Hawaiians in the fur trade of north‐west America, 1785–1820

Abstract

The 1941 decision to remove the New Guinea administration headquarters from Rabaul because of volcanic dangers was again taken up by the post‐war administration under J. K. Murray in 1946. However, decision‐making and planning negotiations between the Territory and Canberra were so protracted by public service inefficiency, contradictory expert and official opinions and the difficulty of finding a suitable port to replace Simpson Harbour that very little had been accomplished by 1951 when Paul Hasluck was appointed Minister for Territories. Hasluck accepted the recommendation of newly appointed Assistant Administrator D. Cleland that the wharf be rebuilt at Simpson Harbour and the township be moved to Nonga‐Tavui. In doing so he rejected the long‐held position of Murray, approved by previous ministers, that a new town and port be constructed at Kokopo. But Cabinet, whose consent was needed for extra‐budgetary costs in the Territory, was motivated by a different agenda and years of planning and negotiations came to nothing when it was decided that Rabaul and its wharf should be rebuilt on their original sites.     

Imperial Outposts and the War Beyond: Singapore,Hong Kong and the British Empire’s Land Force Contribution to the Korean War

Histories of the British Empire’s strategic outposts in the Far East have traditionally focused on their traumatic loss to the Japanese adversary during the Second World War. Only in the past decade-and-a-half have historians begun to examine the post-Second World War importance of these outposts to the continued defence and security of Britain’s empire in the Far East. In taking this line of historical enquiry still further, the article examines how Singapore and Hong Kong were used to project British military power, specifically army deployments, across the Far East, and far beyond the imperial frontier, in support of Britain’s involvement in the 1950–53 Korean War and therefore in pursuit of the empire’s foreign and defence policy objectives. It adopts an essentially operational analysis to this end, relying on operational and army ‘ground-level’ sources from the records of the Colonial, Foreign, and War Offices at the British National Archives. It uncovers the hidden workings of the mechanisms of imperial military power projection through strategic outposts, which ranged from training to logistical support to the exercise of command and control, and how these mechanisms and outposts were utilised by the British Far Eastern land forces involved in the Korean War. In so doing, the article sheds much valuable and original light on the historical importance of these strategic outposts to imperial defence.