‘ Colonialism ' In South Seas

It has been said that the Pacific Islands, so much written about im romance and legend, have been sadly neglected by students of colonial) government.

Well, those days are gone. Rarely does a month pass without the publication of a treatise of some kind by a historian, a political scientist* or an anthropologist, who has made a special study of the way in which! different nations have fitted a Western form of government to one or other of the Pacific Islands communities.

Part of the study, of course, is an examination of the various techniques of colonial administration; and, as “colonialism” now has become a dirty word among the idealists who did not begin to grow their beards until after World War 11, these books have their own peculiar interest.

Political Advancement in the South Pacific is the work of Dr.

Francis James West, a Senior Research Fellow in Pacific History at the Australian National University. He is young—he left Cambridge only in 1952—but he has crammed a lot of study into ten years—six months in Papua-New Guinea in 1954, a couple of years lecturing in history at Victoria College, Wellington, six months in Polynesia. 1 The book’s 200 pages do not cover much South Pacific; but it is a very careful, well-written, documented and indexed comparative study of colonial practice in Fiji, Tahiti and American Samoa.

It has a special value in relation to Fiji and Tahiti, both of which! now are trying to find a new road from a benevolent metropolitan form of administration to a larger and increasing measure of self-government.* Some of the facts lined up, and the conclusions suggested, by this in defatigable scholar could be very useful to future planners.—R.W.R. 1 (POLITICAL ADVANCEMENT IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC, by Dr. Francis West Oxford University Press, Melbourne. 35/-.)