Can territory be decolonised? In one crucial sense, the answer is yes. In a moment when the ‘threat of recolonisation haunts the third world’, the battles fought by the anti-colonial movements of the twentieth century for official recognition of political independence should not be disremembered, or their gains underestimated. But can the concept of territory be decolonised? Building on TWAIL, Indigenous and decolonial scholarly interventions, this chapter revisits the international law of territory to argue that there are two senses in which the question must be answered in the negative. The concept of territory is a Eurocentric construction of the rightful relationship between community, authority, and place. Not only does that construction rely on the ontological rupture between human subject and natural object that characterises European Enlightenment philosophy; it erases the physical Earth itself, replacing it with an abstract object over which sovereignty is exercised or space within which jurisdiction is asserted. The concept of territory in international law thereby presumes the objectification of ‘nature’ necessary for the propertisation and commodification of Earth.

Australia is a product and an agent of empire. From the mid-nineteenth century, the Australian colonies experimented with ‘sub-imperialism’, an expansionist project obstructed by the fact that the ‘self-governing’ white settler colonies of the British empire lacked external sovereignty. This chapter begins with the Australian colonies’ interdependence with and aspirations to annex ‘adjacent islands’ in the mid-nineteenth century. It follows the construction and administration of a Pacific empire beginning with the annexation of the Territory of Papua, to the administration of New Guinea and Nauru as League of Nations C Mandates and then as United Nations Trust Territories. Law proved an indispensable tool of Australian empire-building, producing complex relations of economic and cultural domination and resistance in Papua, New Guinea and Nauru. Amid the significant re-alignments produced by World War II, Australia attempted to renovate its empire in order to retain it. A professionalised administration of Australia’s territories and the regulation of legal citizenship were met with increasing Indigenous resistance and activism for real self-determination. Although decolonization in the later twentieth century brought Australian empire to an official end, the legacies of those expansionist aspirations continue to shape the Commonwealth’s legal, political and economic relationships with islands and communities in the Pacific region.

Chapter 1 is the introduction to the book. It explains the book’s central argument, its theoretical orientation, and its relationship to existing accounts of Nauru’s international legal history. Commencing with a critique of dehistoricised accounts of the island’s story as a parable, whether of environmental limits or of political corruption, the chapter then outlines the theories of jurisdiction and bureaucracy that inform the book’s focus on the history of imperial administration, rather than on the conceptual history of international law. It moves to contextualise this approach in the field of international legal history, explaining its intersections and divergences with Marxist and Third World approaches to international law. The chapter concludes with a summary of the subsequent chapters on the protectorate, mandate, trusteeship and state periods, and highlights the particular perspectives on German imperialism, Australian sub-imperialism, and geopolitical competition in the Pacific that emerge through this account.

Chapter 4 traces the accretion of Nauruan administration from 1920 to 1947. According to Article 22 of the League Covenant, C Mandates were to be administered as ‘integral portions’ of the Mandatory’s territory, an ambiguous status that came to pose juridical and diplomatic problems for the League. Australia defended a minimalist interpretation of its obligations in Nauru, as the British Phosphate Commission delivered cheap Nauruan phosphate into the farming sectors of Australia, Britain and New Zealand. For Japan and Germany, however, C Mandate status revealed the hypocrisies of the mandate system. Tensions in the Pacific worsened after their withdrawals from the League in 1933. The chapter revisits Japan’s occupation of Nauru during World War II, the war in the Pacific, and the formation of the UN from 1942. Nauru was re-taken in 1945, and the UN Trusteeship Agreement for Nauru was finalised in 1947, with Australia reappointed as Administering Authority. The chapter concludes that the shift from mandate to trust territory status later proved significant in defining self-government as a trusteeship objective; but that this shift was met with further accretions of imperial form.

Chapter 5 traces the final shift in Nauru’s status from trust territory to sovereign state in 1968. The dissolution of C Mandate status and the expanded trusteeship system placed Australia and South Africa out of step with global decolonisation movements. Their attempts to maintain control over Nauru and South West Africa attracted international criticism. The chapter examines the relationship between the South West Africa Cases and the UN’s embrace of Nauruan independence. Over the 1960s, the Trusteeship Council brokered independence negotiations between Australia and the Nauru Local Government Council. Australia gradually ceded political control and phosphate ownership but refused liability for the island’s rehabilitation. Nauru’s transition from trust territory to state was a profound achievement, but international recognition of Nauruan sovereignty was deeply ironic. The Republic was regarded less as a viable state than as a vehicle through which the Nauruan people could decide for themselves how to respond to the island’s environmental devastation. The chapter concludes that the 1968 Constitution marked a further accretion of an imperial form of established in the 1880s.

Chapter 6 is the conclusion of the book. It provides a brief account of the post-independence trajectory of the republic, focusing on the outcomes of the ‘Certain Phosphate Lands Case’ in the International Court of Justice 1992, and the impact of Australia’s offshore detention regime on the rule of law in Nauru in the 2010s. The chapter argues that the now notorious ‘failures’ of the republic identified by the Constitutional Review Committee in 2007 – ‘failure of institutions’; ‘lack of motivation or incentive to preserve wealth for the future, and account for its management’; ‘absence of machinery for enforcing accountability and transparency’; ‘failure of leaders to learn the lessons of good governance’ – must be understood as fundamentally continuous with imperial administrative practices of the pre-independence era, and not as originating with the Nauruan community itself following independence. Noting the reassertion of new forms of imperial intervention in Nauru, the chapter concludes that questions of decolonisation remain as urgent today as they were in 1968.

Chapter 3 traces the accretion of imperial administration in Nauru from 1888 to 1920. The formal status of Nauru shifted twice, from protectorate to colony to British mandate. From 1888, Nauru was administered as part of the German Marshall Islands, and later subsumed under the direct colonial control of German New Guinea in 1906. The Jaluit Gesellschaft sold its phosphate rights to the British-owned Pacific Phosphate Company, which developed a mining operation under German administration. In 1914 Nauru was occupied by Australia on British request. The chapter retraces the advent of the League of Nations mandate system, arguing that C Mandate status marked an uneasy compromise between advocates of internationalised administration of the occupied territories and the annexationist Dominions of Australia and South Africa. As Nauru’s legal status shifted from protectorate to C Mandate, administrative control was assumed by Australia pursuant to an intra-imperial bargain between Britain, Australia and New Zealand, which established a tripartite phosphate monopoly. The chapter concludes that the basic division of public and private authority established in 1888 survived this shift.

The Prologue begins with the factors the Nauru Constitutional Review Commission Report of 2007 identified as responsible for the Republic’s contemporary economic and political precarity. In a UNDP-funded constitutional referendum in 2010, the Nauruan community overwhelmingly rejected proposed amendments to Nauru’s 1968 Constitution that were designed to address those factors. The Prologue describes the author’s involvement in the referendum campaign, and introduces the history of Australian, British and German imperial interventions in the Pacific region, and Australia’s use of Nauru as a site for offshore processing of asylum seekers who arrive in Australian waters by sea.

Chapter 2 traces Nauru’s incorporation into the arena of European imperial competition, first as a trading outpost of a Hanseatic firm from Hamburg, then as part of the German protectorate of the Marshall Islands. It traces the activity of Hanseatic firms in the Pacific and Africa in the late nineteenth century, and examines the significance of Hanseatic activity to the geography of German protectorates declared around the Berlin Conference in 1884, and the relationship between that activity and the Australasian federation movement. The chapter moves to assess the relationship between the protectorate concept and the actual forms of protectorate that proliferated from the mid-1880s, when the label was applied to diverse imperial forms involving vague and often contradictory assertions of sovereignty, property and territory. It argues that the protectorate concept bore little relation to the actual balance of company and state rule struck between the Reich and the Jaluit Gesellschaft in 1888 in Nauru. It concludes that this distinction between status and form establishes a new perspective from which to retrace the shift from imperial to international administration in the twentieth century.