After World War II, the US Navy and Army dominated the Pacific Ocean, envisioning it as an “American Lake,” so that it could never again be a pathway for attack from East Asia. As part of this strategic vision, the US military sought to understand and preserve Pacific Island habitats and human communities. This overlapped with the interests of scientists wishing to protect natural habitats, keeping them pristine and accessible for scientific research. This paper illuminates the close and causal connection between the US military and a new network of American, Asian, and European scientists, who reframed scientific knowledge of the Pacific’s web of nature. At the center of this network was the Pacific Science Board (PSB), funded largely—and quietly—through US Cold War military allocations. Under the PSB’s chief executive and diplomat, Harold J. Coolidge, Pacific Science was transformed from a problem-solving cadre of imperial scientists, as had been the case before 1941, into a global conservation movement. My research especially examines US scientist Raymond Fosberg, who leveraged the PSB, as well as the Pacific Science Congresses, to create an international network of naturalists, and went on to oversee conservation of island habitats under US power.

This paper aims to understand global connections in the Indo-Pacific world using the coconut plantations of Lever’s Pacific Plantations Limited (LPPL) as a case study. The LPPL was a subsidiary of Lever Brothers, a Britain-based soap giant that later became Unilever. The company owned 62 properties just in the Solomon Islands, most of which were run as coconut plantations. LPPL further owned about fifteen estates across the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony (today’s Kiribati and Tuvalu), the Cook Islands, Fiji, and New Guinea, all part of the British Empire during the 19–20th centuries. Altogether, the land once held by LPPL comprises 370,000 acres scattered across more than 6000 kilometres in the Pacific Ocean, including those that became strategically important during the Second World War. Coconut palms were grown from seed nuts imported from across the Indo-Pacific, including the Solomon Islands, Samoa, Ceylon, Federated Malay States, and the Straits Settlements. LPPL authorities made numerous attempts to bring in labourers from India, China, or New Guinea. And in the estates, plants, insects, and animals were introduced from Australia, Java, New Guinea, Fiji, Europe, and the US to assist plantation labour and control pests. Utilising the collections at Unilever’s Archives and Records Management, this paper will present a global history of coconut plantations in the Pacific. By doing so, this paper aims to frame plantations as sites of global and imperial connections.

This paper considers the geopolitics of international data sharing in the Cold War, examining through the case of the 1957-58 International Geophysical Year (IGY) and the network of World Data Centers (WDC) that were established as part of the IGY, and which continued to operate, evolve, and expand in subsequent decades. For all that the IGY was conceived and discussed in terms of a non-political and truly global exercise in international scientific cooperation, the IGY and the WDC system were nevertheless both shaped and in turn also helped to shape, political currents that ran through international scientific exchange, cooperation, and competition more widely during that period. Nowhere in the IGY or WDCs were these dynamics more overtly evident than in East Asia, which featured extreme examples of the asymmetries inherent these exercises in geoscientific data collection and exchange, particularly in relation to the nature of knowledge circulation and exclusion alike. While the IGY shaped and further embedded several key dynamics in these areas, crucially, in the case of East Asia these were not static over time and, as the paper demonstrates, were primarily rooted in the Cold War’s dramatic shifting geopolitical currents.