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‘The Fatal Impact’?
from Part IX - Culture Contact and the Impact of Pre-colonial European Influences
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 November 2022
After the arrival of European ships, a new age of infectious disease arrived in Fiji. According to the meke (dance poem) above,2 the first epidemic was introduced to Fiji in the late 1700s. This important Indigenous source was recorded by the Fijian public servant Ilai Motonicocoka in the late 1800s; however, his scholarship was later contested.3 This is a fitting way to introduce a set of debates about a European ‘Fatal Impact’ on Pacific peoples because of two central questions. Did the coming of European ships really bring a new age of infectious disease to the island Pacific? Was this new age responsible for steep demographic decline before formal colonial rule was implemented?
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