Mammon in Paradise: Economic Enterprise in Pacific Historiography

Abstract

With a few notable exceptions, Pacific history still lacks a corpus of business studies that apply the techniques of business history elsewhere. The reasons for this gap are explored below, and the early evolution of business enterprise is traced from its origins in the "agency house" system, through partnerships that left few records before the emergence of joint stock companies, as a consequence of the expansion of facilities for bulk transport and the generalized functions of the earliest firms. The historiographical strengths and weaknesses of works covering Pacific agriculture and extractive industries reveal, in general, a failure to pay sufficient attention to the measurement of "profit" and to management, compared with sources of public and private capital investment. Closer attention to these factors would raise studies of the exploitation of Pacific staples and services to the high level reached in labor history and would advance our understanding of the relationship between business and politics in the colonial and postcolonial periods.