ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a narrative history in three phases – colonial rule, the Pacific War and decolonisation. These three phases are simultaneously crosscut by two longstanding themes in the region, the mobility and relocation of populations, and systems of trade and exchange. In the region known as Melanesia, histories have been told in men’s and women’s houses, in song and dance, in names passed down through generations, in stories told to children about early heroes, warriors and in the origin of names for butterflies, birds and mist-shrouded peaks. Trade and exchange had been a characteristic of indigenous Melanesian societies and continued in the transformed circumstances of the colonial era. The institutional forms of colonialism had their counterpart in systems of trade and commercial activity. The first foreign rule in Melanesia occurred many centuries before Europeans formally annexed territories.
