“[A] magisterial history of twentieth-century Fiji.... The historical research is thorough and scrupulous, and the presentation is lucid. Lal brings together a wealth of information, much of it previously unavailable and the earlier available materials often reframed in thought-provoking ways.... Perhaps its greatest strength is that is presents the history of modern Fiji as very complicated and multifaceted.” —The Contemporary Pacific Pacific Islands Monograph Series No.11 Published in association with the Center for Pacific Islands Studies, University of Hawai‘i

Of all the island groups in the outer Pacific none surpass the Fijis in their rare combination of beautiful scenery and interesting natives. The islands are upon the opposite side of the world from England, for the meridian of 180° passes through the centre of the group crossing the island of Taviuni... That dauntless old rover, Abel Jansen Tasman, discovered them in 1643 on his way from Tonga in the Heemskirk and Zeehaan and named them "Prince William's Islands" and "Heemskirk's Shoals." After this, they were all but forgotten until July 2, 1774, when Captain James Cook sighted the small island of Vatoa in the extreme southeastern end of the group. The natives fled into the forest upon the approach of his boat, and he contented himself by leaving a knife, some medals and nails in a conspicuous place. Finding many sea-turtles in the region, he named his land-fall "Turtle Island," and then departed from the Fijis never to return.

Disturbing History focuses on Fiji’s people and their agency in responding to and engaging the multifarious forms of authority and power that were manifest in the colony from 1874 to 1914. By concentrating on the lives of ordinary Fijians, the book presents alternate ways of reconstructing the island’s past. Couched in the traditions of social, subaltern, and people’s histories, the study is an excavation of a large mass of material that tells the often moving stories of lives that have largely been overlooked by historians. These challenge conventional historical accounts that tend to celebrate the nation, represent Fiji’s colonial experience as ordered and peaceful, or British tutelage as benevolent. In its contribution to postcolonial theory, Disturbing History reveals resistance as a constant but partial and untidy mix of other constituents such as collaboration, consent, appropriation, and opportunism, which together form the colonial landscape. In turn, colonialism in Fiji is shown as a force shaped in struggle, fractured and often fragile, with a presence and application in the daily lives of people that was often chaotic, imperfect, and susceptible to subversion. The book divides the period of study into two broad categories: organized resistance and everyday forms of resistance. The first examines the Colo War (1876), the Tuka Movement (1878–1891), the Seaqaqa War (1894), the Movement for Federation with New Zealand (1901–1903), the Viti Kabani Movement (1913–1917), and the various organized labor protests. The second half of the book addresses resistance manifested in the villages and plantations, including tax and land boycotts, violence and retributive justice, avoidance protest, petitioning, and women’s resistance. In their entirety these forms reveal a complex web of relationships between powerful and subordinate groups and among subordinate groups themselves. The author concludes that resistance cannot be framed as a totality but as a multilayered and multidimensional reality. In the wake of Fiji’s present volatile climate, this book will aid readers in understanding the continuities and disjunctures in Fiji’s interethnic and intraethnic relations.

Indigenous Fijians were singularly fortunate in having a colonial administration that halted the alienation of communally owned land to foreign settlers and that, almost for a century, administered their affairs in their own language and through culturally congenial authority structures and institutions. From the outset, the Fijian Administration was criticised as paternalistic and stifling of individualism. But for all its problems it sustained, at least until World War II, a vigorously autonomous and peaceful social and political world in quite affluent subsistence — underpinning the celebrated exuberance of the culture exploited by the travel industry ever since.

This fourth edition of Fiji in the Pacific aims to provide students with an updated resource for their history and geography studies. Changes in this edition include more detail about the history of Rotuma and a move, where possible, away from a history of what Europeans were doing in Fiji, to a history of all the peoples of Fiji. Part 2: Geography of Fiji has been extensively reshaped and extended to cover specific topics in the Fiji School Leaving Certificate.