Disturbing History – Resistance in Early Colonial Fiji

Disturbing history explores the lives of ordinary people in Fiji and their responses to various forms of power and authority in the colony from 1874 to 1914. Couched in the tradition of people’s histories, this book excavates a mass of archival materials that challenge conventional accounts of Fiji’s colonial experience. This alternate way of reconstructing Fiji’s history reveals stories of ordinary people’s resistance as a constant and highly complex aspect of the colonial world. Colonialism itself, is shown to be a force that was imperfect, fractured and sometimes fragile. It was shaped in struggle and its presence in the daily lives of people was often susceptible to subversion.

“Nicole’s study … aimls] to recover the everyday experiences and actions of ordinary people… This task, for historians, is often a difficult one insofar as the written record mostly omits or neglects such experience…. Nicole’s work is original in the sense that no one else has pulled together in one place accounts of popular resistance and agency in the early decades of colonial Fiji. He expands what we know of the Colo War, the Tuka Movement, etc., thanks to his close reading of the archives.”

-Lamont Lindstrom, professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Tulsa

“Nicole has set himself the task of rewriting Fijian history from below. In my view, he succeeds admirably. The result is a convincing, carefully documented and sensitively analysed ‘resistance history’…”

-James C Scott, professor, Department of Anthropology, Yale University

When the few large-scale oppositional wars and movements in Fiji such as the Colo War or Apolosi Nawai’s Viti Kabani movement are placed alongside forms of everyday resistance… resistance is shown to run almost uninterrupted for the first 40 years of colonial rule. Furthermore, this continuity is not broken by the country’s ethnic divide; what is most surprising is how -albeit separately – similar forms of resistance embraced all communities. This is Robert Nicole’s triumph.”

-Robbie Robertson, professor, School of Arts & Social Sciences, at James Cook Universi