From the Editors

One of the main efforts of the current and past editorial teams of History Australia has been to globalise the scope and content of the journal. In the spirit of this endeavour, and within a section called ‘Historical Practice’, we begin this issue with a short article commissioned by our predecessors from leading scholar Professor G. Balachandran (Geneva Institute of International and Development Studies, Switzerland). In it he reflects on the state of global history from an Asian perspective. As Balachandran suggests, ‘one of the promises of “world” or “global” history’ is to examine the history from the margins and give voice to the ‘experiences of a people, community or group, from the perspective of a locality or region’. Some of what Balachandran suggests can be observed in our lead article. Here Patricia O’Brien explores the largely forgotten and unlikely friendships between the Samoan nationalist leader Ta’isi O.F. Nelson (as seen with his family on the cover of the journal) and Australian politicians and businessmen, and the impact of these relationships on the history of the Polynesian Pacific in the 1920s and 1930s.