Religion, Ideology, Culture and the Integration/Disintegration of the Pacific World

Abstract

Connections between distant areas across the globe were not new in the late 19th century, but the wave of globalization that began at that time and extended through the middle of the 20th century brought an unprecedented intensity of interactions between states and between peoples. A multifarious array of channels and mechanisms facilitated this increasingly dense, and strongly ambivalent, web of human contacts. Trading networks spread over sea and land, chains of commerce that gave impetus to subsequent waves of diplomatic and military engagement. New technologies for transportation and communication made the distances less of an obstacle to transnational and international relations. National empires pushed outward from metropolitan cores, binding subject peoples under the interests and policies of the ruling states, and engaged with those populations in processes of political and social reform that altered all polities in similar ways but did not erase all of the particularities that distinguished one from another.