WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD was no misty-eyed dreamer. It was whaling, or what he eulogised as “the chase of the whale over his broad range of the universal ocean”, that first drew his attention to the Pacific. He was a visionary, though.
The man who became Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of state in 1861 and bought Alaska from tsarist Russia in 1867 knew what America had to do to take advantage of the opening of the Pacific. It needed to build on the Gold Rush spirit in California; finish a transcontinental railway to carry people and freight from one side of America to theother; dig a waterway through Central America for ships to pass through; and acquire Pacific territories like Hawaii and Midway as maritime hubs of trade and security. All this was done either within his lifetime or within a few decades of it.
The Pacific evokes that kind of enthusiasm. It is a 64m square mile (165m square km) blank on the map (except for a plethora of small islands), bigger than the world’s entire landmass.
Still, at times it seemed as though its destiny would never arrive. The refrain, “The Mediterranean is the ocean of the past, the Atlantic is the ocean of the present and the Pacific is the ocean of the future,” first heard more than 100 years ago, is still repeated today. Yet exactly half a century after Japan “rejoined the world” (in the phrase of Ian Buruma, a writer) by hosting the Olympics in 1964, the Pacific Age has now clearly arrived.
Japan’s economic power may have peaked 25 years ago, but it produced a trans-Pacific competition that now has America and China vying with each other for the title of the world’s largest economy (at purchasing-power parity). All three Pacific nations trade vigorously with one another.
image credit curiousmatic.com
