Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.3 | The History Cooperative

Les Etats-Unis et le Pacifique: Histoire d'une frontière (The United States and the Pacific: History of a frontier). By Jean Heffer. (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995. 505 pp. Paper, F 160.00, isbn 2-226-07903-3.) In French.

This French author has now written a dozen books on American history, from a study in 1971 of the Civil War to works on the Great Depression, the Cold War, and American "civilization." What Jean Heffer presents here is a balanced overview of United States expansion into the Pacific region from 1784, the start of our China trade, almost to the present (stopping just short of the East Asian currency crisis). He pursues three main types of American interest—strategic, economic, and cultural—and divides our overseas "manifest destiny" into three time periods: the "Great Frontier" (borrowing from Walter Webb and William McNeill), when the Pacific region became an American commercial periphery; a contraction in the 1860s from which the United States presence in the Pacific only gradually recovered; and post-1945 United States domination of the region. He reinterprets Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis, arguing for a zone of maritime activity that varied over time in intensity and American influence and in which "each actor could maximize his own utility." His attention to cross-cultural relations reflects modern Pacific historiography, unlike the disempowering analyses of world-system theory. . . .

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