On the outside walls of the Whaling Museum in New Bedford, Massachusetts, a stone-carved inscription proclaims the success of the whaling industry in “lighting up the world.“ This claim is literal in that it describes how whaling provided the oil that fuelled the street lamps of Europe's cities and powered many other facets of the Industrial Revolution. But it is also metaphorical in its suggestion that the industry expanded European and American understanding of the geography, resources and cultures of the world's remote oceans, while at the same time exposing those cultures to the “light” of European expansion and global capitalism. In more recent times, the same claims have been taken up by historians under the rubric of globalization. Thus, Granville Allen Mawer in his history of South Seas whaling celebrates ocean-going sperm whalers as pioneers who “broke whaling out of the ice of the North Atlantic and led it south to become the world's first truly global industry.“

This essay re-examines the link between whaling and globalization from the perspective of those whom Eric Wolf famously called “the people without history.“5 In the case of Pacific whaling these were Maori, Native Hawaiians and other indigenous islanders, many of whom encountered Europeans for the first time in the context of whaling and other maritime resource industries. The essay is not, however, an exhaustive account of indigenous engagement with whaling in all parts of the Pacific. Rather, it is an exploratory piece that aims to open up the conversation on whaling and globalization and to suggest avenues for further research. Using case studies from New Zealand and Hawai'i, I show how a focus on global connections can shed new light on the relationship between maritime industries and broader world-historical processes, such as colonialism and cultural contact.