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MONARCHS, TRAVELLERS AND EMPIRE IN THE PACIFIC'S AGE OF REVOLUTIONS
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 November 2020
Abstract
The Pacific has often been invisible in global histories written in the UK. Yet it has consistently been a site for contemplating the past and the future, even among Britons cast on its shores. In this lecture, I reconsider a critical moment of globalisation and empire, the ‘age of revolutions’ at the end of the eighteenth century and the start of the nineteenth century, by journeying with European voyagers to the Pacific Ocean. The lecture will point to what this age meant for Pacific islanders, in social, political and cultural terms. It works with a definition of the Pacific's age of revolutions as a surge of indigeneity met by a counter-revolutionary imperialism. What was involved in undertaking a European voyage changed in this era, even as one important expedition was interrupted by news from revolutionary Europe. Yet more fundamentally vocabularies and practices of monarchy were consolidated by islanders across the Pacific. This was followed by the outworkings of counter-revolutionary imperialism through agreements of alliance and alleged cessation. Such an argument allows me, for instance, to place the 1806 wreck of the Port-au-Prince within the Pacific's age of revolutions. This was an English ship used to raid French and Spanish targets in the Pacific, but which was stripped of its guns, iron, gunpowder and carronades by Tongans. To chart the trajectory from revolution and islander agency on to violence and empire is to appreciate the unsettled paths that gave rise to our modern world. This view foregrounds people who inhabited and travelled through the earth's oceanic frontiers. It is a global history from a specific place in the oceanic south, on the opposite side of the planet to Europe.
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- Prothero Lecture
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- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Royal Historical Society
Footnotes
I am especially grateful to the audience at the Royal Historical Society for their questions. This paper was also presented at the University of Edinburgh and I also thank the audience there for comments. The anonymous reviewer made astute and deeply constructive observations. Margot Finn read the paper carefully. Andrew Spicer edited and commented on the paper very helpfully.
References
1 In making this claim I follow a rich vein of Pacific critique and historiography. See for instance, as a starting point, Pacific Futures: Past and Present, ed. Warwick Anderson, Miranda Johnson and Barbara Brookes (Honolulu, 2018). This collection is very useful on the nature of Pacific genealogies and has informed the following paragraphs.
2 For more on this see Sivasundaram, Sujit, ‘Materialities in the Making of World Histories: South Asia and the South Pacific’, in Oxford Handbook of History and Material Culture: World Perspectives, ed. Gaskell, Ivan and Carter, Sarah (Oxford, 2020), 507–28Google Scholar.
3 Hau‘ofa, Epeli, ‘Our Sea of Islands’, The Contemporary Pacific, 6 (1994), 148–61Google Scholar.
4 Mar, Tracey Banivanua, Decolonisation and the Pacific: Indigenous Globalisation and the Ends of Empire (Cambridge, 2016)Google Scholar.
5 For a recent piece in a UK journal on what this means, see Fitzpatrick, Matthew, ‘Indigenous Australians and German Anthropology in the Era of “Decolonization”’, Historical Journal, 63 (2020), 683–709CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also the very important work of Linda Tuhiwai-Smith, Decolonising Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (New York, 2012).
6 The classic work on this period is E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (New York, 1962). For the need to widen the compass and geography of this period see The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840, ed. David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (Basingstoke, 2010); and The Routledge Companion to the French Revolution in World History, ed. Alan Forrest and Matthias Middell (London and New York, 2016).
7 For the history of science in the global age of revolutions see Global Scientific Practice in an Age of Revolutions, 1750–1850, ed. Patrick Manning and Daniel Rood (Pittsburgh, 2016).
8 For surveys of Pacific history in this era see Thomas, Nicholas, Islanders: The Pacific in an Age of Empire (New Haven, 2010)Google Scholar; and Igler, David, The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush (New York, 2013)Google Scholar.
9 This follows my forthcoming book, Waves across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire (2020).
10 For critical commentary on the shape of the field of the Atlantic age of revolutions see Knott, Sarah, ‘Narrating the Age of Revolution’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 73 (2016), 3–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For some work on the Atlantic age of revolutions see Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (London and New York, 2000); Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2015); Gabrielle Paquette, Imperial Portugal in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions: The Luso-Brazilian World, c. 1770–1850 (Cambridge, 2013); and Paul E. Lovejoy, Jihad in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions (Athens, OH, 2016); and on Europe see Janet Polasky, Revolutionaries without Borders: The Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World (New Haven, 2015).
11 R. R. Palmer, ‘The Age of the Democratic Revolution’, in The Historian’s Workshop: Original Essays by Sixteen Historians, ed. L. P. Curtis (New York, 1970), 169–86, at 170.
12 Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age, ed. Kate Fullagar and Michael A. McDonnell (Baltimore, 2018).
13 For details of the stand-off outside Surabaya and for detail which has fed into this section see John Dunmore, French Explorers in the Pacific (2 vols., Oxford, 1959–65), i, 328–31; Frank Horner, Looking for La Pérouse: D'Entrecasteaux in Australia and the South Pacific, 1792–1793 (Carlton, Vic., 1995), ch. 14; Bruny d'Entrecasteaux, Voyage to Australia and the Pacific 1791 (Carlton, Vic., 2001), trans. Edward Duyker and Maryse Duyker, introduction, xxx–xxxix; Roger Williams, French Botany in the Enlightenment: The Ill-Fated Voyages of La Pérouse and his Rescuers (Dordrecht, 2003), ch. 13; Seymour L. Chapin, ‘The French Revolution in the South Seas: The Republican Spirit and the d'Entrecasteaux Expedition’, Proceedings of the Western Society for French History, 17 (1990), 178–86; and Dianne Johnson, Bruny d'Entrecasteaux and His Encounter with Tasmanian Aborigines: From Provence to Recherche Bay (Lawson, NSW, 2012), ch. 14. Most recently, Collecting in the South Seas: The Voyage of Bruni d'Entrecasteaux, 1791–1794, ed. Bronwen Douglas et al. (Leiden, 2018).
14 Johnson, Bruny d'Entrecasteaux, 72.
15 D'Entrecasteaux, Voyage to Australia, xxxvi.
16 See M. La Billardière, An Account of a Voyage in search of La Pérouse, undertaken by order of the Constituent Assembly of France and Performed in the Years 1791, 1792 and 1793 translated from the French (2 vols., 1800), i, xix. For the intriguing and diverse paths taken by the collections of this expedition, see Collecting in the South Seas, ed. Douglas et al.
17 For analysis of the relationship between these three voyages see Nicole Starbuck, Baudin, Napoleon and the Exploration of Australia (2013), introduction.
18 Leslie R. Marchant, ‘La Pérouse, Jean-François de Galaup (1741–1788)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/la-perouse-jean-francois-de-galaup-2329/text3029, accessed 4 October 2013.
19 For Peter Dillon see J. W. Davidson, Peter Dillon of Vanikoro: Chevalier of the South Seas, ed. O. H. K. Spate (Melbourne, 1975); and J. W. Davidson, ‘Peter Dillon: The Voyages of the Calder and St. Patrick’, in Pacific Islands Portraits, ed. J. W. Davidson and Deryck Scarr (Canberra, 1970), 9–30.
20 For a perspective from Tongan historiography see Essays on the History of Tonga, ed. Peter Suren (3 vols., Nuku‘alofa, Tonga, 2001–6), ii and iii.
21 D'Entrecasteaux, Voyage to Australia, 186.
22 For Cook's interest in the royal line of Tonga see Robert Langdon, ‘The Maritime Explorers’, in The Friendly Islands: A History of Tonga, ed. Noel Rutherford (Melbourne, 1977), 50–1.
23 D'Entrecasteaux, Voyage to Australia, 184.
24 La Billardière, An Account, ii, 116.
25 Ibid., 128.
26 This paragraph relies on Christine Ward Gailey, Kinship to Kingship: Gender, Hierarchy and State Formation in the Tongan Islands (Austin, TX, 1987).
27 Ibid., 178ff. For the history of this period in Tonga, and for further discussion of material below, see I. C. Campbell, Island Kingdom: Tonga, Ancient and Modern (Christchurch, 1992).
28 See Essays, ed. Suren, iii, 187ff.
29 Gailey, Kinship to Kingship, 179.
30 William Mariner, An Account of the Natives of the Tongan Islands in the South Pacific Ocean (2 vols., London, 1817), i, xx, footnote. For some details of Mariner's time in Tonga see also I. C. Campbell, Gone Native in Polynesia: Captivity Narratives and Experiences from the South Pacific (Westport, CT, 1998), 52–9.
31 Essays, ed. Suren, iii, 71. See also, Nelson Eustis, The King of Tonga (Adelaide, 1997), 20–1.
32 Mariner, An Account, i, 58–62.
33 Ibid., i, 46 and see also Essays, ed. Suren, iii, 67.
34 Mariner, An Account, i, 61.
35 See N. Gunson, ‘The Coming of the Foreigners’, in Friendly Islands: A History of Tonga, ed. N. Rutherford (Melbourne, 1978), 90–113, at 102.
36 Campbell, Gone Native in Polynesia, 54; Essays, ed. Suren, iii, 69–70.
37 See J. Orlebar, A Midshipman's Journal on Board H.M.S. Seringapatam during the Year 1830, ed. Melvin J. Voigt (San Diego, 1976), 72. Gunson estimates that there were ‘eighty aliens’ from Europe and ‘the more distant Pacific islands’ who resided in Tonga from 1796 to 1826: ‘Coming of the Foreigners’, 90.
38 For an account of the other survivors from the Port-au-Prince see Essays, ed. Suren, iii, 74. There were twenty-six survivors, excluding the Hawai‘ians.
39 Mariner, An Account, i, 101.
40 Ibid., 100.
41 Ibid., 420.
42 For discussion of this, see Nigel Statham, ‘Mafihape's Letter to William Mariner (1832)’, Journal of Pacific History, 43 (2008), 341–66.
43 From the translation in ibid., 353.
44 In a letter dated London 8 May 1837 to J. H. Cook who brought him the letter he writes: ‘I regret that I have been able to translate very little of my kind Mother's Epistle – partly from having forgotten the language, but principally from the orthography differing materially from that used by me.’ This letter is pasted at the front of Mariner, An Account, i; a copy is at the Mitchell Library, Sydney (hereafter MLS), C 797 v.1.
45 Campbell Gone Native in Polynesia, 59.
46 See also Essays, ed. Suren, iii, 144.
47 The broad outline of the history of New Zealand which follows draws on Keith Sinclair, The Oxford Illustrated History of New Zealand (Auckland, 1990) and M. N. Smith, New Zealand: A Concise History (Cambridge, 2005). It has also been heavily influenced by the revisionist reading of this period and the ‘musket wars’ in Angela Ballara, Taua: ‘Musket Wars’, ‘Land Wars’ or Tikanga?: Warfare in Maori Society in the Early Nineteenth Century (Auckland, 2003), as well as the work of Judith Binney, for instance The Legacy of Guilt: A Life of Thomas Kendall (Wellington, 2005) and Stories without End: Essays, 1795–2010 (Wellington, 2010). Among more recent works, see Tony Ballantyne, Entanglements of Empire: Missionaries, Maori, and the Question of the Body (Durham, NC, 2014), and New Zealand and the Sea: New Historical Perspectives, ed. Frances Steel (Wellington, 2018).
48 This follows the argument in Ballara, Taua.
49 See James Belich, The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict (Auckland, 1986).
50 James Busby, British Resident at New Zealand, to the Secretary of State, dated the Bay of Islands, 16 June 1837, MLS: MLMSS 1668 (typescript copy), 206.
51 Ballara, Taua, 400ff.
52 See Augustus Earle, A Narrative of a Nine Months’ Residence (n.p., 1832), 53–4. For Earle's images of ‘King George’ see ‘King George, N Zealand costume’, watercolour, 1828, National Library of Australia: PIC Solander Box A37 T122 NK 12/84 and ‘The residence of Shulitea, chief of Kororadika, Bay of Islands’, watercolour, 1827, National Library of Australia: PIC Solander Box A36 T109 NK 12/71.
53 Samuel Marsden was a key figure in the origins of the missionary movement in New Zealand. For some context about his ideology, see Andrew Sharp, The World, the Flesh and the Devil: The Life and Opinions of Samuel Marsden in England and the Antipodes (Auckland, 2016).
54 Details of Hongi's biography draw from Angela Ballara, ‘Hongi Hika’, in Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, Te Ara – The Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/1h32/hongi-hika, accessed 10 September 2014.
55 Memoirs of the Life and Labours of the Rev. Samuel Marsden, ed. J. B. Marsden (Cambridge, 2011), 142.
56 From Ballara, ‘Hongi Hika’; also Smith, New Zealand, 33–4.
57 Life and Times of Te Rauparaha by His Son Tamihana Te Rauparaha, ed. Peter Butler (Waiura, Martinborough, 1980). For a critique of the iconic status of Te Rauparaha see Ballara, Taua, 34.
58 For references to the king's ships and king's warriors see Earle, Narrative of a Nine Months’ Residence, 164–5. For another reference to the king's ships see Richard A. Cruise, Journal of a Ten Months’ Residence in New Zealand, 1820, ed. A. G. Bagnall (Christchurch, 1957), 27.
59 For the process of choosing the flag see Extract of a Letter from the British Resident of New Zealand to the Colonial Secretary, 22 March 1834, MLS: Governors’ Despatches and Correspondence, A1267/13 (typescript copy), pp. 1417–18. For commentary on the flag and on a possible constitution see James Busby, British Resident at New Zealand, dated 16 June 1837, Bay of Islands to Secretary of State, MLS: MLMSS 1668 (typescript copy), 207.
60 For the 1835 treaty see ‘A Declaration of Independence of New Zealand’, in Claudia Orange, The Treaty of Waitangi (Wellington, 1976), app. 1, 256.
61 James Busby to Alexander Busby, 10 December 1835, Waitangi, MLS: MLMSS 1349 (typescript copy), 97.
62 John White, The Ancient History of the Maori: His Mythology and Traditions (6 vols., Wellington, 1887–90).
63 Simmons, D. R., The Great New Zealand Myth: A Study of the Discovery and Origin of the Traditions of the Maori (Wellington, 1976), 113Google Scholar.
64 The biographical information here is taken from Ross, Ruth Miriam, ‘Taonui, Aperahama (c.1815–1882)’, in An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, ed. McLintock, A. H. (3 vols., Wellington, 1966)Google Scholar, iii, 347–8 and also Judith Binney, ‘Aperahama Taonui’, in Dictionary of New Zealand Biography ii (1993), republished www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/2t7/taonui-aperahama, accessed 10 April 2014. On one telling, which is unreferenced, Taonui was the first to write down a genealogy in 1843; see Rāwiri Taonui, ‘Whakapapa – genealogy – What is whakapapa?’, in Te Ara – The Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, www.teara.govt.nz/en/whakapapa-genealogy/page-5, accessed 10 June 2015. For the manuscript see Simmons, D. R., ‘The Taonui Manuscript’, Record of the Auckland Institute and Museum, 12 (1975), 57–82Google Scholar. A more recent piece on Taonui is Laura Kamau, ‘Mekana Tata: Magna Carta and the Political Thought of Aperahama Taonui’, in Magna Carta and New Zealand: History, Politics and Law in New Zealand, ed. Stephen Winter and Chris Jones (Auckland, 2017), 153–60.
65 Letter dated Waima, 8 September 1856, from Taonui to White, ‘Letters in Maori from Aperahama Taonui’, MS-Papers-0075-008A, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. Translation as in the archive. I discuss this whole episode further in Sivasundaram, ‘Materialities’.
66 Cited in Kamau, ‘Mekana Tata’, 153.