¹ Munro, Doug, “The Lagoon Islands: A History of Tuvalu, 1820-1908” (PhD, Macquarie University, 1982).Google Scholar

² Brady, Ivan A. “Land Tenure, Kinship and Community Structure: Strategies for Living in the Ellice Islands of Western Polynesia,” (PhD, University of Oregon, 1970), 45.Google Scholar

³ Separation and independence are analyzed in Macdonald, Barrie, “Secession in Defence of Identity: The Making of Tuvalu,” Pacific Viewpoint 16 (1975), 26–44Google Scholar; Wilson, John F., “Tuvalu Achieves Independence,” Commonwealth Law Bulletin 4 (1978), 1003–09Google Scholar; Connell, John, “Tuvalu: Independence or Dependence?” Current Affairs Bulletin (Sydney), 56(1980), 27–31.Google Scholar

⁴ Davidson, J.W., The Study of Pacific History: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered in Canberra on 24 November 1954 (Canberra, 1955), 11, 13.Google Scholar Other such statements are listed in Moore, Clive and Munro, Doug, “The Nature of Pacific History: A Bibliography of Critical and Reflective Writings,” Journal of Pacific Studies (hereafter JPacS), 20 (1996), 155–60.Google Scholar

⁵ See Shineberg, Dorothy, “The Early Years of Pacific History,” JPacS 20 (1996), 6.Google Scholar

⁶ Howe, K.R., “Pacific Islands History in the 1980s: New Directions or Monograph Myopia?” Pacific Studies 3/2 (1979), 81–90.Google Scholar

⁷ Davidson, J.W., “Problems of Pacific History,” Journal of Pacific History (hereafter JPH), 1 (1966), 3–21.Google Scholar

⁸ This is not as Davidson originally intended. In his inaugural lecture, which is now seldom read, he envisaged that Pacific historians would soon be making “incursions into South-east Asia and later, I hope, into India,” the unifying theme being “the contact of European and non-European societies.” Davidson, , Study, 13–14.Google Scholar This never eventuated and he dropped the suggestion in his 1966 update.

⁹ The most articulate advocate of Islander agency is Howe, K.R., “The Fate of the ‘Savage’ in Pacific Historiography,” New Zealand Journal of History (hereafter NZJH), 11 (1977), 137–54Google Scholar; Where the Waves Fall: A New South Sea Islands History from Earliest Settlement to Colonial Rule (Honolulu, 1984), esp. 347–52.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Davidson, “Problems,” 13. Canberra-school historiography has been tendentiously critiqued by Thomas, Nicholas, “Partial Texts: Representations, Colonialism and Agency in Pacific History,” JPH 25 (1990), 139–58Google Scholar; and perceptively by Chappell, David A., “Active Agents versus Passive Victims?: Decolonized Historiography or Problematic Paradigm,” The Contemporary Pacific 7 (1995), 303–26.Google Scholar

¹¹ The response to a more self-conscious age has resulted in three reflective volumes on Pacific Islands historiography. Lal, Brij V., ed., Pacific Islands History: Journeys and Transformations (Canberra, 1992)Google Scholar; Munro, Doug, ed., Reflections on Pacific Islands Historiography, special issue of JPacS 20 (1996)Google Scholar; Borofsky, Robert, ed., Exploring Pacific Pasts: An Invitation (Honolulu, in press).Google Scholar

¹² Howe, K.R., “The Future of Pacific Islands History: A Personal View” in Lal, , Journeys and Transformations, 229.Google Scholar Excellent recent discussions on the state of Pacific Islands historiography include Hempenstall, Peter, “The Line of Descent: Creating Pacific Histories in Australasia” in Moses, John A., ed., Historical Disciplines in Australasia: Themes, Problems and Debates, special issue of Australian Journal of Politics and History 41 (1995), 157–70Google Scholar; Macdonald, Barrie, “‘Now An Island Is Too Big:’ Limits and Limitations of Pacific Islands History,” JPacS 20 (1996), 23–44.Google Scholar

¹³ Spate, O.H.K., “The Pacific as an Artefact” in Gunson, Niel, ed., The Changing Pacific: Essays in Honour of H.E. Maude (Melbourne, 1978), 42Google Scholar; idem., “Islands and Men” in F.R. Fosberg, ed., Ma's Place in the Island Ecosystem: A Symposium (Honolulu, 1963), 253.

¹⁴ Macdonald, Barrie, “Policy and Practice in an Atoll Territory: British Rule in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, 1892-1970” (PhD, Australian National University, 1971.)Google Scholar The dissertation was extensively revised and expanded into Cinderellas of the Empire: Towards a History of Kiribati and Tuvalu (Canberra, 1982).Google Scholar The following year another history of Tuvalu was published: Laracy, Hugh, ed., Tuvalu: A History (Suva/Funafuti, 1983).Google Scholar One of the so-called “indigenous histories” produced under the auspices of the Institute of Pacific Studies of the University of the South Pacific, the individual chapters were written by a hurriedly-assembled group of Tuvaluans under the occasional oversight of a group of exatriate “facititators.” The book claimed to represent the authentic voice of the culture but in reality it made little use of oral testimony, most of the authors depended on the very European sources they so criticized, and two of the chapters were plagiarized. For this and more see Macdonald's, review in NZJH 19 (1985), 89–90Google Scholar; my own in Journal of the Polynesian Society 95 (1986), 392–95Google Scholar; and Besnier's, Niko in American Anthropologist 88 (1986), 215–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The production of another indigenous history is recounted in Huntsman, Judith, “Just Marginally Possible: The Making of Matagi Tokelau,” JPacS 20 (1996), 138–54.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Shineberg, Dorothy, They Came for Sandalwood: A Study of the Sandalwood Trade in the South-west Pacific. 1830-1865 (Melbourne, 1967)Google Scholar; Maude, H.E., Of Islands and Men: Studies in Pacific History (Melbourne, 1968).Google Scholar Despite Maude's pioneering work having a somewhat dated feel, it stands as a model of the careful empirical research that difficult retrieval exercises entail.

¹⁶ Founded in 1830 and reaching its fullest extent in the 1840s, the Port Arthur Penal Settlement was finally disbanded in 1877. It was already in headlong decline by the 1860s, exactly when the pace of events in Tuvalu quickened with the advent of the Peruvian slavers and the LMS missionaries. I found this chronological disparity initially quite disorienting and it took several months before the conflicting time frames became second nature.

¹⁷ Sahlins, Marshall D., Moala: Culture and Nature on a Fijian Island (Ann Arbor, 1962), 3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁸ Munro, , “Lagoon Islands,” 149–53.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Thus when a missionary was prepared to speak his mind, as in the case of W.E. Goward (1891 and 1897), his reports present such a contrast that the sanitized quality of the others is thrown into sharp relief.

²⁰ Moss, Frederick J., Through Atolls and Islands in the Great South Seas (London 1889), 7.Google Scholar

²¹ Dana, Julian, Gods Who Die: The Story of Samoa's Greatest Adventurer (New York, 1935), 238.Google Scholar

²² Munro, , “Lagoon Islands,” 225.Google Scholar

²³ Another newly-literate group, the New Zealand Maori also produced a “veritable flow” of letters, but many have survived. New Zealand was then a settler society and some formal provision, however inadequate, was made for the preservation of records in ways that were impossible in Tuvalu. E.g., Ward, Alan, “Documenting Maori History: The Arrest of Te Kooti Rikirangi Te Turuki, 1889,” NZJH 14 (1980), 27–28.Google Scholar

²⁴ Greenblatt, Stephen, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago, 1991), 145.CrossRefGoogle Scholar I owe this reference to Robert Borofsky of Hawaii Pacific University.

²⁵ Kennedy, Paul M., The Samoan Tangle: A Study in Anglo-German-American Relations, 1874-1900 (Dublin, 1974), ix.Google Scholar

²⁶ Firth, Stewart, “German Firms in the Pacific Islands, 1857-1914” in Moses, John A. and Kennedy, Paul M., eds, German in the Pacific and Far East, 1870-1914 (Brisbane, 1978), 3–25.Google Scholar

²⁷ If the case of Tuvalu sounds grim, then consider that of the northern Cook Islands, which the LMS vessel usually visited every second year and where the report for each island was typically about a handwritten page, as against the four or five pages devoted to each Tuvalu island on an annual basis. (By contrast, there was a resident European missionary on some of the southern Cook Islands, and the documentation relating to these islands is considerable.) The lack of documentary evidence relating to Pacific Islands which Europeans infrequently visited, lived on and observed still needs to be stressed.

²⁸ Zeldin, Theodore, “Social History and Total History,” Journal of Social History 10 (1976), 243.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁹ Take, for example, the activities of Captain Allen of the Samoan Trading and Shipping Company in the early twentieth century. I plotted the voyages of his trading vessels through the shipping columns of the Samoanische Zeitung and identified his vessels' arrivals and departures from Tuvalu (he eventually set up his headquarters at Funafuti atoll.) I also discovered where else his ships were roaming and from this I was able to make better sense of his Tuvalu activities because I could see how the archipelago fit into a wider pattern. The same applied to my investigations of another Samoa-based trading company which was active in Tuvalu. Munro, Doug, “Tom De Wolf's Pacific Venture: The Life History of a Commercial Enterprise in Samoa,” Pacific Studies 3/2 (1980), 22–44.Google Scholar

³⁰ E.g. Evans, Richard J., In Defence of History (London, 1997), 62–66Google Scholar; Tosh, John, The Pursuit of History (2d ed.: London, 1991), 70–71.Google Scholar Tosh is perplexing on this point. He asserts that that “to argue… that the principles of historical enquiry defy definition altogether is a mystification.” He does not spell out these principles but does claim, on the same page, that there is “something to be said for the view that what historians bring to their sources is not so much a method as an attitude of mind—almost an instinct…”

³¹ See Thornley, Andrew, “On the Edges of Christian History in the Pacific: A Personal Journey,” JPacS 20 (1996), 179.Google Scholar A thoughtful essay, by a social anthropologist, on whether non-believers have the capacity, or even the ‘right’, to study Christianity is Goldsmith, Michael, “Understanding or Believing?: On Researching Christianity in Tuvalu,” JPacS 20 (1996), 161–74.Google Scholar

³² Munro, , “Lagoon Islands,” 207–10, 220–28, 253–55.Google Scholar

³³ Ibid., 85, 90, 98-99.

³⁴ Carr, E.H., What is History? (London, 1961), 12–13.Google Scholar Critiques of Carr's distinction include Elton, G.R., The Practice of History (London, 1969), 75–76Google Scholar; Stanford, Michael, The Nature of Historical Knowledge (Oxford, 1987), 71–72.Google Scholar

³⁵ Evans, , In Defence of History, 76–78, 265n4.Google Scholar

³⁶ Bebbington, David, Patterns of History (2d ed.: Leicester, 1991), 8–9.Google Scholar

³⁷ Munro, , “Lagoon Islands,” 110, 110n7.Google Scholar

³⁸ Ibid., 122-23; Chambers, Keith S., “Heirs of Tefolaha; Tradition and Social Organization in Nanumea, a Pacific Atoll” (PhD., University of California—Berkeley, 1984), 110–11.Google Scholar

³⁹ Another safeguard was two periods of fieldwork (1977-78, 1979) spread over thirteen months, an experience I would not care to repeat. Limitations of space preclude discussion but some thoughts are expressed in Munro, “Vaitupu Company Revisited.”

⁴⁰ Munro, , “Lagoon Islands,” 35–45, 269–80, 283–89.Google Scholar

⁴¹ Ibid., 96-98.

⁴² Ibid., 135-61. This has been published as “Samoan Pastors in Tuvalu, 1865-1899” in Munro, Doug and Thornley, Andrew, eds. The Covenant Makers: Islander Missionaries in the Pacific (Suva, 1996), 124–57.Google Scholar

⁴³ Davidson, J.W., “European Penetration of the South Pacific, 1779-1842,” (PhD, Cambridge, 1942), 313.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Maude, , Of Islands and Men, 134.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ A refreshing alternative to the “waves/occupational categories” approach is the recent historical ethnography of Tokelau, an island group of similar ecology and culture and where, moreover, many of the same missionaries and trading companies were involved. Huntsman, Judith and Hooper, Antony, Tokelau: An Historical Ethnography (Auckland, 1997).Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Published as “The Lives and Times of Resident Traders in Tuvalu: An Exercise in History from Below,” Pacific Studies 10/2 (1987), 73–106.Google Scholar Interestingly, a colleague almost simultaneously reached similar conclusions that traders—in this case in the Solomon Islands—were, by and large, life's losers who got caught in a rut from which it was difficult to extract themselves. Bennett, Judith A., Wealth of the Solomons: A History of a Pacific Archipelago, 1800-1978 (Honolulu, 1987), 58–77.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ Munro, Doug, “Migration and the Shift to Dependence in Tuvalu: A Historical Perspective” in Connell, John, ed., Migration and Development in the South Pacific (Canberra, 1990), 29–41.Google Scholar A subsequent such study is Hezel, Francis X., “The Expensive Taste for Modernity: Caroline and Marshall Islands” in Robillard, Albert B., ed., Social Change in the Pacific Islands (London, 1992), 203–19.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ A much better account of the conversion process is Goldsmith, Michael, “Church and Society in Tuvalu” (PhD, Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1989), ch. 5.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ Munro, , “Lagoon Islands,” 95.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ Ibid., 107.

⁵¹ These tendencies are exemplified in some of the chapters in both Rubenstein, Donald, ed., Pacific History: Papers from the 8th Pacific History Conference (Mangilao, 1992)Google Scholar, and Greenwood, Emma, Neumann, Klaus, and Sartori, Andrew, eds., Work in Flux (Melbourne, 1995).Google Scholar

⁵² Macdonald's Cinderellas of the Empire, after all, is subtitled “towards a history of Kiribati and Tuvalu.” See also Rudé, George, Europe in the Eighteenth Century: Aristocracy and the Bourgeois Challenge (London, 1972), 11–15, 301–16Google Scholar; Evans, , In Defence of History, 103–04, 109, 143, 148, 158Google Scholar; Keegan, John, The Face of Battle (London, 1975), 74.Google Scholar The latter book is remarkable, given its mid-1970s publication, for the extent to which the author meditates on his evidence, on historiographic issues, and about the nature of historical knowledge.

⁵³ Munro, , “Lagoon Islands,” 31-35, 80–82Google Scholar,

⁵⁴ Ibid., 57-61, 163-65, 195-205, 268, 300.

⁵⁵ Spate, , “The Pacific as an Artefact,” 34Google Scholar; Howe, “Monograph Myopia.”

⁵⁶ Kennedy, Dane, “The Expansion of Europe,” Journal of Modem History 59 (1978), 331–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁵⁷ Hempenstall, Peter, “‘My Place:’ Finding a Voice Within Pacific Colonial Studies” in Lal, , Journeys and Transformations, 62.Google Scholar

⁵⁸ Firth, S.C., “German Recruitment and Employment of Labourers in the Western Pacific Before the First World War” (D.Phil, Oxford, 1973)Google Scholar; Hempenstall, Peter J., Pacific Islanders under German Rule: A Study in the Meaning of Colonial Resistance (Canberra, 1978).Google Scholar

⁵⁹ Firth, , “German Recruitment,” i.Google Scholar

⁶⁰ Kennedy, Samoan Tangle, which has recently been criticized for “illustrating important premises and concerns of imperial historiography,” particularly his use of an analogy that suggests that Samoans are “less civilised, peripheral people.” This is to downplay the larger issue of an outstanding research effort involving the masterly synthesis of a massive documentation. Linnekin, Jocelyn, “Contending Approaches” in Denoon, Donaldet al, eds., The Cambridge History of the Pacific Islanders (Cambridge, 1997), 23.Google Scholar

⁶¹ Spate, , “The Pacific as an Artefact,” 34.Google Scholar

⁶² Munro, , “Lagoon Islands,” 173–94.Google Scholar

⁶³ Macdonald, , Cinderellas of the Empire, ix.Google ScholarMacdonald, discusses his book in his “Limits and Limitations,” 38–41.Google Scholar

⁶⁴ Poff, Basil, “The Fivizzano Inheritance,” History Now (Christchurch), 1/2 (1995), 12–18.Google Scholar

⁶⁵ Macdonald, , “Limits and Limitations,” 35.Google Scholar For all its faults the indigenous history of Tuvalu (referred to in footnote 14) attempted to bridge this divide. As well as ‘national’ chapters (e.g., “Palagi and Pastor,” “Colonial Rule”), there was a section containing a potted history of each island.

⁶⁶ In a 1975 discussion on the state of Pacific historiography (published in 1979) Oskar Spate did not want to be seen as suggesting “a dichotomous share-out, the islander taking the ‘inner’ or local function, the European relating it to outside world forces and trends.” Daws, Gavan, “On Being a Historian of the Pacific” in Moses, John A., ed., The Historical Disciplines mid Culture in Australasia: An Assessment (Brisbane, 1979), 131Google Scholar; Spate, , “The Pacific as an Artefact,” 44.Google Scholar But that is what is tending to happen: an increasing number of Pacific Islanders are studying their own past and, in contrast to expatriate historians, who are becoming more expansive in their outlooks, the Islander historians are typically narrowing the focus of concern. See Denoon, Donald, “The Right to Misrepresent,” The Contemporary Pacific 9 (1997), 404Google Scholar; Macdonald, , “Limits and Limitations,” 41–42.Google Scholar My additional concern is that Pacific Islanders avoid studying islands other than their own. See Munro, Doug, “Interview with Brij V. Lal—Historian of Indenture and of Contemporary Fiji,” Itinerario 21/1 (1997), 25.Google Scholar

⁶⁷ Lal, Brij V., “The Passage Out” in Howe, K.R., Kiste, Robert C., and Lal, Brij V., eds, Tides of History: The Pacific Islands in the Twentieth Century (Honolulu, 1993), 440Google Scholar; Firth, Stewart, “Colonial Administration and the Invention of the Native” in The Cambridge History of the Pacific Islanders, 266–67.Google Scholar

⁶⁸ Munro, , “Lagoon Islands,” 78–79.Google Scholar The standard work is Maude, H.E., Slavers in Paradise: The Peruvian Labour Trade in the Pacific, 1862-1864 (Canberra, 1981).Google Scholar

⁶⁹ See also Besnier, Niko, Literacy, Emotion, Authority: Reading and Writing on a Polynesian Atoll (Cambridge, 1995), 44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁷⁰ A clear statement of this position is Howe, K.R., The Loyalty Islands: A History of Culture Contact, 1840-1900 (Canberra, 1977).Google Scholar

⁷¹ Chappell, , “Active Agents,” 304.Google Scholar A further influence in my concluding that Tuvaluans got off lightly in their encounters with the West stemmed from Brown's, DeeBury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (London, 1970).Google Scholar When reading this book at the commencement of dissertation work, I was struck by the fact the Native Americans were always going to “lose:” they were outnumbered and outgunned, fragmented into often mutually hostile tribes which could be picked off one by one or else set against each other, had women and children to defend, and they were occupying land or preventing access to other resources, such as gold. The contrast with Tuvalu was immediately apparent.

⁷² Cannon, John, ed., Historians at Work (London, 1980), 2.Google Scholar

⁷³ Skidelsky, Robert, Interests and Obsessions: Historical Essays (London, 1993), ix–xiv.Google Scholar

⁷⁴ E.g., Moore, Clive, Leckie, Jacqueline, and Munro, Doug, eds, Labour in the South Pacific (Townsville, 1990)Google Scholar; Lal, Brij V., Munro, Doug, and Beechert, Edward D., eds, Plantation Workers: Resistance and Accommodation (Honolulu, 1993)Google Scholar; Munro, , ed., Migration and Labour, special issue of JPacS 18 (1994–1995).Google Scholar

⁷⁵ Munro, Doug, “Who ‘Owns’ Pacific History?: Reflections on the Insider/Outsider Dichotomy,” JPH 29 (1994), 232–37Google Scholar; “Pacific Islands History in the Vernacular: Practical and Ethical Considerations,” NZJH 29 (1995), 83–96Google Scholar; “The Isolation of Pacific History,” JPacS 20 (1996), 45–68.Google Scholar

⁷⁶ Roman Grynberg, Doug Munro, and Michael White, The National Bank of Fiji Crisis, in progress.