The Price of the White Man's Peace

Abstract

FROM i908 to i909 I lived in Buin, a thickly inhabited country with an area of about 8o to ioo square miles and a population of about 7,000 or 8,ooo, sloping down from the main mountain range in the southern end of Bougainville, the most northwestern of the large islands of the Solomon Archipelago. In 1933-34 I revisited the same district, now part of the Territory of New Guinea, under Australian Mandate. Twenty-five years is a space of time that counts little in the ordinary course of history, but in this particular case it covered the transition of a savage society from almost complete integrity to a growing disintegration of the old order; and the phenomena of change which I was able to observe in this limited area illustrate significantly the whole process of the spread of the white man's Western technique and civilization among subject peoples. When I first landed on the island of Bougainville, in the course of field work on behalf of the Berlin Museum fur Vblkerkunde extending from i906 to i909, a government station had been operating for two years in Kieta, on the east coast of the island, as had a mission station and a trading store. Altogether there were five or six white residents. About the same time a mission had been opened in Buin, about 200 miles farther south, under the direction of two Catholic fathers. On the entire island, about 6oo miles long and 200 to 300 miles wide, there were as yet no plantations. The inhabitants had been only superfcially touched by Western influence. Boys had been recruited for new plantations in the central Solomon Islands, and before that even for the Queensland sugar industry; but Australia had stopped the recruiting of colored laborers in i905. In pre-white times, Buin had been raided for slaves by Alu and Mono chiefs.1 The comparatively