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In 1853, France annexed the Melanesian islands of New Caledonia to establish a convict colony and strategic port of call. Unlike other European settler–dominated countries in the Pacific, the territory’s indigenous people remained more numerous than immigrants for over a century. Despite military conquest, land dispossession, and epidemics, its thirty language groups survived on tribal reserves and nurtured customary traditions and identities. In addition, colonial segregation into the racial category of canaques helped them to find new unity. When neighboring anglophone colonies began to decolonize in the 1960s, France retained tight control of New Caledonia for its nickel reserves, rev...
A multilayered social and cultural analysis that focuses upon the will of civil society and the will of those who actually lived and worked in the bagne, or penal colony.
The story of the people from the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) and the Solomon Islands who left their homes to work in the French colony of New Caledonia has long remained a missing piece of Pacific Islands history. Now Dorothy Shineberg has brought these laboreres to life by painstakingly assembling fragments from a wide variety of scattered records and documents. She tells the story of their recruitment, then sketches the workers’ lives in New Caledonia, describing the contractual arrangements, the kinds of work they did, their living conditions, how they spent their free time, the large numbers who sickened and died, and the choice at the end of the contract to remain in the colony as free workers or to return home. Throughout the book she throws light on the controversy about the recruiting of the Islanders: were they kidnapped? Or did they choose to leave home? If so, what motivated them? Evidently the Islanders’ cheap labor contributed to the development of the French colony, but how did the episode affect them and their homeland? The People Trade offers readers a revealing new picture of a long neglected side of the Pacific Islands labor trade.
This memoir summarizes the current knowledge of New Caledonia’s geology, geodynamic evolution, and mineral resources, based on published and unpublished information. It comprises 10 research papers, each addressing a particular geological assemblage or topic. After an introductory chapter, and a review of the published geodynamic models of evolution of the SW Pacific, chapters 3 to 5 focus on the main geological assemblages of Grande Terre: the Pre-Late Cretaceous basement terranes, the Late Cretaceous to Eocene cover, and the Eocene subduction-obduction complex, one of the largest and best-preserved in the world. Chapter 6 is devoted to the Loyalty Islands and Ridge. Chapter 7 deals with ...
Accompanying videodisc, entitled La nuit des contes : mise en image de textes calédoniens / produced by Deborah Walker-Morrison and Neil Morrison in 2008, contains ... "approximately three hours of recorded material ... Texts included in the DVD are indicated within Nights of storytelling[.]"--Page 10.
France is a Pacific power, with three territories, a military presence, and extensive investments. Once seen by many as a colonial interloper in the South Pacific, by the early 2000s, after it ended nuclear testing in French Polynesia and negotiated transitional Accords responding to independence demands in New Caledonia, France seems to have become generally accepted as a regional partner, even if its efforts concentrate on its own territories rather than the independent island states. But Frances future in the region has yet to be secured. By 2014 it is to have handed over a set of agreed autonomies to the New Caledonian government, before an independence referendum process begins. Past ex...
This book provides a long history of France’s infamous indigénat regime, from its origins in Algeria to its contested practices and legacies in France’s South Pacific territory of New Caledonia. The term indigénat is synonymous throughout the francophone world with the rigours and injustices of the colonial era under French rule. The indigénat regime or 'Native Code' governed the lives of peoples classified as French 'native' subjects in colonies as diverse as Algeria, West Africa, Madagascar, Indochina and New Caledonia. In New Caledonia it was introduced by decree in 1887 and remained in force until Kanak — New Caledonia’s indigenous people — obtained citizenship in 1946. Amon...