ABSTRACT
Stringer’s assessment accords with countless others going back to the beginnings of European colonial encounters with the inhabitants of the region, views which placed these peoples ‘outside the realm of historical experience’ (Peterson 2000: 27). Originating in Hegel’s division of world history into the ahistorical pre-modern and the historical modern, and elaborated by Marx and Weber in particular, this division pervades Western historical theory, as can be seen in seminal works such as Collingwood’s ([1946] 1994) The idea of history and Wolf’s (1982) Europe and the people without history, as well as much of the wider globalization literature. Yet research in the region continually shows that while the dynamics of history may not have played out in the exactly the way or at the times one might expect from patterns elsewhere, cultural change did occur and generally for the same sorts of reasons it occurred in other parts of the world. This is well illustrated by what have been called the Pacific ‘empires’ of Tonga and Yap.
