This book is a political history of the island of Malaita in the British Solomon Islands Protectorate from 1927, when the last violent resistance to colonial rule was crushed, to 1953 and the inauguration of the island’s first representative political body, the Malaita Council. At the book’s heart is a political movement known as Maasina Rule, which dominated political affairs in the southeastern Solomons for many years after World War II. The movement’s ideology, kastom, was grounded in the determination that only Malaitans themselves could properly chart their future through application of Malaitan sensibilities and methods, free from British interference. Kastom promoted a radical transformation of Malaitan lives by sweeping social engineering projects and alternative governing and legal structures. When the government tried to suppress Maasina Rule through force, its followers brought colonial administration on the island to a halt for several years through a labor strike and massive civil resistance actions that overflowed government prison camps. David Akin draws on extensive archival and field research to present a practice-based analysis of colonial officers’ interactions with Malaitans in the years leading up to and during Maasina Rule. A primary focus is the place of knowledge in the colonial administration. Many scholars have explored how various regimes deployed “colonial knowledge” of subject populations in Asia and Africa to reorder and rule them. The British imported to the Solomons models for “native administration” based on such an approach, particularly schemes of indirect rule developed in Africa. The concept of “custom” was basic to these schemes and to European understandings of Melanesians, and it was made the lynchpin of government policies that granted limited political roles to local ideas and practices. Officers knew very little about Malaitan cultures, however, and Malaitans seized the opportunity to transform custom into kastom, as the foundation for a new society. The book’s overarching topic is the dangerous road that colonial ignorance paved for policy makers, from young cadets in the field to high officials in distant Fiji and London. Today kastom remains a powerful concept on Malaita, but continued confusion regarding its origins, history, and meanings hampers understandings of contemporary Malaitan politics and of Malaitan people’s ongoing, problematic relations with the state.

In 2019, Solomon Islands made international headlines when the country severed its decades-old alliance with Taiwan in exchange for a partnership with Beijing. The decision prompted international condemnation and terrified security experts, who feared Australia’s historical Pacific advantage would come unstuck. This development was framed as another example of China’s inevitable capture of the region – but this misrepresents how and why the decision was made, and how Solomon Islanders have skilfully leveraged global angst over China to achieve extraordinary gains. Despite Solomon Islands’ strategic importance, most outsiders know little about the country, a fragile island-nation stretching over a thousand islands and speaking seventy indigenous languages. In Divided Isles, Edward Cavanough explains how the switch played out on the ground and considers its extraordinary potential consequences. He speaks with the dissidents and politicians who shape Solomon Islands’ politics, and to the ordinary people whose lives have been upended by a decision that has changed the country – and the region – forever.

“Monumental… [A] vast and detailed study that is surely the finest single-volume history of World War II. Richard Overy has given us a powerful reminder of the horror of war and the threat posed by dictators with dreams of empire.” – The Wall Street Journal A thought-provoking and original reassessment of World War II, from Britain’s leading military historian A New York Times bestseller Richard Overy sets out in Blood and Ruins to recast the way in which we view the Second World War and its origins and aftermath. As one of Britain’s most decorated and respected World War II historians, he argues that this was the “last imperial war,” with almost a century-long lead-up of global imperial expansion, which reached its peak in the territorial ambitions of Italy, Germany and Japan in the 1930s and early 1940s, before descending into the largest and costliest war in human history and the end, after 1945, of all territorial empires. Overy also argues for a more global perspective on the war, one that looks broader than the typical focus on military conflict between the Allied and Axis states. Above all, Overy explains the bitter cost for those involved in fighting, and the exceptional level of crime and atrocity that marked the war and its protracted aftermath—which extended far beyond 1945. Blood and Ruins is a masterpiece, a new and definitive look at the ultimate struggle over the future of the global order, which will compel us to view the war in novel and unfamiliar ways. Thought-provoking, original and challenging, Blood and Ruins sets out to understand the war anew.

In 2003 Victoria University hosted the Fourth Wellington Conference on World Affairs. This book is a collection of papers from that gathering. The theme was ‘ New Zealand in World Affairs’ and focused on three major threads: New Zealand’s role in the Pacific, Trans-Tasman relations and New Zealand in a globalising world. Chapters include a discussion and deconstruction of globalization; the role of diplomacy in a global world; security in Oceania in the post 9/11 era; a survey of diplomacy, politics with regard to nuclear testing by the French and an investigation of the differing world views held by Australia and New Zealand.

This book describes the important influences on the career of an eye surgeon, now retired. Dick Galbraith was head of the Eye Clinic at the Royal Melbourne Hospital for twenty two years. For twenty years he led an annual eye team to the Solomon Islands and other islands in the Pacific where he and his team performed sophisticated eye surgery. Dick describes the humour, joy and pathos of his work during that time. Thanks to Phillipe de Montignie, producer of the prize-winning video documentary “Curim Sickness Belong Eye,” who allowed details of the documentary to be included in the book so readers can download it from the Internet.

ASALH 2023 Book Prize Winner A lively living history of anti-colonialist movements across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans Oceania is a vast sea of islands, large scale political struggles and immensely significant historical phenomena. Pasifika Black is a compelling history of understudied anti-colonial movements in this region, exploring how indigenous Oceanic activists intentionally forged international connections with the African world in their fights for liberation. Drawing from research conducted across Fiji, Australia, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, Britain, and the United States, Quito Swan shows how liberation struggles in Oceania actively engaged Black internationalism in their diverse battles against colonial rule. Pasifika Black features as its protagonists Oceania's many playwrights, organizers, religious leaders, scholars, Black Power advocates, musicians, environmental justice activists, feminists, and revolutionaries who carried the banners of Black liberation across the globe. It puts artists like Aboriginal poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal and her 1976 call for a Black Pacific into an extended conversation with Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka, the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific’s Amelia Rokotuivuna, Samoa’s Albert Wendt, African American anthropologist Angela Gilliam, the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins, West Papua’s Ben Tanggahma, New Caledonia’s Déwé Gorodey, and Polynesian Panther Will ‘Ilolahia. In so doing, Swan displays the links Oceanic activists consciously and painstakingly formed in order to connect Black metropoles across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. In a world grappling with the global significance of Black Lives Matter and state-sanctioned violence against Black and Brown bodies, Pasifika Black is a both triumphant history and tragic reminder of the ongoing quests for decolonization in Oceania, the African world, and the Global South.

Little has been written about when, how and why the British Government changed its mind about giving independance to the Pacific Islands. Using recently opened archives, Winding Up the British Empire in the Pacific Islands gives the first detailed account of this event. As Britain began to dissolve the Empire in Asia in the aftermath of the Second World War, it announced that there were some countries that were so small, remote, and lacking in resources that they could never become independent states. However, between 1970 and 1980 there was a rapid about-turn. Accelerated decolonization suddenly became the order of the day. Here was the death warrant of the Empire, and hastily-arranged independence ceremonies were performed for six new states - Tonga, Fiji, Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Kiribati, and Vanuatu. The rise of anti-imperialist pressures in the United Nations had a major role in this change in policy, as did the pioneering examples marked by the release of Western Samoa by New Zealand in 1962 and Nauru by Australia in 1968. The tenacity of Pacific Islanders in maintaining their cultures was in contrast to more strident Afro-Asia nationalisms. The closing of the Colonial Office, by merger with the Commonwealth Relations Office in 1966, followed by the joining of the Commonwealth and Foreign Offices in 1968, became a major turning point in Britain's relations with the Islands. In place of long-nurtured traditions of trusteeship for indigenous populations that had evolved in the Colonial Office, the new Foreign & Commonwealth Office concentrated on fostering British interests, which came to mean reducing distant commitments and focussing on the Atlantic world and Europe.

Wide ranging and cross-disciplinary in its approach, Foreign Flowers focuses on the process of policy transfer in the Pacific and the use of power to achieve it. Many governing institutions in the region have been borrowed, transplanted, or imposed by colonial rule or military intervention from outside. The book attempts to answer several key questions: Where do the governing institutions originate and why are so many of them based on Western models? Why have some transfers succeeded while others have not? What are the effects of transfers? What has been the fate of a particular institution, "the state?" How does "culture" affect the transfer of (and resistance to) institutions? Early chapters identify institutional transfer as a persistent theme in the study of the Pacific, reflected in ideas like cargo cults, homegrown constitutions, invented traditions, and weak states. The author analyzes about forty cases of institutional transfer, beginning with Tonga's borrowing of foreign institutions in the nineteenth century and ending with current attempts to induce island states to regulate their offshore financial centers. He goes on to distinguish factors that determine whether transfer took place, including timing, social conditions, and sympathy with local values. He looks at the kinds of power and coercion being deployed in transfer and at how transfers have been evaluated by their sponsors: domestic reformers, aid donors, international financial institutions, and their consultants and academic advisers.