ABSTRACT

This chapter explores the ‘Pacific’ as an inhabited, geographically conceptualized, historicized, academically scrutinized, and imagined space and investigates how these ideas shape research within the history of knowledge and science. Rather than presenting a comprehensive history of ‘the scientific Pacific’, it considers discussions about the encounters, creation, and circulation of knowledge within a post-colonial framework and within Pacific histories. David Armitage and Alison Bashford emphatically and controversially propose a ‘new thalassology’ in the case of the Pacific with their edited volume, Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land, People. Pacific Histories aims, first, to locate Pacific history in global history by means of a new thalassology; second, to reconfigure Pacific history; and third, to test the applicability of the analytical unit ‘Pacific Worlds’. James Cook’s Endeavour was packed with scientific instruments and naturalists who set out for the Pacific to witness a couple of transits of Venus across the Sun.