Historians are doing it tough today. For the first thirty years after World War II they were accustomed to dealing in empirical realities, constructing typologies of empire, analyzing discrete processes of social and political change, painting word portraits of the human actors engaged in the great confrontational dramas of empire. Or they were flexing ideological muscles, taking on imperialism as an economic and political idea, tying Third World development into world systems, and tracing the genealogies of national independence movements. The field was seemingly theirs by common assent, cozy, and not much contested.

But the 1980s began an unsettling period...

How to construct the colonial past of a Papua New Guinean people without perpetuating that past by means of its very construction? I must be careful about the first words, the first sentences I choose. If anything, they provide me with an opportunity to catch my readers unaware. They set the tone—I may not find it easy to override the readers’ initial presumptions after having conditioned them with my opening paragraphs. Novelists seem to be more consciously aware that their enterprises hinge on how they establish first contact with the readers and set them on a particular track. When...

Growing up in Rotuma, I was never taught Rotuman history from a textbook. Nor was I ever tested on how much I had learned and whether I could remember the facts and dates when important events were supposed to have happened. When I reached secondary school and later went to university, I found myself having to study history, largely the history of the British Empire, and had a difficult time remembering historical information that did not seem to have any relevance to me whatsoever. But I was good at “cramming” and somehow always managed to pass these history tests, although...

There is a ceremony performed nowadays at Tahiti each year in the Bastille Day holidays. At themaraeArahu Rahu, reconstructed for tourists and “folkloric” celebrations, the “King” and “Queen” of Tahiti are invested with amaro ura,a wrap or girdle of red feathers. It is a symbol, like a crown and scepter, of their sovereignty for the time of the celebrations. Thousands are there to see the ceremony.

These signs and symbolic actions enjoy some continuity with the past, they have some cultural presence, yet they establish different realities. They are “Tahitian” in character, but present distinct expressions...

Stories of the first encounters between Europeans and the indigenous peoples of Papua New Guinea have had a particular fascination for both Europeans and Papua New Guineans alike. To the Western popular imagination, these accounts are contained in stories of exploratory expeditions moving into unknown regions beyond the borders of “civilization.” In these tales, the explorers, after suffering hardship and danger, come upon hidden valleys that hold promise of wealth in valuable resources and are populated by exotic peoples who have never seen Europeans before.

To the indigenous people of Papua New Guinea, on the other hand, the arrival of...

It is generally agreed that Cook’s three voyages greatly enhanced the economic and political power of Europe in the Pacific. But before such power could be fully exercised, certain basic sciences and technologies, the efficient maidservants of power, had themselves to be enhanced. Cook’s voyages advanced astronomy, navigation, and cartography or, as he might have put it, geographical science. But there were other sciences of less direct concern to the Admiralty enhanced by his voyages, and these contributed also in their time to European domination in the Pacific—namely natural history, meteorology, and the emergent science of ethnography.

Important advances...

In a series of letters describing conditions in the Islands in the mid-1840s to an American correspondent, the missionary Richard Armstrong observes again and again, and with a certain contempt for the “native character,” that the government of the kingdom by Hawaiians is doomed. The chiefs simply cannot cope with the growth of haole [or foreign] business. “The idea that this floating, restless, moneymaking, go-ahead white population can be governed by natives only, is out of the question” (AC: 11 Nov 1847). In fact, says Armstrong, the government is already out of Hawaiians’ hands. Since 1843,

the government has been...

In 1930 nearly a thousand Papua New Guinean men served as police, just over three hundred in Papua and twice that number in New Guinea (Kituai, 1993). A major part of their task involved exploring the country and “pacifying” the people. And it was from this patrol work that the police won praise from their officers, the government generally, and a wider public (Lett, 1935; Murray, 1931:571–582; Hides, 1938). The policemen with their rucksacks, .303 Lee-Enfield carbines, close-shaven hair, fine physique, and their police uniforms walked into thousands of villages: They were the most numerous of the government’s agents....

This chapter sketches out the paradigmatic features of missionary representations of human difference and of the missionary endeavor, with reference to Methodist propaganda concerning the western Solomon Islands. I do not deal with missionaries’ private understandings of Pacific Islanders, nor do I attempt here to move beyond the propaganda to reconstruct the actual dynamics of conversion in the Pacific. Rather, I use the example of missionary imagery to establish that colonial culture was significantly differentiated and suggest that visual sources—here photographs and a film—enable historians to work toward a deeper understanding of colonial imaginings in the Pacific.

The...

On his conversion tokolonialpolitik[colonial politics] after being hostile to overseas expansion, Bismarck took care to emphasize that Germany would never adopt what he called the French system (Moses 1968:46). According to him the main features of this system were: taking action to occupy territories where no previous economic interests could have been an incentive; establishing garrisons or some sort of military bases; expatriate officers ruling the occupied territory with a view to attracting a sizeable national emigration.

In other words he held the view that France would have preferred or, at least, had resigned herself to a tabula...

In the mid-seventeenth century, the little island of Britain, rent by civil strife and internationally impotent, jostled a ravaged and fragmented Germany for the position of sick man of Europe. A couple of centuries later, Britain ruled large chunks of five continents and dominated the oceans in between. This rise from rags to riches, obscurity to world empire, ranks with that of Latin villagers and Mongolian nomads as a great imperial story. The ascent was shared to some extent by western Europe as a whole, and it was natural that Europeans should seek explanations for it other than mere accident....

Joel Polack was an adventurer who arrived in New Zealand in 1831 and, like so many of his fellows, set out to make a good living wheeling and dealing in goods and land with Māori people, first in Hokianga and subsequently in Kororareka. He became more notable than most early settlers, however, by writing of his experiences. HisNew Zealand: Being a Narrative of Travels and Adventures. . . 1831–1837 appeared in 1838, followed by the two-volumeManners and Customs of the New Zealandersin 1840, the year in which the British claimed sovereignty over Māori and their...

World War II in Kiribati was confined mainly to the important government bases in Banaba, Tarawa, Abemama, and Butaritari. This paper is about the Tarawa campaign, one of the bloodiest battlegrounds in the entire war, and its impact on the Kiribati people, particularly the inhabitants of Betio village, which was the stage of the main conflict between the Japanese and the Americans.

Betio is an islet and village located at the southwestern extremity of Tarawa Atoll. Until the ravages of the war, the Betio people engaged in a subsistence lifestyle with some affluence. The land abounded with tropical fruits and...

This chapter discusses the experiences of Japanese soldiers in Melanesia with special reference to their relationship with and their views of Melanesians. Contrary to my original expectations, Japanese were quite interested in Melanesians. This is reflected in the considerable number of documents I have collected that refer to Melanesians during the war.

Records pertaining to the people living in the Wewak area of Papua New Guinea, including the Kairiru and Mushu Islands off Wewak, Prince Alexander Range, and the basin of the middle and lower Sepik River, are the most abundant. This is because many Japanese, after failing to attack...

Decolonization has one clear and unambiguous meaning in the history of the international system of states since World War II. It refers to the withdrawal of the colonial powers from direct legal and constitutional control over their territories. The process by which the modern states system of Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands came into being is “decolonization” as envisaged by the United Nations in the 1960 decolonization resolutions, which were passed at the height of international enthusiasm for the dismantling of the colonial empires.

If we adopt this straightforward definition in writing a history of decolonization in the...

Tradition always encodes a relation between past and present, but that relation may be constituted as continuous or discontinuous (see Handler and Linnekin 1984). Pasts are related to presents in different ways—at one extreme the past may be seen to flow effortlessly and continuously toward the present, at the other the past may be seen to be irrevocably separated from the present through a rupture, a break, which must be bridged through revival. Such differences in the construction of past-present relations are nowhere more apparent than in how the past is evoked in the politics of tradition in contemporary...

In 1945, Mavis Warner Van Peenen described the contemporary Chamorro—the indigenous people of the Marianas—as teetering on a “precarious cultural position” (1974:41). Referring to the Chamorro in the ever-present masculine pronoun, Van Peenen wrote: “He walks the precipitous ledge of Past and Present, with the abyss of ‘Americanization’ waiting below to engulf him.”

From Van Peenen’s vantage point as wife of an American naval officer stationed on Guam right before the Japanese invasion in 1941, the precipice on which she saw the Chamorro balanced precariously was composed of a history of Spanish Catholic domination further weakened by the...

Billy was laughing his head off reading the history of the New Zealand Company, har, har, har, har.

It was since he’d been made redundant from Mitre 10 that he’d been doing all this reading. Billy and Makere had four children, one who had recently qualified as a lawyer but was out of work, one in her final year at university, and two at secondary school. These kids ate like elephants. Makere’s job as a checkout operator for New World didn’t bring in much money and she thought Billy should be out looking for another job instead of sitting on...

Prodigious research efforts and outpourings of new writing on Maorisettler history have been associated largely with the enactment into New Zealand’s statute law in 1975 of the Treaty of Waitangi. The treaty, signed between the British Crown and some five hundred Maori chiefs in 1840, had been drawn up by British officials and their missionary advisers for the purposes of securing Maori consent, under Article I of the treaty, to the transfer of sovereignty of the New Zealand islands to the British Crown. It was the act of two “executives” and, of itself, it had no force in domestic law,...

The recent cause célèbre between Marshall Sahlins and Gananath Obeyesekere involves more than a tempest in a teapot of exotic details. Behind the obvious issue—of whether Captain James Cook was perceived by Hawaiians in 1778–1779 as a manifestation of theirakua(a term at times translated into English as “god”) Lono—are broader ones critical to both anthropology and history today: To what degree, for example, do the present cultural politics of identity demand a rethinking of anthropology’s ethnographic effort? Who has the right to speak for whom in politically volatile arenas today? Also: How does one evaluate...