Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire

by Nicholas Thomas

This compelling book explores the lived experience of empire in the Pacific, the last region to be contacted and colonized by Europeans following the great voyages of Captain Cook. Unlike conventional accounts that emphasize confrontation and the destruction of indigenous cultures, Islanders reveals there was gain as well as loss, survival as well as suffering, and invention as well as exploitation.

Empowered by imaginative research in obscure archives and collections, Thomas rediscovers a rich and surprising history of encounters, not only between Islanders and Europeans, but among Islanders, brought together in new ways by explorers, missionaries, and colonists. He tells the story of the making of empire, not through an impersonal survey, but through vivid stories of the lives of men and women—some visionary, some vicious, and some just eccentric—and through sensuous evocation of seascapes and landscapes of the Pacific. A fascinating re-creation of an Oceanic world, Islanders offers a new paradigm, not only for histories of the Pacific, but for understandings of cultural contact everywhere.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Anthropology

356 pages, Hardcover

First published November 18, 2010

Reviews

[William · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nicholas Thomas argues for the framing of empire as dialectical. His biggest intervention is arguing for empire as an iterative process, where both Europeans and Pacific Islanders contribute to the creation of mutual knowledge. From the European perspective, Thomas shows how geography and mapping became the primary means of circumscribing racial difference onto Pacific Islanders including the distinctions between Melanesians, Micronesians, and Polynesians.

Thomas’s other intervention is his attempt to restore agency to Islanders in the historical narrative and complicate more simplistic notions of one-sided European domination. He argues that European discovery facilitated not only European knowledge production, but also a rediscovery among Islanders of lost kin, a sense of Oceanic community, and a larger theater of exchange in which to operate—disrupting the notion that Pacific Islanders are a monolith in any sense. Thomas also argues that just as Europeans learned about the Pacific, Islanders also learned about Europe. He shows how Islanders exotified European society (55) and how Islanders were not afraid to appropriate European artifacts, technologies, and religion, helping flip the appropriation narrative on its head. Additionally, I agree with Thomas’s argument that Europeans, in many ways, simply exacerbated and amplified via violence existing tensions, power struggles and relations between Islanders. Indeed, Thomas shows how Islanders were not afraid to deploy Europeans against each other through strategic alliances and vice versa and that confrontations cut across the boundaries of traditional conceptions of Europeans vs. Islanders. Another area where Thomas intervenes in the historical narrative is in the realm of religion, specifically regarding Christianity. He shows how many Islanders converted to Christianity of their own accord due to a confluence of different factors including a past history of changing religions and that there was a constant interplay of religion and power. Thomas references how some chiefs “wait[ed] on more powerful chiefs to turn first” before making the decision to convert (123).

Despite these agreements, one criticism I have of Thomas is that in his efforts to restore agency to Islanders in the historical narrative, he sometimes falls down the slippery slope of sanitizing imperialism and extolling the process of empire-making as mutually beneficial to the Islanders as it is to the Europeans. And while Thomas does acknowledge the violence of empire, he immediately proceeds to wax poetically about how empire is “replete with possibilities, marked out by travels, possible travels, and travels of the mind …” and that empire “was powerfully suggestive, it prompted people to rethink themselves, their lives and their futures” (297). His use of the ‘was’ here is striking as empire continues to be a reality of the present, not yet a relic to be laid aside in the history books. Additionally, his emphasis on “cosmopolitanism” threatens to sanitize even further the violence of empire.

This is not to say that I do not agree with Thomas in his framing of empire as an iterative, dialectical process. But as much as he goes on about how Islanders shaped and influenced the process of empire-making, Thomas focuses the entirety of his book and chapter on how empire transformed the Pacific. And he is right. Empire did transform the Pacific along the material, political, and biological. Yet, at the same time, it cannot be denied that the Pacific transformed Europe along the same dimensions. While he references in passing the journeys of individual Islanders to Europe and hints at how Islanders made Europe ‘more Pacific,’ Thomas fails to go beyond that, and in failing to do so, does a disservice to his argument. If empire is truly dialectical, Thomas needs to do a better job of showing the transformations from the direction of the Pacific to Europe.

A final criticism I have of Thomas is that he does not do a very good job of making clear that while empire is dialectical, Europeans and Pacific Islanders did not operate on a level playing field. He walks the thin line between agency and structure, too often leaning towards agency and erasing the factors of structural violence that tilted the relationship towards exploitation by the Europeans. I believe that the agency of Islanders and the fact that Islanders transformed Europe can be acknowledged while also acknowledging that the relationship between Europeans and Islanders was unequal. By failing to make this explicit, Thomas falls (again) into the trap of sanitizing imperialism.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

A review of contact between Pacific islanders and European and American explorers, missionaries, traders and whalers from 1750 through the end of the 1800s. The book hops from island to island and makes the point that interactions were highly political on a local level -- and highly varied. But it lacks a cohesiveness and skips important places like Hawaii almost completely.

Important questions go unanswered here:
* why were indigenous people converting to Christianity? Though he hints at wealth and literacy as possible reasons, Nicholas Thomas doesn't tie it together in any meaningful way.
* how was property ownership dealt with as common or tribal lands passed into private ownership? Again he touches on some situations without dealing with the impact of French and English colonialization or the United States absorbing Hawaii as a territory. Only in Samoa does he deal with German colonial efforts and land ownership.
* how did native beliefs morph and survive?

Thomas does document about as well as can be expected the impact of western illnesses on local societies, in several cases attempting to estimate the population declines. He also does a reasonable job of describing local politics in a number of islands, especially the fact that in virtually all of the islands there were several competing tribes, one of which would usually ascend in power by allying itself with European influences.

[Tony Mcgowan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite interesting, but rather narrow. This is really the story of missionaries in the Pacific, and I feel he gives them too easy a ride. The reason for that is his determination (in the revisionist style of Linda Colley) to avoid seeing the Polynesians as victims. This may be 'progressive' in that it makes them actors rather than passive spectators of their own fate, but the cost is too high - he downplays the awfulness of their fate, and the culpability of 'the West'. Some nice stories in here, however. One thing though - for a prizewinning book, the writing is rather clumsy.

[Ethan Skipp · Rating 3 out of 5]

Whilst this book does have its merits, the main issue is that its eyes are bigger than its stomach. Taken merely as a narrative survey of Pacific history across the long 19th century, the author creates a pointillist account of the Pacific, illustrating through episodic accounts the key changes and processes of Empire through the period. The book is strongest when Thomas combines these accounts with his anthropological analyses, which adds significant depth to a source base which often lacks the perspectives most desired by an historian. Thomas's use of the source base is creative, constructive, and informative, and he does his best to escape the Eurocentrism of the source base, as demonstrated effectively with his analysis of Kanak Bamboos.

However, to offer a total history of the Pacific across this period is perhaps too ambitious for a book 300 pages long. Whilst Thomas takes pains to ensure that cultural differences across the Pacific aren't smoothed over in his account, the effect of covering the history of an area thousands of kilometres across is that the narrative jumps between islands at a high speed, which prevents analysis in high depth of these histories. Thomas himself concedes in the introduction that New Zealand is hardly touched on at all, and only one chapter significantly features Hawaii. Thus at a stroke, two of the largest Pacific islands are largely removed from the narrative. Furthermore, to class this as a history of Islanders in the "Age of Empire" feels bold, as the conclusion notes how little Empire had actually reached the Pacific Islands by the turn of the 20th century. The term "Age of Encounter" may perhaps be more appropriate.

Within the historiography of Empire, the book also sits somewhat awkwardly. The blurb argued that, "Islanders reveals that there was gain as well as loss" from the experience of Empire. Whilst discussion of Empire ought to move beyond the totalising assertion that Empire was universally awful for everyone, and emphasise creative adaptation by various 'Indigenous' groups to the Imperial experience, I personally feel Thomas can be a bit too eager to redress the balance of these debates. In particular the use of the Rongorongo boards in chapter 6 to demonstrate how Rapanui people adapted to the cultural experience of encounter felt iffy, especially when juxtaposed by the previous descriptions of the depredations experienced by the Rapanui earlier in the chapter.

[Lucille Moala · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is so detailed and I admire the effort to retell Pasifika history from a different perspective - not just destruction and loss but also some gain. However this book took me over a year to read and that is because the writing is sometimes not engaging and so it was difficult at points for me to pick the book up again. I also was frustrated at points where the positive spin on history felt like it was downplaying brutal colonisation of regions and loss that entire populations suffered. It also felt at points that the attempt to take on the history of the entire Pacific was too much and potentially focussing on a smaller part of the Pacific would have helped the book have a better flow.

[Austin Henley · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a good book and a very useful one for getting a general knowledge of the pacific world and its history. With this in mind, Thomas fails to create a work that is easily readable and understood, I often would have to reread chapters for clarity given the large amount of contextual information that I was wholly new to. This helped me read other books about the Pacific, but it was not a book I enjoyed reading.

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

More about Fiji and Samoa but very interesting re islanders traveling from island to island, regardless of distance and how many were taken to England, France, Peru, etc. they were not noble savages.
I skimmed a lot of it.

[Josh Reid · Rating 3 out of 5]

Adept case-study approach to the South Pacific in the age of European/US empire. I appreciate that he engaged with Hau'ofa's "sea of islands" framework, but it is still a largely Eurocentric focus.

[Czarny Pies · Rating 2 out of 5]

Despite the fact that this book was clearly the work of morons in a hurry, I am giving it two stars simply because the extensive use of nineteenth century engravings give it the charm of a similarly illustrated period edition of Jules Verne's "Among the Cannibals"(a.k.a. "In Search of the Castaways").

The sloppiness of Yale University Press can be seen in the map which appears on page xii before the book even begins. Easter Island appears on the map despite the fact that in the text of the book only the modern name Rapa Nui is used. On the other hand, the map shows us Vanuatu although it is occasionally referred to as the New Hebrides in the book. Guam which is discussed in seven different places does not appear on the map. The Aleutian Islands which are peopled by Inuits rather than Polynesians do appear on the map. In the future I suggest that the person the Yale University Press assigns to creating a map for a book should first read the manuscript.

The editors at Yale also allowed too many murky comments to make it into the book. On page 171, Thomas writes: "Tongan kingship perplexed Cook and succeeding European visitors who assumed it to be a simple, quasi-feudal kingship that it was not. ... The king was supported for various reasons by coalitions of districts." My first problem here is that I have a difficult time imagining that Cook equated any of the island chiefs that he met with the various Henrys, Richards and Edwards that rule England in the feudal era. The second and more serious problem is that Thomas provides no information on the social or political structure of the "coalitions" that "supported" the kings and chieftains of the Pacific Island.

The problem is systematic. Throughout the book, Thomas berates the European explorers, missionaries, whalers, pirates and slave-traders for their inability to understand the Islanders while resolutely refusing to explain their political and social culture. I assume that Thomas who is described on the dust-jacket as being a professor of anthropological history refrained from describing the societies in the Island because no field studies exist for him to draw on. The anthropologists after-all did not arrive in the Pacific to do field work until the missionaries had convinced the Islanders to abandon cannibalism a process which was not completed until after the time-frame covered in this book had ended.

There were indeed appalling atrocities committed against the Islanders but not by the missionaries nor by the explorers who were by and large well meaning. Thomas could well have spared us with his condescending comments about the inability of Europeans to understand. It is right of course to remind us of the crimes.

This book does have some merits. It contains an engaging synthesis of the accounts from the explorers and missionaries who lived or traveled in the South Pacific during the nineteenth century. The illustrations are quite charming and some of the sections are well-written. This book however clearly does not come up to the level that I would have expected from a Cambridge Professor. More effort in the writing and editing could have solved many of the problems.

[The Book : An Online Review at The New Republic]

OVER THE LAST HALF-CENTURY, international air travel has made the planet a more accessible, less mysterious place than ever before. But there remain, on this ever-shrinking globe, areas still beyond aviation’s reach. Even today, many of the scattered archipelagoes of the vast Pacific are only visited the old-fashioned way—by sea. Yet unlike other remote regions—the Russian Far East, Central Asia— these places are firmly entrenched in the Western world’s mind. Read more...

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent read and enjoyable prose, though repetitive in places. Challenges the one sided colonial narrative and the static nature of native cultures in the context of the Pacific. One of the more fascinating bits of evidence presented is that the Islanders Christianized themselves, apart from the missionaries. Non-academics will find this to be a manageable and accessible read.