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Preface: Choosing Vanuatu When after two years of wandering and encamping in different places I came back . . . I found the same map of the New Hebrides which I had studied before going out there [in 1929]. It looked totally different. The names were enough to recall a picture of the different islands and what had happened on them. —Evelyn Cheesman, Camping Adventures on Cannibal Islands I have often joked with friends and colleagues that the Condominium of the New Hebrides was established in 1906 so that I might study it eighty-¤ve years later. For one who has specialized in the differences between French and British modes of colonization, and particularly the developmental implications of their respective decolonizations, Vanuatu, as the South Paci¤c archipelago has been called since 1980, would seem to represent the perfect case study. It is the only instance in the annals of colonial history in which Great Britain and France have ruled jointly, for an extended period of time, over the very same territory. As I had already compared neighboring British and French colonies in the West Indies, West Africa, and South Asia, it seemed paradigmatically perfect to examine the one case in which both types of colonization existed side by side within the very same territory, ruling the same indigenous people . Et voilà: Vanuatu! It would be the height of solipsism and insensitivity to relegate an entire nation’s colonial past to the theoretizing fantasies of a social scientist . If I jokingly claim that the Condominium was prophetically conceived by French and British diplomats at the turn of the century for my academic bene¤t, I dare to do so only because there is no satisfactory answer to the converse question: For whose bene¤t was the Condominium created? Certainly not for the denizens of the eighty some-odd islands that were administratively grouped together for the ¤rst time and remained stateless for seventy-four years. Certainly not for France, which would have preferred out-and-out sovereignty for the islands, as she had already acquired over nearby New Caledonia. De¤nitely not for Great Britain, which had minimal interest in adding the New Hebrides to her colonial custody but was pushed to do so by Australian Francophobes. If the Condominium represented an administrative abxv surdity, a colonial headache, and a human rights indignity, perhaps only a social scientist can extract some bene¤t, albeit conceptual, from it. For all of its unique and idiosyncratic features, Vanuatu may be regarded as a microcosm of the colonial phenomenon. Not only did it experience the two major types of colonialism of the modern era, French and British colonialism, it did so in close proximity to each other, with intense rivalry, and over a long period of time. Thanks to its small size and young age as an independent state, Vanuatu is a theoretically compelling exemplar of the clash of contemporary colonialism and its repercussions for the age of independence. At the same time, the uniqueness of Melanesian culture highlights the role played by indigenous culture in shaping both colonial and postcolonial political realities. Understanding Vanuatu’s experience in bridging mental boundaries enables us to better understand those challenges of decolonization, nationalism, identity, and development which face the Third World at large. Geographical and linguistic features also impart to this South Paci¤c society quintessential attributes for comparative, and particularly developing society, politics. Spatial dispersal throughout an archipelago serviced by rudimentary transport and communication networks highlights the necessity of creating an interactive developmental infrastructure for achieving national identity. A multiplicity of languages, giving Vanuatu the highest language-per-capita ratio in the world, underlines the social challenges facing ethnically and culturally diverse states in their quest for national unity. In short, the classic challenges of nation building are here distilled within a topographically small territory. Neither has Vanuatu been immune from the unfortunately familiar plagues of political fragmentation and ethnoregional secession. Although a secessionist rebellion spearheaded from the nation’s largest island was effectively and de¤nitely quashed at independence—thanks, not unusually , to foreign intervention—the scars of that revolt remain in the national psyche. As a poor nation (in its Human Development Index of 1997, the United Nations ranked it 124th out of 175), dependent on foreign aid for its economic survival, Vanuatu well typi¤es the tension between national sovereignty and international dependency. Yet the long-standing weakness of central government has also perpetuated the venerable tradition of strong communitarian autonomy, a phenomenon which...

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