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Book Review
Oceania and the Pacific Islands
| Sally Engle Merry and Donald Brenneis, editors. Law and Empire in the Pacific: Fiji and Hawai'i. (School of American Research Advanced Seminar Series.) Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Oxford: James Currey. 2003. Pp. xi, 313. Cloth $60.00, paper $24.95.
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| There is a dearth of work on American colonialism, Sally Engle Merry states in her book Colonizing Hawai'i: The Cultural Power of Law (2000), and this is even truer for comparative studies. Analyzing different histories of colonization can bear rich fruit, particularly in cases like that of Fiji and Hawai'i, which possess common characteristics. In both places, the natives lived in complex chiefdoms until Western sailors, missionaries, and merchants arrived. In both places, the chiefdoms accumulated power in the colonial encounter and—as Jane F. Collier argues in her contribution—transformed chiefs into authorities with power over land. Both islands were subject to imperial expansion, Fiji entering the British Empire in 1874 and Hawai'i becoming the first Pacific outpost of American expansionism. In both islands, agricultural capitalist and white planters established a plantation economy that required imported workers, from India in the case of Fiji, from East Asia in the case of Hawai'i. And in both cases, the "ownership" of the land, as a hereditary resource of life, became of crucial significance for the identity of ethnic Fijians and of Native Hawaiians in the postcolonial era. |
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In spite of these commonalities, the outcomes of colonialism in Fiji and Hawai'i are strikingly different. While ethnic Fijians own the majority of land and successfully claimed political predominance in two coups d'état, Native Hawaiians are in a precarious position and at risk of losing their remaining land rights in a multiethnic state in which affirmative action, not to mention special entitlements, are contested on the legal principle of equal rights for every citizen. |
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The different paths Fiji and Hawai'i took under British and American colonialism were the subject of an advanced seminar at the School for American Research. This volume presents the diverse interpretations of legal anthropologists, historians, and social scientists from Fiji and Hawai'i, united by a common theoretical framework. The group had the good sense not to work with an ideal-typical dichotomy of British and American colonialism. Instead, the seminar emphasized that the way law was used "and the complex ways it defined power and property" is crucial for the explanation of the differences in the colonial histories (p. 8). |
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In three essays, John D. Kelly, Martha Kaplan, and Sally Engle Merry set forth the legal strategies by which subjects and property rights were defined, and as a result power, citizenship, and identity assigned, in Fiji and Hawai'i. While the British governor in Fiji set up a system of indirect rule, the white elite of missionaries and merchants in Hawai'i put through a liberal capitalist concept of property and private rights even before the coup that brought Hawai'i formally into the United States. The comparison sheds light on the history of colonial regimes more generally, underlining the importance not only of law but also of particular figures and their decision-making capacities. Moreover, these essays demonstrate the significance of an intersection between property law and conceptualizations of "land" that extends beyond the Pacific. Decisions made about land in the nineteenth century, the authors show, shape postcolonial experiences in the twentieth century. |
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