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New Zealand’s Empire revises and expands received histories of empire and imperialism. In the study of the imperial past, both colonial and postcolonial approaches have often asserted the dualism of core and periphery, with New Zealand as on the ‘edge’ or as a ‘periphery’. This book critically revises and makes complex our understandings of the range of ways that New Zealand has played a role as an ‘imperial power’, including the cultural histories of New Zealand inside the British empire, engagements with imperial practices and notions of imperialism, the special significance of New Zealand in the Pacific region, and the circulation of the ideas of empire both through and inside New Zealand over time. It departs from earlier studies of both imperial and national histories by taking a new approach: seeing New Zealand as both powerful as an imperial envoy, and as having its own sovereign role in Pacific nations - as well as in Australia and Antarctica - but also through its examination of the manifold ways in which New Zealanders both look back at and comment on their relationships with the ‘empire’ over time. In separate essays that span social, cultural, political and economic history, contributors test the concept of ‘New Zealand’s Empire’, taking new directions in both historiographical and empirical research.
With an eye to recovering the experiences of those in frontier zones of contact, Savage worlds maps a wide range of different encounters between Germans and non-European indigenous peoples in the age of high imperialism. Examining outbreaks of radical violence as well as instances of mutual co-operation, it examines the differing goals and experiences of German explorers, settlers, travellers, merchants, and academics, and how the variety of projects they undertook shaped their relationship with the indigenous peoples they encountered.
Whether in the Asia-Pacific region, the Americas or Africa, within Germany’s formal empire or in the imperial spaces of other powers, Germans brought with them assumptions about the nature of extra-European peoples. These assumptions were often subverted, disrupted or overturned by their own experience of frontier interactions, which led some Germans to question European ‘knowledge’ of these non-European peoples. Other Germans, however, signally failed to shift from their earlier assumptions about indigenous people and continued to act in the colonies according to their belief in the innate superiority of Europeans.
Examining the multifaceted nature of German interactions with indigenous populations, the wide ranging research presented in this volume offers historians and anthropologists a clear demonstration of the complexity of frontier zone encounters. It illustrates the variety of forms that agency took for both indigenous peoples and Germans in imperial zones of contact and poses the question of how far Germans were able to overcome their initial belief that, in leaving Europe, they were entering ‘savage worlds’.
studies of ships, society and the sea. With particular reference to the British settler societies in the western Pacific, histories of transport and empire have emphasised the vertical lines of connection with the imperial metropole, that ongoing project to blunt the ‘tyranny of distance’ as charted in Geoffrey Blainey’s 1966 classic of the same name. 22 James Belich has
Identity is often regarded as something that is possessed by individuals, states, and other agents. In this edited collection, identity is explored across a range of approaches and under-explored case studies with a view to making visible its fractured, contingent, and dynamic features. The book brings together themes of belonging and exclusion, identity formation and fragmentation. It also examines how identity functions in discourse, and the effects it produces, both materially and in ideational terms. Taking in case studies from Asia-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East and Latin America, the various chapters interrogate identity through formal governing mechanisms, popular culture and place. These studies demonstrate the complex and fluid nature of identity and identity practices, as well as implications for theorising identity.
Peace , p. 156. 25 Christopher Waters, ‘Against the tide’, Journal of Pacific History 48:2 ( 2013 ). Some political historians point to the ways in which national politics ‘decolonised’ (or ‘de-dominionised’) in relation to Whitehall in the 1950s. In such departures from the compliant agreement still sought by London from its
–48. 50 Helen Gardner and Christopher Waters, ‘Decolonisation in Melanesia’, Journal of Pacific History 48.2 (2013), 113–21. 51 Bennett, Wealth of the Solomons , p. 162. 52 Ibid ., p. 320. 53 Clive Moore, ‘Indigenous Participation in Constitutional Development: Case Study of the Solomon Islands Constitutional Review Committees of the 1960s and 1970s’, Journal of Pacific History, 48.2 (2013
1 Damon Salesa, ‘Contested oceans’ ( The People of the Sea book review forum), Journal of Pacific History , 43:1 ( 2008 ), 119. 2 R. A. Derrick, A History of Fiji (Suva: Fiji Government Press, 1946), 147
Malama Meleisea, The Making of Modern Samoa: Traditional Authority and Colonial Administration in the History of Western Samoa (Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies, 1987); Mary Boyd, ‘Coping with Samoan resistance after the 1918 influenza epidemic’, Journal of Pacific History , 15:3 (1980), 155
. Alcohol in Samoa is known as ava malosi (strong kava). 10 N. Gunson, ‘On the incidence of alcoholism and intemperance in early Pacific missions’, Journal of Pacific History , 1, no.1 (1966), 60. Although these effects are not common, kava can induce intoxication (‘grog doped’) and hangovers ( lomoloma ca ). Aporosa, ‘Yaqona (Kava) and Education in Fiji’, 177–84. 11 Gunson, ‘On the incidence of alcoholism’, 60–1; A. Thornley, Exodus of
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), pp. 37–74; and Jane Lewis (ed), Labour and Love: women’s experience of home and family, 1850–1940 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986 ). 48 Ibid., p. 54. See Margaret Jolly, ‘“To Save the Girls for Brighter and Better Lives”: Presbyterian Missions and Women in the South of Vanuatu, 1848–1870’, Journal of Pacific History 26:1 (1991), 27–48. 49 Perry, ‘Hot-bed of Vice’, pp. 604 and 599. 50 My emphasis