DEVELOPMENT?

Throughout the nineteenth century, ambitious Pacific Islanders saw a variety of chances to transform their lives and their production and exchange. Several formed alliances with foreign adventurers, to extract or exploit resources. As the balance of political power tilted against the chiefs, however, it became increasingly difficult to retain land, labour, and autonomy.

The economic sense of the term development, now widely used, is surprisingly recent. It was coined in twentieth-century Australia when hopes of economic progress had been dashed, and it retains currency mainly in regions where economic performance lags behind expectations. If the term is new, the underlying idea of progress is as old as Western civilisation, and in one guise or another it has inspired Westerners to transform the world according to a seemingly preordained schedule. John Locke, the leading English philosopher of the seventeenth century, asserted a stage theory of development when he argued that ‘in the beginning all the world was America, and more so than it is now’. He also advanced a justification for empire: ‘God gave the world to men in Common, but since He gave it them for their benefit and the greatest conveniencies of life they were capable to draw from it, it cannot be supposed He meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the industrious and rational…’. Adam Smith, the founder of modern economic theory, refined this vision in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), describing progress as a set of stages from hunting and gathering, through pastoralism and farming, to metal-working and mechanisation.