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Reviewed by:
  • The Kanak Awakening: The Rise of Nationalism in New Caledonia by David A. Chappell, and: Winding Up the British Empire in the Pacific Islands by W. David McIntyre
  • Viktor M. Stoll
The Kanak Awakening: The Rise of Nationalism in New Caledonia. By David A. Chappell. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2013, Pacific Islands Monograph Series, No. 27. 289pp. $60.00 (cloth).
Winding Up the British Empire in the Pacific Islands. By W. David McIntyre. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014, Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series. 278pp. £65.00/$99.00 (cloth).

While framing the causations of Britain’s withdrawal from the Pacific, W. David McIntyre recalls William Roger Louis’s admonishment that [End Page 387] decolonization should be analyzed within the context of “metropolitan infirmity, nationalist insurgency, and international interference” (p. viii). Indeed, this approach by the editor of the Oxford History of the British Empire (OHBE) provides a broader structure for addressing the motivations of colonial divestment across national boundaries. However, constructing such transnational frameworks is fraught with complexity, and answering “why” any government was willing, or unwilling, to liquidate its colonial responsibilities certainly cannot be done in a formulaic way. The amalgamation of varying core, peripheral, and global strains on the British and French Empires produced postcolonial realities in the Pacific that were so dissimilar that they challenge the rationality of examining decolonization through a transnational lens.

During the 1970s, Britain dumped its colonial dependencies in the Pacific with seemingly reckless abandon, while France brazenly withdrew self-governing powers previously granted to New Caledonia. These inversely proportional paths toward national self-determination in the region, similarly influenced by core, peripheral, and global pressures, certainly challenge Louis’s framework. While metropolitan France and Britain did experience varying degrees of “infirmity” during the period, such as the devaluation of the pound in 1967, the comparatively modest costs of Pacific administration never substantially strained national treasuries. Meanwhile in the periphery, aside from the earlier Mau in Samoa (1920s) and Maasina Ruru in the Solomon Islands (1940s), an ultimately unsuccessful “nationalist insurgency” only affected New Caledonia in the 1980s. In fact, “nationalist insurgency would be hard to find” in the Anglophone Pacific during decolonization (McIntyre, p. 37). Globally, the United Nations “Declaration on Colonialism” (UN Resolution 1514) in 1960, rising anticolonial sentiment among emerging African and Asian states, and Soviet agitation provided similar pressures for both powers to divest. Why would Britain and France, subjected to comparable pressures to decolonize, follow such deviating paths in the Pacific? When taken together, McIntyre’s Winding Up the British Empire in the Pacific Islands and David Chappell’s The Kanak Awakening provide valuable insight into this divergence.

In his work, Chappell examines the formation of Kanak (Melanesian) national identity and self-determination in New Caledonia. While he focuses primarily on the pivotal decades of the 1960s and 1970s, Chappell addresses the entirety of French occupation, from annexation in 1853 to the post–Noumea Accords (1998) and the contemporary period. The work emphasizes that national identity in New Caledonia, particularly that of “Kanaky,” is primarily a result of overlapping political [End Page 388] currents. New Caledonian students in Paris, both white and Kanak, were heavily influenced by metropolitan leftist movements, which culminated in the 1968 Paris protests. Returning to New Caledonia, they mixed their socialist ideology with older self-government based upon traditional power relations, forming a “mosaic of juxtaposed identifies” as they clashed with white caldoche settlers in defining greater Caledonian identity (Chappell, p. 224).

Chappell’s narrative is simultaneously an exploration of the “love-hate triangle” among Kanak, caldoche, and French metropolitan interests (Chappell, p. 250). President Charles de Gaulle’s systematic revocation of New Caledonian autonomy after 1958, which he ironically granted during the Second World War, meant that Paris was “stripping away self-government . . . while the rest of the Pacific was decolonizing” (Chappell, p. 141). For more than two decades, French metropolitan retraction of local self-government, intimately tied to nickel mining concerns, and the demographic growth of non-Kanak settlers, including Pied-Noirs from Algeria, increasingly marginalized Kanak through land appropriation and segregationist policies.

After a “sham,” pro-France self-determination referendum in 1986, boycotted by...

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