Fiji A Short History

Some fifteen hundred years before the birth of Christ, voyaging people first reached the group of islands in the Pacific we now know as Fiji. Today, an independent state for thirteen years after nearly a century of British colonial rule, their homeland is shared by others besides those original Polynesian settlers, and its history reflects the circumstances of their arrival and involvement. The original settlers lived in communication with Tonga and Samoa, invoking deified ancestors to control their environment, installing great chiefs who were themselves living gods, harvesting land and sea and startling their neighbours with their ferocity in battle. In the early nineteenth century the first European traders began to arrive, together with Wesleyan and Catholic missionaries: European residents increased in number, traders and cotton planters seeking to control land and labour, until in the early 1870s outside interference led to the failure of a new mixed race independent government and put the Islands into the hands of Britain. British rule in Fiji led to the introduction of an Indian labour component in the population to maintain a new sugar industry. Over the next hundred years this transformed both the economy and the demography of Fiji; for most of the present century Fiji's history has been dominated by Indians' demand for equal political rights, Fijians' desire to sustain an autonomous way of life, and Europeans' ambition to retain dominance. Since independence in 1970, consensus in the interests of nation-building has been a major goal.