ABSTRACT
Islands have played important roles in the weave of existence. In the long view, islands have been key scenes in the generation of global biodiversity and cultural diversity. More recently – as oceanic hubs and laboratories of colonial enterprises, way stations for provisioning, sources of resource extraction, military outposts, effective spaces for incarceration, convenient sites for dumping waste, strategic geopolitical cornerstones, nodes of the global tourism industry, pockets of escape, and havens for laundering money, evading taxes and accumulating financial wealth – islands have become key places in the operational nuts and bolts of world-systems and arenas of struggles over land and natural resources. As predominantly coastal land, islands are sites from which resources are drawn from oceans and seas, a characteristic they share with continental coastal zones, which account for the bulk of continental populations. Oceanic islands have served as colonial stepping stones en route to distant lands. Continental islands are often closely connected with and form part of the cultures and economic activities of coastal regions, occasionally becoming centers of power – most strikingly Manhattan, Hong Kong and Singapore, so bridged, populated and connected that they do not count as islands by some classifications.
