The Peopling of California in Pacific Context: Parallels, Connections, Political and Cultural Consequences

California today is among the most diverse societies in the world, with a foreign-born population of around 27 percent. Australia and New Zealand have foreign-born populations almost as high; few nations rival these societies in diversity. There is a simple reason: all three societies were conquered and settled in similar ways, often by similar groups, sometimes literally by the same people, and with funding largely from the same Scottish and English banks. In all three cases, indigenous populations were nearly obliterated by genocidal campaigns using virtually the same methods, and pursuing the same aims, in the middle third of the nineteenth century. In all three, the late nineteenth century saw a surge of settlement in which private and public labor recruiters sought to match population groups with particular skills to particular resources—Irish and Basque sheep herders to arid sheep country, Chinese and Welsh miners to goldfields, Italian wine-makers to rich volcanic hill country, Portuguese and Amalfitan fishermen to rocky coasts, Japanese horticulturalists to rich alluvial valleys, and so on. Finally, after adopting discriminatory legislation against Asian immigrants between 1882 and 1926, in the last quarter of the twentieth century all three societies aggressively recruited well-educated labor and entrepreneurial talent from the highly innovative and economically expanding societies of Asia. This presentation will offer suggestions of topics, texts, and images for reconceptualizing the long-term population history of California as part of a focused, self-conscious, and often coordinated regional development effort in the Pacific Basin.