Idealism and Pragmatism in Colonial Fiji: Sir Arthur Gordon's native rule policy and the introduction of Indian contract labor

Historians have become increasingly aware of the difficulty and inaccuracy of assigning the economic and social structures of modern societies to specific categories. In fact, at any given point a single group may incorporate economic arrangements ranging from the relative simplicity of barter to the complexities of international trade and finance. The village may well remain the primary social and political focus of most of the population in a society which, on another level, has all the trappings of a modern nation-state. The colonial society which developed in Fiji after 1880 appears, on first perusal, to provide a classic example of this phenomenon in that it incorporated a tribal, village people engaged in subsistence agriculture, a wage-earning agricultural proletariat, a modern government bureaucracy, and a capitalist class with large-scale enterprises tied to the world economy. But in actuality the Fijian case is unique. This multi-faceted society came about as the calculated creation of Fiji's British rulers and was sustained by British law. As such, it reflected that peculiar blend of idealism and pragmatism which characterized British imperialism in general and the administration of Fiji's first British governor, Sir Arthur Hamilton Gordon, in particular.