Beachcomber at the Ends of Empire: H. E. Maude, Colonial Futurity, and the Origins of Professional Pacific History

Abstract I examine the two careers of British colonial administrator and Pacific historian Henry Evans Maude (1906-2006) to illuminate continuities between the logic of late-imperialism and foundational modes of Pacific historiography. Maude worked as a colonial servant in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony from 1929, where he instigated two coerced resettlement schemes. In 1957, he joined the Department of Pacific History at the Australian National University, where he championed new modes of history writing tailored to the era of decolonisation—especially “island-centred” ethnohistory and “participant history.” I argue that Maude’s visions of empire and of the past were deeply linked, and that imbrications between the two informed the practices of an emerging professional Pacific history during the 1960s. Modes of history-writing that would come to be understood as critical of older imperial histories, or even as anti-colonial, had their origins in colonial structures. At the same time, both of Maude’s careers evinced a colonial notion of futurity; he understood himself as a benevolent expert able to guide Indigenous peoples into eventual independence.