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3 Gordon Was No Amateur Imperial Legal Strategies in the Colonization of Fiji
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In Fiji, colonial inheritances have been nurtured into sad new flowers possible only in the soils of postcolonial predicament. Voting rights are “racially” demarcated and unevenly distributed. Almost all land is reserved as the inalienable property of legally demarcated clans of one ethnic group, the ethnic Fijians. Ethnic Fijians also monopolize the military. In Fiji, a Great Council of Chiefs wields a strange form of paramountcy, not only over ethnic Fijians but also, increasingly, over everyone else, across multiple coups and constitutions. The constitutive nature of law and some particular problems posed by inherited colonial legal schemes for ex-colony nation-states can be illuminated by study of Fiji. Nation-states have different architectural problems when built amid the ruins of empire, and with imperial materials. However, there is more to the omnipresence of colonial legal legacy in Fiji’s current crisis than uncleared detritus, more than old codes ill-fit to new circumstances , old devices ill-suited to new applications. In postcolonial Fiji, active efforts have been made to sustain and enhance colonial legal legacies. These legacies include specific legal instruments, a field of 61 3 Gordon Was No Amateur Imperial Legal Strategies in the Colonization of Fiji John D. Kelly Grumblers might construe into tyranny and injustice the course Her Majesty’s Government has determined to pursue. —Sir Arthur Gordon, speech to settlers, September 2, 1875 61 objects (offices, titles, deeds, registers of ownership) that can, in turn, be considered actants in Latour’s sense (Latour 1988:159ff; see also Riles, Chapter 7, and Merry and Brenneis, the introduction, this volume ). This chapter explains the origins of several legal legacies. But it also pursue matters of the spirit of the law, as well as its embodied letters. In addition to specific objects that are actants, historically born to complex lives of their own, in Fiji a particular kind of top-down, specifically colonial, legal subjectivity has never really died. In Fiji, a repeatedly reinvigorated tradition of colonial lawgiving asymmetrically organizes the rights and privileges of ethnic groups. Embedded within what appears to be ethnic conflict is a contest between the inherited tradition of colonial lawgiving and constitutional, democratic structures of legality. Reinvoked powers of lawgiving paramountcy repeatedly challenge democratic, constitutional orders and are challenged by them. Leaving to other chapters in this volume (Merry and Brenneis’s introduction, Miyazaki’s Chapter 9, and especially Kaplan’s Chapter 6) the fuller description of current crises in Fiji, this chapter re-examines imperial legal strategies in the colonization of Fiji, in particular, the sources of legal strategy for Fiji’s famous first governor, Sir Arthur Gordon. Thereby we pursue the logic and limits of some specifically colonial and postcolonial modes of lawmaking. Above all, we seek to understand, in its particular local efflorescence, the commitment to racism and authoritarianism that is not merely part of the letter of Fiji’s inherited law but also a spirit that still haunts lawmaking there. The story is often told that Gordon was an amateur anthropologist, applying the evolutionary models of his day. His reading in anthropology , the rest of his education and experience, and the larger British imperial context of the onset of Crown rule in Fiji all merit our attention . First, let us clarify that Gordon was no amateur. GORDON AND FIJI Gordon was above all a governor, and not a novice. Fiji was his fourth post as governor (after New Brunswick, Trinidad, and Mauritius). In Fiji, he began the project of codifying customary law of ethnic Fijians. He instituted a system of taxation for ethnic Fijians in kind rather than in cash, slowing the entry of a cash economy into the John D. Kelly 62 [54.205.179.155] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 14:24 GMT) villages. He invented and inaugurated the Great Council of Chiefs. And his land commissions established the rigid land tenure system that makes 83 percent of the land in the islands the unalienable property of ethnic-Fijian mataqali, named patrilineal clans. Gordon also negotiated a fundamental reorganization of Fiji’s industrial landscape. He persuaded Australia’s leading sugar producer, the Colonial Sugar Refining Company (CSR), to make major investments in Fiji. By the early twentieth century, CSR would take over all of Fiji’s sugar refining, much of its sugar growing, and thereby more than half its cash economy. And, in perhaps the biggest change he engineered, Gordon arranged with India a government-managed scheme to...