Canberra: ANU Press, 2019. xxviii, 472 pp. (Maps, coloured photos, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$65.00, paper; free ebook. ISBN 9781760463090.
Clive Moore, emeritus historian at the University of Queensland, has published another comprehensive and even-handed account of the colonial history of the Solomon Islands—this time through the lens of its initial capital, Tulagi. It might seem malapropos for the narrative to be reviewed here by a Tongan academic, as Tonga claims to be the Pacific realm never colonized. But in fact the UK nearly concurrently dominated both nations under the euphemistic rubric “protectorate,” a status reserved for territories that lacked the resources to merit annexation but whose location had to be withheld from rivals.
So on to Moore’s 500-page chronicle of the British protectorate of the Solomon Islands (1897–1978) from a Tulagin perch: The author’s early pages read like an apology for paternalism. The archipelago’s first supervisor, Charles Woodford, is hardly a gruff colonel but rather a lean naturalist specializing in the study of butterflies. And as there are no natural resources to exploit, Woodford goes sustainable, nurturing plantations of coconut, palm, bananas, and sweet potato. Welcome to Green Colonialism.
Benevolence goes further. Ports are dredged to enable commerce, schools are constructed to train the indigenous, swamps are drained to retard malaria, latrines are built to ensure sanitation, and by 1920 the hospital is finally treating natives. Alas, before the retirement of our botanist-in-chief, even an incinerator is raised to pulverize cans and rubbish.
In the end, though, Moore exchanges apology for exposé, as every historian of colonialism must. We learn British administrators typically viewed Melanesians as a “dying race of cannibalistic headhunting savages, incapable of being ‘civilised’” (410). (One wonders, then, for what the natives were being trained—a Pacific Jonestown?) Conditions of employment are disparaged as “exploitative.” The Tungi Club, with its golf and tennis courts, was restricted to Europeans. The Commonwealth Bank would only extend credit to European and biracial applicants.
And no occupation can ever be complete—whether in India, Kenya, or Samoa—without the de rigueur massacre. In the Solomons, such assault inevitably targeted the Kwaio, a Polynesian group on Malaita Island that even today is partially pagan. In addition to resisting Christianity (which of course offended the British), the group opposed taxation and the confiscation of firearms, leading in 1927 to a Kwaio team assassinating an enforcement posse of UK officers and some dozen native assistants.
The protectorate responded with the Malaita crackdown: a collective punishment that terminated some 60 Kwaio and imprisoned some 200, 30 of whom succumbed to dysentery whilst detained. Six of the assassins were executed—the ringleader in front of his sons to impress local youth with British hegemony.
And yet we learn that racism on the Solomons apparently only focused on indigenous people of colour. Moore’s meticulous research discovers the biography of George W. E. Richardson (1866–1949), an African-American sailor initially employed by Levers Plantations following his arrival in 1905. After reviewing sources, the author concludes Richardson was “totally accepted” by local Europeans throughout his long life.
Notwithstanding, after the chilling descriptions of racism and carnage, one almost welcomes the Japanese dismantling of Tulagi in 1942. The Kōkūtai—and the US Air Force in retaliation shortly afterward—so thoroughly razed the city that the capital was later moved to Honiara, where the Americans had paved some airports. It’s a cliché that—except for the pampered “collectivities” of New Caledonia and French Polynesia and “unincorporated” American Samoa—the Second World War doomed colonialism in the Pacific. Cliché was reality for the Solomons: liberation came in 1978, shortly after it was granted to Tonga and Samoa.
For the patient reader, Moore’s monograph eventually exposes the Janus face of the protectorate: paternalist, then oppressive. Yet for the progressive scholar, his early chapter on the Woodford era—however factual—reads, as noted above, like an initial justification for occupation.
Such objection embroils this review in the age-old dispute between positivist and critical history. Positivists have forever held that, just as in natural science, the social scientist must confine research to innocent facts, while their critical counterparts argue that key facts are rarely neutral and by sanitizing them with that credential the positivist risks collaboration with oppression.
There are at least two ways to satisfy the critical challenge: 1) by embedding the facts within a critical perspective; or 2) by prefacing the study with a critical overview. Granted, there’s a certain drama to Moore’s approach: to impartially recount the Woodford administration, then subvert its legacy with the chauvinism of ensuing events. But a wry introduction regarding the contradictory mien of colonialism might have made Tulagi a more dimensional history.
Michael Horowitz
‘Atenisi Institute, Nuku‘alofa