Science, Voyages, and Encounters in Oceania, 1511-1850

This book is the product of a nearly 20-year critical engagement with the written and visual records of European voyaging in Oceania. Douglas originally envisaged a study of how the agency of peoples in the Pacific and Australasia challenged 18th-century voyagers’ assumptions about them, while unsettling voyagers’ senses of self and social identity. Yet she was intrigued by the growing salience of racial thinking within European records of encounters with these peoples, and the complexities of ideas and arguments about the nature and origins of bodily and psychological difference that these encounters provoked from the early 16th century onwards.