In April 1864, two men again witnessed the terrible price of war.

Watching the battle at the redoubt of Te Morere on the western coast of New Zealand just to the north of the fledgling British settlement ofNew Plymouth were Te Whiti O Rongomai and Tohu Kakahi.

The violent convulsions in nineteenth-century New Zealand were part of a long, storied history of colonial violence in the Pacific that stretched back nearly four centuries. Over this long period, in this very diffuse and diverse region, violence took many localised forms. Yet there were clear patterns that sparked and sustained it in the colonial history made between the multitude of Indigenous peoples that populated the vast region and the colonial peoples that entered the region beginning in the early sixteenth century.

European imperial history in the Pacific commenced seventeen years after the Treaty of Tordesillas was brokered in 1494. The first consequence of this papal licence for Spanish and Portuguese domination of the New World was felt in the Pacific region in 1511 when Portuguese forces conquered Muslim rulers in the trading hub of Malacca. At Malacca, the Portuguese set a gruesome precedent displaying the imperial methods they would deploy to establish future imperial nodes in the region. After they crushed resistant potentates the Portuguese would conduct ‘a general massacre of innocent dependents of... vanquished' rulers. Their methods were bloody, brutal and steeled with the righteous imperatives of the Crusades against ‘infidels'; Christian conversion as well as commanding resources - especially Indigenous labour - were their aims. The Portuguese proved adept at blending religious motives with imperial ones to conquer and covet lands, resources and souls in the string of colonies they established through South­East and North-East Asia.^[23]

Ferdinard Magellan, who was at the conquest of Malacca in 1511 when he was serving Portugal, later switched allegiance to Spain and commanded the Spanish imperial fleet that set out from Europe in 1519.

Despite Magellan's demise, the ‘Islands of the West', as the islands of Micronesia became known, were rapidly enveloped in the immense trade conducted by treasure ships carrying American silver west and Chinese goods east that plied the ocean between Manila and Acapulco.^[25] What took place there echoed the fate of Indigenous peoples in the Americas. Bartolome de Las Casas's account of the ‘cruel massacres and slaughters' of ‘innocent people' in the Caribbean Islands and the American mainland, in his 1656 work The Tears of the Indians, also rang true for Indigenes of these Pacific islands.^[26] Las Casas condemned so-called Christians for the staggering death toll, enslavement of survivors of all ages and gender, and the ravishment of women in the Americas.

Back in Te Whiti and Tohu's homeland, the first imperial contact came in the form of Dutch explorers who would give the islands the name New Zealand. Dutch forays into the wider Pacific closely followed their supplant­ing of the Portuguese in Malacca in 1641, a victory that strengthened their colonial position greatly throughout the region. Forty years prior to their conquest at Malacca, the Dutch East India Company was increasingly dom­inating the spice trade and the Spice Islands from the hub of Batavia (Jakarta). Further north, the Dutch secured exclusive commercial access to Japan when all other foreigners, especially Christians, were violently driven out or under­ground during the Tokugawa Shogunate that commenced in 1604 and iso­lated Japan for almost 250 years.^[28]

One year after the Dutch capture of Malacca, explorer Abel Tasman became the first European to ‘discover' New Zealand. The first meeting between the Dutch and Maori in December 1642 resulted in the deaths of four Dutchmen and the retaliatory shooting of a Maori man. Tasman named the place where this bloody first contact took place ‘Murderers Bay', marking it always with memories of this first collision of worlds.^[29] Subsequent sporadic contact between Dutch explorers in the Pacific and Indigenous people repeated this pattern of violence, making bloodshed the norm in Pacific first encounters.

The Dutch differed markedly from their Iberian predecessors, with sub­stantially more emphasis on trade than religious conversion. Commerce mattered above all else, giving the Dutch significant advantages as local peoples supported their campaigns to the detriment of the Portuguese in South and East Asia.^[30] Though they were more restrained than their Iberian forebears, violence was by no means absent from Dutch colonialism.

From the first European encounter with the Dutch in 1642 to the midst of the British settler invasion in the 1860s, New Zealand and its wider, inter­connected region witnessed much violence. For Te Whiti and Tohu, the weight of this long history of entangled beliefs, tactics and ambitions inspired a vastly different response. Las Casas cited the ‘eye for an eye' philosophy espoused in Deuteronomy 29.15 as the guiding principle of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Iberian colonisers against New World Indigenes.^{[31] [32]} In diametric opposition, Te Whiti and Tohu fashioned a non-violent response to the pressures of colonialism they called a ‘fighting peace'.^[33] In this approach, the multiple ravages of colonialism would be met not with the sword (or the main weapon of the 1860s, the gun) but by disruption of settler society's order - ploughing up fields, cutting fences and challenging a violent foe with acts of largesse that undermined European claims of superiority and amplified the monstrosities of colonial violence.

The coming of Europeans into the Pacific did not, of course, commence the history of violence in the region. Warrior cultures pre-existed and postdated the European era. Local histories attest to this past, as does a vast array of weaponry and other artefacts, like armour fashioned from coconut fibre used in the Kiribati Islands. In the Samoan islands, for instance, rival groups regularly battled when deaths of revered chiefs sparked struggles for succession. It is a fair claim that violence was part of a pre-European Pacific, but one enduring colonial legacy has been reconstructions of pre­European Pacific history that have regularly placed violence at the epicentre of pre-European historical forces in the region. In the absence of evidence, Western explorers and recent scholars have postulated violent episodes that predated sustained European contact in the Pacific Ocean. The island of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) has been a particularly favoured location for theories about violence, Indigenous communities and their history. These Rapa Nui theories posit that in the construction and movement of the immense stone statues (moai) that are emblematic of the island's cultural heritage were quests for power that precipitated environmental destruction to the point of societal collapse, culminating in an apocalyptic episode of violence. These theories, based on certain readings of explorers' accounts and some archae­ological evidence, are also laced with stereotypes of Indigenous masculinities where violence is depicted as the dominating, uncontrollable racial instinct.^[34] Though Rapa Nui is one microcosmic component of the Pacific, ideas about innate cultural tendencies of the Pacific's Indigenes towards violence - the essence of constructions of male ‘savagery' - have fed into remarkably consistent and simplistic colonial narratives across the centuries. Violence, particularly in the form of cannibalism and the brutalisation of women, took on alarming and disproportionate dimensions in Western imaginings of the region as a whole.

Explorer accounts of the late eighteenth century were largely responsible for proliferating tales of the Pacific that were hair-raising and deeply intri­guing in the same instance. British naval captain James Cook, arguably the most important of many Enlightenment voyagers who traversed the Pacific from the 1760s, did more than any other explorer to add to the geographic and conceptual maps of the Pacific. From the first voyage accounts, Europeans spun tales heavy with stereotypes that emphasised the seemingly ready access of European travellers to exotic women that many voyagers, especially French ones, felt embodied figures from classical mythology. These same accounts emphasised the mercurial natures of Indigenous men who often resorted to random acts of violence against European crews spurred by jealousy and a sense of ownership over women.^[35] This supposed racial trait was at the heart of stories emanating from the community found on Pitcairn Island in 1808. The hybrid community, comprised of Tahitian women and one remaining British man, were the remnants of the group founded by the infamous HMS Bounty mutineers, Tahitian men and Tahitian women. In the years after the mutineers disappeared into the Pacific in 1789 and before their discovery twenty years later, every man on the island was killed violently: a sequence of bloodletting sparked by the Tahitian men's jealousy over women, according to the one surviving white man’s account.^[36]

The acts of Europeans in violent encounters have had less cultural reso­nance until the relatively recent project of postcolonial historical rewriting where the standpoint shifted to take account of Indigenous experiences and perspectives. In this historical reading, European violence has been given more attention and attributed with being the reason for the legendary sexual accommodations Europeans experienced. For instance, when the British Wallis voyage bombarded the island of Tahiti for several days in 1767 with their ship’s guns (a reaction to Tahitian men having pelted the crew with rocks), a legendary sexual encounter commenced. Subsequent European crews benefited from this initial assertion of Europe’s asymmetrical power in Tahiti, an assertion repeated in myriad locales throughout the region as the Spanish had done centuries before in Micronesia.

Captain Cook arrived at Tahiti two years after the Wallis voyage’s naval bombardment. The sexual welcome and the tropical environs of Pacific islands stood in diametric opposition to the harsh realities of life aboard European ships where physical discipline and deprivation were the order of the day. As Cook became increasingly familiar with the Pacific and frustrated by acts such as theft of equipment by islanders (like Magellan long before him), he began meting out severe punishments to people beyond his crews. For infractions against crew and his ships’ property Cook had ears sliced off, leaders held captive and people shot. In 1779, after he again tried to take a chief hostage in order to secure the return of a stolen long boat at Kealakekua Bay in Hawai‘i, Cook was killed, stabbed in the back, during a chaotic early morning melee. Cook’s body was taken and possibly consumed, though a few parts were eventually returned to the British. In revenge, Cook's crew resorted to punishments of torching boats and villages, killing people, decapitating the corpses and displaying severed heads on spikes.^{[37] [38] [39]} Like Magellan, Cook was lionised, or more accurately deified, for his imperial deeds while Hawai‘ian chiefs were cast as malevolent violent murderers. Cook's violent deeds were erased from European memory until recent times, but not those of the Pacific's Indigenous peoples.

One of Cook's most contested legacies of European contact with the Pacific was the transmission of disease. The great captain himself despaired that his crews had commercialised women's sexuality and spread sexually transmitted disease throughout the islands. Cook knew this consequence of his voyages was devastating: a form of colonial violence that caused untold harm for generations to come.1⁸ After Cook, Indigenous populations were scourged by other imported diseases, like smallpox, that wreaked havoc in this newest New World, as it had in older ones.

After Cook, European encounters in the Pacific surged. This surge brought new forms and increased levels of contact, as well as new forms of violence. The Pacific became dotted with refreshment ports for crews, almost always men, plying the ocean for resources. Sandalwood harvesting required con­siderable negotiation with local peoples. Many a European man found himself in a dangerous predicament, isolated in a remote location and beholden to local laws and rulers who valued such men when they had utility, particularly when they possessed military knowledge and prowess. In the eastern Pacific, where the first sandalwood rushes took place, a European presence had the effect of elevating certain groups over others. This sparked new waves of fighting among rival Indigenous groups.1⁹ The end result in the Tahitian islands was the rise of one dominant ruling family, the Pomare family. In Hawai‘i, the Kamehameha family, beneficiaries of new economies in those islands created by sandalwood, rose up and also vanquished their rivals. The Kamehamehas then united the Hawai‘ian Islands under their monarchial rule that dominated the political landscape of Hawai‘i for nearly a century before the US annexation of the group in 1898.

For the resource rushes where the bodies of whales, seals and otters were the quarry, violence was an ever-present tool and consequence of the activities of thousands of male crew members scattered throughout the region on sea and land. Not only was there the inherent violence of the hunt, but whaling produced many marauding crews that drastically altered life in port towns like Kororareka in northern New Zealand, Lahiana and Honolulu in Hawai‘i, Papeete in Tahiti and Apia in Samoa. All these port towns vied for the dubious honour of being the ‘hell hole' of the Pacific. In these towns, Indigenous law and custom were greatly strained by thriving markets for sex, guns and alcohol, as well as less salacious forms of refresh­ment like food and water. Yet the groups who controlled lands around these ports, as in the case of the Pomares and Kamehamehas, were the ones who were rapidly empowered against traditional foes.^[40]

In New Zealand, the Nga Puhi, who controlled the whaling hub of Kororareka, shifted the practice of capturing vanquished enemies according to the new conditions. From the early nineteenth century, young women enslaved by internecine warfare appeared among the ranks of women parti­cipating in the sex trade.^[41] In exchange for sex, the Nga Puhi acquired guns that wreaked havoc on rival groups. The infusion of guns into traditional warfare in northern New Zealand was hastened by the international travels of Hongi Hika that were organised by Britain to curry favour with this Maori leader. Hongi Hika was showered with gifts in Britain that he then traded en route home for a cache of weapons in the fledgling British colony of Sydney in 1820. After his return to New Zealand, warfare erupted throughout north­ern New Zealand, resulting in the bloodiest fighting the country has seen to this day. The so-called Musket Wars (1820-40) may have claimed as many as 20,000 lives and redrew the demographic and political map of the Maori with far-reaching consequences.

The other actors in New Zealand's bloody and dramatic surge in violence in the early nineteenth century were British Protestant missionaries. As with clergy in the Spanish and Portuguese Pacific colonies, missionaries from Britain and the USA, and later French Catholic priests, were beginning to impact the course of history from 1797. In this year, British missionary activity began when a vessel loaded with men intent on bringing the light of Christian teaching sailed to the Pacific to proselytise to the many peoples depicted, often alarmingly to those with Christian sensibilities, in earlier voyager accounts. Many of these Protestant missionary pioneers were caught up in the warfare sparked by the early sandalwood rushes and fled to the Sydney colony.

In Hawai‘i, New England missionaries gained favour with the Kamehameha family, particularly through the figure of Ka'ahumanu, the favoured wife of King Kamehameha II. In 1825 she imposed a new legal and moral code shaped by Protestant teachings. The most contentious aspect of this new code was the restriction on the trade in sex between local women and whaling crews. Not long after the imposition of this new moral code, an American whaling ship opened fire on the missionary's residence in Lahiana. The crew was incensed at missionary meddling in the privileges crews had come to expect.^[42]

Not all whaling crews resorted to such open violence against missionaries, but throughout the Pacific in the nineteenth century there were countless brash challenges to traditional and new laws that impinged on the activities of European crews. The question of law, jurisdiction and how to capture, try and punish perpetrators of violence became an ever-present polemic. The lawless conduct of European crews pricked the consciences of many. In 1792, British captain George Vancouver had the task of returning two young Hawai‘ian women to their homeland after he discovered them aboard a vessel he encountered on the north-west American coast. The two women had been kidnapped and became caught up in the trade in otter furs for the China market. Vancouver felt it was his duty to return the women to their homeland as an act of gallantry. He could do nothing to punish the perpetrators. Vancouver was witness to a phenomenon that was going to cause havoc in the coming years as the mistreatment of Indigenous peoples surged with the increased colonial traffic in the Pacific.²³

Many Indigenous peoples took matters into their own hands and meted out punishments on perpetrators or on those unfortunate enough to be the next to encounter aggrieved groups after an incident of mistreatment. In the infamous case of the 1809 attack on the passengers of the Boyd, again in New Zealand, little attention was given to the cause of local Maori anger that resulted in most of the people on board the vessel being killed and then eaten. The incident, sparked by the flogging of a young local chief who was travelling on the vessel, sent shock waves through the British Empire. Whalers brutally avenged the killings, sparking ongoing fighting between Maori and Europeans. As well as the price of many lives lost, the

Empires and Indigenous Worlds alarming events around the Boyd deeply impacted ideas about the Maori and other Pacific peoples at the time when contact in the region was growing exponentially. Being well armed and on high alert for Indigenous ‘treachery' and ‘barbarity' became the order of the day, sparking further cycles of violent revenge.^[43]

This situation concerned British authorities in Sydney. This was the colony established in 1788 as a penal settlement, a new society embedded with numerous forms of state-sanctioned brutality as a means to impose order in this far-flung British outpost. This martial society also deployed violence as a tool of colonialism to vanquish local Indigenous peoples.^[44] The uses of violence and the application of British law within Australia spurred constant tension. Colonial authorities also faced the ongoing dilemma of how to project British law to shipping and crews in the islands in the hope of tempering the alarming rates of mistreatment of local peoples at the hands of European crews.^[45] Operating a court system with witness testimony over such a diffuse area proved impossible. Successive governors issued declara­tions from Sydney that proved equally ineffective in altering the incidence of violence. In the 1830s, Evangelicals in Britain gathered together a litany of atrocities committed throughout the Pacific by European men deemed by the missionaries ‘the dregs of humanity' that became evidence in a parliamentary inquiry in London. The resolution to the long-running inquiry was to institute a more proactive system of protection where mis­sionaries, with their supposed moral rectitude, would temper the sordid working-class male culture lubricated by alcohol, licentiousness and aggres­sion considered a scourge on peoples throughout the region.^[46]

The concern of British Evangelicals in the 1830s was significantly not extended to Chinese people. At the very same time that missionaries were wringing their hands about the suffering caused by British colonialism upon Indigenous populations in the Pacific, multitudes of Chinese were suffering the deleterious effects of the British opium traffic and other aggressive British

manoeuvres. Reinforced by its vastly superior naval power, Britain aimed to destabilise China and gain immense commercial and imperial benefits in the Opium Wars that culminated in the 1842 Treaty of Nanking, in which Britain was awarded territory and immense reparations that had an untold impact on the course of Chinese history to follow.

Britain's belligerent tactics against the Chinese government were repli­cated elsewhere around the region at this time. The French, after being excluded from their most desired site for a Pacific colony in southern New Zealand (after Maori signed the Treaty of Waitangi with the British crown in 1840), turned their attention to the eastern islands of Polynesia. In 1842, using classic gunboat diplomacy, the French forced the annexation of Tahiti and surrounding islands and then the Marquesas Islands later in the same year. Tahiti, ruled by Queen Pomare IV, acquiesced to French demands under threats of violence. Following their conquest of a large swath of eastern Polynesian islands, the French turned their attention to the western Pacific islands of New Caledonia. Here they established a penal settlement where various rebels from Paris were sent to labour in the new French colony. The French also commenced a settler assault against the Indigenous Kanak peoples, seizing their lands violently so that agricultural enterprises could take root there. In the 1870s, the economic focus shifted to mining, and with it came another layer of violent history surrounding the recruitment and labour of workers from French possessions in Indochina and other surrounding Pacific islands.^[47]

Following the lead of Britain and France, the US naval captain Matthew Perry targeted the isolated regime of the Tokugawa Shogunate in Japan that stood accused of violently mistreating shipwrecked American whalers in the 1850s. With China's recent crushing defeat by Britain providing a bitter object lesson about the perils of confronting a modern imperial state, Japan acquiesced to US demands but set about modernising and militarising at a stunning pace. In a matter of decades, Japan defeated imperial China and imperial Russia, two events inconceivable a few short years before. Japan continued to mimic Western imperial nations, coveting overseas territories and foreign resources, and increasingly expanding their control over foreign populations. As with European imperial powers before them, Japan deployed numerous forms of violence to suppress peoples absorbed into their newly acquired territories. As their power increased, Japan's use of violence did too, reaching notoriously brutal levels against Koreans (Korea was annexed in 1905) and Chinese once the Second Sino-Japanese War erupted in 1937. Sexual violence against women and its institutionalisation in military brothels, an idea directly borrowed from British and French imperial armies, were the most shocking dimensions of Japanese violence. Enslaving populations for their labour was also widespread, but this had a long, storied history in the Pacific before Japan embarked on its imperial era. Sexual violence against women also had a long, highly charged history.

Harnessing the labour of colonised peoples was a preoccupation of all colonial powers across the tropical Pacific in the second half of the nineteenth century, as plantations spread out from South-East Asia where they had already been established by the Dutch. As with plantation economies in older colonial regions, the perennial problem of finding labourers to work tropical plantations bedevilled the Pacific region. Exploitation, mistreatment and violence shadowed plantations wherever they were established at a varied pace across the region. The dominant pattern of acquiring labourers was to bring in foreigners who would work estates carved from lands acquired from Indigenous owners. These land transactions had their own fraught histories of deception and exploitation that often resulted in an exacerbation of tensions between Indigenous groups and colonial land buyers that regularly erupted into violent confrontation. Plantations also allowed a power base for new groups to take root that invariably challenged extant political norms, often leading to violent outcomes.

The most dramatic example of how plantation economics disrupted Indigenous worlds was Hawai‘i. The Great Mahele of 1848 monetised land, facilitating its rapid transfer from Indigenous possession to that of planters, the majority of whom hailed from the United States.^[48] Within four decades, two thirds of all land had passed into haole (white) hands, driving the creation of an elite planter class. Many in this new Hawaiian planter class were descendants of the New England missionaries who established Christianity in the islands from 1820.^[49] Hawai‘i rapidly became a factory of sugar produc­tion powered by its volcanic soils and the labour of people from China, Portugal and then, at the end of the nineteenth century, Korea, the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico and, most problematic as far as the USA was concerned, Japan. The rapid economic ascent of haole planters came at the expense of Indigenous Hawai‘ians. Every aspect of their culture and lives was adversely impacted by this profound shift from possession to dispossession in a few decades. Change was forced by haole using the threat of military power. A new constitution that stripped the Hawai‘ian monarchy of power was dubbed the Bayonet Constitution because of the overt use of these tactics to compel King Kalakaua to sign it into law, as he did under duress in 1887. The ending of Indigenous governance was achieved when planters seized power from Queen Lili‘uokalani in 1893, imprisoning her and threatening force. Despite a determined uprising of the queen's supporters around Honolulu in 1895, the island group was annexed by the USA in 1898.

The Hawaiian islands were a great prize for the USA. Their strategic importance was unquestioned, allowing the USA to augment its naval power in the Pacific Ocean exponentially. The acquisition of the islands was not an unmitigated advantage, however. Leading figures, like Theodore Roosevelt, questioned the impact of the large population of Japanese in the islands upon the American nation. These fears about a numerous and culturally distinct minority were framed within the rising power of Japan; Roosevelt and others worried where the loyalties of Hawaiian Japanese would lie if the two new Pacific powers clashed. These fears grew through the first three decades of the twentieth century, with Hawai‘i being described as the ‘Restless Rampart' on the eve of the World War II.^[50]

The threat of war secured the Hawaiian islands for the United States. Other significant territorial gains in the Pacific for the USA were won by war, namely the Philippines and Guam. Defeating Spain in 1898, the USA ended the long Spanish imperial era in these countries commenced by Magellan in the early sixteenth century. In order to oust the Spanish, the USA supported Filipino independence fighters who were promised self-rule. The USA reneged on this arrangement and began fighting Filipinos, crushing hopes that the USA was indeed a liberator and not another colonial power deploy­ing the same methods of enforcing domination through overwhelming dis­plays of force and brutality.^[51]

Elsewhere in the Pacific, plantations also caused great disruption. Indentured labourers recruited from the western Pacific islands manned sugar plantations in Northern Queensland. Though some of these workers came voluntarily, many were ‘blackbirded' or kidnapped by unscrupulous operators who plied the islands for young men, and, to a far lesser extent, women. As with violent whaling crews, who triggered cycles of violence between islanders and foreigners, it was well recognised after about a decade of this trade (1870s) that blackbirders were having a similar impact on inciting deadly violence. Humanitarians in the 1870s became concerned that black­birding and the deplorable conditions labourers faced in Queensland equated to slavery, a practice supposedly outlawed in the British Empire in the 1830s. On top of concerns about the mode in which workers were recruited, humanitarians focused on the treatment of workers and their extraordinarily high mortality rates. The use of the whip to drive workers or punish those who resisted authority was also a source of concern, still being debated as late as the 1930s by Australian colonial administrators.^[52]

The shift to a plantation economy in Samoa involved all of these elements. The rapid acquisition of land by foreigners intent on establishing copra plantations was staggering. One land speculator - Frank Cornwall who was a former printer with the London Missionary Society - alone bought some 300,000 acres in a few years (over 40 per cent of all Samoan land). He was also involved in labour recruiting, plying the Gilbert Islands (present-day Kiribati) for labourers. Like Pacific island labourers on the sugar plantations in Queensland (who were mostly recruited from the western Pacific island groups of the Solomons and Vanuatu), these labourers' mortality rates were alarmingly high.^[53] There were many unsavoury characters involved in labour recruiting, such as the so-called last pirate of the Pacific, Bully Hayes, who like Cornwall plied the Gilbert Islands for labourers for Samoan plantations. American-born Hayes became notorious for defrauding, swind­ling and terrorising the Indigenous communities he raided. His brutal ways finally caught up with him when one of his crew killed him during a dispute and dumped his body into the Pacific: a killing, like so many before and after it in the course of Pacific colonial history, not pursued by courts.

Back in Samoa, where Hayes was survived by a wife and children (he reputedly had many of both dotted around the islands), the transfer of such vast amounts ofland out of Samoan hands in such short spaces of time ignited more warfare between rival groups. The introduction of guns meant that warfare was ferocious and of unprecedented lethality. Samoa was wracked by civil war throughout the 1870s to the turn of the century, with brief periods of uneasy peace. Into this toxic mix entered three imperial powers - the USA, Britain and Germany. German nationals spearheaded the plantation econ­omy but all three powers laid claim to the Samoan islands, picking sides in the civil war to advance their imperial ambitions and, in the late 1880s, investing heavily in asserting their perceived rights.^[54] The apex of all these forces came in 1889 when each power stationed naval assets in Apia Harbour in a show of imperial resolve. Nature conjured up a hurricane of legendary proportions; numerous vessels were destroyed in the tempest, and many seamen drowned, adding to the death toll incurred in gaining power in Samoa. A peace was brokered with the three powers in Berlin, but it only held for a decade, before civil war again erupted. To resolve the intractable Samoan problem, the islands were finally partitioned in 1899. Germany secured the western islands and the USA the eastern ones.

Though initially Pacific islanders made up the ranks of plantation workers in Samoa, Chinese indentured servants would dominate during most of Samoa's plantation history up to World War II. The experience of Chinese here replicated that of plantation workers elsewhere in the Pacific. They were driven hard, had few rights, were highly vulnerable to physical abuses and suffered higher levels of disease. As with Chinese in other Pacific polities, these labourers were heavily associated in the minds of their many vocal detractors with depravity, opium traffic and violent interpersonal crime. Also, their presence in Samoa was seen as problematic, as it was in other Pacific societies. Fears about miscegenation were paramount. This vision of Chinese in Samoa was exacerbated after the First World War erupted in September 1914, as this was largely seen as imperilling the numerically vulnerable white race.^[55]

The First World War began relatively bloodlessly in the Pacific. The first order of business for nations allied to Britain was to secure Germany's Pacific territories. New Zealand occupied German Samoa without a shot being fired. Australia had a brief battle before German forces surrendered in German New Guinea, and Australia gained additional territory on the island of New Guinea, adding to the Territory of Papua controlled by Australia from 1906. Japan took the expansive islands of German Micronesia, gaining another immense addition to its rapidly expanding territory.

Australia's military occupation of New Guinea, even for a nation largely inured by a long history of settler violence that was still manifest in northern Australia at this time, attracted significant attention for its brutality.^[56] The war's end and the shift to a mandates system overseen by the League of Nations in 1921 did little to ameliorate the situation. In fact levels of violence worsened. In New Guinea, a gold rush in 1926 saw the influx of large numbers of white men, many of whom were armed and trained veterans of the First World War, into remote regions where contact with the outside world had been minimal, or in some instances non-existent. Like first encounters in the Pacific since the sixteenth century, these meetings were often violent, with white men armed with the latest military hardware combating local peoples, who were more numerous and knowledgeable about the terrain but armed only with spears. The cycles of violence and retribution that had marked the Pacific's colonial history from the start were replicated. In one instance on the island of New Britain, violence was sparked by the ‘mistreatment' (that is, rape) of local women, a common cause of outrage avenged through violence against colonial men. In this case, aggrieved local men killed Australian gold prospectors, and Australian colonial authorities retaliated with a punitive expedition that was armed with the weapons of industrial warfare: a machine gun and grenades. For Australia, the undeniable levels of violence in their mandate came with uncomfortable international scrutiny. Despite the inci­dence and acceptance of violence in both national and international govern­ing bodies like the League of Nations, the rhetoric of enlightened imperialism was given lip service. This paternalistic philosophy espoused restraint in the use of force, but the entrenched methods of colonial rule proved impossible to dislodge.^[57]

These tensions about violence and enlightened colonialism after the First World War also gripped New Zealand.^[58] Like Australia, veterans from the war flooded the colonial ranks of New Zealand's mandate in Samoa. These veterans faced a hostile populace incensed at New Zealand's maladministra­tion during the influenza epidemic in 1918. Incompetent officials permitted the disease into the islands with devastating results: over one quarter of the population perished. Coupled with this recent history, New Zealand con­tinued to blunder in its relations with local leaders, sparking a resistance movement named the Mau. It is another great irony of this long history of colonial violence in the Pacific that when Samoans rose up and confronted a colonial regime stoked by the hyper-violence of the First World War they chose to pursue non-violent resistance. Samoans adopted the philosophy of non-violence directly from Te Whiti and Tohu who had likewise confronted colonial New Zealand in Taranaki four decades earlier. New Zealand autho­rities and their supporters in Britain and the League of Nations struggled with ways to challenge peaceful Samoans who enmired the colonial administra­tion and caused international embarrassment and, worst of all to many authorities, severely damaged ‘European prestige'. Some leaders were troubled by the spectacle of using traditional forms of salutary punishment against unruly colonial charges; others were not. Eventually the latter won out and in late 1929 New Zealand forces fired into a peaceful protest march on the streets of Apia. Though New Zealand suffered few repercussions at the time, for such was the stomach for violent acts that reinforced colonial order, this massacre still resonates to this day.^[59]

For all the violence that had shaped Pacific history since the sixteenth century, nothing compared to what was unleashed in the course of World War II. Commencing with Japanese aggression in Korea and China, the war would ravage the whole region, from the remotest islands to its densest population centres. New technologies expanded the scope of violence - aerial attacks, new artillery and, at the war's end, atomic bombs - unleashing new horrors on an unprecedented scale. The war was transformative but not a complete break with the past. In many ways, forms of violence that had been used to commandeer lands and resources, including human bodies for sex and labour, continued. So too did the asymmetries of military power and population sizes that had been such a central feature of histories of violence in the Pacific since the sixteenth century.