The Fijian Colonial Experience: A Study of the Neotraditional Order under British Colonial Rule Prior to World War II

Indigenous

Fijians were singularly fortunate in having a colonial administration that

halted the alienation of communally owned land to foreign settlers and that,

almost for a century, administered their affairs in their

own language and through culturally congenial authority structures and institutions. From the outset, the Fijian

Administration was criticised as paternalistic and

stifling of individualism. But for all its

problems it sustained, at least until World War II, a vigorously autonomous and peaceful social and political world in quite

affluent subsistence - underpinning the celebrated

exuberance of the culture exploited by the travel industry ever since.