Defining the Pacific: Opportunities and Constraints

This volume lays the physical and conceptual groundwork for the Pacific World series, exploring both the constraints imposed and the opportunities offered to humanity by the physical environment of the Pacific region. Organized from the perspectives of "Big History" and macro-geography, the volume presents a series of major studies and surveys by authors from a range of disciplines. It opens with perspectives on the ocean, and closes with questions of human settlement, diffusion, and trans-...