Colonial political economy, social policy and poverty in Fiji : 1874-1970

Abstract

Recent analysis of colonial social policy and welfare locates their origin at the period just before and after the WWII. This demonstrates a historical shortsightedness and silences an earlier and racialized and binary Imperial Welfare policy with differential re-distributive structure prior to WW II, which denied services to the colonized. The concepts Metropolitan and Colonial Welfare Regimes are used to capture this binary which also valorized traditional solidarity, of the colonized, as the site for their welfare and absorption social risks. This was in spite of profits which flowed from the colonial economy to imperial coffers under the through the agency of the colonial state. This is held to have contributed to the emergence poverty in post-colonial societies. Fiji is only an example.