Paper and Textile Encounters in the Pacific.

This article examines the eighteenth-century work *A Catalogue of the Different Specimens of Cloth Collected in the Three Voyages of Captain Cook to the Southern Hemisphere*, which combines European print culture with Pacific bark cloth (tapa) samples to explore alternative material histories of paper. The book, published by antiquarian Alexander Shaw in 1787, juxtaposes bark cloth—an important Pacific textile imbued with social and ceremonial significance—with European paper, highlighting tensions between these materials as carriers of knowledge, value, and cultural meaning. The bark cloth samples resist full assimilation into European systems of classification and print, embodying histories of colonial exchange, kinship, and mourning that challenge the notion of paper as a neutral, invisible medium. The article also situates this work within broader early modern contexts of paper production, colonialism, and the transformation of lives and materials into economic and epistemic commodities.