Non British Nationals In Islands example essay topic

Most of the indigenous peoples of the Melanesian region are now subjected to pressures of Christianization and westernization. In some areas such forces have been at work for more than a century. In some interior areas, however, particularly in the rugged and virtually impenetrable mountains of New Guinea, contact with Western culture was not made until the 1930's or even later. Today even the most remote regions of Melanesia have become accessible, and they have been transformed. One significant change is the transformation of Melanesia once classless societies into class-stratified groups. The countries of modern Melanesia show increasing polarization between metropolitan centers and village hinterlands.

The rapid growth of squatter settlements around urban centers and increasing movement into towns has begun to link village and urban life. The more remote villages are poor and have little access to the educational, medical, and economic services of the state. As might be expected, it is in the areas of least contact with the Western world that traditional culture tends to be the most resilient. Capitalist enterprise, such as cash cropping of coffee and other high-value crops, is evident even in the hinterlands. Roads and airfields now connect once-isolated areas to regional networks.

Due to colonization by western countries, southern pacific islands became known in the rest of the world. European colonization had both positive and negative effects. In Fiji, for example, first offer to cede the islands to Great Britain in 1858, Europeans arrived to establish plantations, at first of coconuts, then, during the American Civil War, of cotton, and afterward of sugar. The development in Samoa was similar. But planters needed land on a much larger scale than traders, and they needed labor in much greater quantities to work the plantations.

Both land sales and labor recruitment caused friction, for ownership was not an Oceanic concept; thus, land titles were disputed or resented, and the recruitment of labor often caused the breakup of traditional societies if too many males left their communities and the creation of immigrant labor communities if they did not. By 1870 there were 2,000 such permanent European residents in Fiji. Politically the settlers had an interest in stability, and economically they needed security of title to land and a supply of labor. Neither requirement was satisfied by the missionary kingdoms. Nor was it satisfied by native governments that were not guided by missionaries. In Tahiti, Tonga, Samoa, and Fiji no native authority was able to keep order in the novel circumstances created by European enterprise; in any case, the native kings were themselves open to challenge within their own societies.

Pom are II encountered revolt in Tahiti, Samoan politics were always a matter of rivalry between chiefs, and Cakobaus government was threatened by the Tongan chief Maa fu, who had established his own confederacy in the Lau Islands of the Fiji group. Eventually the unstable internal conditions in the Pacific began to draw in European governments, all of which acknowledged some responsibility for the protection of their nationals and their property. The French government was the first to intervene, after the expulsion of two Roman Catholic missionaries from Tahiti in 1836. In the same year two more were deported from Hawaii.

In 1839 the Archbishop of Chalcedon suggested regular association between the Roman Catholic missions and the French navy, but the French government was also aware of the need for a good naval station for the fleet and for French commerce and for a place of penal settlement. Abel Du Petit-Thou ars thus took possession of Tua hata and the southeast Marquesas in 1842 and in the same year persuaded the Tahitians to ask for a French protectorate, which was formally granted in 1843. In 1853 the presence of French missionaries in New Caledonia led to French annexation, possibly for fear of British action, certainly to establish a penal colony (to which convicts were transported until 1897). Other European nations intervened for different reasons. In 1857 August Unhelm, as agent for J.C. Godeffroy and Son, set up the company's depot at Apia, and Samoa became the greatest trading centre in the islands; and even when Godeffroy failed in 1879, the Deutsche Handel und Plantagengesellschaft (German Trading and Plantation Company) took over, and Samoa remained the favorite colony of the colonial party in German politics. British nationals had trading and plantation interests in the islands; to give some protection to these interests, the British government had appointed consuls to those islands governed by recognizable rulers, but their powers to maintain order were limited and, except for the visits of warships, unenforceable.

The United States also appointed consuls. The rivalry between these officers and between European entrepreneurs, and the involvement of both in the internal politics of Oceanic societies, merely emphasized to metropolitan governments the disordered condition of the islands. In Tahiti the problem was resolved by French annexation. In Samoa, after a tripartite supervision set up by the Samoa Act of 1889 came to grief in European rivalries and Samoan factionalism over chieftainships, an agreement of 1899 divided the Samoa group between Germany and the United States; Britain received compensation elsewhere. Britain's main concern was in fact with the activity of its nationals: in Fiji, where it accepted the offer of cession of 1874, it did so primarily because native authority had broken down. But Britain also had been concerned with the labor trade by which the Queensland (Australia) plantations took islanders, who were sometimes recruited under doubtful or brutal conditions.

In the 1860's this trade flourished in the New Hebrides, and violence there led the missionaries to protest. Then the labor trade moved north to the Solomons, where again there was violence, including the murder of the Anglican bishop in the Santa Cruz group, from which five men had been taken by recruiters. The British solution was the Western Pacific Order in Council (1877), which empowered the governor of Fiji to exercise authority over British nationals and vessels in a wide area of the western Pacific. The problem still remained, however, of non-British nationals in islands that had neither native kings nor European governors, especially those of Melanesia. European government, like both mission and commercial enterprise, had been slower to penetrate Melanesia.

Missionary activity did not begin in New Guinea until 1873. There was not much labor recruiting. The first main activity was the gold rush of 1877, but German traders had arrived on the northern coast in 1873, followed by the firm of Hernsheim & Co. (a general trader) in 1875. Such foreign interest produced a demand in the Australian colonies for annexation for reasons quite unconnected with the internal situation in the islands.

German interests were marked in Micronesia, French in the New Hebrides. A number of groups in Australia also looked on New Guinea as a rich possession. But the British government, notwithstanding Queensland's abortive attempt at annexation in 1883, would not annex unless the Australian colonies paid the cost of administration, the same argument it was applying to New Zealand's interest in the Cook Islands. When the Australian colonies agreed to pay, the British government acted. Southeast New Guinea was declared a protectorate in 1884 and annexed four years later; the Cooks became a protectorate in 1888 and were annexed in 1901.

Germany annexed northeast New Guinea in 1884, including the Bismarck Archipelago; in 1886 it took possession of the northern Solomons (Buk a and Bougainville). The British established a protectorate over the rest of the Solomons in 1893. In Micronesia the Germans, after an attempt to annex the Spanish possession of the Caroline's in 1885, finally bought them from Spain with the Pala us and the Marianas (excepting Guam) in 1899. They had annexed the Marshalls in 1885 and, under a convention with Britain of 1886, the phosphate-rich island of Nauru. By that convention Britains interest in the Gilberts was recognized, although no protectorate was declared until 1892. The Ellice's were added to it, the group becoming the Gilbert and Ellice Islands.

France declared a protectorate over Wallis and Futuna in 1887, and in the same year a convention set up a mixed British and French naval commission in the New Hebrides. Its authority was limited, and in 1906 a Condominium was agreed upon by which such difficult legal questions as land title were settled and a joint administration set up. The process of partition was completed by the United States, which took Guam in the Spanish-American War (1898), annexed the republic of Hawaii that same year, and obtained American (eastern) Samoa by agreement with Germany and Great Britain in 1899 and by deeds of cession (1900, 1904) from island chiefs. Such limited resources and the competition between different objectives of colonial policy plainly restricted what could be done.

The islands were affected directly by external events such as the Great Depression and the fluctuations in world markets for copra, sugar, and other products of Oceania. The principal achievements of the colonial powers were to check population decline by control of the introduced European diseases that had ravaged the islands and by increasing control of endemic diseases (such as malaria in Melanesia) and to hold a rough balance between European and indigenous interests. But welfare policies and island administration were both interrupted by World War II. The Japanese had been established in the north of Oceania, where they had treated their mandates as part of Japan itself. In 1941 they advanced into the rest of Oceania, reaching and controlling most of New Guinea and, at the peak of their advance, as much of the Solomons. New Caledonia, the New Hebrides, Fiji, and the islands of Polynesia were not occupied, but the effects of the war made colonial government there secondary to military operations.

After the war the Trusteeship Council of the United Nations replaced the mandates; all of the colonial powers accepted that independence or self-government was the aim of their rule. The Oceanian's themselves had been exposed to a more intensive European (and Japanese) impact; their horizons had widened. The colonial powers felt a greater urgency to promote development and to make available greater resources to achieve it. Politically, colonial governments were reorganized to give indigenous people a part in government. In Western Samoa in 1947 the Legislative Council was given a Samoan majority and considerable powers. In American Samoa naval rule was replaced in 1951 by civilian control, and a legislature of two houses was set up, which by 1960 became a lawmaking body of Samoans.

In French Polynesia and New Caledonia, elected assemblies were given considerable local autonomy in 1956; both territories chose to stay within the French Community in 1958. The trend toward a limited degree of internal autonomy and increased political participation by native residents continued in the 1960's in Fiji, the Cook Islands, and other Pacific dependencies. With the exception of some French, American, and Chilean territories, most of the Pacific Islands had achieved independence by 1980. Although most of these newly independent territories remained within the British Commonwealth, they represented a sizable addition to the ranks of micro states. The speed of political development in the Pacific Islands was partly a matter of external pressure in the United Nations; but the colonial governments, with the exception of the French, were already moving toward self-government or independence. There were no mass nationalist movements, as in Africa and Asia, to whose demands colonial governments responded.

The reaction to European rule usually took the form of nativistic movements or cargo cults in which rituals attempted to secure cargo diverted by Europeans. Occasionally, as with the Mau (Strongly Held View) movement in Western Samoa in the 1920's and 30's, there was more overtly political action. In the French territories of French Polynesia and New Caledonia, for example, European-style political parties have demanded greater local autonomy and, as a minority, independence. In Fiji and Papua New Guinea, political parties formed when electoral machinery was established.

The absence of mass nationalist movements owed something to the policies of colonial governments, which on the whole maintained the paramountcy of Oceanic interests; but it owed even more to the nature of Oceanic societies, in which kinship ties and a preference for consensus as correct behavior led to the Melanesian way or the Pacific way as a style of politics.