Doug Munro

The pacific islands labour trade: Approaches, methodologies, debates

(1993). The pacific islands labour trade: Approaches, methodologies, debates. Slavery & Abolition: Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 87-108.

Review article: Revisionism and its enemies: Debating the queensland labour trade∗

Cane and Labour: the political economy of the Queensland sugar industry, 1862–1906. By Adrian Graves. Edinburgh, University of Edinburgh Press, 1993. xxi, 282 pp, maps, index. ISBN 0–7486–011711. £35 stg.

J.W. Davidson at Cambridge University: Some Student Evaluations

Before arriving in Canberra in 1950 as the foundation Professor of Pacific History at the Australian National University, J.W. (Jim) Davidson (1915-1973) was an Oxbridge don and author of a small book on The Northern Rhodesian Legislative Council (1948). A New Zealander by birth and upbringing, Davidson arrived at Cambridge in late 1938 on a Strathcona Scholarship and embarked on a PhD dissertation at St Johns College, becoming a Fellow in 1945 and from 1 January 1947, a University Lecturer in Colonial Studies. While the formal details are easily established, little of substance is known about Davidsons activities at Cambridge. As Davidsons biographerto-be, I was fortunate to receive a letter from P.E.H. Hair, one of Davidsons undergraduate students at Cambridge, who learned of my work from a footnote in one of my journal articles. Hair put me in contact with a fellow Davidson student, George Shepperson, which led to another fruitful correspondence.

THE VAITUPU COMPANY REVISITED: REFLECTIONS AND SECOND THOUGHTS ON METHODOLOGY AND MINDSET*

different not because they have altered but because we have. For the same reason, a rereading of older historical texts will convey different meanings, and reveal deficiencies and perhaps even profundities that were not initially apparent. In this paper, these observations are applied to a piece of research that was special to me at the time. I now see more clearly the extent to which my methods and mindset were a product of time, of place, and of my own training and preferences. So I will retrace my footsteps--insofar as is possible after all these years--and consider how the preconceptions and expectations of the moment affected the outcome. In other words, to reflect on the nature of thinking and writing. My research was not concerned with African but Pacific Islands history. From the mid 1970s through to the early 1980s I engaged in dissertation work in the nineteenth-century history of Tuvalu, formerly the Ellice Islands.2 Older maps will identify Tuvalu as the southern portion of a British dependency, the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony (astride the equator and just east of the International Date Line). The nine Tuvalu islands are tiny even by the standards of coral atolls; by far the largest is Vaitupu at about six square kilometers, and the group remains economically unimportant and strategically insignificant. During the nineteenth century Tuvalu was incorporated into the world economy through the whaling industry and the copra trade, and further exposed to Western influences by missionization. The paucity of exploitable resources, however, coupled with an inhospitable environment and smallness of scale, rendered the islands unsuitable for large-scale European settlement and muted the potential disruptions of outside contacts. But there were aberrant events, such as the Vaitupu Company, which placed individual island communities under strain from time to time. The Vaitupu Company (1877-1887) was an indigenous trading and shipping company founded by an adventurer named T.W. Williams. In an attempt to compete with the established European firms for a slice of the seaborne copra trade, Williams enlisted 100 shareholders from the Vaitupu population of about 230 and they set themselves in defiance of both the

ON BEING A HISTORIAN OF TUVALU: FURTHER THOUGHTS ON METHODOLOGY AND MINDSET*

is an atoll archipelago near the junction of the equator and the international date line, and is identified on older maps as the southern portion of a British dependency, the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony-now the independent nations of Kiribati and Tuvalu respectively. The nine Tuvalu islands are tiny even by atoll standards, an aggregate 26km2 spread over 360 nautical miles. During the nineteenth century Tuvalu was incorporated into the world economy by a succession of European influences. The early explorers gave way in 1821 to whalers, who, in turn, were superseded by copra traders during the 1850s. From mid-century the pace of events quickened,

Conversion and Church formation in tuvalu

Islands and formed part of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony. The formal colonial connection began in 1892 when a British protectorate was declared. With the assumption of British rule a powerful new element impinged on this tiny island world which altered existing relationships between Tuvaluans and foreigners, gradually giving Tuvalu the basis for a wider sphere of participation with the outside world. An equally important influence has been Christianity, which affected the affairs of each island at every level, and whose introduction predates that of colonialism proper by three decades. The London Missionary Society (LMS) took over Tuvalu by degrees, from its early successes in the mid 1860s until pagan resistance in the three northernmost islands was broken a decade later. The archipelago has remained a Protestant stronghold ever since, despite the recent incursions by Seventh Day Adventists, Jehovahs Witness, Bahai, and Mormons, and the reintroduction of Catholicism. Today the Tuvalu Church (the local successor of the LMS) is an autonomous body affiliated to the Council for World Mission.