Naming Oceania: geography, raciology and local knowledge in the 'fifth part of the world', 1511-1920

This proposal puts contests over naming at the centre of a novel history of Oceania, which includes Australia and Island Southeast Asia. It will show how the conception, naming and partition of places (geography) and the naming, division, and racial classification of people (raciology) were mutually complicit in imperial and colonial agendas. Combining the history of science with the ethnohistory of encounters, this research will set the region in global intellectual contexts but also decentre European science by revealing its debts to local knowledge. Local knowledge includes European experience in often fraught encounters and the traces of indigenous agency, nomenclatures, lore and rumour embedded in foreigners' maps, texts and images.