Imperial Benevolence: Making British Authority in the Pacific Islands (review)

Imperial Benevolence: Making British Authority in the Pacific Islands, by Jane Samson. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1998. ISBN 0-8248-1927-6, xvi + 240 pages, maps, notes, bibliography, index. US$35.

At first glance, this seems an old-fashioned sort of book--something from an earlier historiographical era, perhaps, where imperial and benevolence can appear in the same title without a condemnatory subtitle or at least the irony implied by a question mark. In the detail, readers with a knowledge of the expanding British presence in the Pacific Islands will find familiar events, ships, trials, quotations, and characters--though the last tend to arrive with rank and name and little background. And it is a little strange in the late 1990s to read of King George (or simply George) of Tonga (rather than Taufa'ahau Tupou IV, even if this was a baptismal choice) and the Sandwich Islands. Despite the introduction, where reference is made to the "familiar tension between metropolitan and peripheral approaches to imperial history, refocused by post-modernist and postcolonial critical theory" (2), this uncomfortable sense of anachronism remains. This is not because the author chooses to stand aside from currently fashionable debates about how "the British deployed class, gender, and race as strategies of power" (3)--indeed, that might be seen as a positive attribute--because of the strongly empirical focus of the study, or because she asserts, quite rightly in my view, that many metropolitan documents have been neglected for too long in the writing of the history of empire in general, and the Pacific Islands in particular.

The unease, such as it is, rests with the central thesis of Imperial Benevolence: "I want to show how the British government was drawn into greater involvement in the Pacific through the crafting of a humanitarian mission to protect islanders. Between the eras of culture contact and colonial rule lies the hazy territory of 'informal empire,' where the definition of British influence lay in the hands (and pens) of Britain's most conspicuous representatives: naval officers. We will see that their self-assigned mission drew upon evangelicalism, antislavery sentiment, and contemporary debate about the nature of race....it is an examination of the navy's sense of mission in the Pacific islands" (4).

To take the last first, this approach requires the author to demonstrate that the Royal Navy had a sense of mission that was consistent and coherent across time and place. Without difficulty, Samson demonstrates that many officers working on the Australia Station and their superiors in London shared humanitarian ideas and ideals that informed the policy and practice of naval "justice" in the Pacific Islands. But was it a "mission" and did they have the capacity to implement such a mission as de facto British policy? Humanitarianism as an explanation of British imperial policy was common enough until the 1960s but has since lost ground in the light of research into events and influences at the periphery of empire and a greater recognition of the complex processes involved at the center as well as the periphery. This is not to deny the importance of the humanitarian impulse in Victorian Britain, but to question its relative importance alongside a host of other factors.

Here the argument runs into difficulty. While officers of a common background and class might be expected to share values, Samson's analysis shows that not all officers did; indeed, her discussion of the role of Commodore Goodenough in Fiji in the early 1870s tends to counter the overall argument. But more important is the assumption of a dominant role in policymaking for the navy and, as a consequence, the understating of the roles of other players. While captains and commodores could influence developments through their decisions and actions, these were within the broader context of British approaches to the Pacific. I deliberately avoid talking of "policy" here, for that is too precise a...