Introduction
“It was a brave new world, this world of the history of encounters between Natives and Strangers,” wrote Australian historian Greg Dening about the birth of a new Pacific history in the 1960s. Founded on a then revolutionary amalgam of anthropology and history, it sought to tell the histories of “both sides of the beach,” bringing to life in an increasingly decolonising present the complex pasts of a Sea of Islands.Footnote 1 Professional history at the time was, after all, not far removed from Hugh Trevor-Roper’s proclamation that Africa “has no history,” or, more generally, from received notions that historians need not concern themselves with the world beyond Europe, which was more properly the domain of anthropologists.Footnote 2 As Dening put it, the “pursuit of knowledge of the otherness of indigenous peoples” was not considered to have “gravitas.”Footnote 3 The Pacific historians of the 1960s and 1970s, Dening among them, would work to grant it that weightiness.
And yet, events lent gravitas, too. Beginning in the 1960s, Oceania began a partial wave of decolonisation: Samoa in 1962, Nauru in 1968, Tonga and Fiji in 1970, Papua New Guinea in 1975, Kiribati in 1979. This decolonisation was notably incomplete, as so many empires retained some degree of control or association with their colonial possessions—but even so, independence movements rose or persisted.Footnote 4 Also lending weightiness was an intellectual revolution in anticolonial and postcolonial thought. Dening recalled that spirit, too, and its stakes:
For those of us who reveled in our innocence and looked to the respect that we thought we were owed by those we studied—our natives—precisely because we were so beleaguered and unfashionable academically, it was like a kick in the stomach in the 1960s to be told by those whom we studied that we did not treat them with the proper dignity, and never would, never could.Footnote 5
Professional, academic Pacific history was thus caught between competing currents from the moment of its birth. On the one hand, its new concern with “culture contact” and symmetrical tellings of settler and Indigenous lives sought to make sense of—and to speak for—societies emerging from colonial rule. On the other hand, decolonising forces called into question the authority of settler historians in Europe, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand to tell those stories or to speak for Pacific Islanders in the first place. “Decolonised” history, for and by an emergent and professionalising Pacific History, was exceedingly partial, made possible but also unshakably marked by its colonial origins.
Many of the historians navigating these currents brought with them orienting frameworks already established during the colonial period. Emblematic of these continuities was Dening’s mentor and one of the most celebrated founders of the field, Henry Evans (“Harry”) Maude. Along with James Wightman Davidson, Maude made the Department of Pacific History at the Australia National University into the discipline’s “Rome,” its absolute political and spiritual centre.Footnote 6 He was Pacific History’s great institution builder; Maude co-founded the Journal of Pacific History in 1966, and soon after it launched the ANU Press’s Pacific History Series and the Pacific Manuscripts Bureau.Footnote 7 He mentored many of the twentieth century’s great Pacific historians, like Dening. He authored some of the field’s foundational studies, including a famous 1964 article, “Beachcombers and Castaways,” which traced the history of European and American men who lived among or on the edges of Pacific societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Footnote 8 Across his scholarly and institutional work, Maude championed two not unrelated modes of historical inquiry, neither of which were his inventions but both of which he promulgated. The first was “ethnohistory,” a fusion of anthropology and history which Maude’s students famously practiced across the second half of the twentieth century. The second was “participant history,” which suggested “historians would write better history if they ventured beyond the ivory tower and brought to bear experience of life and practical involvement in public affairs.”Footnote 9 Both approaches would come to define Pacific history during its first decades—and the uneasy and often unstated connections between the two would shape the field’s methods well into the future.
I am not the first to study Maude or his moment, of course. Douglas Munro, who has written extensively on the history of Pacific history, has suggested that despite the colonial biographies of figures like Maude, it was with his generation of scholars that Pacific History “was disengaged from the matrix of imperial history and redefined as the study of culture contacts, or ‘multicultural situations.’”Footnote 10 Other historians have identified in the ANU school a kind of incomplete decolonisation, retaining many of its colonial features.Footnote 11 David Hanlon noted that for historians of Maude’s generation, “the paternalistic bias of doing a history of others or of helping them to do a history seemed not to matter,” retaining “a colonizing quality about it”Footnote 12 Here, he built from David Chappell’s observation that the defining contribution of that generation of settler historians was to “bestow the gift of agency;” European-descended writers increasingly produced accounts concerned with indigenous autonomy, even as they remained the authors of most Pacific histories.Footnote 13
I suggest that Maude’s Pacific history did disengage meaningfully from imperial modes of history writing, staking out new methodologies that began to centre Indigenous experience and that continue to structure approaches in the field. However, I argue that these emerged not despite but from distinct continuities with its colonial pasts. Indeed, many of the historical modes we might think of as anti-colonial have distinctly colonial origins. Island-centred histories, attention to Pacific Islander agency, decentring colonial figures, and anthropologically-inflected attention to Indigenous understandings remain central to many decolonial visions of history writing—but even these were born, in no small part, from the existing practices and sensibilities of one-time colonial servants like Maude. Here, I draw particularly from Helen Tilley’s work on Africa, in which she showed that “epistemic decolonization” emerged from colonial institutions, and that “some of the research sanctioned by Britain’s ‘imperial organism’ and its subsidiary colonial states, bears surprising resemblance” to the agenda of African studies today.”Footnote 14 I extend her analysis from Africa to the Pacific, to suggest that the same occurred across British late colonialism and decolonization—though in ways particular to colonialism in Oceania. I suggest that, in following Maude’s practices as both an imperial administrator and historiographer at the spatial and temporal ends of Britain’s Pacific empire, we gain a situated perspective on such uneasy and unsettling continuities.
However, I by no means argue that colonialism neatly produced an anti-colonial history. Rather, like other entries in this special issue, I suggest that Pacific history’s decolonisation was exceedingly partial. This incompleteness resulted in the kind of paternalism identified by Hanlon and Chappell, and it also meant that, as many critics have pointed out, Pacific history remained overwhelmingly a project by settler “outsiders.”Footnote 15 But beyond these well-trod historiographical positions, I offer another observation, one likewise echoed across this special issue: Maude’s vision of history was informed not only by his colonial experiences, but by his colonial assumptions about and understandings of futures yet to come. Priya Satia has argued that history writing in Britain and its empire was suffused by teleological notions of time, positing that they explicitly or implicitly understood colonised peoples as being shepherded into progress—and that even the more critical modes of history in the twentieth century emerged from and were inflected by that colonialism.Footnote 16 Maude’s school of Pacific history did the same, but in ways uniquely inflected by British colonial visions of Pacific futures.Footnote 17
Tracing perdurances from the colonial across Maude’s biography, this article argues that the methods of professional Pacific history in the era of decolonisation retained the imprint of colonial practices and concerns, shaping the ways in which historians would narrate pasts which decentred Europe. Before joining the ANU, Maude was a British colonial bureaucrat, administering the Gilbert and Ellice Islands. There, he oversaw several migrations of Pacific Islanders meant to establish colonial futures and to repair colonial pasts, including an attempt to colonise the Phoenix Islands in 1937 and the coerced relocation of the Banabans from a home island devastated by phosphate mining in 1945. Maude’s ethnohistorical attention to both sides of colonial encounter and his participant-historical interest in political management alike were deliberately shaped by both his personal experience and colonial understandings of futurity, particularly as he administered these resettlement schemes. Indeed, I suggest that even Maude’s obsession with beachcombers, those renegades and castaways caught on the boundary between Pacific and European settler societies, was no accident, and that Maude understood himself as a beachcomber in his own right: a figure perched ambiguously at the boundary between the colonial and the postcolonial, between a dying past and an uncertain future, a learned outcast at the intersections of bureaucracy, academe, and Pacific life able to know and speak authoritatively about the people whom he had once ruled. It was from such continuities and ambiguities alike that the new Pacific history would be made.
Colonial Administration and Managed Futures
Henry Evans Maude was born in 1906, to a family already long entrenched in colonial service; his father was president of the Legislative Council of Bihar and Orissa. He received an elite education befitting that station: first St. Paul’s School in Darjeeling, then Cambridge, where he studied anthropology.Footnote 18 Upon his graduation, Maude applied for a position in the Colonial Service, claiming to have written “Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony Only” across his application form. It worked. His first posting, and one that would come to define his life and career, was at Banaba, then called Ocean Island, in what is today Kiribati. Banaba, as Maude knew it, was already scarred by phosphate colonialism, one of the most severe examples of such ecological devastation in the Pacific.Footnote 19 Maude began his career by recruiting men for mining work, before a promotion to Native Lands Commissioner, and, finally, Resident Commissioner. His two-decade career in the Colonial Service ultimately took him across the Pacific—to over 75 islands, by his estimation.Footnote 20 Throughout it all, Maude was a model of the late-imperial anthropologist-administrator, writing ethnographically-inflected reports for the Colonial Office and publishing a number of articles on Kiribati and Banaban society in the Journal of the Polynesian Society alongside his wife, Honor.Footnote 21
Maude’s most famous achievements as a colonial civil servant, which would also come to inflect his subsequent career as a historian, were centred around coerced relocations of colonial populations. Forced migration had a long history in the Pacific, as it did across much of the colonised world, and it continued well into the twentieth century. Maude was involved in several relocation projects, instigating at least two himself—both of which encapsulated a colonial sense of obligation to understand Indigenous pasts and manage Indigenous futures. The first of these was the Phoenix Islands Settlement Scheme, which resulted in what was, so far as I am aware, the last attempt at the formal colonisation of new territory by the British Empire. Concerned about overcrowding in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony, Maude suggested that Britain formally claim the Phoenix and Line islands as spaces for settlement. “The romance of these little lone islands, lying out under the equatorial sun far to the east, had quite taken possession of me and I felt that I could not rest till I had seen them the home of a connected and prosperous community,” he later wrote.Footnote 22 In a bid to secure official approval of the scheme, he pointed to anthropology and history, asserting in a memorandum that in “virtually all the small islands of the Pacific it has been the practice from time immemorial, whenever the population threatened to overstep the resources of the island, for the surplus inhabitants to set sail in search of new lands.”Footnote 23 Soon, he was on a scouting mission among the atolls to the east, alighting on beaches covered only in seabirds to plant the union flag and claim the territory—the last time such colonial ceremonies played out for the British imperial project. Within a few years, over 750 people were resettled.Footnote 24
More difficult was Maude’s second, and more coerced, relocation. In 1945, after Tarawa and other islands under his jurisdiction were retaken at the end of the Second World War, Maude proposed a forced resettlement of the Banabans, who had been interned by the Japanese and whose home had long been devastated by British phosphate mining. This was an ambition even before the war. In 1942, he wrote that “it is difficult to see how they can progress as a race,” as “life on the dole on an isolated and barren island, in the shadow of a great commercial machine, can have only one ultimate result.”Footnote 25 His notion of racial “progress” was in keeping with colonial notions of futurity, as was his belief that an anthropologically trained administrator like himself could understand and manage such progress. It was a belief he would make into reality; later that year, he initiated efforts to purchase the island of Rabi, near Fiji, from Levers Pacific Plantations so that it could serve as their new home.Footnote 26
Maude briefly housed the Banabans on Tarawa before moving them to a makeshift camp on Rabi where, in a 1946 visit, he noted “considerable sickness” and “27 deaths so far.” In a report to the Colonial Office, he grew concerned that the new colony would sink into “indolence and apathy”—the future wise colonial administration was meant to forestall—and remarked that sentiment was turning “rather anti-European.”Footnote 27 Nonetheless, he insisted that forced relocation was the only palliative for the Banabans, especially as he looked forward to a future when they might govern themselves. “By learning to solve their problems in their own way,” he insisted, “they will surely develop what they need most at the present time: self-reliance and a sense of responsibility.”Footnote 28 The developmentalist logic of late-colonial paternalism was clear enough.
In 1949, Maude left his post as Resident Commissioner. The colonial powers had set up the South Pacific Commission to manage their interests in a world tilting toward decolonisation, and Maude became its Executive Officer for Social Development. It was a trying moment for an administrator like himself. Surveying Pacific opinions, he wrote that the region’s “attitude toward the government, and Europeans in general, may have undergone a change,” adding that “they are now said to be more openly critical than before, which is ascribed to their having seen the Europeans beaten, if only for a time, by a brown-skinned race such as themselves.”Footnote 29 It was trying, too, because Maude now worked as a technocrat among technocrats, establishing cooperative schemes on Pacific islands while also pushing for further migrations to manage population concerns, if not always successfully.Footnote 30
It was during this same postwar period that James Wightman Davidson accepted the new chair of Pacific history at the Australia National University’s Research School of Pacific Studies, where he would go on to establish the world’s first Department of Pacific History. Davidson was especially interested in recruiting “participant historians” who could combine academic knowledge with professional experience in the region; Davidson himself had taught Colonial Studies at St. Johns College, Cambridge, and advised Western Samoa, the Cook Islands, and other governments on constitutional matters.Footnote 31 He spent years attempting to poach Maude from the South Pacific Commission, insisting that “It will not be possible to find anyone else with your interest in historical research coupled with such a wide administrative experience and knowledge of so much of the area.”Footnote 32 After a half-decade of insistence, Maude finally retired from government service to begin a second career as an academic at the ANU in 1957, where he would help establish the foundations of professional Pacific history. The remainder of this essay will examine the ways in which his second career, and with it those foundations, were built from and inflected by his first.
Ethnohistory and Decolonisation
Decolonisation was always a central concern for the onetime colonial bureaucrat, and Maude thought it inevitable that history would decolonise in some way, too. In a 1971 Presidential Address to the History Section of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science, he declared that “Pacific history will increasingly become what is sometimes termed decolonized history.”Footnote 33 However, in keeping with colonial notions of futurity, he did not imagine that this process would occur without expert guidance. Echoing the stadial, developmental logic of the colonial project he had once helped to administer, he proposed that “indigenous historiographers and teachers” would eventually “take over from Europeans who are, as it were, acting as trustees on their behalf.” Comparing Oceania to Africa and Asia, he understood Pacific Islanders as people whose visions of the past, violently disrupted by colonial encounter, would need to be reconstituted in order to forge confident national paths in the decolonial era. Otherwise, Maude warned, “if this understandable need is not met by professional historians there are others ready with new ideological symbols such as the hammer and sickle, the swastika, or even the little Red Book of Chairman Mao.”
His solution was to reorient the field toward island-centred, indigenous narratives previously ignored in Eurocentric accounts, and especially to focus on the experiences, cultures, and social structures of both sides of colonial encounter. That vision of the past would, in his mind, safeguard an uncertain future. As Maude put it: “The need for a more island-oriented historiography would seem urgent if our work is to stand the test of time and not be rejected as imperialistic rationalisation by the people of the independent nations that are coming into being in the new Pacific.”Footnote 34
The way forward was a fusion of history and anthropology, the field in which Maude was originally trained. “The sort of history I am writing is not often easily distinguishable from some branches of anthropology,” he wrote in 1960. “In America, I suppose, it would be called ethnohistory.” Ethnohistory was indeed most famously first elaborated by historians of the Americas, who fused those disciplines in studies of the continents’ indigenous peoples, and founded the famous journal of the same name.Footnote 35 Maude was one of its earliest proponents in the Pacific, writing to Ernest Beaglehole in 1961 that he was “trying to get away from the tendency among Pacific historians to regard their subject as a sort of regional extension of Imperial history… I find myself more interested in the islands and their peoples than the machinations of the Great Powers.”Footnote 36 He put that new method to use in a string of papers published in his first decade as a historian, many of which were collected in a book of essays published in 1968, Of Islands and Men. These often focused on moments of early encounter between Pacific Islanders and European traders or mutineers, uncertain instances in which they sought to make sense of each others’ worlds.
Perhaps the most famous of these was “Beachcombers and Castaways,” first published in the Journal of the Polynesian Society in 1964. It took as its protagonists those castaways and outcasts who lived on the edge of Pacific Island communities during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Maude borrowed from American anthropologist Alfred Irving Hallowell in defining them and their roles. These were “transculturalites: persons who, throughout history, ‘are temporarily or permanently detached from one group, enter the web of social relations that constitute another society, and come under the influence of its custom, ideas and values to a greater or lesser degree.’”Footnote 37 Maude’s vision of beachcombers remained tinged by colonial notions of race. He lamented that these figures had permanently hybridised, in his words, the “blood” of so many pacific populations. He was also clearly focused on whiteness, and made a point to exclude from any analysis of transculturation those who had emigrated from one Pacific society to another.Footnote 38 He especially excluded most of Melanesia on the basis of colonial racial hierarchies, as he regarded these societies as inherently violent and “cannibalistic” and not as welcoming of strangers as other Pacific communities.Footnote 39
However, his analysis nonetheless remained deeply engaged with the social, cultural, and political worlds of the Pacific communities in which those beachcombers operated. Maude told stories not only of European arrivals, but of indigenous welcomings, understanding these with an anthropological attention to function and meaning. “At first,” he suggested, Europeans were “a mere exotic curiosity from a fabulous race clearly superior in material goods,” but soon “the newcomer was apt to be considered as a sort of status symbol of the local chief and his followers.” Take for instance one European man who became, in Maude’s telling, “the manu manu, or pet bird, of the chief of Thakaunrdove… taken from village to village on exhibition like some bearded woman or two-headed calf.”Footnote 40 Beachcombers appear in his article as objects of interest, but also as go-betweens in trades with other ships, as military assets in Pacific politics, as tools used and deployed by their hosts and understood according to their own systems of value.
Above all, Maude’s contribution was to treat beachcombers, usually regarded as unsympathetic ne’er-do-wells, with a historian’s sympathetic interest. Here, I suggest that a certain kind of identification was at play, as the anthropologist-administrator perhaps saw some version of himself in these renegade cultural mediators, able to speak for and about the peoples among whom they lived, and help guide them into uncertain futures. Maude looked to these early encounters to find visions of successful cross-cultural interactions and even guidance during his own era of decolonising pressures. He largely positioned the beachcomber outside of the colonial, in any case. “The last thing the beachcomber desired was the whistling up of a warship,” Maude wrote; “most of them had in any case little affection for western society.”Footnote 41 As a result, the beachcomber’s most important feature was his ability to navigate the boundaries between cultures, often with a sensitivity and openness unmatched by other contemporary Europeans. Maude argued that the “position of the beachcomber, in and yet out of the indigenous society, made him an excellent mediator… the interpreter of one culture to another—and in performing this function he probably made his major contribution to the ultimate welfare of the people among whom he lived, cushioning by explanation the inevitable onset of culture change.”Footnote 42 It was this latter quality, the Beachcomber’s capacity to soften inevitable change by leveraging cultural understanding, that Maude found most important of all. The parallels to his own profession and moment, as he understood them, were manifest. As he wrote: “The process of change in the island world was indeed devastating enough; yet it would have been even more traumatic but for the preliminary softening by these rather earthy mediators, able to interpret the new and strange in terms of the old and familiar.”Footnote 43
Rarotongan Sandalwood And Colonial Paternalism
It is a remarkable feature of Maude’s essay collection, Of Islands and Men, that two of its chapters, the only ones without sole authorship, were co-authored with women. One, “The Coconut Oil Trade of the Gilbert Islands” was written with Ida Leeson, the Mitchell Librarian at the State Library of New South Wales.Footnote 44 Maude credited her, in the introduction of that volume, as making possible several other chapters, too, with her “unrivalled knowledge of Pacific documentation.”Footnote 45 The other was “Rarotongan Sandalwood,” a remarkable ethnohistorical exercise narrating a botched trading mission from both sides of the beach, which was only possible through co-authorship with Marjorie Crocombe.Footnote 46 In a letter to a colleague in 1961, he called her “a Rarotongan girl of exceptional attainments and of course speaking the language fluently;” he credited her and her husband, his first graduate student R.C. Crocombe, for supplying much of the Rarotongan material from which he worked.Footnote 47 However, while Maude gave credit freely to his collaborators, the gender dynamics of co-authorship reveal something not only of how he understood his position as a British/Australian historian writing about Pacific Islanders, but also of the ways he collected, interpreted, and deployed the sources that made possible his ethnohistorical method. Often, though hardly always, Maude’s histories reflected and were structured by their source material; European perspectives appear in a masculine, textual register, while Pacific perspectives appear as feminised oral testimony. As a result, though his method sought to reconcile different historicities, a female-authored or female-mediated oral tradition was sometimes subordinated structurally to a male-authored or male-mediated archive.
Maude’s collaboration with Crocombe to produce “Rarotongan Sandalwood” was, in any event, driven by a deliberate attention to decolonisation and a future beyond the late colonial present. In their introduction to the article, the authors wrote:
Criticism has been directed of recent years against what has been termed the ethnocentricity of Pacific historians. Probably as a result of their professional training and the availability of their sources, the majority of historical writers have treated their subject matter as a regional extension of imperial history; a story of power politics in which the people of the islands themselves play a largely passive role. However satisfying the results of these studies may be to the European ego they are likely to appear increasingly unconvincing, and often irrelevant, to the Pacific islander of tomorrow, to whom western political domination will seem merely an aspect of a phase in the totality of his historical development. Footnote 48
Maude offered his collaboration with Crocombe as a model other historians should pursue further to escape such ethnocentrisms, and to point the way toward producing island-centred histories of use to a decolonised future. Maude described his collaboration as born from the obvious, Eurocentric defects in standard archival approaches. His primary sources, such as they were, consisted of a few stories about “the expedition in biographies and newspaper articles, and one or two scattered references in later missionary literature.” These, he said, provided only the barest outline of events, shrouded in the “usual vague charges of native duplicity.”Footnote 49
However, with Crocombe’s contributions, as well as information supplied by a number of other informants, Maude and his collaborator were able to contextualise these archival accounts against oral tradition and Rarotongan records. The two authors thus wove a story about the 1814 visit of Philip Goodenough and W.C. Wentworth to Rarotonga in the Cumberland. The two had sought sandalwood, an enormously lucrative commodity, but found none. Instead, Goodenough and Wentworth brought considerable violence and death, which the traders depicted as “native treachery” in their own accounts. Maude and Crocombe worked to expand beyond that imperial story, working to “exonerate the people of Rarotonga from the charge of unprovoked aggression” and shift “stereotyped” visions of the Pacific.Footnote 50 They did so mostly by using Rarotongan accounts to provide the political, cultural, and social frameworks that would make European textual accounts of encounters and acts of violence more intelligible. Take, for instance, the death of two European sailors, George Strait and William Travis. Citing an 1871 account by Maretu, Crocombe and Maude showed that they “extended their amorous intrigues to the wives of the ariki and mataiapo” and desecrated several marae, or religious sites; “they could hardly have done anything more calculated to give offence not only to the ariki and people of Avarua but, to a lesser degree, throughout Rarotonga.”Footnote 51
However, even in this work, modelling the co-production and island-centred history meant to replace colonial modes of historiography, we can identify perduring colonial structures. Maude was still a “man on the spot” with practical experience in Pacific affairs, able to adjudicate the truth of Pacific accounts delivered to him by others, able to make them legible, authoritative, and meaningful to settler audiences. Maude was, even here, a kind of beachcomber himself, a figure of the borderlands. Methodologically, Maude navigated the boundary between history and anthropology, work which required the assistance of collaborators and informants; as he put it: “The task of interpreting racial interactions objectively is admittedly not easy, for few historians possess the necessary familiarity with the two languages and cultures involved, while the anthropologists who may be expected to have this advantage usually lack sufficient knowledge of the documentary sources.”Footnote 52
In navigating the use of archival and oral sources, as well as the liminal spaces between linguistic and cultural frontiers, Maude would have to rely on others. Located at the ANU, in the capital city of an Australian mainland that maintained a colonial relationship with many of the places he and others in his department studied, he worked to bridge geographic and cultural distances to locate sources and collaborators, even as he remained in some ways the dominant partner by virtue of his position. He worked with a number of women to produce his histories “Of Islands and Men;” and yet, in his historical narratives they sometimes remained junior partners, sources of evidence but not always ultimate voices of authority adjudicating meaning and truth. As in his practice as a colonial administrator, he would work with and guide his indigenous partners until such time as Pacific history could more fully decolonise.
Participant Histories, Unsettled Futures
Maude’s interwoven notions of the past, present, and future were most visible in his fascination with migration and resettlement schemes. In Of Islands and Men, which contained several accounts of Pacific migrations, he made his autobiographical interest in these histories clear, writing: “It is because I had myself organised two successful community colonisation schemes, and assisted in the promotion of two others, that I became interested in this prototype of a century before.”Footnote 53 The book included an essay on the forced resettlement of the Pitcairn Islanders by the British Empire in 1830, and the chapter immediately following it, linked by juxtaposition, was a “participant history” of Maude’s own twentieth century resettlement project, “The Colonization of the Phoenix Islands.”Footnote 54 It was written earlier than the other essays in his collection, in 1945, when Maude was in the midst of his second colonial migration scheme involving the Banabans, and revised again in 1951, when he was offering further resettlement schemes as part of his work with the South Pacific Commission. He introduced a lightly-revised version in 1968 with a prefatory note, in which he explained that he had to restrain himself “from rewriting the text in light of more recent events in the Phoenix Islands, themselves due in the main to changes in the political situation and in our attitude towards the welfare of dependent peoples.”Footnote 55 The way in which Maude understood the present context of decolonisation, his role as historian in it, and the audiences for his writing was very obviously signalled by his use of the possessive adjective “our.”
Maude sought to make his colonial past relevant in the era of decolonisation by framing it as an example of “participant history: a record of an episode written not by some historian long after it occurred, nor even by a passive spectator at the time, but by someone who actually took part in and helped to determine the course of events.”Footnote 56 Sagaciously foreseeing the eventual judgement of historians like myself, he wrote:
The writer necessarily lacks hindsight… thus leaving him defenceless in the face of historical mutations unpredictable at the time. In other words participant history should be considered not as a definitive interpretation of what happened and why but, like a diary, as part of the source material from which such an interpretation can be attempted when the passage of time has muted the subjective overtones. Footnote 57
Maude’s disclaimer given, he proceeded to offer a defence of imperially-sponsored migration schemes, especially if directed by the guiding vision of an anthropologically-trained administrator able to speak authoritatively for those under his charge.
His explicit goal was to offer guidance on the future. Maude’s essay opened by pointing to the ongoing need for research into colonisation experiments, especially in light of recent forced removals for US atomic testing.Footnote 58 The lessons from his own experience, Maude suggested, were that only “enthusiasm and absolute trust” lead to successful relocations. He portrayed himself as this sort of knowing and benevolent figure, able to understand and guide island societies into their new futures. During a visit to Tamana, Maude described conversations in which he worked out the colonisation scheme with his partners to “ensure that it was correctly orientated with their own custom and traditions regarding migration;” he decided with them that the first order of business was to compose a song.Footnote 59 Ultimately, he found recruits and moved hundreds of families to new homes on islands further to the East. He described the project’s success in the liberal terms of late colonialism: “we have a thousand peasant proprietors leading happy and contented lives in their own lands, administered by their own island governments.”Footnote 60 Echoing a long line of historically- and anthropologically-inflected British colonial governance, he suggested that his paternal but benevolent hand had helped his colonial partners on the path toward eventual independence.Footnote 61 His ethnohistorical work in the 1960s, including the volume in which this essay appeared, would do the same. Both were understood as way-stations on the path toward eventual decolonisation.
As much as Maude understood the study of the past, and even his own participant histories, as guides to the future, he ultimately grew sceptical of his own impact. In 1963, facing severe droughts, the new communities Maude helped to establish in the Phoenix Islands were abandoned, and their populations again resettled in the distant Solomon Islands. Maude thought the move would be “for the ultimate benefit of the Gilbertese, just as the move from Ocean Island to Rabi has been for the Banabans, though he admitted that it filled him with “gloomy forebodings.” He suggested that work of this sort “must be a thankless job nowadays, without security or sense of vocation, and with the knowledge that one is execrated by most people in the world, and of course with the certain knowledge that all one’s work will be undone in a few years time.”Footnote 62 Surveying the results of his relocations of Pacific peoples several decades on, and self-consciously comparing them to his later history writing, Maude confided to a friend that:
I have never been able to take life very seriously, as you know, or to believe that anything I do matters very much, the islands were lovely, but I always knew deep down that the islanders would be better off if neither I nor any other European were there to lead a parasitic existence off them; the Commission was great fun with material rewards for those who could bandy the jargon, but it never did
anything much, nor ever will; my present work is probably best of all. Absolutely fascinating at times, but I cannot kid myself that the details of the early 19th century sandalwood trade… are of any importance to anyone except myself. Footnote 63
Instead, he suggested, it was only the business of guiding Pacific Islanders that seemed to matter. “Working for and worrying about others, loving and being loved, …those are the only periods that I look back on with any warm nostalgia,” he added.Footnote 64 Ultimately, Maude decided, the work of history-writing or governance meant little, and he could look back with fondness only at the image of himself as a beachcomber on the margins.
But Maude undersold himself. His colonial work was profoundly impactful, to be sure— resulting in the forced removal of entire communities. His historical work was impactful, too, helping to inaugurate a new way of writing about Pacific pasts. Certainly, even in his own era, historians looked to island-centred ethnohistories with some criticism. In a review of Of Islands and Men, University of Otago historian G.S. Parsonson critiqued him for insufficiently decentring Europe, noting that “Mr. Maude writes of the ‘discovery’ of endless islands, every one of which was originally discovered and settled by Polynesians or Micronesians. He writes with equal authority of European settlers, whether mutineers, or beachcombers, and ascribes to them an overwhelming importance. The Polynesian has apparently no independent history.”Footnote 65 Critiques of the ANU school followed similar patterns in the decades since, locating tensions between a vision of island-centred ethnohistory on the one hand and accusations that its histories continued to reinscribe European empire or retain a paternalist bent.
I suggest that these tensions and ambiguities were the result of the continuities between Maude’s two careers, not least a perduring colonial notion of futurity in which independence was always imminent but forestalled. Maude was a partially decolonising historian for a partially decolonising Pacific, a region that he imagined as still heading toward but not yet arrived at either political or epistemic independence. He was always in his self-conception a kind of beachcomber at the geographic and temporal ends of empire. As an administrator, he imagined himself as a lone figure in one of Britain’s smallest and most distant colonies, able to use his cultural knowledge and his position at the margins to guide his subjects. As a historian in the postwar Pacific, he maintained that focus on the liminal, both as his object of study but also as method, imagining intersections of history and anthropology as well as of European and Indigenous cultures. The result was a sustained colonial paternalism, to be sure. And yet, another consequence was a new form of history designed for the era of decolonisation, an “ethnohistory” which purposely eschewed imperial history and which moved the focus toward Pacific Islands and Pacific Islanders, a commitment which in broad terms remains central to decolonial visions even in the present. Like so many postcolonial formations, Pacific historiography’s turn away from imperial history sprung, in no small part, from Maude’s “participant history” in imperialism itself. It would be a partial turn, though, still requiring the guidance and mediation of a historian-beachcomber at the ends of empire—with fully decolonised futures yet to come.
Acknowledgements
My sincere thanks go to Moritz Mihatsch and Casper Andersen, who organized such a lively and intellectually productive workshop on this special issue’s theme in Cambridge—and who have done so much since then to make this special issue happen. This article, based on my contribution to that workshop, expands considerably on part of the fourth chapter of my book project, The Myth of the Natural Laboratory: Science, Empire, and Their Derangements on Pitcairn and Norfolk Islands (University of Hawai’i Press, 2026). Moritz and Casper’s workshop, and all its contributors, did much to focus its themes and arguments. My thanks go, too, to this article’s editors and anonymous peer reviewers, who did much the same.
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