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  1. Home
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  3. The Cambridge History of the Pacific Islanders
  • Cited by 49
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
March 2008
Print publication year:
1997
Online ISBN:
9781139055574
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521441957
Subjects:
Regional and World History: General Interest, History
Collection:
Cambridge Histories - Asian History
Information

Book description

This history presents an authoritative and comprehensive introduction to the experiences of Pacific islanders from their first settlement of the islands to the present day. It addresses the question of insularity and explores islanders' experiences thematically, covering such topics as early settlement, contact with Europeans, colonialism, politics, commerce, nuclear testing, tradition, ideology, and the role of women. It incorporates material on the Maori, the Irianese in western New Guinea, the settled immigrant communities in Fiji, New Caledonia and the Hawaiian monarchy and follows migrants to New Zealand, Australia and North America.

Reviews

‘ … this work makes a landmark contribution to our understanding of the Pacific Islands.’

Source: University of New South Wales Centre for South Pacific Studies Newsletter

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Contents

Contents
  • 1 - Contending Approaches
    pp 1-36
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The Cambridge History acknowledges the diversity of Pacific voices and the particularity of their experiences, while narrating common patterns and intersections with global events. A long-standing convention in Western scholarship was that historians studied events while anthropologists studied cultures. To cultural anthropologists, 'ethnohistory' meant the reconstruction of past life- ways by analysing documentary materials. To the academic audience, the significance of ethnohistorical work usually hinges on its thoroughness, and originality is measured by the extent to which the scholars ferret out unpublished sources and make sense of fragmentary records. Oral traditions, like travellers' accounts and Western histories, are produced in a contemporary context, reflecting particular points of view. In this chapter 'colonial history' denotes a perspective and style of historiography rather than the time of its production. Recounting events significant to Western core states and affecting Westerners, colonial history situates agency, causality and effective power in the actions of the imperial nations and their citizens.
  • 2 - Human Settlement
    pp 37-79
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter presents several samples, including oral histories in poetry, archaeology in theprose of the natural sciences, linguistics in the form of genealogies, and the more conventional language of academic history. The Kumulipo chant and the 'Story of Latmikaik' are not narrowly historical, but creation stories from Polynesian Hawai'i and Micronesian Palau. Meanwhile Archaeology was developing formidable skills in analysing physical remains of past societies, while linguists organised languages into families with genealogies describing their evolution from common ancestor languages. One of the most useful historical disciplines which developed during the past hundred years is Linguistics. The complementary distribution of Austronesian languages and the Island South-East Asian Neolithic and Lapita cultural complexes suggests dates for the spread of both. Castaways from South-East Asia, from South America, and from Portuguese and Spanish ships of the sixteenth century appear to have been significant actors in the last 2000 years of Pacific Island prehistory.
  • 3 - Pacific Edens? Myths and Realities of Primitive Affluence
    pp 80-118
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The pioneers who colonised the western Pacific found immense forests and rivers fed by copious rain. The distinction between 'hunting and gathering' and 'agriculture' is a matter of emphasis. The pioneers developed systematic agriculture first in coastal New Guinea, then in the Highlands and later on smaller islands where natural resources would not sustain hunters and gatherers. Technical ingenuity, religious awe and social relations were so intertwined that it is misleading to isolate the 'economic' meaning of multidimensional experience. Land tenure arrangements are often described as 'traditional' or 'customary', but tenure practices on 'customary' land often differ greatly from practices described by early observers, land commissions, or in recorded oral history. Complementing most people's attachment to particular pieces of land was an equally profound commitment to social relations which rested on (and reinforced) trade and exchange. Underpinning all other relations were a host of relationships between women and men, in production, consumption and exchanges.
  • 4 - Discovering Outsiders
    pp 119-151
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Descriptions of very different ways of organising social relations had a profound influence on European intellectuals, broadening their sense of social, political, cultural and economic possibilities. They assumed that the discovery of Europeans had equally profound effects among the Pacific Islanders who were simultaneously 'discovering' new ways of living and thinking. This chapter examines a sample of early cross-cultural encounters, from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, to try to grasp the ways in which some Islanders understood both the events and their implications for their own lives and ideas. When Europeans and Islanders 'discovered' each other, the self-conscious European explorers were fully expecting to grapple with strange languages, customs and modes of living and thinking. Epidemics of influenza, venereal diseases, tuberculosis and other afflictions did cause population decline and sometimes collapse: in extreme cases, such as Kosrae or Rapanui, populations of several thousands fell to a few hundred.
  • 5 - Land, Labour and Independent Development
    pp 152-184
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Throughout the nineteenth century, ambitious Pacific Islanders saw a variety of chances to transform their lives and their production and exchange. Several formed alliances with foreign adventurers, to extract or exploit resources. As the balance of political power tilted against the chiefs, however, it became increasingly difficult to retain land, labour, and autonomy. Radical scholars argue that development can be destructive, especially in societies remote from metropolitan centres and lacking political leverage. The frequency of shipwrecks even in the seventeenth century implies that many earlier vessels, seeking sandalwood or beche-de-mer, struck the western Carolines. Across the temperate South, British settlers flowed with increasing strength and turbulence. In the early nineteenth century the New Zealand Maori had earned a reputation as brutal yet intelligent natives. Islanders often had to make sacrifices to retain autonomy. The Vaitupu Company in Tuvalu (Ellice Islands) made heroic attempts at self-reliant development.
  • 6 - New Political Orders
    pp 185-217
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Political destinies were shaped mainly by patterns of European trade and migration interacting with indigenous political structures. Two models of foreign settlement crystallised in the nineteenth century, with very different long-term implications. In Australia and New Zealand, indigenous people were outnumbered by European settlers who gained power through settler states and controlled the political agenda. This chapter relies partly on unpublished archival material for Protestant missionary societies. The most complete collection is that of the London Missionary Society, in the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University. Microfilm copies have been made available in several other libraries, including the Mitchell Library in Sydney. The Mitchell Library also holds the bulk of Methodist missionary archival material. Anglican archives are held in Lambeth Palace, London, in the Library of the University of Papua New Guinea, and in several depositories in New Zealand and the Solomon Islands. These collections are described in the bibliographies of Langmore, Missionary Lives; and Hilliard, God's Gentlemen.
  • 7 - New Economic Orders: Land, Labour and Dependency
    pp 218-252
  • View abstract

    Summary

    During most of the nineteenth century, the British Navy was the main over-arching authority in the Pacific, exercising 'informal empire' at a time when Britain was committed to free trade and reluctant to incur the costs of colonial administration. The greatest sources of instability were British settlers in Australia and New Zealand, and French settlers (caldoches) in New Caledonia. The earliest traders needed the support of local power-holders, for ventures which made slight demands on land and labour. At the perimeter of French, British and Australian strategic and commercial interests, the protectorates were declared without enthusiasm or resources. The Young Maori Party campaigns were at a peak when Parliament passed a number of acts granting limited self-government to Maori. CSR's Queens-land operations relied on up-to-date technology, a bounty, and white labour. Many general features of plantation life are manifest in Fiji. Depending on circumstances, some populations recovered quickly even from dreadful epidemics.
  • 8 - Colonial Administration and the Invention of the Native
    pp 253-288
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The accepted European view of colonial rule in the 1920s and 1930s, contested only by a few dissident anthropologists and missionaries, was that it brought immense benefits to Islanders. In international law the South Seas consisted of territories under a variety of foreign jurisdictions. To understand Islands colonialism we must recognise the limitations of colonial power. Christian missions were strong and influential, often exercising quasi-governmental powers. Missions were far more significant mediators of modernisation than most governments. The Fijian Apolosi Nawai spent much of the interwar period exiled on Rotuma for his anti-British activities. Colonialism is perhaps better seen as the interaction of many competing ethnocentrisms, with European racial prejudice forming an overlay. Ethnocentrism was compounded by the fact that Samoan and Tongan missionaries commonly thought of themselves as bringing the Christian message to inferior peoples who desperately needed uplifting. The Fiji system was devised to solve the problem of labour without sacrificing economic development or Fijians themselves.
  • 9 - The War in the Pacific
    pp 289-323
  • View abstract

    Summary

    In the Pacific Islands, World War II came first as a reverberation of distant events. The French Resident in the New Hebrides, a hybrid colony administered jointly by France and Britain, quickly opted for the Allies, but for months the governors of French territories prevaricated. Australia and New Zealand, as British dominions, sent armies to aid Britain, including a Maori battalion which saw action in Greece in 1942. Japan mounted assaults from bases stretching from one end of its Micronesian territory to the other, from Saipan to Kwajalein. The Allied reoccupation of territory was relentless, leaving Japanese on many Islands isolated from supplies as the Americans leapfrogged north and north-west towards Japan. The Australians' departure from Kieta on Bougainville was an even greater blow to white prestige. The Japanese evacuated entire populations as the American threat loomed. While some Islanders fought, many more laboured for the military forces. The Japanese thought the crossing of Papua would be simple.
  • 10 - A Nuclear Pacific
    pp 324-358
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The nuclear history of the Pacific begins with two central facts. The test sites were on Islands remote from Western population, and Islanders were politically subordinated to the nuclear powers. The American tests contaminated and destroyed land, and left physical injury and psychological disturbance among groups of Marshall Islanders whose lives have revolved around the bomb since the 1940s. Towards the end of the war in the Pacific, the Americans expelled Japan from the scattered islands of Micronesia in a series of bloody battles. The United States exploded sixty-six nuclear weapons in the northern Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958, including the most powerful and contaminating bombs in the history of American testing. As in Kiribati and the Marshall Islands, colonialism and nuclear testing have gone together in French Polynesia. The Conference for a Nuclear-Free Pacific in Fiji in 1975 initiated an organised movement for a nuclear-free and independent Pacific.
  • 11 - The Material World Remade
    pp 359-396
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The movement for a nuclear-free Pacific recast itself in terms of a Nuclear-Free and Independent Pacific, recognising that national sovereignty is a pre-condition of reasserting control over the environments. Resource bases had been ravaged by the extraction of resources and capital. This chapter addresses issues which Islanders face as they interact with the environment which must sustain future generations, symbolically and materially. It raises questions, for there is no agreed framework through which to understand relations between economies, cultures and environments. The new nations largely continued the economic linkages established by their colonial predecessors in order to fund the now essential education, medical and public safety service. Transformations are more visible in the capitals-international news services, hospitals, schools and colleges. Academies prepare sailors to join international fleets. Many Pacific nations seek joint ventures with foreign companies, and purchase fishing vessels outright. The root causes are rapidly expanding populations and urbanisation. The redefinition of mineral resources depends crucially on political context.
  • 12 - The Ideological World Remade
    pp 397-438
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Central to many political and constitutional disputes in the Pacific Islands is the fact that cultural and national identities, and categories such as indigenous, are ambiguous and contested. This chapter addresses the transformation of cultural systems and ideologies from the colonial era through decolonisation, by focusing on political ideas, cultural and local identities, and changing forms of group action. It also addresses the implications of decolonisation and economic transformation for women. Scholars suggest various causes for increasing political and other violence, such as foreign education, the frustration of young people, power disparities between ethnic groups, conflicts between region and nation over resources, and a growing gap between rich and poor. During the colonial period, Melanesian tradition became conspicuous and contentious in two arenas, one of them being that debate about local beliefs and practices escalated in association with cargo cults, that well-known form of Melanesian millenarianism. In gender relations, a dynamic conjunction linked indigenous precedents and foreign ideas and institutions.
  • 13 - The End of Insularity
    pp 439-467
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Pacific Islands, and their inhabitants, were always more inter-related than the literature about them recognised. The End of Insularity, then, signifies the end of colonial perceptions of insularity that belied reality. It also denotes the empirical reality of contemporary lives as Islanders renew and expand linkages across the Pacific. Webs of relationships span Pacific and continental societies. Two economists coined the term MIRAB to describe the dependent economies of Kiribati, Tuvalu, the Cook Islands, Niue and Tokelau. It could also be applied to Tahiti, American Samoa, and throughout the former United States Trust Territory of Micronesia. The Marshallese have considerable experience with migrant and relocated communities. The colonial experience fragmented some wider linkages, and continues to shape present relationships. The history and nature of links to Pacific Rim countries significantly affect migration possibilities. Initial migration constraints, as well as the size, location, and time depth of the immigrant populations, have affected populations.

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