Nicholas Thomas has long argued against the idealized and romanticized vision of indigenes which sees them as "innocents" and especially "spiritual people" who are roughly victimized by uncaring and predatory imperialists. The problem with this seemingly sympathetic view, he has pointed out, is that it strips indigenous people of their agency and views them as comparatively immobile groups to whom little happened until Europeans arrive. This view, Thomas has argued, merely perpetuates the mythology of imperialism in which the "superior" and active imperialists confront the "inferior" and passive indigenes. Against these views, Thomas has consistently made the point that the actions and motives of both sides of the imperial encounter were more subtle and varied than either imperial interpretation allows.
In Islanders, Thomas drives this point home with a story of 18C and early 19C Pacific imperialism that confounds imperial and romanticized indigenous history alike. Winner of the 2010 Wolfson Prize, one of Britain's most prestigious book awards, in Islanders we learn of London missionaries who consistently failed to convert islanders, not because of indigenous moral incapacities (as the missionaries thought), but because the islanders found little in the lifeways or persons of the missionaries to recommend them or their religion. We also learn about many islanders who signed on to British, American, and other European ships for no other reason than to see the places where the foreign ships had come from. Even in the darker era of late 19C imperialism, when ships raided Melanesia and the western Pacific in general for labor to work Australian plantations, we see some islanders making their own use of the exploitative labor system.
Islanders is a path-breaking book that makes the case that islanders, like everyone else in the imperial Pacific, forged their own, independent accommodations to economic and social change in an era often marked by brutality, exploitation, and subjugation.
