Extraction and Its Discontents: Biotic Exchange, Resource Consumption, and Social Imagination in the Modern Pacific World

Session Submission Type: Complete Panel

Abstract

This panel explores the interplay between biotic exchange, resource consumption, and socio-cultural mores in the Pacific Ocean region. Drawing inspiration from Alfred Crosby's work on the Atlantic World’s "Columbian Exchange," this panel delves into the understudied biotic flows of the Pacific World. The panel illuminates the extensive biotic exchange and the development of biotic nationalism along the Pacific rim in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It also explores the socio-political factors driving the remaking and reshuffling of Pacific World biota and the consumption of the region’s natural resources.

The panelists examine themes of scarcity, abundance, and the role of technology in mitigating consumer consumption. Barrie Blatchford scrutinizes America’s biotic relationships with the Pacific World through Congress’s 1871 creation of the United States Fish Commission (USFC). The USFC replenished America’s fish supply through the artificial propagation of native fish and the introduction of non-native species. One domestic effect was the remaking of Pacific coast fish fauna and the dispossession of indigenous peoples on salmon-producing rivers. The USFC also spread American fish to Pacific nations like Japan, New Zealand, and Hawaii.

Xiaofei Gao elucidates seaweed’s commodification within rising nationalism in Japan and China. Despite the seaweed industry’s reliance on global technology and international markets, the product activated different nations’ geopolitical anxiety. Gao particularly highlights the importance of Manchuria as a borderland in the “seaweed modernity” of the northwestern Pacific.

Guangshuo Yang analyzes a religious-industrial coalition forged around monosodium glutamate (MSG) in Republican China. Despite its origin as a Japanese industrial extraction from seaweed, Chinese Buddhist leaders hailed MSG as a crucial component in their campaign against animal exploitation. They hoped that the food additive would improve the culinary appeal of vegetarian food and thus “redeem the karmic demerit of the [Chinese] nation,” which was inching toward a total war with Japan.

Sub Unit

• ASEH Annual Conference

Individual Presentations

• America’s Pacific Exchange: The United States Fish Commission, Settler Colonialism, and the Transnational Transplantation of Fish in the Pacific World, 1872-1920 - Barrie Ryne Blatchford, Columbia University

• Extracting Humanity: Monosodium Glutamate (MSG) and the Buddhist Techno-Consumerist Solution to Animal Exploitation in Republican China - Guangshuo Yang, Northwestern University

• Seaweed Modernity: Empire, State, and the Sino-Japanese Relations - Xiaofei Gao, University of Colorado

Chair

• Steven Corey, Columbia College of Chicago