to us all about the frailty of our natural world. But what if that history is wrong? In The Island at the Edge of the World: The Forgotten History of Easter Island (Bloomsbury, 2025), archeological writer and scholar Mike Pitts offers a direct challenge to the orthodoxy of Rapa Nui, bringing to light new research and documents that tell a dramatic and surprising story about what really led to the island’s downfall. Relying on the latest archaeological findings, he paints a vastly different portrait of what life was like on the island before the first Europeans arrived, investigating why a Polynesian people who succeeded for centuries throughout the South Pacific supposedly failed to thrive in Rapa Nui. Pitts also unearths the vital story of one of the first anthropologists to study Rapa Nui, an Oxford-trained iconoclast named Katherine Routledge, who was instrumental in collecting firsthand accounts from the Polynesians living on Rapa Nui in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But though Routledge’s impressive scholarship captured the oral traditions of what life had been like pre-1722, her work was widely dismissed because of her gender, her reliance on indigenous perspectives, and her conclusions which contradicted her historical peers. A stunning work of revisionism, this book raises critical questions about who gets to write history and the stakes of ignoring that history’s true authors. Provocative and illuminating, The Island at the Edge of the World will change the way people think about Easter Island, its colonial legacy, and where the blame for its devastation truly lies. Mike Pitts is a writer and broadcaster, archaeologist and former museum curator. His books include A Fairweather Eden: Excavations at Boxgrove, Hengeworld, Digging for Richard III, Digging up Britain, and How to Build Stonehenge. He has also written for almost all of the important British newspapers - the Guardian, Observer, Times, Sunday Times, Telegraph, New Scientist, BBC History Magazine, Spectator and other papers and magazines - and conduct original research and publish in peer-reviewed journals. He also edited British Archaeology magazine for 20 years and is a Fellow of the London Society of Antiquaries. Sidney Michelini is a post-doctoral researcher working on Ecology, Climate, and Violence at the Peace Research Institute of Frankfurt (PRIF). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 6 mins
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