In 1893, the British government proclaimed a protectorate over Solomon Islands, in the South West Pacific Ocean. Consisting of some nine hundred islands to the south of Papua New Guinea and the north of Vanuatu (then New Hebrides), the borders of the protectorate were finalized following negotiations with Germany and other powers in 1900. Having been selected by Charles Woodford, who had arrived in the archipelago in 1886 from Kent by way of Fiji, and whose lobbying had been fundamental in the formation of the British Solomon Islands Protectorate, the small, largely uninhabited, island of Tulagi in the Gela (or Nggela or Florida) Group, was chosen as the territory's new capital. Under Woodford's administration as deputy and then resident commissioner (1896–1915), a British colonial port town emerged on Tulagi. In Tulagi: Pacific Outpost of British Empire, a comprehensive, beautifully illustrated book, Clive Moore succeeds in providing a “close analysis of race, sex and class, and the process of British colonisation and government in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (12) through this insightful history of Tulagi and its place within wider Pacific and imperial worlds.

Moore aims to examine the British Empire in the Pacific through a detailed local history of a colonial enclave where administrative, commercial, and scientific interests intersected while also making “a contribution to heritage studies” as part of national imaginaries (25). In achieving these objectives, the book is organized into an introduction and eight chapters. The introduction provides an overview of contemporary Tulagi, where the ruins of the former British settlement coexist with small-scale tourism and an abandoned tuna cannery. Vividly illustrated with evocative photographs, the introduction sets the scene for an informative account of the construction of the township in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in chapter 1. Here, Moore makes astute observations about the specific jurisdictional form that the annexation of Solomon Islands took. As a legal political entity, establishing a protectorate over Solomon Islands, rather than a crown colony, limited the scope for European colonization and exploitation. While this did occur in certain areas of Solomon Islands, punctuated by incidents of episodic violence, the extension of protectorate government “to include general administrative and regulatory functions over citizens of other nations and indigenous inhabitants” while confirming “Britain's control over its own subjects” (55), curtailed large scale colonial ambitions that may have been envisaged by early European settlers.

The British administration was established on Tulagi by key personalities in the civil service, and Moore focuses on these individuals in chapters 2 and 3. Through their roles as resident commissioners, surveyors, accountants, treasurers, nurses, and doctors, supported by the vital work (often coerced through prison labor) of Indigenous Solomon Islanders and the commercial investments made by Chinese settlers, these groups established a town (or an enclave, as Moore describes it) where highly racialized and segregated interpersonal politics and relationships were mirrored in urban space just as much as they were in the administration of the wider protectorate. The biographies of these individuals, families and groups are not confined to chapters 2 and 3, but resurface throughout the monograph in thoughtful and creative ways. Some, such as Jessie and Spearline Wilson, the latter who “worked in the Lands Department from 1919 to 1942” (161), helped build the Tulagi enclave, only to see it destroyed in World War II, while returning to the protectorate at the end of conflict in the mid-1940s.

Organized thematically rather than chronologically, the experiences, views, work, social lives, cultural practices, memories and photographs of expatriates, settlers and Solomon Islanders, form the basis of chapters 4 to 8. Chapter 4 provides a detailed account of the Chinese community on Tulagi and the shifting boundaries between racial marginalization and entrepreneurial success. Chapter 4 also covers the atrocities that were committed by an armed British expeditionary force (effectively a militia comprised of settlers, government officials, and Indigenous Solomon Islander constabulary members). In response to an attack on a party of tax collectors “in the Kwaio area” (227) on the nearby island of Malaita, resulting in the murder of a district officer, a cadet, and thirteen police officers in 1927, the British administration approved a series of retaliatory raids in the months that followed, where an estimated sixty innocent people were killed while others were raped, tortured, and died of starvation as they fled government forces. One hundred and ninety-two “Kwaio men were taken to Tulagi prison” (241), where thirty died of dysentery and six were executed. “The Kwaio massacre,” as it became known, “and its aftermath were the largest and most severe random punishment ever meted out by British authorities in the Pacific” (243). The protectorate, as legal form, provided no protection at all in Malaita in 1927 and 1928, and “Kwaio people have never forgotten or forgiven the excesses” (243).

Chapter 5 moves from graphic accounts of organized paramilitary retaliation to the micropower relations embedded in domestic service, architecture, and gender relations in Tulagi and more broadly across the British Solomon Islands Protectorate. “Colonial households,” Moore suggests, in the relationships between employers and servants, in dress codes, food choices, and the organization of domestic space were characterized by a mixture of “paternalism, racism and brutality” (283). Yet it is in these precise spaces that the legal form of the protectorate, rather than colony, marks differences between settler societies “where there is an almost total take over of land and power from the Indigenous people and a Pacific society such as Solomon Islands, where, despite large-scale land alienation in some areas, the foreign population was only ever a small minority who maintained their power largely through ‘smoke and mirrors’—a classic magical technique of illusions with no substance” (283).

The maintenance of hierarchical racialized, gendered, and segregated colonial orders as they intersected with class, ethnicity, and moral panics are addressed in chapters 6 and 7. Here “smoke and mirrors” were maintained by the ambiguous intimacies of desire and the capricious capacities for embodied violence (with the Kwaio massacre the most extreme), arbitrary force masquerading as legal rituals and, moral assumptions together with their transgressions and quotidian subversions. Chapter 6 considers gender, sexuality, and race as they were experienced in marriage (particularly mixed race relationships), perceived risks for white women in the western Pacific and punitive, discriminatory, legal regimes. Particular attention is given to ethnicity and class as it was experienced in social institutions and networks, war service, recreation, alcohol consumption, visiting scientific expeditions, media representations as consumed in Tulagi and portrayed abroad, political organization, and Indigenous livelihoods, both in Tulagi and more broadly across the British Solomon Islands Protectorate and the Pacific, with comparative assessments and observations from throughout the British Empire.

The final chapter covers the end of Tulagi as capital of Solomon Islands. In 1942, the Tulagi enclave was invaded by Japan, and while it was retaken by US forces later that year, the evacuation of residents and the destruction and devastation during World War II meant that when combined with changing transportation and communications requirements (particularly civil aviation), it was never reestablished as the protectorate's capital. Instead a new capital, Honiara, was established on the neighboring island of Guadalcanal.

Moore has succeeded in writing a superb history of British administration in the Pacific, in both its micro forms as expressed in the nuances of political geography, architecture, and bureaucratic practice and Tulagi's broader, situated relationships with cultures of colonialism across the Pacific and throughout the wider empire.