NEW SOURCES OF INSTABILITY

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. Frail kingdoms and mission theocracies flourished under that umbrella, and Protestant mission families provided consular services which hinged the Navy’s maritime power to island-based authorities. Three kinds of instability challenged this informal empire. In the Islands the expansion of commerce unsettled social relations and attracted the opportunists and empire-builders described in chapters 5 and 6. Other industrial powers were also drawn into the region. The French Navy from the 1840s projected French power. American naval power provoked the re-emergence of Japan, and then extinguished the decaying Spanish Empire, to initiate America’s Pacific Century. The new German Empire, under Chancellor Bismarck, was the least of Britain’s anxieties. Island produce generated only a fraction of Germany’s imports, and Bismarck (like Britain but unlike France) resisted tariff protection and colonial acquisitions.

The greatest sources of instability were British settlers in Australia and New Zealand, and French settlers (caldoches) in New Caledonia. They competed with Samoan-based German recruiters for the labour of the western Islands, and all demanded that their metropolitan governments annex every island which either was inhabited or might possess minerals. European governments were understandably reluctant to risk global conflicts for the sake of remote islands and obscure propagandists. They could not ignore the increasing disorder, nor simply rebuff their importunate subjects, but their responses were minimalist and cheap.