Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire by Nicholas Thomas (review)

Abstract

NAIS 1:1 SPRING 2014 Reviews 131 COLL THRUSH Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire by Nicholas Thomas Yale University Press, 2010 BEST KNOWN FOR HIS BOOK Entangled Objects (1991), Nicholas Thomas begins the award-winning Islanders with one of those moments of colonial entanglement that continue to fascinate scholars and confound expectations. Rather than opening this excellent history of the long nineteenth century in the South Pacific with the arrival of a European on some beach, Thomas opens with a scene involving Kualelo, a Kanaka Maoli teenager, aboard a small boat in the Thames, taking in London’s late Georgian skyline. From this starting point, Thomas offers us a compelling, detailed history of Indigenous encounters with European presences that will be of interest to scholars of Indigenous studies. The book is divided into two parts, covering respectively the first and second halves of the nineteenth century. The rough boundary between these periods has to do with differing levels of political and physical presence of Europeans in the Pacific, including the increasing trend toward labor extraction and formal annexation in the 1860s and afterward. While necessarily overly simplistic, as Thomas admits, this structure does help make some sense out of a bewilderingly complex region involving incredibly diverse Indigenous polities, vast distances, and several colonial powers. At the same time, there are commonalities that stretch across this temporal boundary: the presence, often halting, of Christian missionaries; the canny responses of Indigenous elites to European goods, ideas, and political networks; and the ease with which events could slip into all-out war. Ultimately, this is a book of stories: of the fine-grained, on-the-ground lived experiences of nascent and not-so-nascent colonialism or, as Thomas writes, “what empire really was, not so much at the level of colour on the map, or the policy and diplomacy of the metropolitan powers, but in bibles and blood on the beaches of the islands, and in the imaginations that these novel artefacts and intrusions engendered” (25). Some of the stories contained in Islanders will be familiar to many readers with some knowledge of the Pacific’s history: the diversity and legacy of Captain James Cook’s voyages through the region; the social and environmental collapse of Rapa Nui (Easter Island); the complex machinations of the Pōmare dynasty of Tahiti; and the killing of missionary John Williams on Erromanga that fueled missionary fears and fantasies of martyrdom. Thomas also spends several chapters Reviews NAIS 1:1 SPRING 2014 132 detailing the rise of capitalist labor extraction in the Pacific, in which Indigenous men were “recruited”—often through lies, coercion, or outright violence —into networks of plantation servitude that stretched from Australia to South America. Others will be far less familiar except to specialists. They include Keatonui , an adroit Marquesan leader who navigated early encounters with missionaries and other foreigners in the first decades of the nineteenth century, and Veidovi, a Fijian headman taken as a captive as part of the United States Exploring Expedition in the 1830s. He also offers detailed insight to one of the bloodiest wars of the nineteenth-century Pacific, which rocked the interior of Fiji’s Viti Levu in the late nineteenth century. And wherever possible in these stories, Thomas includes contemporary Indigenous sources in his discussion of events. Of particular interest are the Kanak chronicles of an outbreak of violence in 1870s New Caledonia, carved in great detail into sections of ­bamboo. Islanders is at times short on interpretive framing or theoretical heft; it is possible to get lost in the details. And despite its title, the book focuses primarily on only select regions of the Pacific, something Thomas acknowledges . Tonga, Fiji, Tahiti, Sāmoa, and parts of Melanesia receive most of the attention, while places like Aotearoa/New Zealand, Guam, and Hawai‘i receive short shrift. And, like most “Pacific” studies, the topic at hand is in fact merely the southwestern Pacific. Despite increasing oceanic entanglements during the nineteenth century, eastern and northern Pacific regions appear rarely if at all. (The one exception in Islanders is Peru, the destination of many Pacific laborers.) These small criticisms aside, Thomas’s book is of critical value...