THE AGENCIES AND IDEOLOGIES OF COLONIALISM

The accepted European view of colonial rule in the 1920s and 1930s, contested only by a few dissident anthropologists and missionaries, was that it brought immense benefits to Islanders. Colonial officials believed that they had a duty to take control of Islanders’ affairs for their own good. ‘The suppression of intertribal warfare, vendettas and retaliatory homicide and the establishment of law and order are obligatory on all Governments’, the High Commissioner for the Western Pacific said of the Solomon Islands in 1928. To replace endemic warfare with ‘law and order’, he thought, was self-evidently good. Missionaries had no doubt that to free villagers from fear of spirits and open their hearts to Christ was desirable, just as planters believed that they were improving the lot of the people by employing them. As decolonisation began, a contrary view became popular. By this account—the old view inverted—colonialism was a disaster for Islanders, destroying vigorous cultural traditions, imposing alien work disciplines, replacing traditional beliefs with a puritanical and oppressive Christianity, and incorporating Islanders into a global economy in which they were inevitably marginal and exploited. Both interpretations put Europeans centre-stage. Two decades after most colonial flags were lowered, the interpretation shifted again, to a more balanced appreciation of the place of outsiders, greater sensitivity to the pitfalls of language, and a more considered understanding of which outsiders mattered most. Before we turn to these insights, let us recall the Pacific as the world defined it in 1921.