The Cambridge History of the Pacific Islanders (review)

The Cambridge History of the Pacific Islanders, edited by Donald Denoon with Stewart Firth, Jocelyn Linnekin, Malama Meleisea, and Karen Nero. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. ISBN 0-521-44195-1 cloth, xvii + 518 pages, maps, index, bibliography, notes, glossary. US$79.95.

The appearance toward the end of the millennium of The Cambridge History of the Pacific Islanders raises many contestable premises about Pacific historiography and representation. If such a comprehensive volume had appeared a decade earlier it would have been greeted with greater accolades than have been published in recent reviews. Maybe this is because the old certainties of region, culture, and history have been disrupted-- theoretically and through actual shifts within postcolonial societies. Although historians were once confident to write grand regional narratives elsewhere, they have been more reticent in the Pacific. Four, among other, impediments blocked an authorized history of the Pacific. These included not only insufficient accessible research, but also a lack of confidence. The new wave of Pacific historians emerging from the 1970s, particularly the "Canberra school," was usually reluctant to present generalizations about the region, preferring to speak about their specializations. Third, many historians were motivated to write history from the inside out, to revise the imperial school of Pacific history. This emerging reluctance to locate the subject within colonial narratives followed the decolonization of Pacific colonies. By the 1980s historiographical issues of indigenous voices, authenticity, and the kinds of history being published began to be contested. A fourth impediment was the economics of publishing. Pacific Islanders were absent in global histories. This marginality appeared to verify the lack of a market for a regional history.

Donald Denoon and his fellow contributors have therefore taken a brave step in facing these challenges. They have given splendid vent to the accumulated research concerning Pacific Islanders. It is easy to quibble over inclusions and exclusions, but the coverage of existing Pacific scholarship, including considerable ethnographic data, is impressive and usefully summarized in bibliographic essays at the end of each chapter. First-person and indigenous perspectives are provided in both testimonies (such as Onga's, 97-100) and reflexive contributions from Ruth Spriggs on Bougainville and Vilsoni Hereniko on identities. The selectivity of texts remains problematic, especially when claims are made from the beginning by Jocelyn Linnekin that the volume focuses on the experiences of peoples who did not produce written accounts before the coming of Europeans. This project is, however, equally qualified in this stimulating introduction, which presages how the contributors frequently attempt to straddle contradictory interpretations. They aim to avoid essentialist readings of the past, but this does not get away from making historical generalizations. An example of "having it both ways" from Linnekin: "While we abjure 'fatal impact' analyses...Europeans did alter irrevocably the directions in which Island societies developed" (186).

Ironically, the confidence to undertake this project correlates with lessened expectations of grand narratives among academics. The editors stress a reluctance to present a unified voice (as with the juxtaposition of oral narratives, linguistic and archaeological data, and historical interpretation in the chapter on early settlement). Does this multifaceted approach work when the final product becomes a tome endorsed as a Cambridge history? A unilinear approach dominates, despite the thematic essays. The familiar watershed of the Pacific War divides the volume into two sections. Frequently writers try to cover awareness of difference but overall, the reading is of what happened when the Pacific was colonized, within conventional plots (precontact, contact "waves" of Europeans as beachcombers, missionaries, traders--colonial and postcolonial Pacific) where many of the actors are outsiders. (However, migrant communities, especially Indo-Fijians, are not accorded such attention and continue to be cast separate from "the Pacific Islanders".) There is a strong emphasis on Islander agency (as in Meleisea and Schoeffel's discussion of perceptions of outsiders and Denoon on Islanders' negotiations of modernization and development [chapters 5, 7]) but much of the text reads as a reaction to European projects. Linnekin...