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Risky Shores: Savagery and Colonialism in the Western Pacific
Author(s) -
Moore Clive
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
australian journal of politics and history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.123
H-Index - 23
eISSN - 1467-8497
pISSN - 0004-9522
DOI - 10.1111/ajph.12607
Subject(s) - colonialism , citation , politics , asia pacific , shore , history , media studies , art history , sociology , political science , law , ethnology , oceanography , geology
Why did the so-called "Cannibal Isles" of the Western Paci c fascinate Europeans for so long? Spanning three centuries—from Captain James Cook's death on a Hawaiian beach in 1779 to the end of World War II in 1945—this book considers the category of "the savage" in the context of British Empire in the Western Paci c, reassessing the conduct of Islanders and the English-speaking strangers who encountered them. Sensationalized depictions of Melanesian "savages" as cannibals and headhunters created a unifying sense of Britishness during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These exotic people inhabited the edges of empire—and precisely because they did, Britons who never had and never would leave the home islands could imagine their nation's imperial reach.