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DISTURBING HISTORY: Resistance in Early Colonial Fiji. By Robert Nicole. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2011. ix, 298 pp. (Maps, Illus.) US$52.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-3291-9.
When I began research in Fiji in the 1980s I was identified as a Canadian, but after some time I let it slip out around the grog bowl that I had actually been born in England. Overnight my prestige went up noticeably. Subsequently when I visited villages for the first time my British origin would sure to be mentioned, and jovial comments made about the British Lion, and the glories of the empire. Yet this was in the one region of the country to have rejected British colonial rule by force of arms only a century before. It seemed to me that, despite independence, Fiji was still in some sense a colony, not of the real Britain, but of a mythic one that Fijians seemed reluctant to abandon.
In his Introduction to this volume, based on his 2006 University of Canterbury PhD thesis, Robert Nicole notes that this positive view of Fiji's colonial past was also found in the history taught, at least until relatively recently, in Fijian schools. In challenging its factual basis, Nicole situates himself in relation to three recent phases in revisionist Fijian history. In the 1960s historians began to acknowledge Fijians as actively resisting colonial power, but mainly among the chiefly elites. In the 1980s Marxist critiques of contemporary chiefly privileges saw them as inflated and detached from commoners' interests,...