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DONALD DENOON WITH STEWART FIRTH, JOCELYN LINNEKIN, MALAMA MELEISEA AND KAREN NERO, EDS, The Cambridge History of the Pacific Islanders. Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1997, bibliography, glossary, index, maps and figures, pp 518 + xvii, ISBN 0-521-44195-1.
The relative absence of Pacific perspectives on Commonwealth issues has been lamented in The Round Table for some time. Despite the excitement generated by studies of European culture contact in the Pacific-a burgeoning field-later Pacific history has failed to achieve the high profile of African or Asian area studies. The appearance of this compendium is cause for celebration for that reason alone; better still, its numerous contributors have provided essays that are always articulate and informative. The book is divided, quite sensibly, into pre- and post-1941 parts; chapters in the first part cover the historiography of the Pacific Islands, their human settlement and cultures (including the aboriginal peoples of Australia), contact with Europeans, and the impact of European imperialism. Part Two covers World War II in the Pacific, nuclear testing, resource issues, and post-independence ideologies. The book is enhanced throughout by superb maps and figures, and the quality of production is high. Yet somehow the book is much less than the sum of its parts.
Those familiar with other Cambridge Histories will notice a dramatic change of approach in this volume: rather than the usual format of presenting the history of a region, this is a history of the region's indigenous inhabitants alone. This radical departure is never explained, and creates a number of conceptual problems for the editors which might have been lessened by a more inclusive approach. The focus on Islanders prompts defensive discussion of the Euro-American racial origin of most of the contributors, and attempts to explain the relative absence of indigenous Islanders from the list. Such disclaimers were a familiar part of Pacific Studies in the 1960s, when island-centred history was something new. More recent decades have seen a wider acceptance of multivocal histories, and of historical perspectives that incorporate a range of perspectives. Here and there in this book, we glimpse the extensive oral historical traditions of Islanders; it is a pity that more material of this kind was not included to provide them with a greater voice. After...