2025/10/02 by Elizabeth Rechniewski · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Australian History and Society #Caribbean history, culture, and politics #Historical Studies of British Isles
paper · doi:10.1080/00223344.2025.2579061
openalex publication_date 2025/10/02 · openalex created_date 2025/11/29 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/15
This article examines the first fifty years of Anglo-French cooperation in the New Hebrides, from the ‘Arrangement’ of 1878 to the establishment of the Native Code and Courts in 1928, in the context of recent developments in the study of co-imperialism, the biopolitics of settler colonialism, and colonial legal systems. A crucial stage in the evolution of dual imperial control, the Convention of 1906 established a hybrid colonial authority and legal system known as the Anglo-French Condominium, an extended experiment in co-imperialism unique for its longevity in modern imperial history. Drawing on the accounts of trials, correspondence between the colonial metropoles, local authorities, and legal officers, articles in the French and Australian press, and missionaries’ reports, the article explores the forms of collaboration and the points of friction between the governing imperial powers, as all parties negotiated the contradictory, unprecedented, and sometimes surreal challenges imposed on them by the Condominium.