The German Government annexed New Guinea in 1884; it was administered by the German New Guinea Company and largely for the benefit of plantation owners. Papua was ‘annexed’ in 1883 by the Queensland colonial government, a nervous response to German activity so close to its borders. It was only in 1884 that the British government formally and reluctantly ‘protected’ Papua under the name of British New Guinea. In 1906 British New Guinea, renamed Papua, came under Australian administration, with the proclamation of the Papua Act. Pre-war Australian administration of Papua was dominated by J.H.P. (later Sir Hubert) Murray, who became Acting Administrator in 1907, and was Lieutenant Governor until his death in 1940. Murray has been described as ‘ahead of his time at the beginning, quaintly old-fashioned at the end… always hampered by lack of funds and the Australian government's monumental indifference to Papuan affairs’. Beatrice Grimshaw in 1910 describes the resources of Murray's neophyte administration as ‘almost laughably inadequate—two resident Magistrates, thirty-four armed native constables, a couple of whale-boats, and two small ketches’.

In September 1914 the Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force accepted the surrender of German forces on New Britain. The military administration was replaced by a civil administration under Brigadier-General Evan Wisdom in 1921. After the Second World War the administration of Papua and New Guinea was combined, with headquarters in Port Moresby.

Plantations were concentrated in New Guinea where adaptation of the local people to white ways was more extensive.