My current research investigates the emergence and transformation of the “Pacific world” during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. More specifically, it explores how commerce, environment, and cultures linked the future American Far West to the eastern Pacific Basin as well as to larger global exchanges. This project draws from numerous historical fields, including World history, environmental history, Pacific history, and the history of the American West. The eventual book project runs something like this: In the 1770s the eastern Pacific comprised a vast and disconnected set of geographic borderlands. Indigenous populations, from Polynesia to Alaska, experienced epidemiological chaos as waves of disease followed exploration and trade routes. These biological exchanges gradually broadened to include an array of natural resources as traders entangled the eastern Pacific with world markets. During the 1820s the eastern Pacific evolved into a free-trade waterscape for international commerce and a cross-cultural meeting ground increasingly shaped by American interests. By the mid-19th century, pan-Pacific laborers and goods circulated throughout the region, as did the engineers and technologies facilitating resource extraction. Scientific investigations, rich mineral discoveries, and transportation innovations accelerated these processes and thereby diminished the eastern Pacific’s formidable geography. Throughout this study I examine the systematic connections between the areas of the future American Far West—including Hawaii, Alaska, the Northwest Coast, and California—with Peru (Callao), Mexico (San Blas, Acapulco), China (Canton), and the island Pacific. My argument is twofold: first, the Pacific Basin emerged as a geographic entity through exchanges that were simultaneously local, regional, and global in nature; and second, the American Far West was an integral part of the developing Pacific world long before it became the nation’s expansionistic proving ground.
At UCI I teach courses on the American West, environmental history, Pacific history, and US colonial history.
For information on the Pacific Basin and Early California Study Group I coordinate at the Huntington Library, please follow this link:
http://www.usc.edu/schools/college/huntington/working_groups/pacific_rim.html
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DAVID IGLER
Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 1997
Associate Professor of History
Department of History
449 Murray Krieger Hall
Irvine, CA 92697-3275
tel: 949.824.2966
fax: 949.824.2865
email: digler@uci.edu
Fields of Interest:
California and the American West, Environmental History, Pacific History
Publications:
"Re-Orienting Asian American History through Transnational and International Scales," Pacific Historical Review, (November 2007) "Trading Places: The View of Colonial American History from the Pacific," Huntington Frontiers (Fall/Winter 2007)
"Longitudes and Latitudes," in Environmental History (January 2005) "Malaspina off and on the American Northwest Coast the nature of the things he carried" in Commonplace (January 2005) http://www.common-place.org/vol-05/no-02/igler/index.shtml “Diseased Goods: Global Exchanges in the Eastern Pacific Basin, 1770-1850,” American Historical Review 109 (June 2004): 693-719.
http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/109.3/igler.html
“Engineering the Elephant: Industrialization and the Environment in the American West,” in William Deverell, ed., The Blackwell Companion to the American West (2004).
Industrial Cowboys: Miller & Lux and the Transformation of the Far West, 1850-1920 (UC Press, 2001)
“The Industrial Far West: Region and Nation in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Pacific Historical Review (2000).
“The Abattoir of the Prairie,” Rethinking History (1999).
"When Is a River Not a River? Or, Reclaiming Nature's Disorder in Lux v. Haggin," Environmental History (1996).
"Industrial Cowboys: Corporate Ranching in Late Nineteenth-Century California," Agricultural History (1995).