EDITOR'S FORUM PACIFIC ISLANDS HISTORY IN THE 1980s: NEW DIRECTIONS OR MONOGRAPH MYOPIA (original) (raw)
The modern study of Pacific islands history has made a significant contribution to our knowledge of the area, particularly of the period of culture contact in the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, it has to a considerable extent lost sight of basic directions, such as some of those outlined by its principal founding father-the late J. W. Davidson. Today, historians of the Pacific islands seem to be heading rapidly towards a state of monograph myopia. We are finding out more and more about less and less. Relatively little consideration seems to be given to any overall purpose or direction. This paper will attempt to explain how this state of affairs has come about, and will suggest some new directions. Some of the issues which will be raised are not of course unique to Pacific islands history. They can have a relevance to many other branches of historical study. Until the early 1950s, the history of Pacific islands, if it were studied at all, was an adjunct of imperial history. The islands were important to historians only in so far as they could be placed within the context of Eu-ropean imperialism. These historians were concerned with European initiatives and motives in the Pacific-particularly those of explorers, evangelists , administrators. The Pacific islanders, their cultures and their general way of life, were largely irrelevant in this imperial context. Nor was culture contact studied for its own sake but only in so far as it might highlight the activities of imperial agents. The decolonization of Pacific islands history was begun in the 1940s by J. W. Davidson. In the 1950s and 60s he further developed his views laying a basis for our modern studies.
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