The British Colonial History of Fiji

Fiji is the Pacific colony in which the British Empire’s most durable contradictions were stored. The 1874 Deed of Cession preserved indigenous Fijian land tenure and chiefly authority, but the 1879 indenture scheme brought 60,000 Indians to work the sugar plantations. By 1970, the two communities were roughly equal in number, and the constitutional arrangements that the British bequeathed to independent Fiji could not, in the long run, contain the competition between them. The four coups of 1987, 2000, 2006, and to a lesser extent 2021 are the working-out of a contradiction that the British created and did not resolve.

The Deed of Cession

Fiji was ceded to Britain in 1874 by a group of principal Fijian chiefs, led by Cakobau, the Ratu of Bau, and supported by other high chiefs. The cession was made in the context of a long-running civil war among the Fijian chiefs, of concern about American and German designs on the islands, and of a desire to secure British protection. The Deed of Cession promised that the Fijian customs, the indigenous land tenure, and the chiefly system would be respected, and that the sale of land to Europeans would be prohibited.

The first governor, Sir John Bates Thurston, who had been British consul in Fiji before the cession, served from 1875 to 1888 and established the basic structure of the colonial administration. The Deed of Cession was, as the historian Deryck Scarr showed in Fiji: A Short History (1984), “a text of deliberately ambiguous commitments”: the Fijian chiefs thought they were signing a treaty of alliance; the British thought they were signing a deed of surrender. The ambiguity shaped everything that followed.

The Colonial Administration

The British administration of Fiji was based at Suva, with a governor representing the British Crown and a legislative council that included European and Fijian representatives. The colony was administered under the principles of indirect rule, with traditional Fijian institutions preserved where possible. The Fijian administration was carried on through the system of mataqali (sub-clans) and the tikina (districts), with the Bose Levu Vakaturaga, or Great Council of Chiefs, providing a forum for the chiefly elite. The administration of Indian affairs, which became increasingly important as the Indian population grew, was carried out by a separate department.

The Sugar Industry and Indian Indentured Labour

The development of the sugar industry in Fiji was based on the recruitment of Indian indentured labourers, who were brought to Fiji under long-term contracts to work on the plantations. The first shipment of indentured Indians arrived in 1879, and the system continued until 1916, when the last shipment arrived. Over the period of indenture, some 60,500 Indians were brought to Fiji, of whom perhaps half returned to India after the end of their contracts.

The conditions of indenture were often harsh, and the mortality rate was high. The experience of the indentured Indians, as the historians K. L. Gillion and more recently Brij V. Lal have shown, was “a Pacific mirror of the post-emancipation Caribbean.” The Indian population of Fiji grew rapidly, and by the time of independence in 1970 it was slightly larger than the Fijian population. The British failure, in the judgment of the historian Deryck Scarr, was to have built a colonial economy on the assumption that the Indians would eventually return to India; the failure of the assumption produced the demographic contradiction at the centre of Fijian politics.

Fijian Society and Culture

The British administration attempted to preserve Fijian society and culture through a system of indirect rule and the protection of traditional institutions. The Native Lands Ordinance of 1880 prohibited the sale of Fijian land to non-Fijians, and the Native Administration Regulations of 1912 codified the system of Fijian local government. The Great Council of Chiefs, the Bose Levu Vakaturaga, was established in 1876 and became an important forum for the chiefly elite; the British administration also relied on the chiefs for the collection of taxes and the enforcement of regulations.

The Fijian population, however, suffered from introduced diseases and from a declining birth rate, and the Fijian share of the population fell from a clear majority in the 1880s to about 44 percent in 1970. The 2013 Constitution, which entrenched Fijian chiefly control of the political system, was a direct consequence of the demographic shift the British had set in motion.

The Path to Independence

The twentieth century saw a long struggle for political rights in Fiji. The development of trade unions, the Fijian political parties, and the Indian political parties all contributed to the demand for self-government. The 1966 constitutional conference, held in London, set out the basis for a representative government; a further conference in 1970 established the terms of independence. The Fiji Independence Order of 1970, made under the Fiji Independence Act of 1970 of the British Parliament, brought the colony to independence on 10 October 1970. Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara, the Tui Nayau and a former premier of the colonial legislature, became the first prime minister. Fiji became a member of the Commonwealth, and a constitutional conference in London in 1970 set the terms of the new state.

Fiji After Independence

Fiji has faced significant political challenges since independence, including two coups in 1987, a civilian coup in 2000, and a military coup in 2006. The political instability has been driven in part by the tension between the Fijian and Indian communities, by the role of the military in Fijian politics, and by the question of constitutional reform. The 1997 constitution, which was widely regarded as a model for multiracial democracy, was abrogated in 2009; the 2013 constitution re-established a more majoritarian political order. Fiji was suspended from the Commonwealth of Nations in 2009 and was readmitted in 2014, and it has remained an active member of the Commonwealth Games movement.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of British Fiji was, for a long time, dominated by the colonial administrative accounts — R. A. Derrick’s A History of Fiji (1946) and the official histories produced by the colonial government. The revisionist work of the last forty years, led by Deryck Scarr, Fiji: A Short History (1984), K. L. Gillion’s Fiji’s Indian Migrants (1962), and the more recent writing of Brij V. Lal, has produced a more critical picture, in which the British period is read as a contested terrain in which the British, the Fijians, and the Indians were all active agents. The current debate, exemplified in the recent work of the contributors to the Journal of Pacific History, is over how far the political instability of independent Fiji can be attributed to the colonial period and how far it should be treated as a product of the post-independence period.

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