Tonga: The Last of the Victorians

Outside Australia and New Zealand, the South Pacific peoples are numerically small, live in minute territories, and lack - in otherwise interesting cultures - the stabilizing influence of literary traditions.

Because of these factors the South Seas in the 1970s have become a reservoir region where, on the one hand, the classic imperial orders linger in bizarre and attenuated forms, and, on the other, archaic social patterns are reinforced or revived under the aegis of twentieth-century nationalism.

In surviving dependencies of the British crown, like the Gilbert and Ellice Islands and the Solomon Islands Protectorate, some of the last colonial servants enact, with a fair degree of pomp, the final days of the greatest of all the empires.

In New Caledonia and Tahiti the lesser imperial glory of France survives with a more defiant panache. And in the New Hebrides, the land of the celebrated Franco-British Condominium, the old colonial rivals sustain the strangest political show of all imperial history.