Abstract
This thesis examines the histories of three exceptional copra enterprises undertaken by ni-Vanuatu, the Indigenous people of what is now the nation of Vanuatu, during the first half of the twentieth century, when their archipelago was jointly ruled by Britain and France as the Anglo-French Condominium of the New Hebrides. These three enterprises were very different from one another. One was organised by a European settler working with two New Hebrideans, promised metropolitan-scale copra profits in return for investment, and collapsed in only a few months. Another, organised and operated entirely by New Hebrideans, purchased a sailing vessel and successfully shipped local copra to market in Port Vila for several years. The third was a labour collective founded on a vision of a communal utopia in which New Hebrideans would live like Europeans. The originators and members of each enterprise pursued their goals at significant risk, be it financial, political, or physical. That they undertook those risks was all the more noteworthy given that colonised New Hebrideans controlled their own subsistence economy and were not forced to pay taxes to their colonisers. Why then did they do it? This thesis investigates that question by reconstructing the idiosyncratic local colonial contexts which gave rise to each of the three enterprises, on different islands at different times in New Hebrides Condominium history. Those reconstructions reveal that while each of the enterprises was very much the product of its local circumstances, those circumstances were inflected by the expanding interaction of New Hebrideans and Europeans throughout the imperial Pacific. That interaction mixed traditional New Hebridean ambition to acquire wealth and prestige with new knowledge of European life and techniques and resentment of subordination by Europeans. It motivated a quest for technical competence and socio-economic self-determination that would simultaneously convey the wealth and modernity of the West and liberate New Hebrideans from European colonial rule. These findings expand our understanding of the complex, contingent realities underlying conventional tropes of the Indigenous South Pacific, and make a significant contribution to the limited body of literature on the history of the New Hebrides Condominium.