British colonial performance in the South Pacific
Robert Smith
Author| International development | Private & Financial Sectors | Business Enabling Environment | Fund Management
For some younger readers, those under the age of 50, the idea of British colonialism might seem a bit bizarre. But they nostalgically seek it. While left-wing academics, politicians and immigrant ginger groups loudly proclaim about the damage to their ancestral places and societies, more people in the UK think that the British Empire was a good thing than bad, and that those people living in the ex-colonies are worse off than they were under British rule, according to a YouGov survey.????
When they answered the researcher’s questions, I wonder what countries they were thinking of when they thought of the British Empire? Possibly English-speaking Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and many countries in Sub Saharan Africa. They will think of India. They probably have not heard of Kiribati and Tuvalu.
Some will have forgotten that thirteen U.S. states were British colonies almost 250 years ago. Wikipedia’s list of colonies excludes those thirteen states, as if the British were never there. Bing AI took eight attempts before it agreed that they should be in the list. So that list is now ninety-one names long, and that is just the colonies, it does not include the protectorates, mandates, and other governance arrangements. I am sure this is not a comprehensive list – such was the size of the British presence in the World, the largely red-coloured map of my childhood.
Most countries have a foreign affairs ministry. The UK had three: the Colonial Office, for dealing with the overseas territories other than India; the India office; and the Foreign Office, for dealing with the rest of the World. The Colonial Office has always been sized to deal with the issues at hand. It was formed in 1768 to deal with Canada and the thirteen U.S. colonies. After the U.S.A. went its own way, The Colonial Office was merged into the Home Office, before moving to the War Office in 1801 in advance of the Napoleonic war. There it stayed until 1854, when it emerged as its own power.
The office had less staff than you might think for such a huge undertaking. Estimates, and it seems no-one had more precise numbers, range from 1,800 in 1874, to 40,000. Of which maybe 4,500 (the 1927 number) were decision-makers, the rest being local office staff.? In Whitehall, the area in London which houses many of the more important departments of the UK Government, the building that now houses about a third of the current Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office, housed four departments - Foreign, India, Home, and Colonial.
I like an analytical framework, but it is hard to find one that is useful in the case of British colonial comparative performance, because the colonial system is now largely dismantled. Many have tried. The framework would need to look at the before, during and after stages to determine whether the concept of colony was a good thing and / or whether decolonisation was the right / wrong thing.
The modern-day mantra is that colonisation was a bad thing: the rape of territories assets; the slavery; the outrage of oppression; the destruction of culture. In many cases, the people doing the shouting on colonialism are generally liberal or left-wing, and similar in some ways to those people we see on the TV who no-platform academics and famous people for their views on the definition of “woman”, or trans rights more generally, and in some cases, they are the same. When I was researching this issue, I found one such person, who writes extensively on gender rights, weighing in on the colonial debate with absolutist views.????
In the modern day, if an academic writes an article that supports colonialism, it may, in some cases, create uproar. Such was the case with Bruce Gilley, Professor of Political Science at Portland State University, who wrote an article “The Case for Colonialism” for the journal “Third World Quarterly”. Despite the article being peer reviewed – standard practice for a serious journal - thousands of academics asked that it should be retracted, asking for the journal’s editor to be dismissed. Gilley received death threats. The article was retracted by the journal but republished as a matter of free speech by the National Association of Scholars.
What could possibly have caused such an uproar? Why are these academics so angry?
There is little in the article that directly references the South Pacific, other than the Australian $A2.6 billion regional assistance mission in the Solomon Islands that some see as backdoor recolonisation because it created a parallel administration. Others consider this assistance programme to have been successful.?
I draw out two important observations from Gilley’s article that help me build my analytical framework. Firstly, he lists “dimensions of success”. To paraphrase Monty Python “What have the Romans ever done for us”, the list (Gilley’s not Monty Python’s!) is, to quote:
Significant social, economic, and political gains under colonialism: expanded education; improved public health; the abolition of slavery; widened employment opportunities; improved administration; the creation of basic infrastructure; female rights; enfranchisement of untouchable or historically excluded communities; fair taxation; access to capital; the generation of historical and cultural knowledge; and national identity formation
These are improvements, if - and this is a big if - social and economic development and westernisation out-trump the loss of communal or tribal identity; traditions; local laws; and grass roots institutions.
The second aspect of the article that I find useful:
A sobering World Bank report of 1996 noted: “Almost every African country has witnessed a systematic regression of capacity in the last thirty years; the majority had better capacity at independence than they now possess.”
?
Another scholarly attempts to develop a framework for measuring colonial performance, measured by human development indicators, divides the colonies into five sets.? I will call this the Lange-Mahoney-von Hau Categorisation. The first set comprises settler colonies where it has been possible to overcome the existing sparse populations of inhabitants and replicate the colonial power’s structures and institutions, and the colony needs to be disease-free. These colonies include the thirteen U.S. colonies, Canada, the six Australian colonies and New Zealand. These are seen as economically successful and capable Western democracies, in post-colonial times, with world-leading human development indicators. They maintain some residual affection for their Indigenous people, affection that ranges in its effectiveness, from the creation of native territories to positive discrimination, for example, preferential access to higher education. I would classify Mauritius in this group.
The second group of colonies – those with direct colonialism - provides a territory-wide rule, imposition of the colonialist’s institutional structures, but a light touch, due to disease issues, with a goal of encouraging trade back to the UK. Think Hong Kong or Singapore, or the plantation islands in the West Indies.
A third group, indirect colonialism, characterised by the UK imposing a fee for colonial services, otherwise leaving existing institutions and leaders intact, given that existing societies were complex with true administration capacity.
A fourth set comprise a mixture of “indirect” and “settler” such as South Africa, where white settlers were able to access local labour under the watchful eye of the colonial administration.
The fifth set is a mixture of “indirect” and “direct”, common in Asia and the Pacific. Fiji and the Solomon Islands were classified as such, where the British administration directly ruled the local tribal populations, while allowing plantation owners to operate unhindered outside of that rule. The size of local tribes gave rise to an intermediate level of governance, which was less on the Solomon Islands, because of the lack of strong tribal presence.
This academic study covered Spanish and British colonies. It found that where the colonised territory was already advanced at the time of colonisation, that the colonial impact was negative, measured by its eventual success as a nation. Where the opposite was the case - that is where the colonised territory was underdeveloped at the outset - then colonialism was positive. The Spanish had concentrated more on the more sophisticated territories with trade and extractive industries as their colonial goal, and the British the undeveloped and the underdeveloped territories.
The study provided some insights on the factors that impacted post-colonial human development. In Fiji, the relatively poor outcome on human development was attributed to ethno-racist behaviour caused by the introduction of indentured workers from Asia during the colonial period. In that study, Two other post-colonial countries were listed as comparators to Fiji - Guyana and Sri Lanka.
Yet you hear in the Fiji newspapers that Fiji often wants to learn from Mauritius as the comparator, because Mauritius is doing better economically, an island in the middle of an ocean, yet having the same sugar cane industry, worked by immigrant populations, as Fiji.
The major difference here is that Mauritius had no population at the time of its discovery by European powers, and although it had a chequered colonial history, under the Dutch, French and the British, the colonial model above suggests that it was different to Fiji, because of the lack of an Indigenous population. The British were light touch, decided not to settle. Mauritius’s ruling classes as a nation are European (especially French), with Chinese and Indian elites, and its workers primarily African. However, all ethnic groups have equal rights, with less powerful ethnic groups still provided with representation in parliament. The Mauritian economy is no longer all about sugar, but a deeply varied service and production economy.
You might think to place the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony in the third group of the model, as the British charged a fee for its services in the early days of its protectorate, but it is more correctly placed in the fifth group, given that leeway that British Phosphate Commission was allowed under the colonial administration.
?What is clear though - this was an extractive colony, but was it more akin to, say, Belgian Congo, or some of the large Spanish colonies of Central and South America? The Gilbert and Ellice Island populations did share in the development wealth – but the British extracted super-royalties from phosphate and then spent that money on education, health and in creating a fund for the future well-being of the people post-independence. The outcome by the time of independence would have been a true model for how “good” colonialism could have worked. Kiribati, the successor to the colony, after the Ellice Islands exited for its own independence as Tuvalu, would have struggled after independence without that sovereign wealth fund, but with a larger fund, it might have followed Nauru’s path - Lamborghinis for the police chiefs, bloated salaries for the civil servants without a continuing paternal guidance.
That’s the problem with post-colonial self-determination - many countries are yet to work out how to run themselves for the benefit of their people. Yet many blame this on the colonialists rather than the greed and lack of skills of their current leaders.
I would add one item to the analytical framework, it is the mantra that many developed economies swear by, including the U.S.A. and the UK, that democracy is better than any other alternative. As I write this, the Vanuatuan government is about to fail again for the second time since the 2022 elections. No party gained more than 7% at the election, and thirteen parties are present in parliament. The country appears to be going to the dogs. Potentially, this is time for China to pick up another UN pawn – it may have done so already given the bloated non-productive investments it has introduced, or maybe Americans want to play Great Game chess, but Vanuatu has not been a successful post-colonial country. Vanuatu might have been a lot more successful under a strong leader, even if that leader had been undemocratically chosen or dictatorial. Vanuatu may have been better returned to colonialism.
I may get 10,000 hate messages for saying that. I won’t because there won’t be that many people reading what I have to say. But I might get a lot of hate messages for the fact that I report that the Lange-Mahoney-von Hau paper states that Fiji is underperforming because of racial tension.
The root cause of that is the decision of the British colonial authorities to allow large numbers of foreign people, the “vulagi”, onto islands where the native population, the iTaukei, are fiercely united in their culture, to the point where the vulagi were in the majority in the 1980s, before the coup that changed that balance in favour of the iTaukei.
But immigration, per se, is not the reason for Fiji’s underperformance. The 19th century British found that the iTaukei were not economically motivated and work-shy, more motivated by other aspects of life: the solidity of the family; the relations with their own village and their own tribe; the continuity of their traditions; and their love of their new religion, Christianity.
This generalisation is a racist statement when looked at on its own. In 2022, in a parliamentary debate, the opposition right-wing MP, Tania Waqanika, expressed concerns that iTaukei villages were emptying because of the Australia fruit-picking scheme, that allowed fruit pickers to also reside permanently with their families.? That does rather suggest that the generalisation of iTaukei as work-shy as historical and unrepresentative.
A coup in 1987 was racially motivated and targeted at removing large numbers of Indo-Fijians and succeeded in that objective.
Throughout the late 20th and early 21st century, Fiji vacillates between two big ideas.
Which it chooses in on a knife-edge. The 2022 general election gave an outcome that was so close that it would have taken just one changed vote from the members of right-wing SODELPA party committee to permit a different government with a different, progressive, inclusive direction.
See-sawing between the two big ideas though is likely to cause investment to decline – investment requires a long-term solid uninterrupted vision from government and that is just not possible right now. Without maximising its relationship with investors, Fiji might not achieve the best human development outcomes for its citizens, iTaukei and vulagi.
At the heart of the above analysis is the seeming imperative of economics over culture. It could have easily been pointed out that Fiji vacillates between two big ideas:
When I talk to people in the South Pacific, not only Fijians, but Banabans, Kioans, Solomonis and others, it is so easy to lose sight of the fact that many prefer the second option.
?Our country, our way.
The colonial authorities in the South Pacific never totally aligned itself to that second option. It did align with that second option over Fijian land reform in the late 19th century - the critics of that are those who align to the economic imperative. The highest level of UK government made a landmark decision to refine the indentured workers scheme so that those workers did not return to their own cultures – this impacted many colonies and cultures, and Fiji was one that perhaps was the most impacted. The critics that support the economic imperative will argue again that today’s Fijian economy would be weaker without the Indo-Fijian contribution.
Two divergent arguments, two political views, and one remarkably close election.
Where will Fiji go in the future?
They will choose.