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FOREIGN TRADE PATTERNS AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC
Edwin Charle
The region of the world usually referred to as the South Pacific includes about 5 million widely scattered in space and divided politically into more than twenty separate national
entities. Because of the physical and political individualisation of the societies, economic change in the region is accompanied by an unusually high proportion of foreign trade flow (and international movements of
people) and trade flow statistics have become available despite the smallness of the economic units.
MAKING NEW HISTORIES OF FIJI:
THE CHOICE BETWEEN MATERIALIST POLITICAL ECONOMY AND NEOCOLONIAL ORTHODOXY
R T Robertson
From the late eighteenth century until the present Fiji' s history has been perceived largely in terms of interaction between a dominant corrective and modernizing
European presence and a sluggish traditional (and at times self-defeating) Fijian reality. Early histories, unshamedly biased towards the overwhelming superiority of Western
"culture", pictured a dark and gloomy Fiji of anarchic forces and unbridled barbarism, pathetic in its inability to rise even to the level of the noble savage in European eyes.
The Fiji Times in 1880, for example, described Fiji as "the foulest blot upon the fair face of creation; a terrestrial pandemonium and a veritable abode of friends", "a
climmerian darkness of barbarism" only in part dispelled as its peoples "learnt the acts of peace and realised the benefits of civilisation".
FIJI'S COLONIAL MONETARY SYSTEM AND EXPORT OF COLONIAL CAPITAL: questions posed for the theories of the
Currency Board System and colonial underdevelopment
Wardan Lal Narsey
Any study of Fiji's colonial monetary system faces a serious methodological problem. As a British colony, its general economic environment ought to have been, on a priori
grounds, similiar to that of other colonies. Thus it would be methodologically unsound to analyse Fiji's colonial monetary experiences without reference to the general British
colonial monetary experience. However, two difficulties present themselves in the case of Fiji. Firstly, Fiji's colonial monetary experience on the surface would not seem
to fit the typical British colonial monetary system itself would seem to be open to serious question: the internal inconsistencies of the accepted theory; the discrepancies
posed by Fiji's experience might be generalised to other colonies; and a methodological failure to situate colonial monetary systems within the context of the
evolution of the wider imperial monetary and economic systems.
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