| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Oceania and the Pacific Islands

Jonathan Lamb. Preserving the Self in the South Seas 1680–1840. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2001. Pp. xii, 345. Cloth $52.00, paper $18.00.

Jonathan Lamb's work convincingly subverts heroic histories of Pacific voyaging. Divine providence, national glory, the expansion of empire, and the visionary spirit of the navigator all fail to explain adequately the character of European exploration from the late seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries. Lamb directs his readers instead to the ways in which these voyages served as theater for the law of self-preservation and the paradoxes and contradictions that swirled about that law. For Lamb, the European self is not a product of reflection or interpretation but a bundle of immediate, remembered impressions on which a sense of personal identity depends. Challenging this sense of self are the pressures of civil society, which require accommodation to a common good. Reviewing an extensive body of writing on social contract theory, Lamb first considers how self-preservation, "the most urgent of instincts and the most imperative of social duties" (p. 6), necessitated an often tense, sometimes rebellious relationship with the norms of society. Voyaging, with its distancing of the self from all that was familiar, revealed these tensions in marked relief.

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