| Abstract: | The focus of this article is the way in which United States (US) whalers, and other Pacific voyagers, helped to consolidate an increasingly globalized understanding of the world ? with implications for both the US itself and Australasia. The US globalizing enterprises also resulted in greater contact between Europeans and a diverse range of peoples within the Pacific, which encompassed Australian Aborigines and Polynesians. Linking the US and Australia and their globalizing enterprises was a sense of a common culture and origins, along with a shared justification for Pacific expansionism based on Enlightenment conceptions of the promotion of progress. |
