Robert Louis and Fanny Stevenson in revolutionary Samoa, 1888-1894

Robert Louis Stevenson gives us an eye-witness account of the workings of German colonialism in the Pacific in a series of letters to The Times and in A footnote to history: eight years of trouble in Samoa (1892), writings which thrust the remote Samoan archipelago onto the world stage. Stating bluntly that the ‘head of the boil’ afflicting Samoa was ‘the German firm’, Stevenson describes how a ‘handful of whites have everything’ in Apia, leaving the natives to walk ‘in a foreign town’. The Stevensons drew on two histories to understand the turbulent colonization of their new home outside Apia. One was the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 in which the Samoan chieftain Mata’afa Iosefa represents ‘the king over the water’. Less noted is the French revolution, invoked by Stevenson in his first letter to The Times where he refers to the ‘reign of terror’ that had descended on Samoa. This paper explores the various revolutionary frames used by the Stevensons to view Samoa: Scotland, France, Haiti, and the Pacific itself.

Presenter
Professor Deirdre Coleman is Robert Wallace Chair of English and Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor at the University of Melbourne. She researches 18th and 19th-century literature and cultural history with particular interests in the links between natural history, race, slavery, and empire. Her most recent ARC Discovery project is 'Slavery, Sugar, Race: Australia's South Sea Islander Labourers' (2022-2024).