Winding Up the British Empire in the Pacific Islands.

• Author: Hensley, Gerald
• Position: Book review

WINDING UP THE BRITISH EMPIRE IN THE PACIFIC ISLANDS

Author: W. David McIntyre

Published by: Oxford University Press, 2014, 304pp, 65 [pounds sterling].

The Pacific region was the last of Britain's imperial enterprises to be wound up, completed only in 1997 if you count the special case of Hong Kong. Islands could be annexed by a lieutenant going ashore with a flag, but disengaging from them became a decades-long headache for London. David McIntyre, well-known as an expert on Commonwealth and Pacific history, looks at how Britain came slowly to terms with the awkward problems decolonisation posed for its multitudinous island territories in the Pacific.

Ending the world's largest empire could never be simple, but, once the pattern had been established in India and Africa of the rise of nationalist movements and the more or less graceful concession of independence, the process could roll on across the globe as if on tram lines. The trouble was that Pacific territories did not fit this model. They were often a pattern of small islands scattered over the wide ocean; there were no organised nationalist movements to speak of, and in most cases few resources with which to sustain an independent state.

So during the rush to independence in the 1950s and 1960s the Pacific stayed at home. Independence, it was universally agreed, was not possible for most island territories. Distinguished committees in Whitehall looked at the difficulties from time to time. If the colonies were regarded as a profit and loss account it was clear they should go, but the Colonial Office stoutly upheld British obligations to the peoples they had taken over. Ingenious ideas were turned over; creating larger island federations, regional associations, persuading Australia and New Zealand to accept responsibility for some, even getting the United Nations to take over as trustee. All were ideas that perhaps looked hopeful to policy-makers in London but had no appeal to Pacific islanders who had little perspective beyond their own island horizons and were not comfortable with larger groupings. Australia, though earlier interested in annexing some of Britain's Pacific empire, had decolonisation problems of its own; New Zealand was always strongly resistant, horrified by the thought of becoming responsible for Fiji and unresponsive even to suggestions about the Polynesian islands that became Tuvalu.

The reviews and intellectual doodling came always to a full stop over the...