Indigenous involvement in the cash economy of Lau, Fiji, 1840–1946

Autor: Bruce Knapman
Rok vydání: 1976
Předmět:
Zdroj: The Journal of Pacific History. 11:167-188
ISSN: 1469-9605
0022-3344
DOI: 10.1080/00223347608572300
Popis: THE INTEGRATION OF RURAL FIJIANS INTO THE 'MODERN' MARKET ECONOMY is a major policy aim of the government of independent Fiji. Working on the assumptions that subsistence economies are incapable of sustaining significant economic growth and that such growth is necessary and desirable, the government continues to commit itself to one major British-introduced organization through which people in the rural villages are expected to be come involved in the transition to the cash economy: the co-operative society.1 Co-operatives in the eastern Lau group of islands, popularly assumed to be the most 'tradition-bound' in Fiji,2 have been operating as relatively successful business enterprises for upwards of two decades. They have been a major vehicle for a marked increase in villagers' involvement in the cash economy during the post-World War II period.3 But co-operatives in Lau accelerated an already well established market participation. Lauan society had not, at the most basic level of earning a livelihood, remained frozen in some kind of pre-contact primitive state, as if the Tongan conquest of Lau in the 1850s and 60s, European trading from the 1840s and settlement in the 1870s, and cession to Britain in 1874 were separable parts of Lauan history. Even before European contact, Lauans were not simply subsistence farmers producing in passive isolation from all contacts external to the village. They were motivated to produce goods and services not only for their own use but also to trade within the Fiji group and with Tongans.4 An examination of Lauan participation in the market economy from about 1840 to 1946 reveals the indigenous response to new opportunities for economic transactions outside the village and serves to emphasize that the contemporary market participation of rural Fijians in the Province of Lau is the result of a long, dynamic process in which govern ment has played a positive and consciously formative role only recently.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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