ABSTRACT
While the Pacific Islands region may lend itself to views of smallness, remoteness and insularity, alternative perceptions of interisland relations and global connectedness have gained analytical force.1 In fact, nothing is inherently small or isolated about a vast maritime region of historically, socially, culturally and economically connected
islands and continental margins.2 At the Pacific Islands region’s south-western edge of Melanesia, where the majority of Pacific Islanders live, cultural diversity and rapidly accelerating global connections of political economy, with high financial stakes, falsify any notion of ‘smallness’. In Melanesia, intense processes of ‘compressed globalization’ – whereby diverse, large-scale connections of global scope are initiated and engaged in locally by few participants on the ground – generate new forms of inequality in interaction with the global political economy in the starkest sense.3
