Evelyn Colbert - The Pacific Islands: Paths to the Present

The Pacific Islands: Paths to the Present, Evelyn Colbert

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This small book was conceived in ignorancemy own. In 1978 my responsibilities in the State Departments Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs having been extended to the Pacific islands, I found myself entering a world for which three decades of largely East Asian experience had hardly prepared me. Nor was it easy to fill the gap from the writings of others. With the exception of a few travel books, most of the quite limited literature on the area had been written by specialists for specialistslargely of the anthropological persuasion.

Today much has changed. Historians, economists, and political and social scientists are joining anthropologists in providing what is becoming a diversified and substantial literature. Even so, it has seemed to me that a gap remains, that there would still be utility in a brief work introducing the general reader to the institutions, policy preoccupations, and international roles of the island polities as they have been shaped by their physical circumstances, their traditions, and their interaction with the West and Western institutions.

The debts I have incurred in the course of this enterprise are many and substantial. Not least are those I owe to colleagues who guided my initial Pacific islands education: Richard Holbrooke, who, as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific, did much to activate U.S. policy in the South Pacific; the late John Dorrance, a pioneer among U.S. foreign service officers in the breadth and depth of his understanding of the region; and William Bodde, whose talents, energy, and empathy sped his remarkable transformation from Europeanist to man of the Pacific.

My great debt to scholars who have specialized in Pacific island studies is only partially revealed in my endnotes. I am deeply grateful also to the hospitality afforded me during visits to the region that enabled me to meet political and church leaders, educators, and a variety of other representatives of island society. Officials representing the island governments as well as Australia, France, Japan, New Zealand, and the United States have been a major source of information and insights. I am especially indebted to Professor Robert Kiste of the University of Hawaii, Robert Sutter of the Library of Congress, and U.S. ambassador to Papua New Guinea, Richard Teare, who read and commented most helpfully on the entire manuscript. I owe thanks also to Karen Scullen, who faithfully applied her superb word processing skills to a frequently illegible manuscript. Finally, I am grateful to the Asia Society for its support of this project and to its discerning and helpful editors, Deborah Field Washburn and Karen S. Fein. The errors are all my own.

Evelyn Colbert

Ten thousand islandsa few large, most very small, many uninhabitedare scattered over a vast oceanic expanse, stretching from the southern reaches of the Pacific to the Tropic of Cancer and covering 20 million square miles. The inhabitants of the islands, some 6 million people, see themselves in a unique relationship to their surrounding waters, one that distinguishes them in all their diversity as Pacific peoples.

Convention assigns the islands to a still larger region, Oceania, which includes Australia, New Zealand, and even Hawaii, whose claim to membership is based on its location, insular character, and the ethnic identity of its indigenous people. For the islands, however, Oceania is little more than a useful political device. It casts the much larger and more developed Australia and New Zealand as partners rather than patrons, while encouraging them to provide aid and protection. The inclusion of Hawaii reinforces island claims to U.S. attention.

Rhetorical concepts of an even more comprehensive Pacific groupingwhether the Asia-Pacific Community, the Pacific Basin, or the Pacific Rimhave had little resonance throughout the islands. Although anthropologists hold migration from Southeast Asia responsible for the original peopling of some of the islands, todays islanders, settled for millennia in their present homes, see little kinship between themselves and Asians, including those who have more recently taken up residence in their midst. Conversely, those outside the region who speak eloquently of a dawning Pacific century rarely have these small islands in mind.