Philip LaRue

Buried in Dr. J.R. McNeill’s 1994 “Of Rats and Men: A Synoptic Environmental History of the Island Pacific” is a tantalizing datapoint. The people of Nauru, one of the islands of McNeill’s study, were apparently then “fortunate: none of them need[ed] work.” After renegotiating extractive colonial-era phosphate mining leases in 1968, Nauruans reached higher per capita incomes than Saudis or Swiss by the time “Of Rats and Men” went to print. And while the island’s supply of phosphate was expected to run dry by the turn of the millennium, McNeill and other contemporary observers understandably predicted that wise fiscal stewardship would likely extend Nauruan prosperity long into the future. 

It was not to be. By 2009, Nauru was so cash-starved that its leaders were among the few worldwide to recognize Russia’s de facto annexation of the “breakaway republics” of South Abkhazia and Ossetia, thanks in large part to considerable formal and informal Russian financial aid. The island receives other controversial sources of revenue as well. Since 2001 (but for a brief interlude between 2007-2012) it has operated an Australian migrant detention facility notorious for multiple reports of sexual assault, suicide, and graphic forms of self-harm.  As two writers for The Guardian put it in 2018, “Nauru’s main industry could perhaps be described as misery and suffering.”

What happened? How did the Saudi Arabia of the South Pacific turn, in the span of just fifteen years, so desperate, cash-strapped, and internationally instrumentalized? Explanations range from the ridiculous to the sublime: ill-advised investment in a failed musical on Da Vinci, sanctions stemming from alleged money-laundering for the Russian mafia and Al Qaeda, and the devaluation of the Australian dollar all frequently figure in the accounting. Yet such questions reveal as much about the questioner as they do the questioned: namely, the positivist assumptions buried in assessments relying on so-called “turning points” extracted from their historical contexts. It is precisely for this reason that historians should make greater efforts to surface these contexts and place them in conversation with each other.  

After all, Nauru was not an isolated case but one of many in a postcolonial global archipelago. Nearby Tonga’s leaders set off alarm bells throughout the region when, in the late 1970s, they threatened to welcome Soviet bases to their shores, prompting New Zealand’s government to pledge a doubling of aid and 24-hour lighting for the archipelago’s main airport. Thousands of miles away, a revolutionary government in Grenada cast about in search of international aid to extend the runway of its own airport, eventually finding material aid from another postcolonial island state—Cuba—and catalyzing international friction that would lead to U.S. invasion in 1983. Both cases occurred not long after violent births to postcolonial eras in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Madagascar, to name a few. Juxtaposed with each other and with other cases, these islands yield fascinating insights. 

One possible insight: the value of deconstructing harsh historiographic divides between colonial and postcolonial periods. The Grenadian case is instructive. The revolutionaries drew inspiration not from “anticolonial” contemporary ideologies like Maoism or even solely from traditional Marxist-Leninism, but from a longue durée tradition of indigenous resistance stretching back to Carib Indians and a 1795 slave revolt led by Julian Fédon—a revolt whose aim was to join Revolutionary France less than ten years before Haitians broke from its successor. Indeed, some of these long traditions may have inspirational intersections with the West’s own. In 2019’s Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia, the late David Graeber examined Malagasay social traditions tracing to egalitarian, polyglot communities of European pirates and island natives—and speculated that they animated tales of mythical pirate kingdoms that, in turn, may have circulated in Enlightenment-era salon conversations. The faraway islands, it seems, may not have been so far away at all. 

Fascinating methodological questions abound. What is the value in assessing postcolonial island nation-states on their own, instead of vis-à-vis their colonizers or continental postcolonial nation-states? And who really counts as a “postcolonial island state,” anyway? Are not Australia and New Zealand, Global Northerners as they are in the Global South, yet former British possessions, part of the category? Do Haiti and the Dominican Republic get credit for their respective halves of Hispaniola? Moreover, when does coloniality really begin and end? Is it capacious enough to include Cuba’s notional independence after the Spanish-American War or Haiti? Is “splendidly isolated” England really the postcolonial product of resistance to the Danelaw’s yoke—or, better yet, still living under the Norman colonial thumb? The answers may seem obvious, steeped as they are in legacies of modern transnational imperialism, commerce, racialization, and the resistance to it, but what is obvious and what is visible remain two separate things. 

Postcolonial island nation-states were—and are—more than simply former sites of extraction and settlement, or sites destined to contend with ecological disaster in the coming decades. They were laboratories of experimentation in novel, if often unsuccessful, forms of social organization and governance. They were—and are—subject to the same vicissitudes of rule and misrule as the rest of humanity, if often with more acutely-felt results. They were—and are—homes to lengthy oral, written, danced, sung, and drawn traditions linking their first inhabitants to those who sought refuge in their shores or came to those shores involuntarily. These unique and oft-overlooked polities deserve greater attention from historians, so that instead of simply observing Nauru wither, we can instead ask “whither, Nauru:” or how these states might contend with environmental and sociopolitical challenges in the decades to come. 

Photo by Winston Chen on Unsplash

Philip LaRue is a first-year M.A. student in the Global, International, and Comparative History program. His primary research focuses on the experiences of Richard T. Greener, U.S. Commercial Agent to Vladivostok from 1898-1906. He loves reading—to himself and his son—hiking, and the occasional video game.