To stimulate the development of new industries, in 1881 the New Zealand government announced a scheme that included the offer of a reward for the production of sulphuric acid. The New Zealand Drug Company, that had begun life as Kempthorne Prosser & Co druggists and importers, decided to extend the range of their activities, and so took up the challenge. Instead of turning to London, as other British colonists were prone to do, the New Zealanders turned to their Australian ‘cousins’ who had already developed that technology in Melbourne and Sydney. Already in partnership with a firm in Melbourne, where there were several sulphuric acid manufacturers who were exporting acid across the Tasman Sea, the New Zealanders entered into an agreement with Cuming Smith & Co for transfer of technology and with it an experienced acid-maker, George Smith. The success of this venture enabled them to establish the industry in Dunedin, the city where we are meeting, to claim the reward, and (as the Australians and others had done) to use the acid to make superphosphate which greatly benefitted their country’s agricultural industry.

The Michaelis-Arbuzov rearrangement was discovered by August Michaelis (1847-1916) in 1898, and studied in depth by the Russian chemist, Aleksandr Yerminingel’dovich Arbuzov (1877-1968). He reported his first results in five papers in 1905 and 1906, followed by four papers on the mechanism of the reaction in 1910. After moving to Kazan in 1911 as Zaitsev’s successor, Arbuzov made Kazan a global center of organophosphorus chemistry. This was further cemented by the 1997 initiation of the biennial International Arbuzovs Prize in the field of organophosphorous chemistry. This prize recognizes outstanding contributions in the field by any chemist. The early awards went predominantly to European chemists [Russia (1997, 2007, 2019, 2023), Poland (1999, 2009), France (2001), Germany (2003, 2017), the United Kingdom (2011), Ukraine (2013), the Netherlands (2021)], but more recently it has been awarded to chemists from the Pacific Rim [the United States (1997), Japan (2005), China (2015)].
The spread of organophosphorus chemistry from Russia includes the Horner-Wadsworth-Emmons olefination reaction, in which the Arbuzov rearrangement of a trialkyl phosphite by an alkyl halide provides the critical phosphonate esters from which the anionic nucleophile is derived. This reaction provides us with an excellent vehicle to explore the diaspora of chemistry throughout the world, including the nations of the Pacific Rim.

The first International Symposium on Applied Bioinorganic Chemistry (ISABC) was held in Wuhan, China April 23-26 ,1990. The Chairman was Professor Wang Kui of Beijing Medical University with Professor John Webb from Australia as the Co-Chairman. The sponsors were the Chinese Chemical Society, UNESCO and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
The conference area of interest was the science behind the applications of bioinorganic chemistry in health, agriculture, the environment and related fields. There were few international speakers but a large group of almost 200 Chinese scholars and researchers.
A little over two years later, in December 1992, the second ISABC was held, also in China, at Zhongshan (Sun Yatsen) University in the southern city of Guangzhou. The international Advisory Committee had been established. The participants, around 200, now included researchers from across China as well as 45 delegates from around the world.
For the third conference, in 1994, the location was Fremantle, in Western Australia with Murdoch University’s Prof John Webb as the local host. About 100 participants came from 21 countries. The keynote lectures were published in the international journal Coordination Chemistry Reviews, volume 151 in 1996.
The paper will consider the factors involved in the creation and growth of this set of symposia which continue to the present day.

The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), established in 1919 as an arena for chemists’ international exchange, was dominated by European and North American members until the 1950s. IUPAC’s globalisation proceeded from the 1960s to the 1980s, marked by the increase of Asian, Latin American, and Oceanian members in its leading positions, and went hand in hand with the regionalisation of international chemistry, exemplified by the emergence of the Federation of European Chemical Societies (FECS, today’s European Chemical Society [EuChemS]) established in 1970 and the Federation of Asian Chemical Societies (FACS) established in 1979. Both FECS and FACS were created at UNESCO’s suggestion and share as part of their aims the promotion of “regional cooperation” and “to nurture a platform for scientific discussion.” This paper aims to complicate this picture and argues that regional coalescence works in more than one way, taking the example of Japanese engagement with the FACS and The International Chemical Congress of Pacific Basin Societies (Pacifichem), a corporation founded in 1984 that organises a conference in Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, every five years. Japan is geographically and geopolitically situated on the eastern edge of Asia and western edge of the Pacific Rim and has had strained relationships with its neighbours due to its imperial past, meaning that how to forge regional alliances is not a simple question. It examines the motives, attitudes and expectations of Japanese chemists and the Chemical Society of Japan held for these regional bodies and their complex regional identities.