ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on circumstances as the primary determinant of leaders' roles and of recruitment into leadership. For almost a century beginning in 1860, Solomon Islanders reacted to a world economy which transformed their societies. Initially at the local level, this economy was based upon the recruitment of laborers for sugar plantations and commercial farms in Queensland. Men known as 'passage masters' were essential from the time recruiting for Queensland first began. Queensland was unique among the nineteenth-century frontiers of capitalism. As compared with the Caribbean and Hawaii, landownership was less monopolistic. Solomons workers became quite skillful in manipulating the system they found in Queensland. Circumstances in the Solomons could not have been more different. For a variety of reasons it proved impossible to control the supply of skilled labor, as had happened in Queensland.
