Océanie retained both its breadth and its racial connotations in French usage well into the twentieth century.^[34] By this stage, 'Oceania' was fairly common in English and just as racialized despite its narrower geographic span (see note 10). In 1920, the Foreign Office handbook on British Possessions in Oceania differentiated Pacific Islanders along explicitly social evolutionist racial lines: Solomon Islanders were 'a Melanesian race, still largely in a state of barbarism' and 'naked savages scarcely beyond the head-hunting stage of development'; whereas Tongans were 'a branch of the Polynesian race', 'a highly advanced native race who have accepted Christianity'.^[35] By the 1970s, with the public discrediting of racial language, the regional name had shed overt intimations of race in both French and English. In French, Océanie had contracted in conformity with the international geopolitical norm that puts the Malay Archipelago in Asia and divides Asia from Oceania along the arbitrary colonial border which cuts the island of New Guinea in two.^[36]

Recuperation of the broader early conception of Oceania suits our ethical, political, and intellectual interests. Ethically, we seek to expose the old racial implications of the term to rigorous historical critique. Politically, an inclusive construction of Oceania unsettles the unquestioned realism of the postcolonial national and ethnic boundaries that were inherited from colonial divisions and are further reinscribed in the partitioning of academic research. Historically, our terminology acknowledges farflung cultural and linguistic affinities, notably between Austronesian-speaking groups, and the trajectories of settlement and other human movements in the region, including those of Europeans, before the congealing of colonial borders in the late nineteenth century. At least until the 1880s, the indigenous inhabitants of New Holland/Australia and Van Diemen's Land/Tasmania were usually compared, classified, and ranked within the same regional frame as people labelled Malays, Polynesians, Micronesians, Melanesians, Oceanic Negroes, or Papuans. And Oceania loomed large in its own right in the history of racial thinking: Oceanian experience and examples were central to the biologization of the idea of race from the late eighteenth century (see Chapters Two and Three); racial comparisons within Oceania and case studies from the region, especially Aboriginal Australia, figured prominently in the nineteenth-century appropriation of anthropology by the science of race and in qualified humanitarian opposition to the union (see Chapters Two, Four, Five, Six, and Seven); and the region contributed to science's rejection of race from the mid-twentieth century, notwithstanding entrenched popular beliefs and vocabularies and the naturalization of Dumont d'Urville's racial categories in modern indigenous usages.^[37]